by George Baxt
“This isn’t going to be easy,” despaired Villon. “If they form some kind of cryptogram, then I’m finished. They had me working in decoding when I first joined the army, but they soon shifted me elsewhere. What do you make of it, Anna May?”
“I haven’t given it that much thought. I’ve been too busy interpreting the Chinese characters. For a woman with a very orderly mind, Mai Mai wrote very disorderly charts.”
“Perhaps disorderly to you, but they obviously made a great deal of sense to Mai Mai. All of us have a shorthand all our own. Mine is terribly complicated to everyone in my household when I write them notes. The cook did guess that ‘en em liv’ meant no more chopped liver appetizer for a while, for crying out loud, but she’s a wiz at things like crossword puzzles.” Marlene was at the cooler helping herself to more champagne. “We haven’t told Anna May about Brunhilde Messer.”
Anna May looked surprised. “Was she at the party?” Marlene said, “Was she ever.” She had Anna May’s complete attention.
Having absorbed Marlene’s information, Anna May said, “She’s no fool, and on the other hand she’s never been known to be a mental giant. Still, here she is and I think you’re right, Marlene. I have a feeling that silly offer from Hitler is a smokescreen.”
“And where there’s smoke,” said Marlene, “to use a boring but appropriate cliché, there’s fire.”
Anna May refilled Villon’s glass and then attended to her own. “I’ve been having a lot of thoughts about Mai Mai and the charts. The deeper I get into translating them, the more I’m growing suspicious there’s more to them than the innocence of having their astrological charts mapped. I think Mai Mai was offered some kind of involvement with these people, and Mai Mai offered to read their charts not for their edification, but as protection for herself.”
Villon said, “Christ, I hate that word.”
Marlene was bemused. “Which word. You’ve spoken five.”
“I’m speaking it now. Conspiracy. I hate that goddamned word. I think I prefer ‘plot.’” He said to Anna May. “You think Mai Mai was offered the opportunity to become a member of whatever this bunch is up to?”
“It stands to reason,” said Anna May. “She was very much a part of their circle in Europe. She was highly respected. I’m sure her psychic gifts were seriously considered of paramount importance to them. Coupled with her brilliance at charting the future, Mai Mai would have been invaluable. But she refused them, obviously.” She leaned forward. “Before refusing, she learned a great deal. She learned too much. And now she had to be eliminated. It must have taken them some time to realize she must have consigned what she knew to the charts, not just as protection for herself, but as information to be deciphered after her death. I’m positive Mai Mai knew she was to be murdered.”
Marlene was aghast. “And she didn’t go to the police? She didn’t seek protection?”
“She didn’t need the police. She had the tong. You’ll forgive me, Herb, but the police are no match for the tong.”
“They were nowhere to be seen this afternoon.”
“In which lies their genius.”
“Why didn’t they protect her at my party?” Marlene was more indignant than confused. “If she knew she was in danger, why did Mai Mai consent to attend the party? It was a last-minute invitation. She could have given you any number of excuses why not to attend. Aren’t I logical, Herb?”
“Very logical, Marlene. I wasn’t going to, but I’m going to tell you what I omitted from the coroner’s report.” Marlene had a feeling she knew what was coming. “Mai Mai was terminally ill.” Tears formed in Anna May’s eyes. Marlene had guessed right. She handed Anna May her handkerchief. “She would have been dead within a few months.”
Anna May needed a few moments to compose herself, after which she said, “I’ll tell you something ironic. Mai Mai swore if she ever became fatally ill, she would kill herself. She couldn’t see herself consigned to a hospital at the mercy of the medical profession. She didn’t wish to end her days as a burden, as she put it to me, with her family and friends wishing she would die and be out of not only her misery but their misery.” She dabbed at her eyes. “Mai Mai had poison pills. They were given to her by the tong’s apothecary with the tong’s approval. They were strychnine.”
Marlene slammed her fist on an arm of the chair. “Irony or no irony, murder is a heinous crime. The other one, Morton Duncan, he wasn’t terminal, was he Herb?”
“I haven’t read his report yet. The coroner delayed it. He had tickets to a football game. But I doubt if Duncan had a serious illness.”
“He looked and sounded awfully healthy when you questioned him. Ach Gote, I’m so weary, I can’t think clearly. What to make of the underlined words, what?” She returned to the dining room table and stared at the charts. She transferred her attention to the few pages Anna May had translated, with their underlined words.
“‘Forever.’
‘Worship.’
‘States.’
‘Squad.’”
Those were the words Anna May told her on the phone. Now there were others.
“‘World.’
‘Future.’
‘Clouds.’
‘Monsters.’”
She repeated them aloud.
“Anna May, do you have a piece of paper?” Herb Villon had his fountain pen ready. On the slip of paper Anna May gave him, he jotted down the words, which Marlene repeated for him. She read them slowly and with what Villon considered was a great deal of unnecessary feeling.
Anna May asked Marlene, “Do you want a copy for yourself?”
“Not necessary, darling. I’ve committed them to memory.” Marlene was known to be a fast study. She took great pride in the fact that she could commit a script to memory in just one day of concentrated study. This was a gift generally attributed to child actors, who usually memorized not only their own lines but everybody else’s so they could provide them with the dialogue they couldn’t remember. Child actress Mitzi Green had made an art of it, and there was a collective sigh of relief at Paramount when they dropped her option. “And when I get home,” said Marlene, “I must commit to memory the dialogue for the scenes I’m doing tomorrow with Monsieur Souvir. What’s worse, I have to be up at the crack of dawn. But oh well, at least I will have breakfast with Maria.” A thought struck her. “Anna May. The tong.”
“What about it?”
“Does it protect you?”
“I could ask them to. Do you think because of Brunhilde, our lives are in danger?”
“Herb? You’re the authority. Do you think we’re marked women?”
He thought for a moment. ‘‘It’s a possibility. But still, if they tried to score a hit on either one of you, they know I’d put them all behind bars and throw the keys away.”
Marlene asked, ‘isn’t that unconstitutional?”
“Probably,” said Herb, “but who among us can recite the Constitution?”
“Herb Villon, within you there breathes a rogue and a knave. Are you off to make peace with Miss Dickson?”
“I’ve had enough of Miss Dickson for one day. Anna May, just for the hell of it, bolt your door after we leave.”
“Herb, I’ll do that, but trust me, it’s not necessary. All the other apartments are occupied by relatives and friends. One yell out of me and they’ll be up here like a swarm of killer bees.”
Marlene reminded them she employed bodyguards. “I also have a handgun and I’m a deadly shot.” Villon believed her. “Come Herb, and thank you, Anna May. The food was delicious. Herb, do you really think I might be in danger?” He reassured her he didn’t think so. He didn’t tell her he had two detectives tailing her and two tailing Anna May. In the elevator, Marlene stifled a yawn and asked him, “Herb, is detective work always this exhausting?”
“It is when you’re drinking champagne.”
“But Tallulah, please! That’s not in the script!” Raymond Souvir was backing away from the formidable Bankhead, who, having e
nticed him to her rented house for some coaching, had changed into a flimsy negligee and was now setting about enticing him into bed.
“Of course it isn’t, dahling, it’s an improvisation. The sort of thing that Russian person Stanislavsky is so fond of. Have you never seen the Russian Art Theater?”
“You mean the Moscow Art Theater?” He was perspiring profusely. Tallulah was dabbing at his face with a dish towel, which she was grateful to find protruding from under the couch, where she had kicked it several nights earlier while trying to cause an effect with a studio electrician she’d invited up to inspect her wiring.
“The Moscow Art Theater. Of course. They’re always improvising. In fact, they’re known to rehearse a play for a year before exhibiting it before the public. Now come over here, Raymond. You may have done some films and some theater, but what little I’ve heard from you tonight tells me you’re still wet behind the ears and I’m determined to dry them. Now then, in the film you’re Marlene’s protector, she having sold herself to you to get the money she needs for her husband, who has one of those deadly diseases you’ll never find in a medical dictionary but is attributable to the highly underworked mind of a Hollywood scriptwriter. So she gives herself to you and rightly so, as you’re absolutely divine. And I haven’t seen anyone so beautiful since I tried to coach Lew Ayres. Oh, do sit down, Raymond. The way you’re flitting about the room you’re making me think of Lillian Gish trapped in that damned closet in Broken Blossoms, and believe you me the last thing I want to think about at a time like this is Lillian Gish. You poor boy, you’re still perspiring buckets, you’re a nervous wreck; I know just what you need to calm you down.” There was a dish of white powder on a table with a spoon at the side. She scooped up the powder and advanced on Raymond with a devastating smile. “Sniff this, dahling. It’ll calm you down. It’s the best cocaine this side of the Mexican border. Come on, dahling, Sniff!”
Herb Villon sat in his underwear in his favorite easy chair, positioned so that he could look out the window at the lights of Hollywood, a twinkling carpet spread below his apartment at the top of a building in the Hollywood Hills. He had much to think about. The two murder victims, the seven suspects, incredible women like Marlene and Anna May, the astrological charts with their underlined words, Lewis Tate’s suicide— which he knew had no connection to the murders, but the tragedy gnawed at his gut. Brunhilde Messer. A kettle of fish he could do without, but there was the possibility proposed by Marlene that she could have been at the party New Year’s Eve. He thought more about Brunhilde and Marlene’s party. It wasn’t a masquerade ball, so she couldn’t have been there in disguise. Getting out of the patty might have posed a problem until Herb decided to relax the security, but how did she get away with Marlene not recognizing her? He prodded his brain mercilessly until a thought came to him that caused him to snap his finger. He looked at his wristwatch. Not yet midnight. Marlene couldn’t be asleep yet. She’s probably at her dressing table meticulously removing her makeup with cold cream and then sponging her face with alcohol. He’d read somewhere that was her nightly ritual. He gave her number to the operator and hoped he wouldn’t meet with a blockade known as the butler.
Marlene answered on the third ring. “Oh, Herb! This is extrasensory perception. I’ve been thinking of you and wishing I had your home number. Listen. I have a thought. How Brunhilde wasn’t easily recognizable at my party. Herb, she could have been wearing some kind of a wig.”
He smiled. How he loved her. “Marlene, that’s why I called you. I got the same idea.”
“Darling,” said Marlene, her voice seductive and exciting as it caressed his ear, “what’s that they say about two great minds?”
FIFTEEN
THE COFFEE IN Herb Villon’s cardboard container looked as though it had been drawn from a Louisiana bayou. Jim Mallory’s container of coffee had long been drained of its contents and Jim finally got around to dumping it into the wastepaper basket. Both detectives had arrived early at the precinct and immediately closeted themselves in Herb’s office. Brunhilde Messer as a fresh entrant in the suspects sweepstakes displeased Herb. Last night’s phone conversation with Marlene lasted almost an hour. Brunhilde’s wig stoked their adrenalin and it led to a discussion of a great many facets of the case, which Herb had shared with Mallory over the better part of an hour. Brunhilde, Herb and Marlene had agreed, was probably a red herring. As Marlene succinctly put it, Brunhilde could bore you to death, but she’d never use a weapon. Yet they were not too quick to dismiss her. She most certainly had to know about the plot to kill Mai Mai and, as she had put it to Marlene the previous morning, she didn’t want to miss the fun. A very strange woman, Marlene explained to Herb, a very ambitious woman, a very jealous woman, she couldn’t bear not to be in on things. And that’s probably what her presence in Hollywood was all about, she didn’t want to be left out of the action. Marlene concluded that Brunhilde had messages to deliver of such importance that they needed to be conveyed in person by someone who could be trusted. Power, that’s what Brunhilde’s films were to be about, power. Murder is power.
“Murderers are like rapists,” Herb said to Marlene. “They’re cowards.” And he repeated this to Jim Mallory, who was entertaining a vision of Marlene Dietrich spoonfeeding him apple pie.
Herb had been writing on a yellow-paged legal pad, and he sat back in his swivel chair to survey his work. “Okay, let’s start at the top again and see what we’ve got. Come on, Jim, get that dumb look off your face and concentrate. Seven suspects and the Messer broad we keep in reserve to one side. First we have Ivar Tensha. He’d never have stabbed Morton Duncan in the back. That’s dirty work and Tensha hires people to do his dirty work for him. The Countess di Frasso. I don’t see her meeting up with Duncan in that dump of his, especially in that part of town. Also, I don’t see her plunging the knife.”
“Not even in a fit of anger?” Mallory remembered his mother flinging a pot of boiling coffee at his father, and then her thankfulness that she had missed.
“No knives for di Frasso,” said Herb. “Her tongue would be more lethal. So, to continue. Dong See. Yeah, he could kill. Musicians are very temperamental. They’re worse than hairdressers. He was out of action for six months. Badly smashed up in the car accident. I wonder if he was driving. He doesn’t drive now. Or I assume he doesn’t. Souvir’s been chauffeuring him around, and last night the Countess took over the job, driving him home from Novarro’s party. At least I assume she drove him home. That brings us to Souvir. Could he murder?”
“The manual says everybody’s capable of committing murder.” Jim lived by the detective’s manual.
“Souvir’s a devil behind the steering wheel, but does he have enough of an evil streak to commit murder?”
“He could have stabbed Duncan.”
“Now we come to my personal favorite, Monte Trevor. He’s not only a producer, but I suspect he’s a damned good actor. The way he goes about trying to convince actors they’re right for his movie. When you’ve got the cash with which to pay them, actors don’t need too much convincing to accept a job. He’s been trying to get money out of Tensha for his movie. Why should he have to? They’ve known each other a long time, I’m sure of that. Why not just say, ‘Hey, Ivar baby, I need half a million for a new movie.’ So maybe Ivar doesn’t like movies, ah, who the hell knows. And back to Souvir, where’s he getting the money to live the way he does? Marlene says he couldn’t have earned all that much in Europe, and I believe Marlene.”
“You’re right. She’s so believable.”
Mallory was lucky Herb liked him tremendously. Herb was beginning to have his doubts about putting up with much more of Mallory’s schoolboy-like infatuation with Dietrich.
“Natalia and Gregory Ivanov. They could use a knife. That Natalia could penetrate an elephant’s hide with a salad fork. That’s one powerful lady. Gregory would do as he’s told. He was born to take orders and carry them out.” He scratched his chin while staring at the revo
lving ceiling fan. The fan was of little use; all it did was rearrange the warm air so it wouldn’t grow tired of remaining in the same position. “So what have we got? We’ve got a gang of people who we know are up to no good, but what that no good is we’ll never dig out of them, so we have to wait and see what Anna May comes up with. Got any other ideas?”
“I was thinking why haven’t we tried to find out where the suspects were when Morton Duncan was murdered.”
Herb laughed. “You really want to bother? You want to listen to and file some more double-talk? Take it from me, they’ve composed perfect alibis. I’ve played this scene before. I’ll wait for someone to slip up. Jim, we’re going to have to enter through the back door of these crimes to find the killer.
Somebody’s going to slip up the way Brunhilde did last night.”
“I thought you and Marlene thought she blabbed deliberately.”
“As of my phone conversation with Marlene last night, she’s rewritten that theory. Brunhilde was never one, in Marlene’s experience, to think before she spoke. Marlene said something funny about her. Brunhilde Messer needs to hear cues.” He arose and looked out the window. Palm trees. Nothing but effing palm trees. Rats nest in them. Who needs sterile palm trees? They don’t flower. They don’t bear fruit. It costs the city a small fortune to keep the fronds trimmed. He hated palm trees. “I wonder how the screen test’s going? And why do I give a damn?”
There wasn’t an unoccupied soundstage on the Paramount lot. The studio had to grind out fifty-two films a year to keep its chain of theaters supplied. Contract stars were expected to film a minimum of four films a year. One actress remembered shooting three films at the same time. She worked for one director from eight in the morning until lunchtime. She had time to grab a sandwich and coffee while having her hair restyled to work for another director all afternoon. After a hasty dinner of soup and a hamburger, she was driven to another soundstage to do pickup shots for a film she’d completed a month earlier. She feared there’d be no continuity with her performance in this one because she’d forgotten her interpretation of her character.
