A Century of Noir

by Max Allan Collins

  She said, “I suppose that you’ll be carrying a gun again in this new profession you and Vartan dreamed up?”

  “Ma, at Arden, I carried a gun only when I worked guard duty. I never carried one when I did investigative work. This will not be guard duty.”

  She put out her cigarette and stood up. “That’s something, I suppose. You’re coming for dinner on Sunday, of course?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  She went out to take over the counter. Adele came in to have a cup of coffee. She was born eight years after I was; she is twenty and romantically inclined. She has our mother’s slim, dark beauty and our father’s love of the theater. She was currently sharing quarters with an aspiring actor. My father was a still cameraman at Elysian Films.

  “Mom looks angry,” she said. “What did you two argue about this time?”

  “My new office. Uncle Vartan is going to back me.”

  She shook her head. “What a waste! With your looks you’d be a cinch in films.”

  “Even prettier than your Ronnie?”

  “Call it a tie,” she said. “You don’t like him, do you?”

  Her Ronnie was an aspiring actor who called himself Ronnie Egan. His real name was Salvatore Martino. I shrugged.

  “He’s got another commercial coming up next week. And his agent thinks he might be able to work me into it.”

  “Great!” I said.

  That gave him a three-year career total of four commercials. If he worked her in, it would be her second.

  “Why don’t you like him?”

  “Honey, I only met him twice and I don’t dislike him. Could we drop the subject?”

  “Aagh!” she said. “You and Vartan, you two deserve each other. Bullheads!”

  “People who live in glass houses,” I pointed out, “should undress in the cellar.”

  She shook her head again. “You and Papa, you know all the corny old ones, don’t you?”

  “Guilty,” I admitted. “Are you bringing Ronnie to dinner on Sunday?”

  “Not this Sunday. We’re going to a party at his agent’s house. Ronnie wants me to meet him.”

  “I hope it works out. I’ll hold my thumbs. I love you, sis.”

  “It’s mutual,” she said.

  I kissed the top of her head and went out to my ancient Camaro. On the way to the apartment I stopped in Santa Monica and talked with my former boss at Arden.

  I had served him well; he promised that if they ever had any commercial reason to invade my new bailiwick, and were short-handed, I would be their first choice for associate action.

  The apartment I shared with two others in Pacific Palisades was on the crest of the road just before Sunset Boulevard curves and dips down to the sea.

  My parents had bought a tract house here in the fifties for an exorbitant twenty-one thousand dollars. It was now worth enough to permit both of them to retire. But they enjoyed their work too much to consider that.

  I will not immortalize my roomies’ names in print. One of them was addicted to prime-time soap operas, the other changed his underwear and socks once a week, on Saturday, after his weekly shower.

  When I told them, over our oven-warmed frozen TV dinners, that I would be leaving at the end of the month, they took it graciously. Dirty Underwear was currently courting a lunch-counter waitress who had been hoping to share an apartment. She would inherit my rollout bed—when she wasn’t in his.

  On Thursday morning my former boss phoned to tell me he had several credit investigations that needed immediate action and two operatives home with the flu. Was I available? I was.

  Uncle Sarkis and I went shopping on Saturday for office and apartment furniture. Wholesale, of course. “Retail” is an obscene word to my Uncle Sarkis.

  The clan was gathered on Sunday at my parents’ house, all but Adele. Uncle Vartan and my father played tavlu (backgammon to you). My mother, Uncle Sarkis, his three sons, and I played twenty-five-cent-limit poker out on the patio. My mother won, as usual. I broke even; the others lost. I have often suspected that the Sunday gatherings my mother hosts are more financially motivated than familial.

  My roommates told me Monday morning that I didn’t have to wait until the end of the month; I could move anytime my place was ready. The waitress was aching to move in.

  The remodeling was finished at noon on Tuesday, the furniture delivered in the afternoon. I moved in the next morning. All who passed on the street below would now be informed by the gilt letters on the new wide front window that the Pierre Apoyan Investigative Service was now open and ready to serve them.

  There were many who passed on the street below in the next three hours, but not one came up the steps. There was no reason to expect that anyone would. Referrals and advertising were what brought the clients in. Arden was my only doubtful source for the first; my decision to open this office had come too late to make the deadline for an ad in the phone book yellow pages.

  I consoled myself with the knowledge that there was no odor of sour socks in the room and I would not be subjected to the idiocies of prime-time soap opera. I read the L.A. Times all the way through to the classified pages.

  It had been a tiring two days; I went into my small bedroom to nap around ten o’clock. It was noon when I came back to the here and now. I turned on my answering machine and went down to ask Vartan if I could take him to lunch.

  He shook his head. “Not today. After your first case, you may buy. Today, lunch is on me.”

  He had not spent enough time in the old country to develop a taste for Armenian food. He had spent his formative years in New York and become addicted to Italian cuisine. We ate at La Famiglia on North Canon Drive.

  He had whitefish poached in white wine, topped with capers and small bay shrimp. I had a Caesar salad.

  Over our coffee, he asked, “Dull morning?”

  I nodded. “There are bound to be a lot of them for a one-man office. I got in two days at Arden last week. I might get more when they’re short-handed.”

  He studied me for a few seconds. Then, “I wasn’t going to mention this. I don’t want to get your hopes up. But I have a—a customer who might drop in this afternoon. It’s about a rug I sold her. It has been stolen. For some reason, which she wouldn’t tell me, she doesn’t want to go to the police. I gave her your name.”

  He had hesitated before he had called her a customer. With his history, she could have been more than that. “Was it an expensive rug?” I asked.

  “I got three thousand for it eight years ago. Only God knows what it’s worth now. That was a sad day for me. It’s an antique Kerman.”

  “Wasn’t it insured?”

  “Probably. But if she reported the loss to her insurance company they would insist she go to the police.”

  “Was anything else stolen?”

  “Apparently not. The rug was all she mentioned.”

  That didn’t make sense. A woman who could afford my uncle’s antique oriental rugs must have some jewelry. That would be easier and safer to haul out of a house than a rug.

  “I’d better get back to the office,” I said.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” he warned me again. “I probably shouldn’t have told you.”

  I checked my answering machine when I got back to the office. Nothing. I took out my contract forms and laid them on top of my desk and sat where I could watch the street below.

  I decided, an hour later, that was sophomoric. The ghost of Sam Spade must have been sneering down at me.

  She opened the door about twenty minutes later, a fairly tall, slim woman with jet-black hair, wearing black slacks and a white cashmere sweater. She could have been sixty or thirty; she had those high cheekbones which keep a face taut.

  “Mr. Apoyan?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “Your uncle recommended you to me.”

  “He told me. But he didn’t tell me your name.”

  “I asked him not to.” She came over to sit in my client’s cha
ir. “It’s Bishop, Mrs. Whitney Bishop. Did he tell you that I prefer not to have the police involved?”

  “Yes. Was anything else stolen?”

  She shook her head.

  “That seems strange to me,” I said. “Burglars don’t usually carry out anything big, anything suspicious enough to alert the neighbors.”

  “Our neighbors are well screened from view,” she told me, “and I’m sure this was not a burglar.” She paused. “I am almost certain it was my daughter. And that is why I don’t want the police involved.”

  “It wasn’t a rug too big for a woman to carry?”

  She shook her head. “A three-by-five-foot antique Kerman.”

  I winced. “For three thousand dollars—?”

  Her smile was dim. “You obviously don’t have your uncle’s knowledge of rugs. I was offered more than I care to mention for it only two months ago. My daughter is—adopted. She has been in trouble before. I have almost given up on her. We had a squabble the day my husband and I went down to visit friends in Rancho Santa Fe. When we came home the rug was gone and so was she.”

  I wondered if it was her daughter she wanted back or the rug. I decided that would be a cynical question to ask.

  “We have an elaborate alarm system,” she went on, “with a well-hidden turnoff in the house. It couldn’t have been burglars.” She stared bleakly past me. “She knows how much I love that rug. I feel that it was simply a vindictive act on her part. It has been a—troubled relationship.”

  “How old is she?” I asked.

  “Seventeen.”

  “Does she know who her real parents are?”

  “No. And neither do we. Why?”

  “I thought she might have gone back to them. How about her friends?”

  “We’ve talked with all of her friends that we know. There are a number of them we have never met.” A pause. “And I am sure would not want to.”

  “Your daughter’s—acceptable friends might know of others,” I suggested.

  “Possibly,” she admitted. “I’ll give you a list of those we know well.”

  She told me her daughter’s name was Janice and made out a list of her friends while I filled in the contract. She gave me a check, her unlisted phone number, and a picture of her daughter.

  When she left, I went to the window and saw her climb into a sleek black Jaguar below. My hunch had been sound; this was the town that attracted the carriage trade.

  I went downstairs to thank Vartan and tell him our next lunch would be on me at a restaurant of his choice.

  “I look forward to it,” he said. “She’s quite a woman, isn’t she?”

  “That she is. Was she ever more than a customer to you?”

  “We had a brief but meaningful relationship,” he said coolly, “at a time when she was between husbands. But then she started talking marriage.” He sighed.

  “Uncle Vartan,” I asked, “haven’t you ever regretted the fact that you have no children to carry on your name?”

  “Never,” he said, and smiled. “You are all I need.”

  Two elderly female customers came in then and I went out with my list of names. It was a little after three o’clock; some of the kids should be home from school.

  There were five names on the list, two girls and three boys, all students at Beverly Hills High. Only one of the girls was home. She had seen Janice at school on Friday, she told me, but not since. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t been at school Monday and Tuesday.

  “She’s not in any of my classes,” she explained.

  I showed her the list. “Could you tell me if any of these students are in any of her classes?”

  “Not for sure. But Howard might be in her art appreciation class. They’re both kind of—you know—”

  “Artistic?” I asked.

  “I suppose. You know—that weird stuff—”

  “Avant-garde, abstract, cubist?”

  She shrugged. “I guess, whatever that means. Janice and I were never really close.”

  From the one-story stone house of Miss Youknow, I drove to the two-story Colonial home of Howard Retzenbaum.

  He was a tall thin youth with horn-rimmed glasses. He was wearing faded jeans and a light gray T-shirt with a darker gray reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s Woman’s Head emblazoned on his narrow chest.

  Janice, he told me, had been in class on Friday, but not Monday or yesterday. “Has something happened to her?”

  “I hope not. Do you know of any friends she has who don’t go to your school?”

  Only one, he told me, a boy named Leslie she had introduced him to several weeks ago. He had forgotten his last name. He tapped his forehead. “I remember she told me he worked at some Italian restaurant in town. He was a busboy there.”

  “La Famiglia?”

  “No, no. That one on Santa Monica Boulevard.”

  “La Dolce Vita?”

  He nodded. “That’s the place. Would you tell her to phone me if you find her?”

  I promised him I would and thanked him. The other two boys were not at home; they had baseball practice after school. I drove to La Dolce Vita.

  They serve no luncheon trade. The manager was not in. The assistant manager looked at me suspiciously when I asked if a boy named Leslie worked there.

  “Does he have a last name?”

  “I’m sure he has. Most people do. But I don’t happen to know it.”

  “Are you a police officer?”

  I shook my head. “I am a licensed and bonded private investigator. My Uncle Vartan told me that Leslie is an employee here.”

  “Would that be Vartan Apoyan?”

  “It would be and it is.” I handed him my card.

  He read it and smiled. “That’s different. Leslie’s last name is Denton. He’s a student at UCLA and works from seven o’clock until closing.” He gave me Leslie’s phone number and address, and asked, “Is Pierre an Armenian name?”

  “Quite often,” I informed him coldly and left without thanking him.

  The address was in Westwood and it was now almost five o’clock. I had no desire to buck the going-home traffic in this city of wheels. I drove to the office to phone Leslie.

  He answered the phone. I told him I was a friend of Howard Retzenbaum’s and we were worried about Janice. I explained that she hadn’t been in school on Monday or Tuesday and her parents didn’t know where she was.

  “Are you also a friend of her parents?” he asked.

  “No way!”

  She had come to his place Friday afternoon, he told me, when her parents had left for Rancho Santa Fe. She had stayed over the weekend. But when he had come home from school on Tuesday she was gone.

  “She didn’t leave a note or anything?”

  “No.”

  “She didn’t, by chance, bring a three-foot-by-five-foot Kerman rug with her, did she?”

  “Hell, no! Why?”

  “According to a police officer I know in Beverly Hills, her parents think she stole it from the house. Did she come in a car?”

  “No. A taxi. What in hell is going on? Are those creepy parents of hers trying to frame her?”

  “Not if I can help it. Did she leave your place anytime during the weekend?”

  “She did not. If you find her, will you let me know?”

  I promised him I would.

  I phoned Mrs. Whitney Bishop and asked her if Janice had been in the house Friday when they left for Rancho Santa Fe.

  “No. She left several hours before that. My husband didn’t get home from the office until five o’clock.”

  “Were there any servants in the house when you left?”

  “We have no live-in servants, Mr. Apoyan.”

  “In that case,” I said, “I think it is time for you to call the police and file a missing persons report. Janice was in Westwood from Friday afternoon until some time on Tuesday.”

  “Westwood? Was she with that Leslie Denton person?”

  “She was. Do you know him?”


  “Janice brought him to the house several times. Let me assure you, Mr. Apoyan, that he is a doubtful source of information. You know, of course, that he’s gay.”

  That sounded like a non sequitur to me. I didn’t point it out. I thought of telling her to go to hell. But a more reasonable (and mercenary) thought overruled it; rich bigots should pay for their bigotry.

  “You want me to continue, then?” I asked.

  “I certainly do. Have you considered the possibility that one of Leslie Denton’s friends might have used her key and Janice told him where the turnoff switch is located?”

  I hadn’t thought of that.

  “I thought of that,” I explained, “but if that happened, I doubt if we could prove it. I don’t want to waste your money, Mrs. Bishop.”

  “Don’t you worry about that,” she said. “You find my rug!”

  Not her daughter; her rug. First things first. “I’ll get right on it,” I assured her.

  I was warming some lahmajoons Sarkis’s wife had given me last Sunday when I heard my office door open. I went out.

  It was Cheryl, my current love, back from San Francisco, where she had gone to visit her mother.

  “Welcome home!” I said. “How did you know I moved?”

  “Adele told me. Are those lahmajoons I smell?”

  I nodded. She came over to kiss me. She looked around the office, went through the open doorway, and inspected the apartment.

  When she came back, she said, “And now we have this. Now we won’t have to worry if your roommates are home, or mine. Do you think I should move in?”

  “We’ll see. What’s in the brown bag?”

  “Potato salad, a jar of big black olives, and two avocados.”

  “Welcome home again. You can make the coffee.”

  Over our meal I told her about my day, my lucky opening day in this high-priced town. I mentioned no names, only places.

  It sounded like a classic British locked-room mystery, she thought and said. She is an addict of the genre.

  “Except for the guy in Westwood,” I pointed out. “Maybe one of his friends stole the rug.”

  Westwood was where she shared an apartment with two friends. “Does he have a name?” she asked.

  I explained to her that that would be privileged information.

  “I was planning to stay the night,” she said, “until now.”