Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 01 - Frames

by Loren D. Estleman

  He sighed. It wasn’t the first time he’d let a movie get in the way of important business.

  Still, he stalled; there seemed no reason not to now. He got Ruth on the intercom. “What on earth is the Prong?”

  “He said it was the student organ at Berkeley.” She sounded even flintier over the speaker than she did in person. “I didn’t like the way he said ‘organ.’ He sounded like one of those rappers. They say ‘yo’ a lot, like pirates.”

  “I thought the Barb was the student paper there.”

  “That’s what I thought. He said it was reactionary, so he started his own. What’s this about the Oracle and a skeleton?”

  He filled her in, and closed his eyes awaiting the reaction. This was almost as bad as the chewout he had coming from Clifford. But Ruth surprised him.

  “Beautiful theater,” she said. “My first husband proposed to me there while Errol Flynn was wooing Olivia de Havilland in Captain Blood. It was a revival,” she added, “on a double bill with The Sea Hawk. I’m not as old as some people seem to think.”

  “Maybe I’ll run them both again in your honor when I reopen. I may need the income to handle the mortgage.”

  “I wonder if that skeleton was there that night.”

  “I doubt it. If the police expert was right, it was placed there long after the house stopped showing big-ticket films.” He hesitated; an opinion was something one never sought from Ruth. She gave them out like gum. “Was I mistaken to buy it?”

  “Someone had to. I’m glad it was you. The last thing this town needs is another gym.”

  He thanked her, hung up, drummed his fingers on the desk, lifted the receiver from his telephone, and dialed.

  “I was about to send a squad car,” Clifford said when he’d identified himself. “I talked to Anita Sarawak this morning.”

  “Anita who?”

  “Your realtor. She said there were a lot of film cans in the room by the projection booth when she showed you the place yesterday morning. We found only a few when we went through it. They were empty.”

  Valentino said nothing, avoiding a trap. He’d had experience with reluctant informants, old-time film people’s personal servants and the like, and knew the power of silence. Some people would say anything to fill it.

  “Our CSI team found steel shavings on that empty shelf in the basement that match the ones I had a couple of uniforms bring back from upstairs. I’m asking you again what you took away from my crime scene.”

  “Is it a crime scene?”

  “It is until I say it isn’t. If I have to ask the question a third time, it’ll be downtown.”

  He took a deep breath and told her about Greed. He’d barely begun to explain the circumstances of its filming when she interrupted. “I’ll send someone to pick it up. You’ll get a receipt, and you can reclaim it when my investigation is finished. You might have to wait longer if there’s anyone alive to bring to trial.”

  “It’s a priceless historical artifact. It needs to be stored in a stable environment.” He made his lecture on the fragility of silver nitrate brief. “Sergeant, why don’t you come down and visit our facility? I think you’ll find it instructive from a professional—”

  “How long does it take to knock off a copy on this safety film?”

  “In this case, a month at least, working in shifts. It has to be done a frame at a time, and the length of—”

  “You’ve got three days.”

  “How do you know the film has anything to do with that skeleton?”

  “How do you know it doesn’t? It’s two minutes past ten. If it isn’t in this precinct by three minutes past ten Friday morning, I’m sending that squad car: for you and Greed.”

  He’d just hung up on the dial tone when Ruth buzzed him on the intercom. “You’ve got a call on line one. That Sergeant Clifford.”

  “I just spoke to her.”

  “She says she forgot something.”

  Instructing him to punch line one was unnecessary. His department seldom received enough calls to activate the second line. He pushed the button and picked up. He had the childish hope she’d changed her mind.

  She started talking before he could say hello. “Ever hear of a director named Castle?”

  He ran a thumb through his mental file. “William Castle. He shot horror flicks on the cheap during the fifties and sixties. He used gimmicks to amp up the reaction: battery-charged seats during The Tingler to shock the audience, painted sheets on wires to send spooks flying over their heads during Thirteen Ghosts. Sometimes he hired actors to run up and down the aisles in hideous costumes. Early experimental theater.”

  “That checks. Department computer shows him answering a public-nuisance complaint in nineteen fifty-eight for scaring an old lady half to death during a showing of something called The House on Haunted Hill, at the Oracle. Care to hear the particulars?”

  He said yes. He felt a tingle, as if he were sitting in one of Bill Castle’s electrified seats.

  “Seems a wire or something broke thirty minutes in and a certain object dropped into the old lady’s lap. She wet her pants and hollered cop. Guess what it was.”

  “A human skeleton.”

  “Maybe you’ve got a little detective in you after all. Well, this Castle is a skeleton himself now, so we can’t interview him. But if no dental records turn up suggesting otherwise, which is a crapshoot anyway after all this time, we may safely consider Mr. Bones an alumnus of some medical-school anatomy class and redirect our energies toward murders that took place in this century.”

  “Then you won’t need the film.”

  “We’ve got three days minus ten minutes to establish that. You’re on the clock.”

  “What does Harriet Johansen say?”

  “About what, the case or your perfect cheekbones? I’m not a dating service.”

  “She said I have perfect cheekbones?”

  “DNA’s no good without a national database or a surviving relative to provide a match. That brings us back to finding the dentist who put in those fillings forty or fifty years ago, and since this one isn’t exactly a department priority, you’re going to surrender those reels before we turn up any X-rays.”

  “What’s the hurry, if it’s not a priority?”

  “Because I had to come to you. If you’d given up the information yesterday, I might have been in a mood to work something out.”

  “I was in shock, Sergeant.” He almost added, and under peer pressure, but there was nothing to be gained by ratting out Kyle and Fanta. “I can have two reels for you by Friday, and the rest as they’re transferred. Please? I’m sorry, sorry, sorry.”

  The line was silent. He was beginning to think she’d hung up when she came back on. “The answer’s no. But I will take you up on your invitation.”

  “Invitation?”

  “To tour your facility. Maybe it’ll give me an angle on this case I hadn’t considered.”

  That was encouraging. With Kyle along, wearing the charm he assumed for cocktail party fund-raisers, he thought he might be able to bring the Big Red Dog to heel. “When would you like to come down?”

  “Not me. Criminalist Johansen. You two seem to speak the same language. Wait for her call.”

  This time the connection broke. He sat chewing the inside of a cheek. He thought of calling Broadhead for advice, but he decided not to disturb him; he was worried about the old fellow’s health after twenty-four hours without sleep. He picked up the phone to call Anklemire, then put it down without dialing; twenty minutes with that little fugitive from the Warner Brothers animation department were exhausting enough. Then his gaze fell to one of the message slips on his desk.

  He got up suddenly and charged across the hall. Ruth glanced up from her computer. “What’s the matter, on the lam?”

  “I left something in Dr. Broadhead’s office.”

  “Hope it’s still there. He never locks the door. Someday he’ll find his computer missing.”

  “It’
s a Wang.”

  He didn’t need the computer. Broadhead only used the huge museum piece to write letters to colleagues, which he printed out and sent by snail mail. Valentino, who had carried in Fanta’s message even though it contained nothing useful, spun the Rolodex on the desk, found her number, and called her from Broadhead’s phone.

  “Oh, hi,” she said. “Well, is it the real deal or is it the bogus hocus-pocus?”

  He heard plumbers working in the background, complete with banging wrenches and cursing. When the volume went down suddenly he realized she’d been listening to music.

  “It’s the real deal, but I can tell you all about it later. What do you know about William Castle?”

  “The hamburger tycoon?”

  “That’s White Castle. Never mind, I’ll handle that end myself. How’s your course load?”

  “Not bad today. I’ve got archery practice in an hour.”

  “Can you blow it off?”

  “I—don’t know….” She drew it out, sounding guarded.

  It struck him then he was talking to an attractive coed who was probably hit on often. He hastened to tell her about Sergeant Clifford’s demand.

  Her tone changed. “That’s a bummer. The way Dr. Broadhead explained it, you can’t copy anywhere near eight hours of film in that time.”

  “Or ten. Turning over the original isn’t an option. I could go to jail, be a hero, but it wouldn’t save Greed. She’d just get a court order and seize the reels.”

  “Bummer to the twelfth power. I didn’t mean to get you in trouble.”

  “I’m a grown-up. That means I can get in trouble all by myself. Anyway, it was the right thing to do. When a man is murdered, that’s one man’s tragedy, but a work of art belongs to all of us.”

  “What can we do?”

  He felt himself smiling. “I’m glad you said ‘we.’” He told her.

  “Wow?”

  “‘Wow?’ Isn’t there some New Age expression that fits?”

  “Not for Greed. Um, and ‘New Age’ is kind of old maid.”

  Valentino scratched his neck, checking for wattles.

  “Will Dr. Broadhead be joining us?” she asked.

  “He’s resting. He was up all night working in the lab.”

  “Is he okay? I mean, that can’t be healthy for a man his—in his position.”

  “Now you sound like our secretary. She thinks the world would be a better place if everyone acted his age.” But he was touched by the young woman’s concern. Broadhead could lecture for hours on the inattention and ingratitude of the current crop of undergraduates.

  “I talked to her on the phone this morning. What’s her problem?”

  “You’re young. She’s not. But she knows everyone in the industry. So what do you think?”

  “This is my first murder,” she said. “Where do we start?”

  CHAPTER

  9

  THEY DIVVIED UP two of the four estates. Fanta took Government, Valentino the Press.

  Dropping her off at the Civic Center, he watched her cross the sidewalk, a tall, slender, self-assured young woman in a white linen jacket and khaki slacks, cork-heeled sandals on her tanned feet. She’d tied her blue-black hair in a ponytail and put a notebook and pen in a leather shoulder bag. He’d noticed during the drive that she’d pruned the kid stuff from her speech. First impressions counted. The Los Angeles County property records were open to the public, but it was possible to get a clerk with an attitude.

  From there, Valentino went to the downtown branch of the library, where most of the staff knew him by name and greeted him with smiles and nods and here and there a tightening of nostrils, bracing for a request that would send them to the remote dusty stacks for an item no one had checked out in decades. He thought he heard a collective release of breath as he passed the desk and went straight to the microfilm reading room.

  There among his most devoted friends—spools of film in boxes arranged by date and the Moviola-like readers in their carrells—he began scrolling through ancient numbers of the L.A. Times and the late great Mirror. After a while he stopped mooning over the advertised premieres of motion pictures that no longer existed and directed his attention to the local news. The readers were time machines, and there were occasions when he wished he could crawl inside one, reverse the crank, and travel backward with the pages preserved on film, wonderful film. Rumors that the library was preparing to transfer its newspaper files onto digital discs, for viewing on computer monitors, depressed him as nothing had since colorization.

  Four hours later, woozy and shielding his eyes from the glare of the twenty-first century, he found Fanta in the place they’d arranged to meet, a microbrewery off the old Plaza where he and Kyle liked to hang out. The walls were plastered with four-sheets of W. C. Fields playing poker, Douglas Fairbanks in tights, and Marilyn fluttering too close to the flame. Reese Witherspoon and Johnny Depp had been added to attract a younger crowd, but the clientele so far had remained relentlessly middle-aged. Fanta and the wait-staff were the youngest people present.

  At the moment, however, she looked older. She had unaccustomed circles under her eyes and smelled faintly of old plat books. She ordered a glass of stout.

  “Can I see ID?” The waitress wore a ring in her nose and a James Dean T-shirt.

  “Diet Pepsi.” Fanta shrugged at Valentino. “Can’t blame a girl for trying.”

  “Nothing to eat?” he asked.

  “Now that you mention it, I’ve had a humongous craving for White Castle all day. I’ll have the Scarface,” she told the waitress. “Extra heavy on the blood ‘n’ gore.”

  Valentino discovered that she’d ordered a half-pound burger with double everything. The menu had changed since his last visit. “I’ll have the clam chowder.”

  “One Buster Keaton.” The waitress wrote on her pad. “Anything to drink?”

  “Regular Pepsi.”

  “Have a beer,” Fanta said. “At least I can smell it.”

  He ordered the stout, in her honor. Ordinarily he preferred something domestic and lighter in body. When they were alone, Fanta leaned her forearms on the table. “The Oracle changed hands three times between nineteen twenty-nine, when Max Fink sold it, and nineteen thirty-seven. The last time was to a guy named—”

  “Warren Pegler,” he finished. “He sold it in fifty-six to a film society. They showed Bergman and Fellini to college students, and broadened the program a few years later to include more popular fare. That was the generation that made stars all over again out of Humphrey Bogart and the Marx Brothers.”

  “Then mine came along and plunged them back into obscurity.”

  “I wasn’t going to say that.”

  “It’s true, though. Maybe my kids will reverse the cycle.”

  He smiled. “You have a fine vocabulary. You should use it more often.”

  “Totally. Only for right now I’d rather be a closet nerd. You know, we wasted a bundle of time if all we did was dupe each other’s efforts.”

  “Your sources were more official. Newspapers were no more reliable then than they are now, especially the feature items. According to the Times—it was the Times Mirror then, before the takeover was complete—the society struggled ahead for several years trying to make ends meet, then gave it up as an expensive hobby and sold it to my realty firm, which rented it to a hippie commune until it could find a buyer. That turned out to be me, long after the hippies packed up their lava lamps and left.”

  “I got as far as the realtor,” she said. “County records aren’t long on colorful details, and they don’t have you on the books yet.”

  “The world is waiting to see if my check bounces. The Mirror did a human-interest piece on Pegler when he took over. He was a double amputee, lost both legs in an accident in the developing lab at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he worked a dozen years earlier.”

  The food and drinks arrived. Fanta waited impatiently while the waitress set everything out, asked if they needed any
thing else, and left without waiting for an answer. Then Fanta pounced. “MGM did Greed, right?”

  He nodded. “It’s a coincidence worth looking into, but it’s not remarkable when you know L.A.’s history. It’s still a factory town, the factories being the studios, but it was even more so from the twenties through the forties. They were the biggest employers around, and MGM was bigger than all the rest of them put together. It’s like trying to connect a Chevrolet assembly worker to something that happened at General Motors world headquarters.”

  “An assembly worker who bought himself a dealership,” she said. “Where’d he get the bucks?”

  “Metro’s lawyers gave him a fat settlement to avoid a lawsuit. After he paid his hospital expenses he had enough left over to buy a block of shares in Warner Brothers just before The Jazz Singer.” He paused. “You know the story behind The Jazz Singer?”

  “Al Jolson talks and sings, the box office lights up like Grand Theft Auto.” She rolled her eyes. “Four-point-oh, film studies, Kyle Broadhead, Ph.D., hello.”

  “Sorry. Habit.” He stirred his soup. “Long story short, he pulled out of the stock market two months ahead of the crash in nineteen twenty-nine. Eight years into a major depression, he still had the price of a lucrative theater franchise in his pocket.”

  “Your reading was way better than mine.” She sneezed.

  “Bless you.”

  “Thanks. They should dust that place every hundred years.” She picked up her burger. “That reminds me. Did you call that Harriet person yet?”

  He swallowed some chowder. He couldn’t recall mentioning Ms. Johansen’s impending visit to UCLA. “Call?”

  “You thirtysomethings are worse than we are in the slacking department. There were so many sparks flying around that basement I was glad we got the film out of it.”

  “We exchanged polite words.”

  “Any more polite and you’d’ve finished up in the sack.”

  “At your age, maybe. I’m too young for ‘Do your own thing’ and too old for ‘Whatever.’ She sneezed and I said, ‘Bless you.’ I just blessed you when you sneezed. I didn’t see any sparks.”