by Ron Goulart
“How long have you been staying here?” Groucho sat in a claw-footed armchair facing the slim widow.
“Coffee, Miss Erika?” inquired Gunther from the doorway.
“That would be nice, yes,” she told him, smiling. “Gunther and I have been here at Merlinwood for close to three months, Groucho.”
“Oh, I had the impression, chatting with Guy Pope just now, that you’d only moved in very recently.”
“I sometimes suspect that Guy, bless him, jumped off one too many balconies during his heyday,” Erika said, touching at her temple, “and jiggled his brain. He seems to be getting increasingly forgetful.”
“So who was it who invited you to live in this cottage?”
“Actually I’m a tenant, Groucho, but it was Guy and Alma who suggested the arrangement,” she answered. “Felix and I became acquainted with them soon after we arrived here from Germany. Guy was inordinately fond of my late husband’s Ride of the Valkyries. That was made in Berlin in 1929.”
“And you and Felix separated because—”
“We simply decided it would be better to live apart for a time,” Erika told him. “We remained devoted to each other, however. You must know that in the best of marriages, there are periods when you want to be away from each other.”
“My wives tend to want extremely long periods of separation, followed by substantial alimony,” said Groucho, taking out a new cigar.
“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t smoke, Groucho.”
“Sorry.” He put the cigar away. “Who exactly is Gunther?”
“A very loyal fellow. He was Felix’s valet in Berlin and emigrated to the United States with us,” she explained. “When I moved to Merlinwood, Felix insisted that Gunther come along to look after me. As you’ve witnessed, Gunther is terribly devoted to me.”
“Gunther mentioned threats to you.”
Erika left her chair to cross to the mantelpiece. “These are photostats of the originals,” she said, picking up two sheets of paper. “I turned the originals over to Sergeant … Norman, isn’t it?”
“Norment.” Groucho accepted the stats.
“I’ve made several copies. You can keep these for your files.”
Both notes were hand-lettered in neat block capitals. The first said, “FELIX DENKER: THEY FAILED TO GET YOU IN GERMANY. WE’LL SUCCEED.” The other read, “ERIKA KLEIN. YOU’RE AS BAD AS YOUR JEW HUSBAND. YOU WON’T LIVE LONG.”
“When were these sent?”
“Felix showed me his letter about a week ago,” she said. “He wasn’t as upset as I was. I persuaded him to give it to me, but unfortunately I hesitated about showing it to the police.”
“You got this other one after Felix’s death?”
“Yes, although I didn’t know it at the time. The letter was in the mailbox here when I got home from the studio Monday night,” Erika said. “I left Mammoth about six-thirty that night. If I’d stayed longer, I might have been able to—”
“Or you might’ve gotten shot, too. What about the envelopes these came in?”
“They weren’t mailed, so there weren’t any postmarks. And Sergeant Norment told me there were no fingerprints besides mine and Felix’s on either note.”
“Any idea who sent these?” He folded the letters and stuffed them away in an inside pocket of his sports coat.
“Yes, I do. I believe it was Franz Henkel, the studio electrician Felix had fired,” she said, returning to her chair. “He’d made other threats to my husband, using similar language.”
“How’d he do that, face-to-face or—”
“On the telephone, on two separate occasions. Felix told me that a man who sounded very much like that fascist had made some nasty anti-Semitic remarks and warned him that he wasn’t going to be alive much longer.”
Gunther entered carrying a dark wood tray that held two delicate cups, a small bowl of sugar cubes, and a carafe of coffee. “Anything else, Miss Erika?”
“Not at the moment. Thank you.”
After plopping two lumps of sugar into his coffee, Groucho asked, “Suppose Henkel didn’t do it—who else might want to kill your husband?”
“There are, which you know, quite a few groups right here in Southern California that support Hitler,” she said, picking up her cup. “Everything from the German American Bund to those America First fools.”
“But so far they haven’t murdered anybody.”
“So far they haven’t been caught murdering anybody,” said Erika. “I’m also certain that there are Nazi agents here, too, spies, saboteurs. Felix had been extremely outspoken in his attacks on the Third Reich.”
Groucho drank some of his coffee, then set the cup on the table and stood. “I must be going,” he announced. “I appreciate your talking to me.”
Erika stood. “I’ve read about the murder cases you and your writer friend helped to solve,” she said. “I’m hoping you’ll be able to find out who killed my husband, whether it was Henkel or somebody else. Frankly, Groucho, I don’t have much faith in the police. Although that may be because of our experiences with the police in Germany.”
As she escorted him to the front door, Groucho said, “I’ll try to keep you informed.”
“You’ll be attending the funeral on Friday, won’t you?”
“Quite probably.”
“Then we’ll talk again there, if not before.”
There was no sign of Guy Pope as Groucho walked back to where he’d left his Cadillac. Before he started the engine, he took out his cigar again and lit it. “Sometimes in Hollywood,” he said to himself, “it’s extremely tough to tell a performance from the real thing. I wonder if Erika really gives a damn about who killed Felix.”
He sighed out smoke, started the car, and drove away from Merlinwood.
Ten
You don’t need a restaurant guide to tell you that a Mexican café owned and operated by a former Swedish character actor is probably not going to serve authentic cuisine. The smells of burnt pots and aging lard that gave the Señorita Rio Mexican Café its distinctive fragrance provided another reason why I’d ignored the mimeographed menu and ordered only a Dos Equis beer while I was waiting for Mary Jane to sneak over from Mammoth.
Olaf Hamsun, who’d played his last movie role in 1931, was sitting by himself at a small table near the door of his establishment, reading a two-day-old copy of Film Daily and, very dejectedly, eating a bowl of warm milk laced with oyster crackers.
There was nobody else in the little place, and I felt that if I sat here another ten minutes or so, I’d probably order some food just out of sympathy. I was speculating on what would be less god-awful, enchiladas à la Olaf or Swedish tamales, when M. J. McLeod showed up.
She entered sort of sideways, looking furtive, the way movie spies looked when keeping rendezvous in dark alleys. “Hello, Olaf,” she said as she passed his table. “How’re you doing?”
“Business is picking up, Mary Jane. Two customers already and it’s barely noon.” He looked up at her hopefully. “How about a nice bowl of Stockholm chili?”
“Only a cup of coffee, thanks.” She sat down opposite me. “I’ll leave a huge tip. I always feel so guilty when I come here and don’t eat.”
“So why do you come here, then?”
“Because, dodo, it’s a great place for clandestine meetings.” Mary Jane was about my age, tall and dark-haired. She was talking in a low, confidential voice and I had to lean toward her to catch what she was saying.
“I didn’t know Miles Ravenshaw had so much influence with your studio.”
“With Randy Grothkopf backing him, he sure does.”
“Your boss—the head of the Mammoth Publicity Department?”
“Him, right.” She let out a forlorn sigh. “Because of the murder, The Valley of Fear is getting a hell of a play in the papers and on radio. Ravenshaw convinced Randy that his pretending to find out who bumped off Felix will get us even more publicity. That would be screwed up if you and Groucho actually
did nab the killer. So you guys are barred from the lot. What’s this floating in my coffee, Olaf?”
The owner had just placed a coffee cup in front of her. Squatting, he squinted into the cup. “How do you suppose a Mexican jumping bean got into your coffee?”
“We can assume,” she said, “the darn thing jumped in.”
Olaf picked up her spoon and was attempting to rescue the floating bean.
I suggested, “Suppose you just bring a fresh cup of coffee?”
“I’d have to charge another nickel for that.”
“That’s okay. Put it on my tab.”
The unemployed actor straightened up and took the coffee away.
“Olaf was very funny in the movies,” Mary Jane said, watching him shuffle toward his small, dismal kitchen. “That was, unfortunately, some years ago.”
“Does anybody at Mammoth really believe that Ravenshaw is going to beat the police and Groucho and me to a solution?”
“Randy has pretty much convinced Lew Number One that a onetime Scotland Yard inspector ought to be smarter than a Burbank cop,” she answered. “Goldstein was already sure that Ravenshaw was smarter than you and Groucho.”
I took a sip of my warm beer. “Has that hambone actually done anything thus far?”
“He examined the scene of the murder at the Two-twenty-one-B set, using his Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass and accompanied by photographers from the L.A. Times, the Hearst papers, Photoplay, and Motion Picture,” she answered, eyeing the fresh cup of coffee Hamsun had just delivered. She picked up her spoon, poking it into the coffee. “Olaf, there’s something in this one, too. Down around the bottom of the damn cup.”
“It might be another jumping bean, Mary Jane. One that drowned in the coffee pot.”
She dropped the spoon next to the cup and pointed across at my bottle of beer. “Forget coffee, bring me one of those.”
“Your friend got the last one I had in stock,” he said apologetically, looking down at his scuffed shoes. “But I’ve got two Lucky lagers and a Regal Pale left.”
Mary Jane assumed the expression of a small child who’s just been abandoned in the deep woods by a wicked stepmother. “Lucky Lager,” she decided after a few seconds.
Resting an elbow on the tabletop, I asked her, “What about Sergeant Norment and his crew? You can’t lock them out of the studio. What’s he come up with?”
“Jack Norment doesn’t confide in me, Frank,” she said. “But the scuttlebutt is he favors the notion that Franz Henkel may’ve killed Felix.”
I straightened up. “That’s the electrician he had fired?”
“Him, yes. Seems Henkel got in a couple of serious brawls during the three months he worked for us, proving he has a violent temper,” Mary Jane told me. “He also tried to hand out some anti-Semitic pamphlets and, most important to Norment, he allegedly threatened to get even with Felix Denker.”
“Get even how? By sneaking by the security people, breaking into the soundstage, and shooting the poor guy?”
“He didn’t draw up an agenda and hand out copies, Frank,” she said. “The quote I heard, third or fourth hand, was something like, ‘I’ll fix that dirty Jew for what he did to me.’”
“Did he also click his heels and shout, ‘Heil Hitler’?”
“Most times murder in real life isn’t like murder in the movies,” she reminded me. “In the everyday world some goon will say, ‘I’m going to kill that bastard one of these days,’ and then actually go out and kill him. That’s how the police catch most of their murderers, I’d imagine.”
“Maybe, but Franz Henkel is too obvious a candidate.”
“That’s because you’re thinking like a writer.”
“What’s Henkel say for himself?”
She paused to touch the side of the beer bottle Olaf had placed before her. “This feels awfully warm.”
“I can bring you a glass full of ice cubes to pour it in.”
“Never mind, no.” She issued another sigh. “Franz Henkel has apparently disappeared, Frank. He lived in a rooming house over in Manhattan Beach, but he hasn’t been seen since the murder. You have to admit that’s suspicious.”
“Yeah, we better round up a posse and lynch him.”
She shrugged. “Well, I think Ravenshaw is inclined in that direction, too.” After tapping the Lucky lager bottle with the tip of her finger a few times, she pushed the beer aside and picked up her cup of coffee.
“Considerable silence seems to have descended on Clair Rickson,” I said. “What do you know about her?”
A pained expression touched her face as she turned away from me to gaze at a faded bullfight poster taped to the splotched pale orange wall. “I was hoping, Frank, we could skirt this entirely.”
“Skirt what? Is she involved in the murder somehow?”
Mary Jane sighed out a breath. “No, Clair is … well, she’s just Clair.” Turning to face me, she leaned forward and lowered her voice even further. “She apparently had some kind of violent quarrel with one of her boyfriends in the Writers Department Monday afternoon. That prompted her to go on one of her protracted solitary drinking binges in her office. Sometime in the middle of the night, she started wandering around the lot and, probably because she wrote the screenplay, she ended up on one of the indoor Valley of Fear sets. She’d brought a bottle with her and she sat down in the pub to finish it. She passed out and didn’t wake up until the cops found her in the morning.”
“Jesus, that’s so unlikely it wouldn’t even get by in The Case of the Crucified Crooner.”
“True nonetheless, Frank,” she insisted. “Clair didn’t get to the soundstage until long after Denker was killed. She didn’t hear or see a damn thing. To help her get herself back on track and avoid a lot of embarrassing, notoriety, everybody’s agreed to play down her involvement in this whole mess.”
“Yeah, what I like about movie people is their altruism.”
“Hey, lay off, buster. I’m leveling with you.”
“Where’s Clair?”
“Drying out at a private clinic.”
“Which?”
She shook her head. “Randy might know. I don’t,” she said. “So help me.”
I changed topics. “You knew Denker and—”
“Not well.”
“Better than I did, since I never met him,” I said. “If this missing electrician didn’t kill him, who would you—”
“Since I’m not in a contest to solve this murder, Frank, I haven’t given much thought to who done it.”
I pushed my bottle of beer aside. “Okay, how about Marsha Tederow—did you know her?”
She nodded sadly. “We weren’t close friends, but I had lunch with Marsha a few times and I liked her,” she replied. “After she started her affair with Denker, she complained to me about him once or twice. My advice was to stay away from a son of a bitch who’d treat you like that, but she didn’t follow it.”
“How did he treat her? Physical violence or what?”
“He could be violent at times and I know he hit her more than once,” she answered, trying her coffee and then wincing. “Why she kept meeting him at that damned love nest he set up, I don’t know. Some weekends she spent just about—”
“Whoa, halt, Mary Jane. What love nest?”
She said, “Marsha lived in a small place up in Beverly Glen, which she shared with a roommate. Denker would meet her there sometimes, but that was only when the roomie was elsewhere.” Mary Jane tried the coffee again, then set the cup down and slid it over toward the beer bottle. “Even though Denker wasn’t living with his wife in recent months, he didn’t want Marsha coming to his mansion. Probably so Erika Klein wouldn’t be able to find out what he was up to. Anyway, he rented a beach house down around Malibu someplace. That’s where they were meeting most of the time.”
“Are the police aware of that hideaway?”
“I’m not sure,” she said.
“Know specifically where the house is?”
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br /> “I don’t have an address, no,” she answered. “But a month or so ago, when I had to keep in touch with Marsha over a weekend because of a studio problem, she gave me the phone number.”
“Do you still have it?”
Reaching down, she retrieved her large straw purse from the dusty floor. “I’m pretty sure I wrote it down,” she said, poking her hand into the bag. She produced a very fat address book and started leafing through its pages. “Here’s the number of a cowboy actor who was going to leave his wife and marry me but never got around to it. Here’s a stuntman who was going to leave me and go back to his wife and never got around to that. Good, here’s Marsha Tederow’s number.” She scribbled the telephone number on a paper napkin and passed it across to me.
“I can probably use a reverse directory and get the location of the place.” I folded the napkin and put it in the breast pocket of my coat. “Now what about Erika Klein?”
Mary Jane produced a razzberry sound while making a thumbs-down gesture. “A very cold, nasty lady,” she said. “But, so I hear, a damned good historian. They all appreciate her at Mammoth, I know.”
“From what I’ve learned so far about her and her husband, she wouldn’t have been jealous about his affairs.”
“No, they weren’t the Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald of German refugees,” she said. “I think he tried to keep his romantic interludes quiet because he was afraid she might get lawyers after him and sue for divorce. But, nope, Erika wouldn’t shoot him down for jumping in the sack with poor Marsha.”
“How about some dessert?” Olaf inquired as he approached our table.
“No,” we answered simultaneously.
Eleven
Just beyond the palm trees and the stone deities in the courtyard of the Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, he later told me, Groucho encountered a tall, lanky Santa Claus standing beside a copper kettle and rather halfheartedly clanging a small brass bell. “Give to the Community Charities Fund,” the Saint Nick recited. “Help the less fortunate at Christmas.”
Slowing, Groucho came to a stop, leaned, and peered into the kettle. There was what looked to be about twenty-five bucks in change and a few crumpled dollar bills within. “I’m less fortunate than just about anybody,” he explained, dipping his right hand down toward the sprawl of money. “How much am I allowed to scoop up, my good man?”