Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 01 - Frames

by Loren D. Estleman

  He let himself out. Bogart and Hepburn resumed squabbling the moment he drew the door shut.

  At the end of the hall he met Kym Trujillo carrying an armload of file folders. She was a pretty, sharp-featured brunette of thirty who had turned down a modeling job for Sports Illustrated to study for her MBA. L.A. Magazine had included her in a recent spread on Latinas who made a difference.

  “How was your visit?” she asked.

  “I couldn’t tell when he was forgetting and when he was pretending.”

  “That’s how you know it’s one of his good days.”

  CHAPTER

  16

  WAITING IN FRONT of The Oracle for his appointment to arrive, Valentino felt his heart sink when a white stretch Mercedes limo squashed to a stop at the curb and a chauffeur got out to open the door for a small man in a three-thousand-dollar suit. The license plate read FLIX.

  “Mr. Kalishnikov?” He shook a hand in a white doeskin glove. The little man wore a white fedora and a white cashmere coat over his shoulders like a cape. The temperature was eighty-six degrees in the shade, but the newcomer wasn’t perspiring. Valentino was sure he couldn’t afford to hire a man who didn’t sweat.

  “Mr. Valentino. Ha! A dead movie star and an obsolete assault weapon. Kismet! Pick me up in an hour, Rupert.”

  The chauffeur got in and drove away. Leo Kalishnikov surveyed the busload of chanting Berkeley students circling the sidewalk. He had eyes the color of chocolate syrup and a tiny black moustache like a lowercase w in the middle of his round face. He was younger than expected, or else a man addicted to nips and tucks. “Who is this rabble?”

  “Protesters. I can’t get them to believe that skeleton didn’t come over on the land bridge from Siberia twenty thousand years ago.”

  The little man charged up to a hulking student with hair to his shoulders and put a gloved finger to a chest in a cutoff T-shirt reading MY HEROES HAVE ALWAYS KILLED COWBOYS. “Young man, what are you protesting?”

  The student wet his lips. “Four hundred years of white aggression against my people.”

  “I see. And you, young lady?” He turned the finger on a heavyset female with short hair and a tribal tattoo on one cheek.

  “Same thing.”

  “I see. How about you?”

  One by one, the Russian asked the same question of fourteen young people who had stopped chanting and put down their signs to provide the same answer. Kalishnikov then returned his attention to the hulk in the shoulder-length hair.

  “How many parts Indian—”

  “Native American.” The protester bunched his chin.

  “I am native Russian myself. How many parts Native American are you?”

  “One-sixteenth Cherokee.”

  “Yes, that is the popular one. Pardon my atrocious comprehension of English and arithmetic, but do I understand that one-sixteenth of you has come here today to demonstrate against the actions of the remaining fifteen sixteenths?”

  The young man opened his mouth, closed it, colored, opened it again. “Bolshevik!”

  “That is very close to the word that occurred to me. Carry on.” He led the way into the theater as if he were the host and Valentino the visitor. As the boarded-over glass door drifted shut against renewed chants from outside, Valentino said, “May I ask what the point of that was? You can’t change their minds with fractions.”

  “Sorry I made you uncomfortable.” The Russian’s accent lightened, along with his diction. “Where I was born, a protest wasn’t a protest if it didn’t involve standing in front of a tank. Anyone can see the only Indians that bit the dust here did it up on the screen.” He snatched off a glove and laid a smooth palm against the mahogany side of the ticket booth, leaving a print like a child’s in the dust. “This belongs outside, under the marquee. They probably moved it to keep people from chucking rocks through the glass. See how it foreshortens the perspective in the lobby.”

  “Bad feng shui?”

  “Actually, it cuts ten feet off what should be a journey of wonder starting at the sidewalk. The whole point of these structures was to rescue you from reality long before the lights came down and the feature rolled. Did you notice the inconsistency in the stained-glass windows?”

  “Some panes are broken.”

  “Those can be replaced. I know a glazier in the Valley who specializes in restoring stained glass in churches and cathedrals. His shop looks like he moved it intact from eleventh-century Venice. He’s expensive, but he’s worth it. I was talking about the subjects: angel, angel, pastoral, knight.” He turned in a circle, stabbing a finger at each of the discolored windows. “A Teutonic knight, no less; note the Maltese Cross on his breastplate. That was Fink’s architect’s way of preparing the patrons for the variety of the fare that awaited them. Take a good look at the fellow’s face. Does he seem familiar?”

  Valentino studied the stern features under the slotted visor. “He looks like Francis X. Bushman.”

  “Good eye. The original glazier must have gone to see Ben-Hur while he was working on the project. The Archangel Gabriel bears a family resemblance to the Barrymores, and unless I miss my guess that milkmaid is Mary Pickford.”

  “I never noticed. It’s kind of tacky when you think about it.”

  “Tacky, yes, but with gravitas. Gothic sculptors were known to carve gargoyles into caricatures of their wealthy sponsors.”

  “I’m surprised Fink isn’t represented. The historical commission dedicated that plaque to him much later.”

  “Take a closer look at winged Pegasus.”

  He compared the sculpture’s equine features to the face on the plaque. “Holy Mother of—”

  “Max. She’s here, too, in plaster relief above the mezzanine entrance. I see they covered her when they suspended the ceiling over the landing. Let’s hope the squirrels haven’t gotten to her.”

  “How do you know so much about this theater? Have you been here before?”

  “I never was able to work it into my schedule. I’ve seen so many across the country. But after we talked yesterday, I went to the Civic Center and had a long look at the building plans. They’re on file there, along with the Beaudry Reservoir and Dodger Stadium.”

  “I was down there just the other day. I didn’t think to look.” Valentino paused. “You don’t look like the kind of person who spends time going through dusty records.”

  “You should see my dry-cleaning bill. I started out in sweaters and jeans, just like any other contractor. My phone never rang. Then someone told me doing business in Hollywood is like attending one long masquerade party. So I became Vittorio De Sica out of Frank Lloyd Wright.” As he spoke, Kalishnikov took off his coat, hat, and jacket, and handed them to Valentino. By the time he put his studs in a pocket and turned back his cuffs he appeared older and less pudgy; a man getting ready to go to work. “Let’s assess the damage.”

  The archivist spent the next forty-five minutes following him around, carrying his outer clothes like a valet, while Kalishnikov pulled frayed wires spaghetti-fashion out of holes in the walls and flushed toilets and ran faucets in the restrooms and listened to the banging in the pipes as if he were a musical conductor isolating an untuned string in the violin section. It smacked faintly of affectation, but the designer muttered to himself in what sounded like peasant Russian and made close notes with a gold pencil on the inside of his starched cuffs. They covered the building from the attic, water-stained and streaked with pigeon droppings and bat guano, to the basement, where yellow police tape still festooned the room that was no longer a secret from anyone. No officers were present. Apparently the place had been squeezed dry of important clues and no one cared who tracked what onto those that remained.

  The auditorium came last, as if the designer had been saving it for dessert. Valentino entered behind him hesitantly, but this time no spirits were in attendance. The tatters of the screen were blank. Kalishnikov tested the floorboards in the aisles with his weight, plucked pieces of horsehai
r-laced plaster from inside the proscenium arch, pounded a quart of dust out of a brittle velvet seat, and dusted off his palms. Back in the lobby he slapped the corner of a silk handkerchief at smears on his trousers and used it to wipe off his alligator shoes, patting Pegasus on the side of the neck as he did so, as if to apologize for propping his foot up on the pedestal.

  “I’ll do a computer search for its mate,” he said, “on the long shot an employee or someone took it home to jazz up his rec room. It’s custom work; there’s not another like it in any theater I’ve been to. We’ll probably have to build one from scratch. Fortunately, I know someone: Not a Michelangelo, but he could copy him so you’d never know the difference.”

  “In the Valley?”

  “Paris.”

  “Paris, France?”

  “Ornamentation’s going to be the biggest part of the budget on this job. Hazmat comes next. That’s asbestos dangling from the ceiling in the ladies’ lounge.”

  “Not rock wool.”

  “You wish. Everything else is boilerplate: roof repair, carpentry, plumbing, and electrical. Wiring’s the first order of business, to power the equipment. That means strategic drilling and snaking out the precode stuff to replace it. We want to preserve as much of the plasterwork as possible. You can’t find people who can do that quality of work anymore, and even if you could, you couldn’t afford them.”

  “I’m pretty sure I can’t afford most of it.”

  “You might qualify for a federal loan under historic preservation.”

  “Can you give me a rough estimate of the cost?”

  Kalishnikov took back his jacket, coat, and hat, put them on, the hat on the back of his head, produced a leather notepad with gold corners from his inside breast pocket, and scribbled on it with his gold pencil. He tore off the sheet and handed it to Valentino.

  He shuddered, but his heart kept beating. “Actually, I thought it would be a lot worse.”

  “That’s my fee. Hold on.” The Russian closed his eyes, made some calculations in the air with his pencil, wrote again, and tore off the sheet.

  Valentino read. He felt faint. “I don’t suppose this includes your fee.”

  “No.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “Architectural Digest wants to do a feature on my home theaters. If you’ll let them include a spread on the Oracle before and after renovation, I’ll make you a present of my fee.”

  “I can’t accept that. It’s too generous.”

  “If you’ll put that in writing, I’ll throw in my expenses.” Kalishnikov smiled, showing off a beautiful bond job. “I’m kidding. My last client called me a pirate, and that was for a little fifteen-seater in his basement, with a foyer and a snack bar.”

  “I get paid for my work. You should, too.”

  “I share a tax bracket with the State of North Carolina. If I make any more money this quarter, I’ll have to sell the house in Malibu and set up a cot here in the lobby. I need to do the Oracle. All my work so far has been repro, on a domestic scale. I’ve never done a full-size theater with a legitimate history. And that murder-mystery scenario is primo advertising for my business partners.”

  Valentino showed his own modest dentalwork. “Are you familiar with Henry Anklemire in UCLA Information Services?”

  “No.”

  “I think you’d get along.” He folded the two pieces of paper and put them in his wallet, which was looking slim. “It’s still far beyond my means, Mr. Kalishnikov. May I think about it and get back to you?”

  “Certainly.” The extra y was audible between the t and the a; the Russian had squared his hat and put on his gloves, getting into character for the protesting students, who hoisted their signs and resumed chanting slogans when the pair emerged onto the sidewalk. The limousine was waiting, Rupert the chauffeur holding the door. Valentino shook hands and watched the preposterous car bear away its preposterous passenger.

  His own car released an unfamiliar odor from inside when he opened the door. The ashtray was pulled out and a cigarette lay propped across it clamped in an old-fashioned onyx holder, lisping smoke. Instinctively he glanced at the seat on the passenger’s side, then at the backseat, checking for intruders. They were empty. When he looked back, the cigarette and holder were gone and the ashtray was closed.

  He leaned across the driver’s seat and tipped open the tray. It was clean; he didn’t smoke and he’d emptied it of Broadhead’s pipe ashes a day or two before. There was no cigarette or holder on the floor. It had been an optical illusion, a trick of light and shadow. Yet a faint aroma of tobacco lingered. It smelled like just the kind of exotic blend that Erich von Stroheim would have smoked in his famous holder.

  “I’m doing the best I can, maestro.”

  Valentino slid behind the wheel, grateful for the warmth of the upholstery against his chilled spine. He opened his window to let in the combined stenches of smog and fresh-poured asphalt that bespoke West Hollywood in the twenty-first century. It wasn’t enough. He needed to hear a human voice, belonging to someone of flesh and blood. In the absence of the person who’d refused all day to answer her phone, he took out his cell and dialed the office.

  Ruth answered. Harriet Johansen had called, and this time the only remaining secretary on the West Coast got the name right.

  CHAPTER

  17

  “ARE YOU ALL right?” Harriet asked. “You look a little green around the gills.”

  They were seated in the break room down the hall from the forensics lab and the autopsy room, at a laminated table littered with copies of Guns & Ammo, Popular Science, and Cinema Fantastique. He had coffee in a Styrofoam cup. She was dipping a tea bag in a mug with her name on it.

  “I’m fine. I never held a man’s brains in my hands before.”

  “Sure? I’ve seen sergeants faint dead away at the first incision, twenty-year men.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Would you like something to eat?”

  “No freaking way.”

  She laughed.

  He sipped. The stuff in the cup took skin off his tongue, but it sponged the postmortem smell from his nostrils.

  A young criminalist with a puppy moustache took a bottle of water out of the refrigerator and went out, leaving them alone. Valentino reached across the table and squeezed Harriet’s hand. “Thanks for forgiving me. I was too tired to remember that practical jokes always backfire on me. I don’t have the talent for them.”

  “Peer pressure. From a twelve-year-old coed.” Her eyes were still a little steely above the rim of her cup. But she didn’t withdraw her hand.

  “She’s not much older than that, but she has a first-class brain. She’s been a real help with—the program.” He’d almost said the investigation. Even in those official surroundings, after a Cook’s tour of the billion or so dollars’ worth of facilities dedicated to the solution of crime in Los Angeles, it was easy to forget he was talking to an employee of the police department.

  “Stop explaining before you land yourself back in the doghouse. I’m sorry I acted out. Apart from my not having the right to assume a damn thing about where this is going, playing the jealous hag is playing against type for me. I realized that even before I played back the message you left on my phone.”

  “That awkward thing? It was all I could do not to call back and start over.”

  “If you’d been glib I’d never have returned the call.”

  “Took you all day.”

  “I didn’t say you didn’t deserve to suffer a while.”

  He smiled. “So I had you at hello?”

  “Make you a deal. Try not to quote movies at me and I’ll try not to use words like ‘postrigor putrefaction.’”

  “Deal.”

  She slid her hand free then and wrapped it around her cup. “So what did you think of our little shop of horrors?”

  “It’s fascinating. But then I knew it would be. Our work isn’t so different after all. We’re both interested in pie
cing things together and preserving them. We even use some of the same equipment.”

  “You mean like cold-storage facilities?”

  “A stand-up comic could do an hour on that with the right audience. I mean like copy cameras and electron microscopes, even scalpels. In the old days, the editors at the studios used their teeth to part the film. Having front teeth was the only prerequisite for the position. Our splicers go through several dozen disposable scalpels a day just to avoid scraping a thousandth of an inch off a single frame.” He read her smile and sat back, raising his hands. “I’m hopeless, aren’t I? I can’t stop talking about my work even when I’m on your territory.”

  “We have that in common. I’m not invited to dinner parties anymore. All my former friends are afraid I’ll dissect the roast to determine cause of death.”

  “Maybe we can wean each other off shop talk.”

  “Relationships have been built on less. Hello, Sergeant. What brings you downtown?”

  Karen Clifford had come in, headed for the coffee machine. She changed course to stop at their table. From his seated position, Valentino looked up three feet to meet her startlingly verdant gaze. Her pile of red hair threw off halos from the fluorescents on the ceiling. “I came down to watch one of your colleagues spin sperm in a dish,” she said. “That’s how we investigate rape-murder now. I’m just a glorified trash collector.” She offered her hand to Valentino, who rose to grasp it. “Got those reels wrapped up and ready to go? We’re picking them up in the morning.”

  “I guess that means you didn’t get anything off the cans,” he said.

  “We didn’t expect to. We don’t expect to get anything off the film, either, but we live to get lucky.”

  Harriet said, “I wondered about those film cans. I didn’t treat them, but I saw them when they came in. Greed; isn’t that the picture you wanted to show me last night?” She looked at him.

  The sergeant lifted her chin. He was looking up at it as it was. “I didn’t get an invitation to that.”

  “You didn’t ask for it,” Valentino said. “You just wanted to confiscate it.”