by Ron Goulart
Frowning, giving a negative shake of his head, he said, “No, no, the idea is to give us something.”
“What kind of charity is that? When I have to give you something?” Groucho stepped back, scowling. “You look to be in much better shape than I am, which isn’t saying much.”
“You’re being obtuse about how charity is supposed to …” The sidewalk Santa stopped, started laughing. “Oh, it’s you, Mr. Marx. I didn’t catch on right away that you were joking.”
“Far too many people have been suffering from that problem of late,” he confessed. “Whole vast audiences of people seeing Room Service for the first time claim to have had such experiences. A prominent New York motion picture critic dubbed the movie the greatest tragedy he’d even seen and three state troopers in Wisconsin voted me the greatest tragedian since Jean Hersholt.”
“I guess you don’t know who I am, Mr. Marx, but—”
“You mean you aren’t Santa Claus?”
The man smiled through his whiskers. “I’m Leonard Hershberger,” he said. “I had bit parts in A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races.”
“What a coincidence. I had bit parts in those same movies,” Groucho told him. “Two itinerant musicians claiming a distant kinship with me upstaged me throughout both those MGM epics.”
“Actually, I thought you were terrific in both of those and you were very funny in Room Service.”
Groucho pressed a warning finger to his lips. “Don’t go around saying anything like that too loudly,” he cautioned. “They’re liable to drop a net over you and haul you away. I haven’t checked my Blackstone recently, but I think such remarks also violate the California sedition laws. I did check my Gladstone the other day, however, and if I can only remember what bus depot it’s in, I’ll be able to go to that slumber party after all.” He located a four-bit piece in the pocket of his sports coat and tossed it into the pot. “Keep the change. And good luck, Leonard.”
“Thanks, I’m optimistic,” the unemployed actor assured him. “Things are sure to get better after the first of the year.”
“If that giant meteor that’s scheduled to flatten Los Angeles early next month swerves off course at the last moment, yes, life is going to be a bowl of cherries. And, frankly, I can’t think of anything that sounds messier.” He added some lint from his pocket to the kettle and hurried on his way.
When he reached Los Palmas, he crossed the street and hurried along toward Musso & Frank’s Grill.
As he was going through the arched entryway and reaching out to push open the glass-paneled door, a passing tourist exclaimed to her companion, “That’s Groucho Marx!”
Stopping, Groucho pivoted and pointed an accusing finger at them. “Have a care as to what you call an innocent bystander, my good woman,” he warned. “Accusing someone of being Groucho Marx in this man’s town is tantamount to slander. And calling him Bob Hope is tantamount to Paramount. Keep that in mind—and you might also keep the multiplication tables in mind, since you never know when you’ll be called upon to multiply.”
Curtsying, he backed on in to the restaurant.
“Oof,” gasped the head waiter he bumped into.
“Good afternoon, Orlando,” said Groucho after turning around and recognizing the plump man in the tux. “Am I too late for the free lunch?”
“Table for one, Mr. Marx?”
“Alas, I fear so, Orlando. All my family and friends have deserted me,” he confided. “In fact, not five minutes ago, three total strangers deserted me.”
Bowing very slightly and turning, the waiter invited. “Follow me, please.”
As he was making his way along a row of booths in the beam-ceilinged main room, Groucho spotted Rosalind Russell, Merle Oberon, and Joan Crawford lunching together. “Top of the afternoon, ladies,” he mentioned in passing.
Rosalind Russell smiled, Merle Oberon smiled, and Joan Crawford gave him the finger.
“She never forgave me for what happened in that phone booth in Tijuana,” Groucho told the plump waiter, sighing at the distant memory.
About two minutes after he was settled in his booth and studying the menu, someone appeared beside his table.
“Jove, what a lovely treat for us all. It’s the great detective himself.”
Groucho glanced up to behold Miles Ravenshaw smiling down on him.
The Santa Claus I encountered was a short and chubby one and might possibly have been a woman under the red suit and fluffy white whiskers. This Saint Nicholas was sitting in a canvas director’s chair on a grass sidewalk border out near the end of Sunset. Next to him leaned a large hand-lettered sign offering MAPS of the STARS’ Homes—Only 25 Cents! A slight drizzle had commenced about ten minutes earlier and Santa was waving his handful of maps from under a wide polka-dot umbrella.
When I stopped at the stoplight next to the map vendor, he called out, “Hey, asshole! It’s Christmas—buy a goddamned map!”
“Humbug,” I replied, not bothering to roll down my window.
At the Coast Highway, I made a right turn. Using the reverse telephone directory that I kept in a drawer of my desk, I’d been able to connect the number Marsha Tederow had given M. J. McLeod to a house in the beach town of San Amaro. That was a few miles north of Malibu.
A sizable congregation of seagulls had gathered, huddling, out along the gray beach on my left and looking annoyed at the rain. Now and then a couple of them would rise up a few feet, wings flapping angrily, and start pecking at each other. From up ahead a flatbed truck full of freshly cut Christmas trees came roaring. Both the driver and his partner appeared to be wearing Santa hats.
“Hollywood,” I muttered, “your magic spell is everywhere.”
The drizzle segued into rain, the gray Pacific grew choppier.
My dashboard clock told me it was ten minutes after two, my wristwatch maintained it was only five minutes past, when I located Paloma Lane in San Amaro. It was a well-kept little street that held only six scattered houses on its three blocks. Number 232 had a high redwood fence around its half acre of land.
A high fence would come in handy if I had to break into Felix Denker’s love nest.
Parking a half block from my target, I sat there for a few minutes. There didn’t seem to be any outdoor activity in the vicinity and none of the houses was lit. I watched the ocean for a while, thinking about Jane and hoping that we’d both live to be extremely long in years and that I’d succeed in selling a movie script before our youngest child went off to college.
Then I eased free of the Ford and walked, very casually, up to the redwood fence. The narrow gate wasn’t locked. Assuming an expression that indicated I had several—at least—perfectly legitimate reasons for prowling around here, I pushed it open to enter the yard.
There was a stretch of dry yellow lawn with a stone bench midway down on each side of the red flagstone path. The house looked to be about six or seven rooms, one story, and of the peach-colored stucco and red tile roof school of architecture. Chained to a rung of the ornamental iron porch rail was a bicycle, an expensive European woman’s model.
The front door was locked. So was the back door.
I fished out the lock-pick kit that was a souvenir of my newspaper days and started fooling with the back door lock.
I got it unlocked. It led into the kitchen.
Something greenish brown in a casserole dish had spoiled in the icebox, which had used up its supply of ice several days earlier, I estimated.
A smell of strong tobacco lingered in the hall and all the other rooms of the hideaway. On the mantel of the small stone fireplace in the living room sat two framed photographs and a small snowing globe that held a portion of old Vienna within. The venetian blinds were closed tight and the flowered drapes drawn nearly shut.
I carried both pictures over to the floor lamp and clicked it on. One of the small photos showed the late Felix Denker, wearing his monocle, with his arm around a very pretty dark-haired girl in her middle twenties. One of
the photos had been shot in the backyard and the other on a stretch of sunny afternoon beach. I couldn’t tell whether someone else had taken them or if Denker had rigged a timing mechanism.
Assuming the young woman was Marsha Tederow, I slid the backyard photo out of its frame and dropped it into my breast pocket. The frames I returned to their original place over the fireplace.
The rain slapped hard against the windows while I poked around the living room. There was a box of special-made cigarettes from “Van Gelder, Tobacconist” sitting on the glass-top coffee table next to a scatter of trade papers from a week or more earlier. Nothing in the fireplace, no scraps of paper or crumpled notes in the black wastebasket.
In the bedroom I found five dresses, three sweaters, and two pairs of slacks hanging in one of the closets. Marsha Tederow had also kept a small supply of lingerie, mostly white and frilly, in the middle drawer of the carved oaken bureau. Denker’s drawer held a smattering of underwear, an ascot, and a carton of contraceptives. The only clothes of his in the closet were a crimson-and-gold silk dressing gown and what I took to be an old-fashioned striped nightgown.
On the nightstand on the side of the bed I figured had been the dead director’s rested an empty coffee mug, a copy of a movie script for something titled Death on a Dark Street, and a monocle with a leather string attached.
In another closet was a blank stretched canvas, a pinewood box that held a barely touched set of expensive watercolors. Since Marsha Tederow had been an art director at Mammoth, I concluded she was the one who painted.
Leaning against the shadowy wall of the closet was a black leather portfolio of about the same dimensions as a page of the L.A. Times. Coaxing it out into the bedroom, I slapped the portfolio onto the unmade bed and unzipped it.
There were three rough charcoal sketches of Denker in thoughtful poses. Each had been signed “MT.”
In a sleeve of the portfolio I discovered three books. One was a hardcover, the other two very thin paperbacks. I extracted them and carried them over to the dressing table, sat down, and clicked on the lamp.
They were in German. I studied Spanish in high school, French in college. Thing was, you didn’t have to be a linguist to translate the titles or comprehend what they were about.
The hardcover was called something like The Superiority of the Aryan Race. The paperbacks were, approximately, Why the Jew Is Inferior and How to Rid the Fatherland of the Curse of the Jews. All three were the work of a Dr. Helga Krieger. In the front of the hardcover was a photo portrait of the author. Dr. Krieger, who was affiliated with a university in Munich in 1930 when all three of these works were published, was a fat, dark-haired woman in her late thirties. She wore a pince-nez and a self-satisfied expression.
I started to ask myself, “Why in the hell would Marsha Tederow save abysmal crap like this?”
I got as far as abysmal, when something took me by surprise.
What it was was a sudden sharp blow to the base of the skull.
I lost contact with everything at that point.
Twelve
“ … real horns of a dilemma, although, actually, now that I think about it, I’m not awfully certain why a dilemma should have horns in the first place, though that’s probably beside the point in this instance and, certainly, I have to admit, that I haven’t cured myself of the habit of straying, or at the very least wandering somewhat, from the point, and here’s Frank Denby sprawled on the floor and I really would feel bad, no matter how much looking on the bright side I applied after the fact, if he came to grief because I neglected to take the appropriate action,” someone was saying quite close to my head.
Speaking of my head, I was beginning to notice that it ached to a considerable degree.
I was sensing as well that whoever it was who was kneeling in my vicinity and delivering some sort of valedictory speech was someone I knew. A young woman I knew.
“ … calling the police, obviously, would be an absolutely fine thing to do, except that I really don’t belong here at all and so they might get entirely too preoccupied with my trespassing, ignoring the fact, which isn’t, I have to admit, a very valid legal premise, that since I was Marsha’s roommate for nearly three months up in Beverly Glen, that I’m entitled to housebreak down here in San Amaro simply because she sometimes lived here with that odious man with the monocle and the slick hair, and, on top of that, Frank may be housebreaking, too, although now that he and Groucho are detecting once again, he may have a certain leeway when it comes to—”
“Victoria,” I managed to cry out in a low, blurry voice.
I managed to persuade my left eye to open some.
Yellow lamplight came knifing in. I winced, groaned, and shut my eye.
“Are you conscious, Frank?” asked Victoria St. John, lips close to my ear. “Well, come to think of it, that’s a pretty dippy question, because, obviously, if you were unconscious, this would be only a rhetorical question and—”
“Could you …” I took a slow breath in and out, then a slower one. “Could you maintain … perhaps … a moment of silence?”
“Well, certainly, it’s not like I’m some chatterbox who just goes on ranting and raving for hours on end, especially when I’ve had a specific request to button my lip.”
“Splendid,” I muttered.
“I learned how to nurse injured people in relative silence and calm when I did volunteer work at the West Hollywood Clinic two years ago, although they finally asked me to do my volunteer work elsewhere because I was too distracting to some of the less stable patients, but that wasn’t because of my admittedly sometimes excessive volubility. It was because the whole of Southern California seems to get inordinately overactive in the presence of a pretty blonde. But I’m probably talking too much again and, if there’s one thing I learned at the clinic, it’s to shut your yap around head wound victims. Not that we had a great many people with head wounds wandering into the clinic, because, after all, it was West Hollywood and what you got more of was pokes in the snoot and … Well, you understand.” She fell silent.
Either she fell silent or I passed out again. “Why are you here?” I was able to ask her after what might have been two or three minutes.
“It’s going to seem like an enormous coincidence, but, to my way of thinking, there aren’t really any coincidences but only odd juxtapositions of events and—”
“Victoria, I assume you aren’t the one who bopped me on the coco,” I cut in in a very creaky voice.
“Certainly not, Frank,” she assured me, patting me, gingerly, between the shoulder blades. “I came here to snoop around and there you were, sprawled on the bedroom floor.”
“You didn’t see anybody?”
“Nary a soul,” she answered. “Are you seriously injured, do you think? The bump on the back of your head didn’t appear too awful, but then, unless I turned you over, there was no way I could tell if you didn’t have more serious injuries.”
With her help, I managed to sit up on the floor of the bedroom. When I stopped feeling dizzy, I asked her, “You were Marsha Tederow’s roommate?”
Victoria nodded. “For nearly three months,” she answered, tucking her legs under her and sitting close beside me. “Right after Groucho Marx, Private Eye left the air and, I’m sure I expressed this at the time last spring, but your discovering me right out of the blue working in that demeaning job as a Mullens Maiden and handing out samples of Mullens pudding, all five flavorful flavors, at grocery market openings and county fairs and even a Boy Scout jamboree, where I learned, by the way, that some of those scouts are very mature for their years, and giving me the chance to play Groucho’s secretary on the Mullens pudding show was absolutely a wonderful gesture, and even though the show flopped the ninth week I was on it, it boosted my career immeasurably and I was able to get an agent, although Sid Gruber is not exactly the pinnacle of Hollywood agents, he did get me a nice regular part on The Den of the Old Witch, where I get to scream my heart out almost every week,
and, what’s more important to answering your question, I’m earning enough money to afford a nice place in Beverly Glen without having to wear a little short skirt and my front slit down to here.”
“Am I correct in assuming that in that Icelandic epic you just recited, you didn’t get around to explaining how you came to move in with Marsha Tederow?”
“I answered an ad in the Hollywood Reporter.”
When I nodded, to indicate that I understood, several new varieties of sharp pain went zigzagging through my skull. “And what brought you here to Denker’s love nest?”
Victoria, who was wearing slacks and a sea-green pullover paused to collect her thoughts. “I’ve been making a very serious effort, Frank, to express myself concisely and I even attended a night school course in Westwood, except I found the instructor an awful windbag, which was odd in a way, since he claimed to have been an actor in silent movies, where, you’d have thought, he would’ve learned the value of … But, darn, I seem to be straying again,” she realized. “Okay, here goes. When Marsha was killed in that terrible car accident, I assumed it was nothing more than an accident. But when Felix Denker got himself shot, that seemed to be stretching probability too far. There had to be some sort of connection, don’t you think? What I mean is, maybe Marsha was murdered, too, and they just made it look like an accident.”
“I’ve been following up on a similar notion,” I told her. “Any idea who might’ve wanted to kill her?”
Victoria said, “I got the impression over the last few weeks that Marsha was possibly involved in something shady.”
“Shady how?”
“Well, one night when she’d had a couple of glasses of wine with dinner, she bragged to me that she was going to have a lot of money very soon.”