Alone

by Loren D. Estleman

  “You touched the gun?” Padilla had an irritating habit of clicking his pen repeatedly while waiting for an answer.

  “Only with the back of my hand. Mr. Rankin was agitated. I was afraid of what he might do with it in his state.”

  “Suicidal?”

  “I’m not qualified to judge. Given the circumstances I just thought it was a good idea.”

  He’d said nothing of the old man’s attempt to take the letter from him at gunpoint. He felt as protective of him as Rankin had of his late wife’s reputation. Anyway it had seemed a halfhearted threat at best.

  “What is it you do again?”

  “I look for movies.”

  “That shouldn’t take long in this town.”

  “Beverly Hills?”

  Padilla masticated his cigarette. “Hollywood. The Monster That Ate Southern California. You can’t sit on the John without seeing Natalie Wood in a monitor in the stall. My kid brother got a ticket for yanking out the air bag in the middle of his steering wheel and installing a DVD player. He asked me to fix it. As if.”

  Valentino tried not to sigh. Of all the cops in Los Angeles County, he had to draw one who hated movies.

  “The films I’m paid to look for haven’t been seen in decades. I’m a preservationist.”

  “Sounds like you put up pickles in jars.”

  “I leave that part to others. I’m a hunter and gatherer, and in some small way a detective.”

  The lieutenant turned his bleak eyes on him. “Some detective. You didn’t even hear the shot.”

  “The study is soundproof. I noticed that last night, when you could only hear the music of a live orchestra when the door was open.”

  “Yeah, the party. You say Rankin and Akers had words?”

  “I said that twice. I told you what they were.”

  “You’ll tell it all again before we’re through. I’m a detective, in a large way. That’s how I do things.” Click, click. “Any drugs at this party? You see Rankin take anything?”

  “Definitely not. It wasn’t that kind of party.”

  “Good. I stood in a courtroom once and watched a rich man’s son walk on a manslaughter rap because he was on Ecstasy at the time.”

  “It was a perfectly respectable affair.”

  “Yeah. Grownups in crazy costumes.”

  “Lieutenant, do you have any reason to believe Mr. Rankin wasn’t defending himself when he shot his assistant?”

  Padilla looked as if he was considering answering when someone knocked. He barked, and a female officer in uniform came in holding up a transparent Ziploc bag by one corner. Sealed inside was the copy of the Garbo letter. “Print team scanned it, Lieutenant.”

  “You’ll find mine on it,” Valentino said. “They’re on file at UCLA.”

  The lieutenant didn’t appear to be listening. He was holding the Swedish letter in front of him as if he were reading it. Valentino was pretty sure he was posing.

  The officer was still standing there when Padilla lowered the sheet. “Did I forget to tip you?”

  “The chief of detectives is here.”

  “What’d he use, a helicopter?”

  “I heard him say it’s a high-profile case.”

  “We don’t get any other kind. Tell him I’m on my way.” When she left, he pointed his pen at Valentino. “We’ve got your contact info. Any trips planned?”

  “No, but I’m in the middle of changing addresses. You can reach me on my cell or through the university.”

  “Sure you didn’t hear a shot? Maybe you thought it was a door slamming.”

  “Positive.”

  “What I don’t like about it is not being able to fix the time. It could have happened ten minutes before the housekeeper looked in on Rankin. Plenty of time for him to dress the set to fit his story.”

  “You can test the soundproofing for yourself.”

  “Gee, I didn’t think of that. I guess you are a detective.” He flipped shut the pad. “Okay, Valentino. Hop on your camel and hump it out of here.”

  He knew something like that had been coming.

  The foyer now was jammed with people, nearly as many as had filled the ballroom the night before. Uniforms and plainclothesmen and -women stood about in klatches, and every time one of them went out or came in through the front door, officers stationed there had to push it back against reporters clamoring to enter. The bullet that had ended Roger Akers’ life had shattered all the years and money that Matthew Rankin had invested in his privacy. Valentino felt the tragedy as if he were in its center.

  The chief of detectives—Valentino had heard the name Conroy when a reporter had cried for his attention—conformed far more closely to his concept of a Beverly Hills cop. A tall man in his forties with a sixty-dollar haircut, he wore a midnight-blue suit cut to his solid frame and gold-rimmed glasses with tinted lenses. When Padilla approached him, Conroy asked the lieutenant if he was having a hot flash.

  “No, sir.”

  “Plainclothes detail doesn’t mean you can go about in public dressed like you’re in the lineup. The next time we meet I want to see a necktie and not your Adam’s apple.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now, what’ve we got?”

  Valentino made his way around the officers at the door and into the desert glare of TV lights and stuttering strobes on the front porch, microphones poking at him and questions tumbling over one another like lemmings. “Who are you?” seemed to be the theme. He shouldered his way through the crowd and trailed a number of reporters out to his car, where two of them tried to block his path but parted when he gunned the motor. The experience gave him a new appreciation of the word press.

  **

  CHAPTER

  5

  HE LAUGHED ALOUD when he saw Kyle Broadhead.

  It was the first time since leaving the Rankin house he’d felt anything but gloom. The shooting, the implications of the Garbo letter, the police interview, the assault by reporters, and his inability to raise Harriet on his cell had made him as dreary as the smog that lay on the roof of The Oracle like a ton of moldy cheese.

  He’d reached the professor at home and found him eager to help out with the carpentry project. On the way to the theater, Valentino had stopped at Home Depot and bought a four-by-eight sheet of plywood and a bungee cord, intending to slide as much of the sheet as he could into his trunk and tie down the lid, only to find that it was too wide for the trunk. He’d gone back inside, exchanged the bungee for thirty feet of rope, and tied the sheet to the roof of the car, making sure to leave the door handle free on the driver’s side for him to climb in behind the wheel. For the second time in as many days, he felt like a clown transporting flotsam across the City of Angels.

  Broadhead greeted him in the lobby, wearing a brand new pair of bib-front overalls, painfully blue and as stiff as aluminum, over a checked flannel shirt with its factory creases showing. His shaggy hair boiled out from under a Dodgers cap and his feet were shod in his favorite pair of worn Italian loafers. Their low heels allowed the cuffs of the overalls to touch the floor in back.

  He scowled at Valentino’s reaction. “What’s the matter? Haven’t you ever seen a man dressed for honest work?”

  “You look like you’re in the Witness Protection Program.”

  “At least I don’t look like an unemployed actor. You got a place for nails in that sport coat?”

  He stopped laughing. “I forgot nails.”

  “Now, that’s funny.” Broadhead bent suddenly and lifted a handmade wooden toolbox loaded with hammers and squares and Mason jars filled with nails of various lengths and girth. “I could rebuild New Orleans with just what’s in here.”

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “From my grandfather, on his deathbed. He was a master cabinetmaker. I’ve waited all these years for his genes to kick in.” He scooped a short-handled hammer out of the box. “This is older than I am. It came with hi
m from Sheffield. Someone made a mistake and left the head too long in the flames. It’s triple tempered, harder than an industrial diamond. He called it Thor’s Knob. You know what ‘knob’ means in England?”

  “Stop waving it around. I’m developing a case of hammer envy. Kyle, we’re just nailing up a board.”

  “There are no small projects, only small workers.” He set the toolbox down on a stack of lumber, drew out a pair of heavy leather work gloves, tugged them on, and hoisted the box. “Let’s do this thing.”

  “I have to go up and pack a bag first. Unless you have clothes in your house that fit me.” Broadhead had agreed to put him up until he found other living arrangements.

  “I don’t even have any that fit me.”

  They went into the auditorium and up the stairs to the projection booth, leaving the toolbox behind. As Valentino opened drawers and transferred shirts, underwear, trousers, and socks to the suitcase on the sofa bed, Broadhead looked around. “I’ll miss this room. Every time I’m in it I expect to make another exciting discovery.”

  “It gave us a complete print of Greed. It doesn’t owe us anything.”

  “Putting in new stairs is going to cost you some floor space.”

  “I won’t need it if I can get a good deal on a digital projector. You can fit a dozen of them in one of those old Bell and Howells.”

  “Aren’t you planning to screen anything from the university library?”

  “Sure. It’s going digital.”

  “That just started. It’ll take ten years just to transfer the inventory from safety stock to discs. Some of it’s still on silver nitrate. Oh, wait.” Broadhead chuckled. “I forgot. By the time you get this pile of bricks ready for show, they’ll be implanting movies in our brains.”

  “I don’t know how I’d get along without your encouragement.”

  “I think I liked you better when you were making sport of my apparel. Did you and Harriet have a fight?”

  “Sort of, but that’s not the worst of it.” Valentino stopped packing and told him what had happened at Matthew Rankin’s house.

  Broadhead listened without comment, then dug his pipe and tobacco pouch out of his bib pockets and began stuffing the bowl. “So you think Garbo was a dyke?”

  “I know you enjoy being a curmudgeon, but irony doesn’t make an ugly word any less ugly,” Valentino said. “If what Rankin says is true, she was at least bisexual, or entertained fantasies in that direction, and Andrea Rankin shared them; or at the very least did nothing to discourage them. But that’s ancient history. I’m more concerned about Rankin. Lieutenant Padilla seemed hell-bent on charging him with murder.”

  “Well, motives don’t get much stronger.” Broadhead got the pipe going and crushed out the match on the floor.

  “But if he was planning to kill Akers, why offer me a deal to dig something up on him?”

  “Maybe he needed a witness.”

  “He had his housekeeper.”

  “Servants are like spouses. Prosecutors don’t assign them much weight in court. All he had to do was pop Akers and dump the bust off the pedestal so it would look like he dropped it when he fell. It’s not hard to put a dead man’s fingerprints on a chunk of marble.”

  Valentino said, “I’m glad he picked me for a witness, if that’s what it was about, instead of you. You’ve already got him measured for the gas chamber.”

  “Lethal injection, in this state. I’m not saying anything this Padilla isn’t already thinking.”

  “There’s just one hole in that theory. If Rankin plotted to kill Akers to keep that letter a secret, why’d he give me the copy when I asked him what Akers had on him?”

  “You said yourself the original has to be somewhere. But it’s a good point. If he planned the murder, he’d have worked out some way to get his hands on the original and destroy them both.”

  “Which suggests his innocence.”

  “Of premeditation, possibly,” Broadhead said, puffing. “It doesn’t mean he didn’t lose his cool, maybe because Akers was taunting him, and shoot him without stopping to consider the consequences.”

  “At least it wouldn’t make him a cold-blooded killer.”

  “Manslaughter is still a jailable offense, and at his age, a year could be a life sentence.” He studied Valentino’s face. “I didn’t know you had any close friends among the plutocracy.”

  “I don’t. But he’s been a good friend to the Film Preservation Department, and I don’t like to see anyone railroaded.”

  “Of course, this has nothing to do with the promise he made.”

  The archivist unfolded a shirt and refolded it the same way. “I suppose that’s part of it.”

  “I’m as interested as you are in rescuing the history of cinema from the ravages of time. Helping a murderer to escape the consequences of his crime is a steep price to pay to recover a couple of reels of celluloid.”

  “I agree. By the same token I’d let them go to the devil if they got in the way of clearing an innocent man.”

  Broadhead let his pipe go out. “We set a bad precedent by interfering in an official police investigation to prevent Greed from rotting away in a non-climate-controlled evidence room. I’ve never seen How Not to Dress, nor has anyone else who’s still breathing his own oxygen, but I doubt a promotional documentary conceived and executed to bring customers into a department store that closed its doors under Gustav the Fifth is worth a felony record for obstruction of justice.”

  “I never said a word about interfering with the police.”

  “You didn’t. That’s what has me worried.”

  “I’ve got my hands full with this pile of bricks, not to mention Dwight Spink. The sleuths’ union hasn’t a thing to fear from me.”

  Broadhead smiled. “That’s all I needed to hear. I wouldn’t want to be accused of harboring a wanted man.” He pointed at Valentino’s coffeemaker. “You might want to take that with you. I haven’t had a taste of caffeine since Elaine died. I can’t sleep more than an hour at a time even without it.”

  “Without it I can’t wake up. Thanks again for letting me crash at your place. At the rate I’m going I couldn’t swing a week at the Bates Motel.”

  “I still think you ought to bunk at Harriet’s. I have it on the authority of my dear departed wife that I’d drive Gandhi to violence after two nights under the same roof.”

  “That would be problematic,”

  “Bring her flowers. For some reason that always worked with Elaine. You could have knocked me over with a bus the first time she fell for it. I guess there’s a reason some things hang around long enough to become clichés.”

  “We’ll work it out. It’s just too early in the relationship to show up at her door with a toothbrush.”

  “You’re the expert. Thank God I don’t have to chew over that kind of thing anymore. The wind from the grave can be quite liberating.”

  Valentino closed and latched the suitcase. “I thought you were working up the courage to plight your troth with the fair Fanta.”

  “I was, until I did the simple arithmetic. Do you have any idea how many numbers have come and gone between my Social Security number and hers? I was eligible for AARP when she was learning how to finger paint.”

  “How does she feel?”

  “I haven’t asked her. She’s interning with a legal firm downtown and studying law at night. She hardly has time to think about a decrepit old monomaniac.”

  “You’re not decrepit.”

  Broadhead struck another match. “How much does a bachelor need to pack? I wouldn’t leave a decent piece of plywood unguarded in a neighborhood like this for ten minutes. One of your neighbors is probably building a deck behind his refrigerator box as we speak.”

  Valentino unplugged his coffeemaker, tucked it under one arm, hoisted the suitcase, and took one last look around. Spare as it was, the projection booth had been his home for weeks, and he shared with Broadhead the s
ense of discovery that would always bathe that room with golden light. He turned his back on it and led the way downstairs.

  He was glad Leo Kalishnikov had not been present to see the variety of mishaps a lifelong academic and a practical film scholar could bring to the simple business of boarding up the entrance to a staircase. They managed to knock a corner off the plywood sheet carrying it through the doorway, bent several nails fixing it in place, had to pull it down and start all over again when it failed to cover the doorway, mashed two thumbs (both Valentino’s), and performed microsurgery removing a splinter from the heel of Valentino’s right palm with a pair of pliers and an application of mineral spirits to prevent infection; the sting had shot Valentino to his feet and chipped one of Broadhead’s teeth when he bit down on his pipe stem. At length the barricade was in place and the professor returned his tools to his box.