by JL Bryan
I pressed on. “Did you start obsessing over Chance when Adaire co-starred with him? Did you watch Hotel Island and Pocketful of Aces and think, hey, that should be me starring in those movies with her instead of him? Something like that?”
The face shifted in front of me. Cracks and pits opened along both sides of it, turning the face that had charmed a postwar generation into a moonscape across both cheeks, partly concealed by the big mustache. The nose, chin, and forehead shifted in subtle ways, the hairline receded, the fedora and suit shifted from solid, smooth black to ratty gray plaid.
It was a different man who stood before me now. Only the mustache was truly the same.
“Stanley Preston,” I said.
He reached up and touched the craggy side of his face, seeming shocked to find how it had changed, how the face below the mask had revealed itself.
“Pox scars?” I asked.
His face twisted into an expression of rage.
“Ellie!” Jacob burst out from behind the curtain and swept the room with one of our tactical flashlights in flood mode, filling the gloomy storage area with white light that chased away all hint of shadow. “It’s coming for you.”
“Yeah, it was.” I’d been on the edge of clicking on my own light, but still holding back, waiting to see what else the entity might reveal, intentionally or otherwise.
The entity was gone.
“Are you okay?” Stacey asked, swinging her own light around. “Jakey said you were under attack.”
“It was the Chance Chadwick apparition again,” I said. “Only now I’m pretty sure it’s just Stan Preston, hiding his insecurities behind a Chance Chadwick image, like he did in life.”
“Well, that kinda makes sense. Then who’s behind the Adaire Fontaine apparition?”
“I’m not so sure about that.” I looked at the biography in my hand. The pirate treasure box had slammed shut hard enough to crack and splinter its lip. “But it looks like Jacob uncovered a treasure trove of possible clues for us. We can get some insight into Stanley’s movie-star obsessions.” I showed them the heavily marked Adaire biography.
“Shiver me timbers!” Stacey said. “That is obsessive. What do we do now?”
“We stick to the plan,” I said. “Wait for the hour to grow later, and until then, we go to the movies.”
Chapter Twenty
Jacob was chivalrous enough to insist on carrying the wooden treasure chest down the stairs for us, which I tried to counter-insist he didn’t have to do, but I didn’t try very hard to stop him.
We—I mean, he—lugged it out to our van in the middle of the parking lot, where I could paw through it at my leisure.
Benny and Callie saw us emerge from the screen tower and met us halfway, Benny carrying a sleeping Daisy on his shoulder. Callie skateboarded ahead to speak to us. They must have stashed the picnic blanket somewhere, maybe inside the concession stand.
“How did it go?” Callie rolled to a stop, speaking in a stage whisper. Benny continued onward, carrying their slumbering child toward their screen-tower apartment, by either prior arrangement or unspoken mutual understanding between the parents.
“We encountered the third-floor entity again,” I said. “All of you should stay away from the top floor for now. Stacey, want to take Jacob somewhere? Maybe get the movie going?”
“Oh, yep.” Stacey took his arm, and they headed for the concession stand. Jacob, as our psychic consultant, needed to be kept from hearing too many details of our case, but I had to catch Callie up on everything.
“Do you think we’re safe in the apartment?” Callie asked me.
“Well, the fact that the third-floor entity hasn’t come down and bothered you all this time would indicate he’s not that interested in the first two floors of the tower. That’s what our psychic said, too. Just avoid the third floor completely for now,” I said. “If it’s Stanley Preston, like I suspect, he might even be glad you’re getting the drive-in going again. It was his dream, and his life’s biggest accomplishment, and all that. Still, I wouldn’t leave Daisy in the tower, or anywhere without an adult present anymore, even with the baby monitor.”
Callie nodded. “Okay. But why would Preston be scaring off customers if he wants the drive-in open again? Or is it another ghost doing that?”
“If it’s Preston, maybe he’s not doing it on purpose. He’s just freaking people out as he looks around.”
“Could it be Adaire Fontaine?” Callie asked, a smile twitching the corner of her lips. “I mean, an actual movie star ghost, that could be good for business, right? If only she’d stop sneaking up on people.”
“I’m hoping the entity will sneak up on us, sooner or later,” I said. “That’s part of the reason we’re screening movies while our psychic is here. Maybe whatever’s haunting your parking lot will come out tonight. Then, hopefully, we can identify it and figure out how to remove it.”
“Sounds good to me.” Callie frowned at the screen tower. “I wish we had somewhere else to go live, but we just don’t.”
“I’m sorry it’s not going faster. Removing a ghost requires understanding who it is and why it’s here, understanding its story. That can take time, unfortunately.”
“I’m sure it’s not easy work,” Callie said. “I feel crazy just finding out ghosts are not only real, but that our place is crawling with them. I can’t imagine what it must be like for you, dealing with it all the time.”
“You get used to it,” I said, which was only partly true. There are always new horrors revealing themselves, new depths of the soul to face.
Callie skated away toward her haunted home. I wished her a good night, but she shook her head like that was an incredibly absurd comment under the circumstances.
The wide second-floor window of the concession stand glowed, and a black and white studio logo appeared on the screen, bouncing and flickering. This dissolved into a bright blue sky, and the view panned down to the vast Mississippi River.
I climbed into the van and turned on the radio. A chorus of voices singing an old-time work song rose from my speakers. On the screen, slaves hacked through a field of sugarcane.
A well-appointed carriage drawn by four white horses, driven by a slave coachman in fine livery, traveled along a road through the cane fields.
Inside the carriage sat three extremely well-dressed people—a middle-aged man and woman and their daughter, played by Adaire Fontaine.
The mother character made it clear they were on their way to a ball, and it was imperative that Adaire’s character make the right sort of impression on the most important gentlemen. The father broke in occasionally to mention each potential suitor’s bona fides—this one was a banker, that one owned a sugar mill.
The daughter seemed less than interested in this talk, her eyes straying to the fields and laborers.
The contrast of worlds couldn’t have been starker between the inside and outside of the carriage. Within, a young woman born to wealth and comfort prepared to be courted and married in a way that would only increase her wealth. Without, suffering people with little hope for the future toiled under the scorching sun, among mud and mosquitoes, enabling the leisure and luxury enjoyed by the others.
Legend of the South was a truly famous movie, probably Adaire Fontaine’s most famous, though not the one for which she’d been Oscar-nominated.
Stacey approached, and I lowered my window.
“Jacob’s in my car,” she said. “Are you sure you don’t want to join us?”
“Splitting up might be better. The idea is to try to get stalked by the parking lot phantom. Don’t tell Jacob, though.”
“Well, come on if you want. I know you’ve got a hot date with those old papers, but maybe you’ll get bored.” She nodded at the pirate chest I’d moved up to the shotgun seat. “Want me to have Jacob peek into the projection house out here?”
“Only if he brings it up first.”
“Gotcha. He asked what it was, but that’s all so far.”
“Okay. See you at intermission if nothing jumps out and attacks us.”
“Let’s hope it does!” Stacey waved and walked back to her car.
I watched the movie for a while, part of me hoping that it would darken in the strange way as Pocketful of Aces had, that Adaire Fontaine would look at me or reach out to me with another message of some kind. I left my window open so I could listen for approaching footsteps. If Adaire walked up on me, or perhaps something much worse, I didn’t want to be caught by surprise.
I’d heard of Legend of the South, seen bits and pieces, and knew that a great flood would eventually destroy everything in sight. The movie was visually beautiful, saturated with bright colors, filled with swamps and rivers, flowers and fine clothing, but the story droned a bit as Adaire Fontaine’s mother focused on shopping her around to eligible men. Adaire’s character was secretly in love with an unacceptably low-born blacksmith in town, a handsome fellow who could sing and dance in concert with everyone at the local tavern as though they’d all rehearsed and choreographed things ahead of time.
Soon I was rummaging through the pirate chest again.
One standout item was a faded, fragile page from the Los Angeles Free Press. It was dated 1969, and everything about it reminded me of The Great Horned Owl, the long-defunct underground newspaper I’d grown familiar with during a case in Atlanta.
Preston had saved one sheet of the paper. The square boxes along the edges advertised head shops, upcoming concerts, and something called a “People's Theater Troupe” that performed in a public park.
An interview with the film director Antonio Mazzanti took up most of the page.
Under the headline The Forgotten World of Antonio Mazzanti was a picture of the director, looking much rougher than he had on the Academy red carpet a decade earlier with Adaire Fontaine at his side. Mazzanti was balding and graying, had developed a paunch, and wore a stained, ratty t-shirt under a partially buttoned outer shirt. He still wore the pitch-black circular sunglasses and the excessively long beard, though it had gone gray and ratty. He looked like he hadn’t seen the inside of a bath or shower in days. He sat in a dim, dingy-looking bar with filmy, dusty windows behind him.
Turning my flashlight to its dimmest setting, I began to read.
RIKER’S WATERHOLE, NORTH HOLLYWOOD - The famous director, once hailed as a groundbreaking young visionary, sits in a rundown bar and thinks about the past, his once-legendary place in the filmmaker pantheon somehow lost in recent years.
“This isn’t a bad spot,” Antonio Mazzanti says, over a chipped glass half-filled with cheap brown whiskey. “We filmed Biker Banshee here, a lot of it. The bar scenes. Did you see that one?”
No, I must have missed it, I tell him.
He begins to tell me the film’s story—something about an undead female motorcyclist—but soon loses the thread, and it’s clear he doesn’t recall much about the 1966 biker horror flick he directed.
“You didn’t miss much,” he concludes. “The result always falls short of the vision.”
Is that the advice he gives young film students who make their pilgrimage to visit the famous director?
“I tell them stick to your vision, forget what the guys in suits and the bean-counters have to say. Forget what everyone says and go with what’s inside you.”
Is that good advice for success in film?
“No, unless you are brilliant. But maybe someone brilliant will hear it.”
What about the rest of them? The non-brilliant?
“Anybody coming out here to ask me the secrets of commercial success is madly off-course. I can’t speak to commercial success. Only to artistry, only to the creative demon raging within. Without the demon, you will make nothing. Perhaps you will make fine commercials for laundry soap, but you will make nothing that cuts deep, nothing that leaves a mark on the soul.”
Many would say The Heart of Man leaves such a mark. How were you inspired to make a film about the devil prowling Venice in the 1700s?
“That is how it came to me. Is the devil out there, or in here?” He touches his chest. “Can we ever separate ourselves from evil? Is it with each of us, always? The voice of temptation is born as a whisper, but grows stronger each time it is fed. Each time it feeds. And the desire to purify the world, to purge all evil, this leads to the greatest evils of all, no?”
He asks me if drinks are included with the interview—he previously asked me this on the phone. He orders a whiskey to replace the one he’s finished, which does not appear to be his first of the day. It’s a hot afternoon outside, and the rattling air conditioner in the bar’s window is doing nothing to cut the burn from the air.
I ask him about Stanzas for Regina, the story of an Italian immigrant woman, an elderly widow, her mind decaying along with the bug-infested tenement apartment around her as she looks back on her life. Is this in any way about his family?
“My parents immigrated from Italy,” he said. “My father was a steelworker like Regina’s husband. My sister died of tuberculosis like Regina’s daughter. Why do people ask stupid questions?”
Does he have plans to do more films like his early movies?
He laughs.
“You’re like everyone,” he says, his voice slurring now. “You think those two films are grand works of art, and the rest is trash. When will you make another Heart of Man, they ask. Nobody ever asks about the underlying themes in Biker Banshee, or when will I finally make another Body in the Basement.” He laughs and orders yet another drink. “The hidden curses and dark secrets of us all.”
With that, we both know the time has come to raise the subject, radioactive but inevitable, that will perhaps always be intertwined with Mazzanti.
“It has been nine… ten years,” he says. “There is nothing I can say I have not said countless times, to police, to journalists, to those who stop me on the street and ask. Of course I do not know who killed her. Of course I would never have wished her dead. She was a rare light, a divine presence in a dark and despicable world. She was to be the shining jewel in my finest film. House of Gold would have been an expression of great human truth, forged in the fires of passion and desire and suffering, yet it was only a finely wrought setting for her talent to glow, to illuminate. To destroy her would be to destroy all that was good in the world. I have truly loved no one since. Her loss left me broken inside.”
Does he believe Adaire Fontaine’s death affected his work?
“Another tired question,” he says. “You are asking me, are my later movies trash because of my pain and loss from her death? Did my talent die with her?” He smiles as he says it, but it doesn’t last. He appears to be staring into space, lost behind his trademark solid-black sunglasses, his drink forgotten an inch from his lip. “Perhaps,” he finally says.
Is there any truth to the rumors of his struggles with alcohol and drugs?
“Of course not. That’s not the problem. My enemies at the studios spread those rumors about me.” He checks his shirt sleeve, buttons the wrist to hide marks I’ve already seen. “The problem is these false rumors about Adaire Fontaine. Not only did I lose the greatest love of my life, but at that very moment of profound loss, I gained a reputation as a monster. I was suspected and investigated, never arrested. I would never have harmed her. Her death is the dark cloud over my life in every way. Perhaps I am already dead, and drifting now through Hell.” His words hang in the smoke-filled bar, where heavyset bikers, mostly men, erupt in raucous laughter at the next table. Perhaps the once-great filmmaker, the grand auteur turned fallen idol, has spoken the truth of the human condition once again.
“Hey, bleak closing paragraph,” I mumbled as I set the article aside and began chewing it over, trying to see how any of it might apply to our case. Why had Stanley saved this particular article?
One of our working ideas was obviously that Stanley Preston was the true murderer of Adaire Fontaine, considering that we seemed to be encountering both of their ghosts and on
e of them was the victim of an unsolved murder. To biographers and the media, Stanley would have been too marginal a figure to notice, a meaningless background blip in a tale full of romances and flings with prominent movie stars, musicians, and a professional athlete or two. Yet Stanley was someone who could have gotten into her home without a struggle. He could also have conveniently skipped town without a trace after the murder, since he didn’t live in Los Angeles in the first place.
I read the interview again. Was there any sign here that Antonio Mazzanti would murder two actresses less than a year later? He was clearly a broken-down version of his former self. He also clearly obsessed over dark things, over evil and the devil, and claimed to have demons within. Maybe he had committed the murder of Adaire Fontaine after all, and it haunted him, and in time he’d given in again to that urge to kill, murdering actresses Portia Reynolds and Grace LeRoux in their apartment.
Then it hit me.
I texted Stacey: What if Stanley Preston wasn’t a psycho killer, but was trying to solve Adaire’s murder?
Ooh, you think so? she replied.
He seemed to be studying the case years after it happened. Like he was trying to puzzle it out.
I don’t suppose he wrote his thoughts down for us somewhere? That would be convenient.
I’ll keep digging.
As I looked through the press coverage—all revolving in some way around Adaire, Mazzanti, or Chance Chadwick—I thought about Stacey’s last question. Stanley Preston had only died a few years earlier, a very old man living in his crumbling ruin of a theater. If he had indeed solved the mystery of Adaire Fontaine’s murder, he’d had plenty of years in which to make his knowledge public.
Perhaps he’d found something he’d chosen to keep secret. Or perhaps he believed he had solved it, but nobody in the news media was interested in the opinion of some random drive-in owner from the other side of the continent. Anything he said would have been just one more crackpot theory for the pile.
On the screen, Adaire Fontaine strolled along a boardwalk clad in a wide, flowing antebellum dress and a parasol, presumably by the Mississippi or one of its tributaries. She walked with her unacceptably poor blacksmith beau, played by 1950s heartthrob Phineas Darby.
