by Sam Roskoe
“What now, Mr. Finch? Do you have any notion of what we might do now?”
I shot a glance at Charlie Jones’ corpse. Poor kid had taken the slug right to his broken heart.
He’d wanted the Hollywood dream in reverse. He’d wanted out and as far away from the phonies and the fakers that made up the town as he could get. He’d had a dame who wanted the same. Anywhere else he would have had his way.
Not in Hollywood.
Here, under the hot lights of the stage everything had to look just-so, even when it was so-so or downright rotten to the core. The why of it all became clear to me. A why that was as Hollywood as it was deplorable. But I needed to be sure.
“First thing we do is get as far from the lot as we can get. We can’t risk someone walking in on us with Jones there freshly dead. So tell me, Mr. Meriwether, how’d you get in without being noticed exactly, ‘cause we could use that kind of expertise right about now?”
“Did I not tell you that part of my tale?”
“You got as far as some bar nearby and then how you wanted back in. You skipped ahead after that.”
“They call it the Lulu Express.”
“Who call what when now?” I said.
“In the years of prohibition, when the studio first started, they needed a way to, shall we say, gas up the talent. They built a passageway that runs directly beneath this stage and comes out in the brush land at the rear of the pigpen. Stage Six was the original stage built here, renamed only a few years ago.”
“Are you serious?”
“How else do you think I’d managed to gain access to this place if there was no such thing as the Lulu Express? I may be capable of many things and much more than that if I’m balanced out with just the right amount of liquor. But I am not some master of disguise like Lon Chaney or able to make myself invisible like…well whoever that chap was who made himself invisible.”
“I figured you knew someone who could smuggle you in, some friend who might get us out again without being seen…never mind, where is this Lulu Express? How do we get into it?”
“Where the light switches are located, to the right of those is a hatch in the floor. The hatch leads down below the stage. There we’ll find the doorway to the Lulu Express.”
I waved a hand toward the rear of the stage.
“Lead on,” I said, “lead on.”
“And that poor fellow? Shouldn’t we do something about the body?” Tarquin Meriwether said, motioning toward Charlie Jones’ corpse.
“What would you have us do?”
“Move it, call the police, I mean, it’s so…it’s not right us leaving this poor boy here alone for someone to stumble upon his body. There’s no dignity in such an end.”
I glanced over at the corpse. There wasn’t anything near to dignity in a dead body, never would be. It was like a gun without a bullet, still a gun, but useless.
“That kid isn’t thinking about anything anymore, not a God damn thing. And he certainly ain’t thinking about how this all looks to anybody on the outside. But you should be.”
“Excuse me?”
“You wanted to put a bullet in him yourself not an hour ago. You had your finger on the trigger and now you’ve gone soft on the kid. Don’t think he’s the killer anymore, do you?”
“You think he might be, still? Even after all he said about the girl about his father and…”
“I know he isn’t.”
“Then who, Mr. Finch, who could have done such a thing? I mean, if not Charlie Jones, if not the only man I saw holding a knife, at least the only one I remember being at the party with a knife in his hand, then who could it possibly be?”
“That’s a question we’re going to answer, at least I am, as soon as we get out of here and make sure you don’t wind up on the sheet for two murders instead of one.”
“But how could anyone possibly think I had anything to do with the murder of this—“
“You wanted him dead and it won’t take more than a few hours under a hot lamp in a cramped office before you fess up and tell them that. Cop math. They find you here they’ll put one and one together and it’ll come out with you guilty no matter how you figure.”
“I never thought about—“
“And you’re not going to think about it now. We need to get moving, and quick smart before any of those tone deaf guards that work the gate start making rounds and stumble on this little scene of death. Move.”
He moved.
We all moved.
The three of us, with Steinbeck keeping up the rear, his head up in the air and about as nonchalant as if were out for a walk along the pier back at home.
“And don’t think I’ve forgotten about you,” I told him, and wagged my finger in chastisement.
He looked at me with that ‘me, what have I done?’ question in his eyes.
“I bet you thought it was a laugh riot, didn’t you? Throwing a scare into us with all that creeping around in the dark. And didn’t I tell you to stay put? I gave you a direct order to stay inside the car…”
My voice trailed off as a new question formed in my mind.
“Just how did you get out of the car?” I asked Steinbeck.
He didn’t have an answer for me. Not that he could tell me, or would tell me if he’d found some way to escape even after I’d made sure he couldn’t.
And I had made sure.
I’d parked up in the shade, cracked the window no more than an inch, and not enough for dog to squeeze through at any rate. A cat would have a hard time trying to slink through that gap, although I did wonder sometimes if Steinbeck wasn’t more cat than dog. The way he acted had more in common with felines on a day to day basis.
Not enough room for him to escape.
Not enough room.
The thought chased me down through the Lulu Express and out into the dusty land at the rear of the studio lot.
It chased me, along with a lot of other thoughts throughout the rest of that day and to a new Motel room in North Hollywood, where I rented a car and bedded down for the night.
It would chase me all the way to the next night and to the movie premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theater that I’d invited myself too.
Then, and only then, did I figure out just how Steinbeck had escaped my car.
Chapter 24
Along with the rented car, I rented a tux and didn’t I just look the Dapper Dan all fitted out and ready for the party.
Steinbeck didn’t agree.
He snubbed me when I asked him that Friday evening for an opinion on my new, smarter appearance. He hopped up onto the window sill of the Motel room and did his best impersonation of a cat until I left. He even had that catty look to him as I turned and looked back from the parking lot to see if he was watching me.
I’d told Tarquin not to move. There would be no more jaunts to his familiar haunts, no more midnight trips on the hunt for liquor. And I’d made sure with two bottles of primo Bourbon from a liquor store nearby.
He thanked me with the flourish, but he’d fixed on the bottles I’d put down on the nightstand. Lust brightened his eyes. I’d become a distraction at the edge of his desire.
I wasn’t too worried about Tarquin or Steinbeck as I headed to Grauman’s Chinese Theater.
A freshly vacuumed red carpet lolled out onto the sidewalk as I arrived. The high and the low were separated by lengths of velvet rope. Ten and more man-mountains were suited up and planted in regular intervals along the edge of the carpet just in case one adoring gaze became a threatening touch.
I walked past them all, waving as I went, receiving plenty in the way of gazes, but not a one of them adoring. Pity them. I could be the next big thing. If I stayed in Hollywood longer than it took to wrap up this mess. But I wanted back to San Francisco. I wanted mornings where the fog rolled in across the Bay and you couldn’t see more than a finger when you held up a hand. I wanted my café, open to the public or not. I wanted to talk to Lucy about nothing much at all and everyth
ing in particular.
Soon, I promised myself, soon enough.
One of the mountains came to Mohammed as I reached the foyer of Grauman’s. This particular mountain had a clipboard in his hand.
“Name?” he said, pinning me with a look that was at once disinterested and threatening.
“Mohammad,” I said, my tongue threatening to burst out the side of my cheek.
“Mohammad?” He ran a finger across the clipboard. “Not got anybody by that name—“
“It’s okay, Buster, that’s not really my name.”
It took him a while, about as long as it took the plates to shift under the San Andreas Fault, but he brewed up a question in inside that rock-hewn brain of his.
“Why’d you make up that name?”
I leaned in and gave him a wink that all the best G-Men used when they tried to impress someone with a secret that wasn’t really any kind of secret at all. Least, I’d seen them do that in the movies, and when in Rome do as…
“Testing you, see. Need to know if you’re on you’re on your toes, Buster. Big night we have here, don’t want any slip-ups with security, do we.”
The rocks cracked above his nose and caused a landslide.
“What’s your real name?” he said.
“Don’t want to know why I made up the name anymore?”
He didn’t. Whatever he thought of me, it would take an army of geologists with those little hammers to chisel it out of his face.
“What’s your real name?”
“Elliot Finch,” I said.
He ran his stony finger across the board.
“Elliot Finch, yeah, you’re on here.”
“I’m a special little flower, I am.”
He didn’t know how to take that, so he didn’t. He stepped aside and nodded to the interior of Grauman’s.
“Nice chatting with you, buddy,” I said, tipping a hat I wasn’t wearing, “maybe you me and the Algonquin Round Table can get together for a few drinks sometime. Chew over some philosophy, maybe have a game of Rummy, huh?”
The mountain had left Mohammad, now he was talking to another mountain and pointing to somewhere off in the distance that might interest mountains.
It didn’t interest me.
What did was Kay Martin and Elsnick waiting at either side of the foyer. Both were trying hard not to look at each other while trying to look at each other. Both reminded me of the last to be picked in a high school gym lineup. They were nervous. I wanted it that way.
Kay Martin was the first to peel away. She walked a hallway to an office on the right and looked back at me once before going inside. Elsnick followed, waddling his way in Kay Martin’s wake.
And I was the last little piggy that went…
I shut the door to the office behind me.
“Wee, wee wee all the way home,” I said, finishing off my earlier thought.
Kay Martin leaned against the corner of a desk. She had a cigarette dangling from a holder in one hand, the other hand fidgeted nervously with the hem of her silver dress. She was all dressed up for the Premiere and now she had to spend some of it in a back room talking to a Gumshoe in a rented penguin suit.
She wasn’t happy.
Then again, nobody was in that room, well, maybe me, a little.
Elsnick had taken a seat behind the desk, and was now resting his not inconsiderable softness over the tip of the white cane. His breath came in soft wheezes, like an asthmatic St. Bernard.
“And what is that supposed to mean, Mr. Finch?” Kay Martin asked.
“Means ‘the gangs all here’ and now we can do what I came here to do, at last.”
Elsnick nodded.
“Yes, yes, you have the aforementioned item that has brought we three unlikely people to this place tonight?”
I took a cigarette out and lit it. Once I’d got myself a lungful I took a walk over to the far wall and leaned my back against it so I could see the both of them, and the door to the office.
“I’d be a stupid man if I’d brought the script with me, wouldn’t you say?”
“Of course, of course,” Elsnick said. “I would no more deal with you in that eventuality, than I would some common pool-hall thug. You were wise not to bring it along.”
“Sure I was, because I know you’ve got that gun-happy Gunsel of yours parked right outside the door, just waiting for the word to crash in here and get you a real discount on the deal.”
Elsnick laughed and it was the laugh of a man trying too hard.
“A fanciful imagination you have, Mr. Finch.”
Kay Martin shot him a grieved look.
“Fanciful is it? How do I know he’s not telling the truth and you do have somebody waiting out there? Maybe someone who’d do the same to me?”
It was my turn to laugh, and my laugh was pointed directly at Kay Martin.
“You find something funny about this, do you, Mr. Finch?”
“Everything,” I said.
“Well it is not funny, not at all. We’re talking about a lot of money and a lot at stake here. This is no laughing matter.”
I waved my cigarette around in her direction. For a moment she was obscured with a silver snake of smoke that matched her dress and made her look otherworldly. The smoke disappeared and we were back to reality.
“Come now, Miss Martin, are you telling me you haven’t got those two men of yours waiting outside for me? Waiting in a car, perhaps, or maybe just some dark corner of this theater, for their chance to save you a little money on this deal? A bullet or a beating costs a lot less than the million you offered me.”
“You’re right, but then I don’t’ think you’re stupid enough to fall for something like that, Mr. Finch. Unless I’ve underestimated you completely?”
“No, I’m not stupid, but maybe you are.”
She tensed. The ashes from the end of her cigarette dropped to the floor.
“I won’t have you talk to me like that, Mr. Finch. Nobody in this town talks to me in such a manner.”
“How am I supposed to talk to you, either of you, when you’re going Daffy with money over some script? Tell me, Miss Martin, do you actually believe this script has the powers everyone claims it has?”
“And what powers would those be, Mr. Finch?”
“You know, the usual. It can turn water into wine, heal the sick, cure the lame, resurrect the dead.”
She laughed this time. Anybody listening might have thought we were having a good time.
“Do you believe that I believe it possesses such powers?”
“Of course he doesn’t,” Elsnick said, his voice rising in anger. “He’s trying to make both of us look stupid, that’s all.”
“You don’t need my help with that, either of you. I’d say anybody who’s willing to pony up a million or two for some ancient scraps of paper, well, they’re doing a fine job of it already.”
Elsnick waved his jowls at me.
“Enough of these games. Name your price, Mr. Finch, we don’t have all night to attend to your fancies and notions. If you hadn’t noticed there’s a Premiere going on outside. One that both myself and Miss Martin here should be attending.”
“Yes, he’s right, just name the damn price and let’s end this once and for all,” Kay Martin said.
I glanced at the door.
Beyond was the foyer and beyond the foyer the cinema screen where a very dead woman would live again. A woman who’d wanted nothing more than to leave this town behind. A woman who had known the game, I supposed, but not know the game well enough to make it out alive.
“You know,” I said, “it’s a shame Marla Donovan couldn’t be here.”
They looked to me, and then to each other. There was a lot of confusion in that room. Kay Martin was the first to put words to it.
“A tragedy, of course, but what has that to do with anything, Mr. Finch?”
I took a long, thoughtful drag on my cigarette. I bit at the end of my lip as I thought of what words would fit,
and then I found some.
“See, when I first got here, I figured I’d just poke around. Do what I do best.”
“Which would be?” Elsnick said.
“Climb on a back or two, play monkey until someone got angry enough to shake me off. That’s my usual routine, you know. No fancy magnifying glass, no chemicals in some sterile room with some Doctor in a white coat doing a lot of explaining. See, I figure you can get to the truth of anything if only you wait around long enough and lean on the right people. People just spill their guts in the end. People want to talk, it’s how we’re built.”
The confusion was so thick in the room you’d need a snow shovel to dig us out.
I would try my best.
“What I figured was that Tarquin Meriwether was too big of a lush to kill someone, especially a someone he had no reason to kill. I mean this is a town where everyone has a reason to kill everyone else, and nobody could find a one to pin one on Tarquin, well, that made me suspicious enough. So I asked myself, why? Why would anybody put a knife into the back of a beautiful creature like Marla Donovan? What could they possibly gain from that?”
Elsnick shook in his seat. Anger was like a fire under his flabby feet. He had the hotfoot but it wasn’t burning hot enough yet for him to jump.
“What is this? I didn’t come here to have you play the drawing room sleuth. This is not England and you are not any kind of Poirot, Mr. Finch. I came here to make a deal, and a deal shall be made sooner rather than later.”
“You sound confident, real confident about that, Elsnick,” I said.
“Believe me when I say that if you do not hurry up this, this auction of yours, I will find another way to gain the script from you. A way that will be far less pleasant, let me tell you.”
I gave him a long and unconcerned smile. The kind of smile you might give to a bartender who just gave you change for a ten when all you gave him was a five.
“Are you threatening to kill me, Elsnick, is that what you’re doing?”
He narrowed his eyes at me.
