“Thanks,” Coltrane said.
It had been years since he had used this kind of machine, but his familiarity with it soon came back. After attaching the roll to a spindle on the right at the bottom, he fed the film through the machine and linked it to a spindle on the left. By twisting a knob, he could forward the film past the light that projected and magnified the small print onto the screen. The roll was for all the issues of the L.A. Times that had been published during the last quarter of 1934, which, according to the police report Coltrane had brought with him, was when Rebecca Chance, born Juanita Chavez, had disappeared—specifically, during the second week of October. The missing persons’ report had been filed on October tenth, two days after she failed to show up for work. That meant Coltrane had only nine issues of the newspaper to spin through before he got to the period of time that interested him, but to give himself some context and to avoid missing any seemingly innocent reference to her earlier, he made an effort not to speed ahead but, rather, to take his time and do the job right.
The headline for the October first issue was about Franklin Roosevelt and the President’s efforts to deal with the Depression. A related story described the worsening economic conditions in Los Angeles. International news about fears of a war in Europe were next to a report of a local fire in which five children and two adults had burned to death. If you weren’t in a bad mood when you woke up, Coltrane thought, you would be after reading all this.
As the machine’s fan whirred, preventing the heat of the bulb from burning the microfilm, Coltrane spooled further on. He paid close attention to the entertainment section in each issue but failed to find any mention of Rebecca Chance. Even when he got to October tenth, the day the police had been told that she was missing, he still didn’t find any mention of her. Was the studio keeping her disappearance quiet in order to avoid a scandal? If so, what kind of scandal?
On page eighteen, two days later, October twelfth, he finally found it, “Actress Missing,” a story only six inches long that basically summarized what was in the police report. She had failed to report for work at Universal. The studio had grumbled to her agent. The agent had tried to phone her and then had gone to her home, where no one answered. A neighbor said that he hadn’t seen any sign of activity in the house, including lights, for at least a week. When police searched the house, they found nothing that appeared to have been disturbed or missing. An assistant director at the studio said that she was always on time and knew her lines—it wasn’t like her to fail to be punctual. There weren’t any gaps in her clothes closet to indicate that she had packed and gone on an unannounced trip. Foul play was suspected.
A photograph accompanied the article, and Coltrane had the impression that the article might not have been printed at all if Rebecca Chance hadn’t been so beautiful. Although the photograph, obviously a studio still, didn’t do her the justice that Coltrane knew was possible, he had trouble taking his eyes away from it. The tone of the article wasn’t reverential. It didn’t treat her as a star. That the small piece was buried in the middle of the newspaper reinforced the impression that this was being considered more a crime story than a show-business one. Up-and-coming and promising were the words used to describe her. At the end of the article, Coltrane wrote down two titles, the films she had most recently appeared in: Jamaica Wind and The Trailblazer.
Finishing the issue for October twelfth, he continued to the next day, and the day after that. On page twenty of the latter, Rebecca’s photograph, another studio still, immediately caught his attention. It, too, couldn’t compare to Packard’s amazing depictions of her. Nonetheless, her gaze held his own. When he finally broke away and read the article, he learned that the only hint of progress in the investigation was that an actress friend at Universal had told the police about crank phone calls and obsessive fan mail Rebecca had complained about. The calls and the letters all seemed to have come from the same person, and they were all about the same thing: vows of eternal love. “The ‘eternal’ part sounded creepy,” the actress friend said. Rebecca had apparently thrown the letters away—when the police went back to search her house again, they couldn’t find them. The police were speaking to other actresses who might have received similar letters. Other than that, there weren’t any leads.
Coltrane leaned back in his rigid wooden chair and rubbed his forehead. The copy of the police report that Rodriguez had given him made no mention of an overinsistent fan. Did that mean the file was incomplete, or did it mean that the police had put no credence in the story the actress friend had told? Perhaps the actress friend hadn’t been such a close friend after all; perhaps her only motivation had been to get her name in the newspaper. If the police discounted her claims, would they have mentioned them in their report? This wasn’t the only discrepancy Coltrane had noted. The first article had listed Rebecca’s age as twenty-two, while the missing persons’ file had given her age as twenty-five, a figure supplied by her parents. At the same time, it had not mentioned Rebecca Chance’s real name. Ohio, and not Texas, was now her home state. All of this suggested to Coltrane that the newspaper hadn’t gotten a look at the police report but had received its information through an intermediary, what seemed to Coltrane like a studio publicist who was protecting the studio’s investment in her, persisting in its white-bread image of her.
The effort had worked. Coltrane scanned the bold print at the start of every article in every issue on the microfilm, continuing through to the end of the year, feeling an odd sense of time overlapping when he reached December twenty-ninth, the same date as when he now examined the microfilm. There were no further references to the disappearance of Rebecca Chance. He rubbed his eyes, which felt as if sand had fallen into them. Stretching his arms, he glanced at his watch and blinked with shock. A few minutes before six o’clock. He had been here seven hours.
14
J AMAICA W IND ?”
“Yes.”
“The Trailblazer?”
Coltrane nodded.
“Never heard of them.” The purple-haired clerk was about twenty. Videotapes crammed the shelves behind him.
“I’m not surprised. They never heard of them over at Tower Video, either. But they told me that if anybody would know how to get a copy of them, it’d be you.”
The clerk, who also had a ring through his left nostril, straightened a little, his pride engaged. He pulled Leonard Maltin’s Movie and Video Guide from beneath the counter and started to leaf through it.
“They had a copy of Maltin’s book over at Tower,” Coltrane said.
“These movies aren’t in it?”
Coltrane shook his head.
“Well, if Maltin doesn’t list them, it’s a pretty good sign these things have never been shown on TV.”
“Except maybe since that edition of the book came out,” Coltrane said. “And Maltin himself admits that his book doesn’t include every minor film that ever had only a couple of showings at midnight forty years ago.”
The clerk, who was wearing an Edward Scissorhands T-shirt, pulled another reference book from beneath the desk. This one was called A Worldwide Filmography. It was oversized, battered, and thick. He looked through the pages. “Jamaica Wind. Yep, it exists.”
“I never doubted that.”
“Universal, 1934.”
“Right.”
“Guy Kibbee, William Gargan, Beulah Bondi, Walter Catlett, Rebecca Chance.”
Coltrane felt his pulse increase.
“Sounds like a remake of Rain,” the clerk said.
“What?”
“This is almost the same cast as Rain, but without Joan Crawford.”
“You really do know your movies.”
The clerk, who wore a Mickey Mouse wristwatch, straightened with greater pride. “I try. But I have to tell you—I never heard of this actress here at the end: Rebecca Chance.”
“She had a short career.”
“What else was she in?”
“That other movie I’m
trying to find.”
“The Trailblazer? Let’s have a look.” The clerk flipped to near the back of the book. “Yep. Same company. Same year. Bruce Cabot, Hugh Buckler, Heather Angel, Tully Marshall, and . . .” The clerk made a drumroll with his hands. “Rebecca Chance. Now we’re getting somewhere. The picture was directed by George B. Seitz.”
“Who?”
“A couple of years later, Seitz did The Last of the Mohicans. Matter of fact, some of these actors were in that movie.”
“You continue to amaze me.”
“In this case, it’s not so amazing.”
The clerk pointed toward a row of film posters above the shelves of videos on the opposite side of the long room. One of them, tinted orange, faded, announced T HE L AST OF THE M OHICANS — STARRING R ANDOLPH S COTT . Scott, incredibly young, was seen in profile. He held a flintlock rifle and wore a buckskin jacket as well as a coonskin cap. Two Indians fought each other in the background. At the bottom, bold letters proclaimed D IRECTED BY G EORGE B. S EITZ .
“A friend of mine’s a George B. Seitz fanatic. He gave me that poster to put up. Personally, I don’t get what’s so special about Seitz’s work. He’s sure not Orson Welles. But my friend’s an expert. He’s the guy to ask.”
15
T HE FRAIL , distinguished-looking, white-haired, elderly gentleman had a Vandyke beard and a cane. Bundled in a thick brown cardigan sweater, he was waiting at the metal gate of his home in Sherman Oaks when Coltrane parked in front. The expansive Tudor house was high in the hills, the glinting lights of the valley spread out below.
“I didn’t realize how late it was,” Coltrane said after he shook hands and introduced himself. A cool breeze tugged at his hair. “If I’d thought about it, I never would have let the guy in the video store call you.”
The elderly man made a “think nothing of it” gesture. His voice was reedy. “Sidney knows I don’t go to bed until two or three in the morning. Anybody who wants to talk about the work of George B. Seitz is welcome anytime.”
“Actually, Seitz isn’t why I’m here.”
The elderly man looked confused.
“What I’m really interested in is an actress he directed in The Trailblazer.”
“Which actress?”
“Rebecca Chance.”
The elderly man nodded.
“You know about her?” Coltrane asked.
“About her? Not in the least.”
Coltrane felt something deflate inside him. “I guess I’ve bothered you for nothing. I’m sorry. I won’t take up any more of your time.”
“But I’ve seen her work.”
Coltrane froze in the act of turning toward his car.
“You came to talk to me about The Trailblazer. Don’t you think it would be more satisfying if you watched it?”
“Watched it?”
“I don’t have every picture Seitz made. Many of the silents were on film stock that disintegrated before they could be preserved, although I do have copies of the most famous ones, such as The Perils of Pauline, which he wrote before he became a director. The sound pictures he directed are another matter. From Black Magic in ’29 to Andy Hardy’s Blonde Trouble in ’44, the year Seitz died, I’ve managed to track down a print of every film Seitz made.”
The dignified gentleman, who introduced himself as Vincent Toler, escorted Coltrane into his house, the living room of which had a screen behind retractable oak panels at one end and a projection room adjacent to the opposite end, the two rooms linked via a space behind an Andrew Wyeth painting that slid to the side.
Toler, Coltrane learned, was a widower, a retired neurosurgeon who lived alone. He had hated being a neurosurgeon, he explained. “I never wanted to enter medicine, but my father, who was a doctor, bullied me into doing so. What I really wanted was to work in the movies. In what capacity, I had no idea. I just knew that was what I loved, but my father wouldn’t hear of it, and I wasn’t brave enough to stand up to him.” After Toler retired, he had happened to see an Andy Hardy movie on the American Movie Classics channel, had remembered the delight with which he had watched it as a boy, had reexperienced the same delight, and had noticed when viewing the movie on its next AMC showing that the director was George B. Seitz.
That name had meant nothing to him, but when he asked the clerk at a video store he frequented (the same video store to which Coltrane had gone) to find other movies that Seitz had directed, Toler had been delighted to discover that Seitz had directed almost all the Andy Hardy movies and many other movies that Toler recalled fondly from his youth. “I started collecting videos, but some of Seitz’s movies weren’t available on video, so the next step was . . .” Toler indicated the reel of film that he was attaching to the projector. “It’s been an interesting hobby. You could say that I’m collecting my youth.”
As he finished setting up, Toler explained that Seitz had invented the cliffhanger serial in 1914 and had eventually switched to feature films in 1925, making westerns, mysteries, crime melodramas, and comedies. “He was a professional. His pictures were on schedule and underbudget. More important, he knew how to entertain.”
Settling into a plush chair, Coltrane was surprised that his anticipation of seeing Rebecca Chance move and speak was making him uneasy. After Toler turned off the lights and then turned on the projector, tinny epical music, evocative of rivers, plains, and mountains, obscured the projector’s whir. Simultaneously, a beam of light hit the screen, showing a brilliant black-and-white image of a hand that opened a book and revealed the title, The Trailblazer, with Seitz’s “directed by” credit below the title. Coltrane gripped the upholstered arms of his chair as the cast list appeared. There wasn’t any separate card for the star; rather, all the actors’ names appeared together on a list, with the star’s name at the top. Rebecca Chance’s was the sixth name down. Seeing it made Coltrane lean forward.
Writers. Cameraman. As the hand continued to turn pages, the music built to a dramatic peak, and all at once, Coltrane was startled by the last of the credits.
“Produced by Winston Case?” Coltrane said in shock.
“You recognize the name?” Toler asked from the darkness behind Coltrane.
Good Lord, Coltrane thought. Rebecca Chance hadn’t only bought Case’s house, she had worked with him. They were connected. “Do you know anything about him?”
“Not a lot. This is the only picture he produced for Seitz.”
“What about Rebecca Chance? Was she in any other of Seitz’s movies?”
“No.”
While they spoke, the screen showed a wagon train making its way across a prairie. A lean, tall man in buckskin, Bruce Cabot, was leading the pioneers. The vista was impressive, as was the multilayered sound track—the creak of wagon wheels, the plod of hooves, the jangle of harnesses. The dramatic use of sound was amazing, given the limitations of recording devices then in use. But Coltrane didn’t care about that. All he did care about as he watched intently, scanning the crowd of pioneers, was a glimpse of . . .
“I did a little research on Case,” Toler’s disembodied voice said. “He started producing in 1928, just as sound was coming in. Except for The Trailblazer and one other film, he wasn’t associated with anything I’ve heard of.”
“That other picture wouldn’t be Jamaica Wind, would it?”
“How did you know?”
“That’s the other picture I’m looking for. Rebecca Chance is in that one also.”’
Coltrane kept staring at the wagon train. It entered a canyon, where Cabot frowned toward smoke rising from a hollow. He told the wagon train to wait while he and one of the pioneers investigated.
“But you’ve never seen her act?” Toler asked.
“I’ve only seen stills.”
“What made you interested in her?”
Avoiding the question, Coltrane asked, “When does she appear?”
“Soon.”
In the hollow, Cabot galloped to the burning wreckage of a Conestoga wagon. H
e found a dead dog with an arrow through it, dismounted next to a middle-aged man and woman who were sprawled on the ground, and checked to see if they were still alive. His scowl toward their heads, which were discreetly out of camera view, made clear that they had been scalped. The pioneer who had come with him heard a noise, pulled out his handgun, crept toward a stream, and shouted for Cabot to come running.
Movement behind reeds against the bank of the stream revealed a terrified figure emerging from a hiding place. The figure was a woman, and Coltrane became even more attentive, trying to identify Rebecca Chance’s features. But despite her disheveled hair and grimy face, it was instantly clear that she wasn’t Rebecca.
“I keep forgetting she’s only a supporting player.”
“But she has an important part,” Toler said.
After the woman had been helped to the wagon train and cared for, introducing herself as Mary Beecham, Coltrane understood. There had been someone else in their party, she told Cabot, sobbing—her sister, Amy. The Indians who had attacked their wagon had taken her with them.
Because the attack had happened only a few hours earlier, there was still a chance to get Amy back if a rescue party set out immediately, but that would leave the wagon train undermanned and vulnerable. The pioneers had to make a moral choice—whether to forget about Amy, look after themselves, and keep going, or whether to jeopardize the good of the many for the possible good of one person. Cabot’s doe-eyed looks at Mary made clear that he had fallen instantly in love with her. He told the pioneers that they could do what they wanted but that he was going to rescue Mary’s sister. Coltrane had the strong suspicion that Cabot was motivated less by wanting to rescue Amy than he was by wanting to impress Mary. In a dramatically staged scene, Cabot galloped off with six men, following the raiding party’s tracks, while the wagon train proceeded in a different direction.
Coltrane felt light-headed as the scene shifted and he saw Rebecca secured by a rope, stumbling next to the raiding party, who jeered at her from their horses. She, too, had disheveled hair and grimy features, but nothing could obscure her riveting beauty. Her blouse had been torn, revealing more of her right shoulder, almost to her upper breast, than he had realized was permitted by censors back then. Similarly, her skirt was torn up to her knees, exposing her stockings, the tantalizing sight of which seemed more sensual than bare flesh would have been. The animal quality suggested by her lush, tangled hair, the insolence in her dark eyes, the defiance in her full lips made for as erotic a combination as he had ever seen.
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