They locked eyes. A nerve in her cheek twitched. Suddenly she broke up. The room seemed to go from gloomy black-and-white to Technicolor.
“I tried,” she said, wiping her eyes with her napkin. “I couldn’t sustain it. I wish I had a picture of your expression. You looked like a puppy with a bellyache. Val, you couldn’t bring yourself to knock down that old barn if you struck oil in the basement. You can’t sell it either. If you did and whoever bought it tore it down and put up a Seven-Eleven, you’d drive clear around the L.A. basin to avoid looking at it.”
“I’d do it for you.”
“If you did I’d drive the same route for the same reason. You are possessed, with a dream, and I’m not going to let you cast me as the Wicked Witch of the West by slapping you awake.” She sat back, stirring the crushed ice in her fountain cup with the straw. “Anyway, that’s where we met. What kind of girlfriend would I be if I demolished a romantic landmark?”
He ventured a smile. “Does that mean I’m forgiven?”
“No, Val, you’re not.”
He studied her face closely. Her cheek didn’t twitch. She looked up. “We need a break,” she said. “You can’t cuddle up to that rat trap and me at the same time, and my work takes patience I can’t afford to spread around.” She held up a hand when he started to speak. “I’m not blaming you entirely. If I’d been thinking like a professional instead of mooning over my beau, I’d never have spilled information on an open police case by telling you what we’d found out from that phony Garbo letter. We both need a vacation, and not from work.”
“How long?” he said at last.
“I don’t know. It’s not like making a reservation at a resort. We’ll play it by ear.”
He opened his mouth, closed it. He didn’t want to say it. “I feel like we’re breaking up.”
“Maybe we are. I hope not. You’re a pretty good guy, Mr. Valentino.”
“You’re not so bad yourself, Ms. Johansen.”
She broke eye contact to lift a shopping bag from the floor beside her chair and put it on the table. It bore the Lord & Taylor logo; he’d assumed she’d spent her day off shopping and had wanted to show him what she’d bought, but she’d behaved as if she’d forgotten it. He asked her what it contained.
“A bunch of old letters. The originals are still in Stockholm and Beverly Hills has copies on file. They’re just taking up space here. I thought you might like to add them to your collection.”
He tilted the bag and looked inside. He recognized the script on the top sheet, as elegant as the hand that had written it, but so much more simple than the personality behind the words. The letter was in somewhat mangled English, an early experiment addressed to Greta Garbo’s close friend Vera Schmiterlöw in Sweden from Hollywood, and characteristically unsigned.
Harriet interrupted before he could thank her. “This, too. They’re issuing a press release, so don’t think I’m falling back into my bad habits.” She took a square fold of paper from a pocket of her smock and snapped it open under his nose.
The fax machine needed a new ink cartridge. The letters were faded, but legible. The message was signed by an inspector with the Swedish Ministry of Police.
**
Ray Padilla’s office was tidier than he was, but then it had been stripped of everything personal and whatever paperwork it had contained had been transferred to someone else with the Beverly Hills Police. The lieutenant slid a bowling trophy into the cardboard carton on the desk and replaced the shredded Kool between his teeth with a fresh one from the pack. His rusty blazer had a fresh hole burned in the left sleeve— apparently he did more than just chew them when he wasn’t under official scrutiny—and he’d gotten rid of the bolo tie.
“What’s so important I had to delay my unpaid vacation?” he demanded.
Valentino held out the fax.
“I’ve seen it. When’s the last time you changed your cartridge?”
“It isn’t mine, it’s LAPD’s.”
“That was my next question. You’ve got a cheap pipeline. All you have to do is buy it flowers and feed it from time to time.”
“I don’t think that’s a road you want to go down, considering the reason you’re cleaning out your desk.”
“I thought tipping the press to what was in the letter might send Rankin over the edge, force him to make a mistake that would reopen the investigation. Maybe I need some time off at that.” Padilla upended a coffee mug full of pencils into the box, started to put down the mug, then shrugged and put it in too.
“It’s possible I owe you an apology. I thought you had it in for everyone who was better off than you, and would frame evidence just to bring him down. Now I’m beginning to think you’re the only cop in Beverly Hills who hasn’t forgotten what justice is all about. Do you know what the fax means?”
“It’s in English, and I can read. The cops in Stockholm arrested the guy that stole Garbo’s letters from the military archives, a replacement janitor. Congrats to them. What’s it got to do with a cold case in California?”
“It’s warming up. All the material reported missing was recovered from the janitor’s flat. It never left Stockholm. What does that do to the theory that Roger Akers stole it and used it to falsify the letter he blackmailed Matthew Rankin with?”
“Maybe he and the janitor were in cahoots. Maybe he borrowed them long enough to make copies and gave them back. The janitor’s end would come out of whatever he got from selling them.”
“You ran the background on Rankin and Akers. How long were they in Stockholm on that visit?”
“They came home after four days.” Padilla chewed on his cigarette. “Not much time to set up a heist. Akers might’ve planned it long distance before they made the trip.”
“How was his Swedish?”
“I didn’t ask him. He’s dead.”
“He’d need more than you can get from a tourist’s phrase book to communicate something as sophisticated as a conspiracy to commit grand theft. If he’d studied the language formally, there’d be a transcript; if he got it from Berlitz, he’d have tapes or CDs at his place or in his car. Even if he got rid of them, there’d have to be a paper trail of some kind.”
“Maybe the janitor speaks English. I’m always hearing how European schools are better than ours when it comes to teaching languages.”
“Something nudged me when I found out that whoever faked the blackmail letter needed at least a working knowledge of Swedish,” Valentino said. “I wasn’t in a frame of mind to know what it was at the time. Whether or not the actual thief speaks English, Akers had to be bilingual in order to fool Rankin, who knew enough to get by. I doubt the schools over there are so good that a janitor could pull it off.”
“Nothing in Akers’ file says he spoke or wrote any other language well enough to order in a Mexican restaurant. Rankin did all the talking when they were abroad. I’ve still got some credit with Records and Information; I can check those other things. But maybe Akers had help over there besides the janitor.”
“He wasn’t extorting enough from Rankin to pay that many accomplices. We’ll know more when the police over there finish interrogating their suspect. Meanwhile we need to let go of the Garbo angle if we’re going to clear this up.”
“We,” Padilla said. “A disgraced cop and a stamp collector. The dream team.”
“Any reinforcements you can suggest are welcome.”
The lieutenant made a face and dropped the cigarette into his wastebasket in two halves. He plucked a shred of tobacco from his lower lip and flicked it away. “There’s a little crack in your theory. If Akers wasn’t squeezing Rankin, there’s no motive for shooting Akers. We can’t blow apart Rankin’s story that Akers attacked him when he refused to go on paying him without discarding the only other reason Rankin had for killing him. It’s like one of those damn number puzzles where you can’t slide one tile where it belongs without pushing another one out of its slot.”
“Those puzzles are designed to be solved,” Valentino said. “And Roger Akers didn’t shoot himself.”
“We know who shot Akers. Rankin admitted it.”
“Let’s ask him why.”
**
He wanted to put his plan into operation immediately, but he remembered he had a meeting scheduled with Henry Anklemire in Information Services. Backing out wasn’t an option; Smith Oldfield was enthusiastic about the deal with MGM, and the way Valentino’s life had been going lately he needed a friend in the legal department.
The little publicist’s office was the only one on campus less commodious than Valentino’s. His abrasive personality had banished him to a monastic cell right next door to the boiler room in the basement of the UCLA administration building. During winter cold snaps—when skateboarders in Malibu wore scarves with their Speedos—the pipes rattled like maracas and the very walls seemed to sweat. Curling photographs in cheap frames showed Anklemire shaking hands with celebrities from both sides of the earthly pale. Some of the poses were putative; the ones with Richard Simmons and Gary Coleman looked genuine, but Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger screamed Photoshop, and most of the autographs appeared to have been written by the same hand.
Anklemire popped up from behind his painted-plywood desk to wring his visitor’s hand, mauling bone and grinning exactly as in his pictures with teeth courtesy of the university’s dental school. He was a youngish man, but wore secondhand hairpieces he obtained from contacts in studio wardrobe departments, and his shiny-slick suit fit his tubby frame like the skin on a bratwurst.
“Garbo!” He spoke in sentence fragments and exclamation points, like the blurbs on an old-time movie poster.
“No, Valentino.”
“You think I forgot your name? I’m still spending the bonus I got on the mileage from that Greed deal. Murder! Skeletons! A haunted moompitcher house! Boo! My onliest regret is we couldn’t sit on it till Halloween! Sit down! Not there, that one’s busted. I keep it around in case the director of the department comes to visit. Fat chance!”
Valentino sat in an orange plastic scoop chair that looked as if it had come from a high school, working his hand until circulation returned. The little man couldn’t climb a flight of stairs without wheezing, but a lifetime of glad-handing had put him in shape to arm wrestle Mr. T.
“Cigar?” Back behind his desk, Anklemire shoved a box of White Owls the other’s way. Valentino had visited many offices, but no one had ever offered him a cigar before. The man lived in a time warp.
“No, thanks. Will this take long? I’ve got an important call to make.”
“I never chaired a meeting longer than five minutes. Words are for the rubes. Garbo!” It was the most singular case of Tourette’s Syndrome the archivist had encountered. “I vant to be alone! Ha-ha!”
“Actually, she didn’t say—”
“You’re an ornament of this institution.”
The statement, and the sudden grave expression that accompanied it, set him aback. He shifted uncomfortably. “Well, you know what happens to ornaments the day after Christmas.”
“I’m on the level. Football, phooey! Endowments from old geezers that can’t fit into their old varsity jerseys, horse puckey! This town was built on moompitchers. Where’d Hugh Hefner be without boobs, I ask you?”
“I really can’t answer that.”
“In the crapper, that’s where! You got to go with your long suit. I was in London last year, can you pipe that? I had frequent flyer miles burning a hole in my pocket, and Israel was at war with somebody or other. I seen some punked-up teenagers bopping through Picadilly, they had on T-shirts with movie stars on ‘em. You think it was Larry Oliver and that tribe? Hell, no! Marilyn, Bogie, Jimmy Dean, American what-you-call icons! Detroit can’t compete with the Nips, and those geeks in Silicone Valley can’t get it up with even the South Koreans, but our junk culture—I’m swiping the phrase from those fossils in the English Lit Department—our junk culture has muscled its way clear into Baghdad. Those ragheads can keep their weapons of mass construction. We got Garbo!”
“Look, I’ve only been invited to an audition. I’m not much of a public speaker. It’s highly possible they’ll pass me over for someone who’s a bigger draw. When I agreed to this meeting I thought you wanted to write up my bio, something to throw to the reporters who write for the entertainment page.”
“Hell, I could cobble up something dynamite without taking up your time. As to the rest, I can get you a dialogue coach from Tri-Star. This guy taught Gwyneth Paltrow how to speak English. I asked you here to give me some ideas on how I can turn this canned ham into a honey-baked West Virginia.”
Valentino rubbed his temples with his thumbs. He never came away from a meeting with Anklemire without a thumping headache, and the racket from the pipes next door wasn’t helping. “I may need that dialogue coach. Right now I’m not sure we’re speaking the same language.”
“Look, Garbo’s dead what, fifteen, sixteen years? That’s forever in PR if you can’t come up with a hook to make it what-you-call relevant today. Greed was good, it was great; we had that murder. I got up my adrenaline when that shooting went down in Beverly Hills, and when that dyke thing broke I thought we was golden; but it’s been weeks, and I need a sure-enough Dr. Frankensteen to keep it alive till How to Dress hits Best Buy.”
“How Not to Dress.”
“Schlemiel, Schlemozzle.” He waggled a hand. “Give me input. How can we pump blood into this carcass, make it stand up and shout, ‘Mazoola?’”
“I’ve no idea. I’m an archivist, not a publicist.”
Anklemire studied his face, then sat back, squirming in his blown-out Naugahyde chair; the pernicious hemorrhoids that had driven him from Madison Avenue to this backwater were evident. “Well, I’ll fire up some land of rocket. I ain’t dead yet.”
“I wouldn’t give up hope.”
Valentino had intended the encouragement to be rhetorical, but it was a mistake to underestimate Henry Anklemire’s powers of interpretation. He hounded Valentino with questions all the way to the exit. The man was as bad as the jackals from the press.
**
CHAPTER
21
HE CALLED MATTHEW Rankin’s house, but was told by the housekeeper that her employer was meeting with his board of directors in San Francisco and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. Ray Padilla took in the information over his cell phone and told Valentino to call him when he had an appointment.
“I wish we were wrapping this up tonight,” Valentino said. “This waiting is murder.”
“Murder is murder. Having second thoughts?”
“I had those an hour ago. Right now I’m halfway between my third and my fourth.”
“I’d never trust you with this if I were in solid with the department; there’s nothing like having a fat detective sergeant by your side and a prowl car purring at the curb for leverage. Rankin trusts you. If I try to get my foot in the door he’ll call his lawyer and I won’t be able to come within five hundred feet of him without a trunkload of probable cause.”
“I’m not backing out on you, Lieutenant. I just needed a pep talk. I’m still hoping this whole thing turns out to be a monstrous misunderstanding.”
“I don’t. But then I’ve got a pension going down for the third time.” The connection broke. He had the telephone etiquette of an alligator gar.
Valentino’s cell rang while he was driving to his residential hotel. It was Leo Kalishnikov.
“Spink resigned, did you hear?” he said by way of greeting.
“Through the grapevine. Any more good news?”
“Indeed, my friend. The zoning board has conferred and voted to extend you a temporary variance for the remainder of this term, to be reviewed next spring, when if there are no outstanding violations the members will consider making it permanent. Until then you are free to take up residence in the Oracle once again.”
&n
bsp; “What about the stairs to the projection booth?”
“Spink withdrew the objection when he submitted his resignation. Evidently he misinterpreted the ordinance.” The Russian made a decorous noise in his throat. “Perhaps you have some insight that can shed light on this surprising turn of events. I myself have none.”
“I didn’t really know the man. Maybe he had an epiphany of some kind.”
“With a bus, maybe, crossing Santa Monica against the light.”
Valentino drove half a block in silence. When Kalishnikov spoke again, his Old World manner was back in place. “I look forward to making your better acquaintance throughout this project. You have facets that do not reveal themselves in the course of casual conversation.”
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