The April Robin Murders

by Craig Rice

  “Okay, Bingo,” Handsome said. “Where do we start taking pictures?”

  “Wherever there’s people,” Bingo said.

  It was still early in the day. A quick job on the cards had been managed. “An action picture of you has just been taken. See how you would look in the newsreels or tomorrow’s paper. Send this card with 25¢ and your address—”

  There had been a brief, but not insurmountable, problem about the address on the cards. “Since we already practically have an office,” Bingo had said, “and it’s a very swell address—” He decided to call up Victor Budlong.

  Victor Budlong said of course it was perfectly all right to use the office as a mailing address until they moved in, which he trusted would be soon. He personally would see to it that Miss Meadows put a card with their firm name in the mail slot. If there was anything more he could do, he would be delighted. He hoped everything else was proceeding satisfactorily?

  “Fine,” Bingo assured him. “Fine and double fine.”

  To be on the safe side, he ordered a batch of cards, not to be mailed in, but to be filled in and collected on the spot. “There’s a lot of people,” he reminded Handsome, “who are happy to give you their address and their two-bits right away, but might sometimes forget about it when they got home. Like I told you back in Central Park, you gotta pick your people accordingly.”

  By the time they returned from getting their license the cards had been ready, printed—thanks to some overstock at the cut-rate and quick-job printers, and some fast haggling on Bingo’s part—in a vivid shocking pink, with the International Foto, Motion Picture and Television Corporation of America printed in a startling and brilliant green. Dignity, Bingo had explained, would come later.

  Now it was barely one o’clock, and they were ready to begin a day’s work. “Wherever there’s people,” Bingo repeated.

  “There’s people everywhere,” Handsome said, glancing at the traffic and at the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard.

  “Tourists, I mean,” Bingo said. “Tourists who want a souvenir picture taken in the heart of Hollywood to send home to their friends and families. Or to keep for their memory book. Wait a minute, Handsome, let me look in the book.”

  He began thumbing through the New Visitor’s Guide.

  “Alligator Farm,” he read. “Ambassador Hotel. Angel’s Flight. Arrowhead Lake.” He paused. “I guess this section is all by alphabet. Most of that sounds pretty far away.” He turned a few pages.

  “Look under ‘H,’” Handsome suggested.

  Bingo turned another few pages. “Hollywood Bowl, Hollywood High School, Hollywood Cemetery, Hollywood Post Office—Here we are, Handsome. Hollywood and Vine!” He read enthusiastically, “‘Famous throughout the world, the center of the motion picture capital draws thousands of tourists daily—’”

  “Six blocks from here,” Handsome said.

  Eighteen blocks of driving later, they found a parking lot within walking distance of the center of the motion picture capital. Bingo handed Handsome a stack of the mail-in cards and said, “I’ll take the camera.”

  There was a hurt look in Handsome’s eyes.

  “Only,” Bingo said hastily, “because while I don’t take so good pictures like you do, more ladies take cards when you pass ’em out, and the ladies are the ones who send in most of the quarters.”

  Fifteen minutes later they had tried all four corners of Hollywood and Vine. Bingo had hopefully taken a few pictures, Handsome had done his smiling best to hand out the pink and green cards. No one had paid the slightest attention.

  Finally they stepped into a doorway and paused for a cigarette. “Everybody’s going to lunch, or everybody’s coming back from lunch,” Handsome said, as though he were personally apologizing for the deficiencies of Hollywood and Vine.

  “Everybody except us,” Bingo growled. He glanced again at the New Visitor’s Guide and read aloud, “‘Here you will see celebrities, beautiful girls, Hollywood characters—’”

  “None of them seem to want to have their picture taken,” Handsome said.

  Bingo drew a long breath and said, “Maybe we just picked a bad time of day, Handsome.” He glanced down Vine Street. His eyes narrowed and he said, “I see a bunch of tourist-looking people standing still.” He took one more quick look at the guidebook. “‘The Brown Derby, favorite rendezvous of stage, screen and television stars.’” He stuck the book in his pocket and said, “Sure, Handsome, those people are hanging around there hoping somebody will come out that they can get an autograph off of. That’s the place for us to go into business.”

  He took a few steps, paused, looked at Handsome and said, “I’ll take the cards, I talk faster. You take the camera, you make better pictures. But every time you snap one of a lady, give her a big wistful smile like you wished you knew her better.” He added, “And when they smile back, I hand out the card.”

  It began well. With a few nudges from Bingo, Handsome singled out a pair of near-middle-aged women in print dresses; an obviously married couple, he in a Hawaiian print sports shirt (Bingo immediately resolved never to wear one again), she in a powder-blue traveling suit and flowered hat; and a blissful-eyed, hand-holding honeymoon pair.

  “A newsreel-type picture of you has just been taken—” Bingo began. He greeted the two women—schoolteachers on vacation, he guessed—with, “You’ll want to take home a picture of yourself, snapped right in front of the famous Brown Derby, favorite rendezvous of stars—” They took a card. He noticed the admiring glance the woman in the traveling suit was giving Handsome, and said, “Send some pictures to the friends back home—show them how you look in the heart of Hollywood—” To the honeymoon couple he said warmly, “What a wonderful souvenir of the happiest days of your life—” and followed it up with congratulations to the groom and felicitations to the bride.

  The man in the Hawaiian shirt, who had taken a card, said, “Hey, bud, you know your way around this town. How can me and the wife get tickets to some TV shows?”

  “Nothing to it,” Bingo said, “I’ll be glad to help you out. When you send in that card, put in a note of what shows you’d like to see, and I’ll get tickets for you. And don’t forget, if you like the picture, we’ll happily make an enlargement for you, practically at cost—say, how about my partner catching a couple more of you, right in front of the door—”

  Two pictures later, though, he felt suddenly as though the glacial cap had moved down from the North Pole. He shoved the cards hastily in his pocket, and turned his head to signal Handsome.

  Pushing through the crowd, and unnoticed by it, were Leo Henkin and Rex Strober.

  It was too late to catch Handsome, who went right on taking pictures.

  “Well!” Bingo said. “Here we meet again!” He saw Leo Henkin’s eyes rake over Handsome with the camera. Rex Strober was looking at nothing but his watch.

  “Taking pictures?” Leo Henkin asked, implying that they could be two boy scouts with a Brownie camera.

  “Of course!” Bingo said, marshaling up all the enthusiasm he could. “We’re always taking pictures. For background ideas! And people! What is a picture without people? Clothes! Mannerisms! Above all, faces!” He drew himself up to his full five foot five and said, “Faces! Above all, faces!”

  “You hear that?” Leo Henkin said to Rex Strober. “These boys are artists!”

  Rex Strober was busy opening a package of cigarettes and paying no attention.

  Handsome said solemnly, “‘Some faces are books in which not a line is written, except a date.’”

  “Boy,” Leo Henkin said. “What a line! Original?”

  “Longfellow,” Handsome said. “It was the caption under a picture in the—”

  “Except a date!” Leo Henkin said. “You listening, Rex?” Rex Strober was now looking for matches.

  “These boys have a great property,” Leo Henkin said as he and Rex Strober left. “And Leo Henkin has the inside track on it—” They disappeared into the Derby
.

  Bingo looked after them wistfully. “Handsome,” he said, “let’s move on. There’s no telling who we might run into here, and let’s not take chances with our dignity.” He led the way back toward Hollywood Boulevard.

  “There were more people there,” Handsome said, a little wistfully. “And more coming.”

  “Another time,” Bingo said. “And at some other place.” At the moment he was tempted to add, “And in some other world.”

  They walked in silence to the corner of Hollywood and Vine. At the corner a newsdealer spotted the camera still hanging around Handsome’s neck, smirked and said, “I let’cha take my pitcher for a quarter.”

  Bingo came back with a startling jolt into the world he lived in, looked through narrowed eyelids at the dealer and said, “It’s a sale. But only if you give us three papers for free.”

  After a brief argument, money changed hands, a picture was taken, and copies of the Examiner, the Mirror and the Herald Express were tucked under Bingo’s arm.

  “And if you’d like some postcard pictures of yourself to send to your many out-of-town customers—” Bingo began.

  “Buster,” the newsdealer said, “you just take your own side of the street, and we’ll get along fine.”

  Bingo decided it was not the time for discussion. “Maybe we could sell him the negative,” he muttered to Handsome as they headed for the parking lot. He paused to cast a last look at Hollywood and Vine, half closed his eyes and pictured Columbus Circle in a dreary February rain, lower Broadway in a sleet storm, and 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue in the hottest July in the history of the weather bureau. He wished he were in any one of those dreamed-of scenes. Indeed, at the moment he wished he were anywhere else in the world, including a small igloo on the fringe of the polar cap.

  Handsome nudged him and said, “Hey! Isn’t that June Melrose?”

  Bingo left the polar ice cap, took a quick look, shook his head and said, “Looks like her. But most of these beautiful thirty-six by twenty-four by thirty-six blondes look so alike. Especially in those jersey slacks.” He added wistfully, “I really would like to get a look at June Melrose sometime!”

  Then suddenly it came back to him, like an unexpected and wayward sunbeam popping out through a rift in what had been darkly threatening clouds.

  This, he reminded himself, was Hollywood. This was where he and Handsome had come to get rich and famous. A few temporary setbacks were certainly not going to stop them now!

  He slid into the car and said, “Wait a minute. Let’s us take one more look in the guidebook.” He thumbed through it. “Olivera Street.” He shook his head. “Too far from here, right now. La Brea Tar Pits. No profit for us in a batch of prehistoric animals that didn’t have any more sense than to go and get stuck in some place they didn’t have any business getting into in the first place.”

  Handsome didn’t say, “Like us.” He just went on wiping the windshield.

  “Gilmore Stadium,” Bingo read on. “Nothing doing there at this hour of the day. Greek Theatre.” His face darkened. “Closed this time of year. Griffith Planetarium. Wrong kind of stars for us, right now. Hey!” He beamed at Handsome. “Grauman’s Chinese Theatre! That’s where we should’ve headed for in the first place!”

  Handsome started the car and began feeling the way out of the parking lot.

  Bingo leaned back, half closed his eyes, and rehearsed: “What a wonderful souvenir to take home to your folks! A picture of you, standing beside the—” He consulted the book again. “—The imperishable memories of the stars you love! Betty Grable’s legs! Jimmy Durante’s nose! Trigger’s hoofprint!”

  “Lots more,” Handsome said.

  “Sure!” Bingo said. “Handsome, that’s the place everybody from out of town heads for when they get to Hollywood!” He drew a long breath. “Handsome, we might even find April Robin’s footprint there!”

  “If she was after 1927 we will,” Handsome said, threading his way through Hollywood Boulevard traffic. “Account of, Bingo, that’s when it opened up. The first stars were Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Norma Shearer—”

  Bingo said accusingly, “You’ve been reading the guidebook.”

  “Uh-uh,” Handsome said. “There was this article about it. Pictures of everybody. In a Sunday supplement. On the opposite page was an article about Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee being formed by an earthquake in 1811. There was a picture of the lake, too. Right straight across the page was a picture of Mickey Rooney.” He angled around a waiting taxi and said, “It was a real good article. About the theatre, I mean, not the lake. I remember it especially account of my Aunt Elsieday, who was Irish, and married Uncle Steve. The second time, I mean. For him, not for her. My Aunt Elsieday was in San Diego in 1925 and saw a little bit of a movie being made with Gloria Swanson, and that’s why she was so interested in the article.” He added, “The picture was Madame Sans-Gene.”

  Bingo half closed his eyes. “How deep was Reelfoot Lake, and what page was the article on?”

  “Bottomless,” Handsome said. “At least when the article was written nobody had got to the bottom of it. It was on”—he paused just a moment—“page five. The article about Grauman’s Chinese Theatre was on page four. There was a design across the top—”

  “Never mind right now,” Bingo said. “Just remember, we could just possibly find April Robin’s footprint in the concrete!”

  Handsome missed a bus by inches and said, “Bingo, April Robin. Do you think there’s something wrong with my memory?”

  “She was before your time,” Bingo told him again. “And turn right—”

  Handsome swerved expertly into the parking lot, said, “They got a nice place to leave a person’s car. Bingo, do I take the camera or the cards?”

  Bingo slid out of the car and said, “Let’s look the place over before we decide.”

  It was, as always, a matter of what kind of prospects were in the crowd he expected in front of the theatre. He gave Handsome a reassuring smile and said, “Everything is going to be all right.”

  But everything wasn’t all right, he realized several minutes later. There were people around the theatre, lots of people. There was a line of them, waiting at the box office for tickets to the two P.M. show. There were stragglers coming out from the earlier show. And there were tourists, all kinds of tourists, the ones he had hoped for, wandering through the lobby. Only, he realized almost immediately, they were all taking pictures of each other.

  The spiel he had been rehearsing died quietly in his throat.

  Good-looking young ushers were showing the tourists around. The tourists were not only taking pictures of each other, they were taking pictures of the ushers.

  All right, he told himself, he’d been wrong before. Like the time he’d loaded up two cameras for a St. Patrick’s Day Parade and found himself caught in a pedestrian traffic jam on the corner of 47th and Fifth. But at least something could be accomplished here.

  He caught the eye of one of the ushers and said, “Can you help me find Reelfoot Lake?”

  The young man blinked and said, “Sir?”

  “I mean,” Bingo stammered, pulling himself together as best he could, “April Robin. You remember April Robin?”

  “Oh,” the young man said. “Yes,” and then, “Of course.” He looked a little unhappy. “The great April Robin. She was quite some time ago—”

  “You probably don’t remember her yourself,” Bingo said kindly.

  “Well,” the young man said, “my father was a great admirer of hers—” He gulped. “We’ll look—”

  “Never mind,” Bingo said, not quite as kindly. “We’ll find her prints.”

  The young man looked relieved and went away.

  Fifteen minutes later Bingo said, “Maybe if we asked the manager. Or somebody.” He had a mental picture of April Robin’s footprints. Tiny, delicate, high-arched. Suddenly he spotted an elderly man with a tiny dust sweeper, busily engaged in keeping the concrete as spotless as hands
could make it. He cleared his throat. “You’ve been here a long time?”

  “Since before the Hoover administration, friend,” the elderly man said gently. “Pleased to make your acquaintance. Will you please move just a little to the left? Thank you, friend.” He swept expertly around their feet and said, “May I assist you in any way?”

  “We’re looking for some footprints,” Bingo said.

  The sweeper gestured with one hand to indicate that the foyer was full of them.

  “I mean,” Bingo said, “some very special footprints.” He drew a long breath. “April Robin’s.” He mustered up his best smile and said, “You know. April Robin?”

  “Ah yes,” the sweeper said. “Ah yes! April Robin!” He leaned on his broom and gazed into nothingness as though he were seeing flowers in the spring, moonlight on magnolia blossoms, and stars over the sea. “April Robin!” he said again, dreamily. He looked at Bingo and said, “You must know, I was once an actor. I was a spectator in the fight scene in The Spoilers. The first version. And I did a small bit in a picture with Theda Bara. But I was not cut out to be an actor. Although once I drew gunfire from William S. Hart—”

  “April Robin,” Bingo prompted.

  The old man shook his head and said, “There will never be another like her!” Potential tears formed in his red-rimmed eyes.

  “Her footprints,” Bingo said. “We want to see her footprints. They must be here somewhere—”

  The sweeper suddenly seemed to be nearly six feet tall. “My dear young man,” he said. “My very dear young man. Since the time in 1927, when the prints of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were marked, not on the drifting sands of time, but in imperishable and immemorial concrete, there has not been a star of great magnitude who has not left a mark here. And never has so much as an inch of concrete been removed, nor left unswept. I would like to quote to you—”

  He paused and said, “Perhaps I should explain to you, I am a poet. If you would care to have a small volume of my work, privately printed—” As though by magic, a pale gray pamphlet appeared from his pocket. “I regret that I must sell them, for the cost of printing alone—”