Brazen

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Give it to me again,” he said.

  A by-the-book man, thought his passenger, for all his pose as a department rebel: asking a question that had already been answered in case the answer changed.

  “Leaving behind an empty box with Mansfield’s name on it would have been too obvious. Too easy. Following the news and waiting for the authorities to connect the dots is part of the fun. It isn’t enough just to kill someone and rig the scene to recreate a famous tragedy; he needs to know his work is appreciated. It’s like a director reading the trade papers hoping for a rave review and big numbers at the box office.”

  But that wasn’t what had spurred the lieutenant into requesting—no, demanding—his company in the unmarked car. It had happened this way:

  Valentino: Did Root live alone?

  Padilla: He had a companion, fellow named Sheridan. What their relationship was isn’t police business these days.

  Valentino: Do we know where he was last night?

  Padilla: Troopers are checking his story. But I’m no good at waiting. Let’s go.

  Valentino: Why me?

  Padilla: You speak entertainer. I need an interpreter.

  At that hour the streets belonged only to them, late- and early-shifters, and the occasional coyote from the foothills. Fifteen minutes brought them to a retro Spanish/Moroccan hacienda in a neighborhood once crowded with bungalows and motor courts—Nathanael West country—but they’d all given way to bail bondsmen, pawnshops, and quick-check-cash emporia; the dregs of a local economy that never improved. Their facades sported no-nonsense non-decorative grillwork, with forty-watt bulbs burning deep inside to discourage burglars (the kind, Valentino thought acerbically, who wore striped pullovers and little black masks and carried their booty in gunnysacks over one shoulder; anything more sophisticated would have gone through the security systems advertised on their window stickers like a Ginsu knife through gravy).

  Eleazar Sheridan, forewarned of their visit by way of Padilla’s cell, opened the door of the hacienda, inspected the lieutenant’s credentials, and showed them in. He was tall and graying, with a slight stoop, wore a hand-loomed cardigan over a silk polo shirt and pressed khakis, and was obviously composing himself with effort.

  “Sorry again for the late hour.” Padilla sounded sincere. Valentino (unfortunately!) had been in the company of police officials often enough to note the multiple personalities in their possession: suspects (curt), superiors (respectful), upright citizens (cordial), film archivists (barely suppressed rage).

  “Not to worry. I don’t think I’ll be sleeping much for a long time.”

  The house’s interior was refreshingly well-tended, considering the block where it stood. The sunken living room into which the visitors had been led contained a horseshoe-shaped arrangement of eggshell leather sofas and love seats and a round bleached-oak coffee table on a rug with an arabesque border and a teak floor gleaming warmly in the light of low-key lamps with barrel shades. Tasteful African carvings decorated a mantel of very old and weathered cottonwood, above which hung a framed life-size full-body painting of Salome in full harem dress twisting her way through the Dance of the Seven Veils. Valentino didn’t have to step close to identify the model. Geoffrey Root’s features, plastic though they were in the original protean sense of the term, were unmistakable despite the exotic makeup and pageboy wig: platinum-blond, as opposed to the usual biblical interpretation of a dusky Mediterranean princess.

  There was nothing even slightly masculine about the image. It was anything but preposterous. Anyone unacquainted with the person who’d posed for it would never have suspected it wasn’t a woman, and a remarkably attractive woman at that.

  Sheridan noted the direction of his guest’s gaze. His long features brightened a tint. “That was my present to Jeff, two Christmases ago. I cashed in part of a 401(k) and commissioned the best portrait artist on the Coast. He was so patient about sitting for it. I told him he didn’t have to humor me: If he didn’t like it, he could stick it in a closet or sell it on eBay. It is in questionable taste; but that was my Jeff. You never knew when he was being camp on purpose or just plain clueless. It’s one of the things I loved about him. His interests shifted as effortlessly as his personality onstage.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Padilla said; and once again the sympathy seemed genuine. “I’m investigating what happened as a homicide.”

  “So you said on the phone.” Sheridan’s expression changed from grief to curiosity. “Did you say, ‘I’m’ investigating? Not ‘we’re’?” He looked at the lieutenant’s companion, but Valentino was interrupted before he could explain himself.

  “He’s helping me in an unofficial capacity. The theory I’m testing involves some history he knows a bit about.”

  As Padilla provided a sketchy account of the theory, their host lowered himself onto one of the sofas, his face slowly turning as pale as the leather. Valentino scarcely noticed, distracted by a pair of shadowy squares he’d spotted on the off-white wall opposite the entrance to the room, one on either side of the fireplace. They appeared to be some kind of mesh, painted to match the background.

  “But that’s absurd!” Sheridan said, when the narrative ended. “Jeff hadn’t an enemy in the world!”

  “I get that a lot, sir, and with all respect it’s seldom the case. This isn’t my first brush with show business. When you’re in the limelight, there’s always someone you’ve never met who thinks he knows you. Maybe he’s jealous of all the attention you’re getting, or maybe he just doesn’t like your looks. In this particular case, we have to consider the possibility of a hate crime.”

  “Because of what we—what Jeff was?” He shook his head, a heartbroken smile on his face. “Both of us have known what we are—were—since we were boys, and children can be crueler than any grown bigot. We’d been called all the names you can think of long before the professional haters spat on us in public and scrawled unspeakable things on our front door. We heard the reports of those other deaths; we suspected they were connected, even if no one else did. If you’re saying that some copycat k-killed Jeff because of his lifestyle and tried to make it look like the work of a psycho, I refuse to accept it. I’m in enough pain as it is. What happened to him was a tragedy, not a crime.”

  “I thought of the copycat angle and rejected it.” Now there was no compassion in Padilla’s tone, only business. “We’re dealing with the original.”

  “Will you gentlemen please excuse me?” Sheridan got up and hurried out, tugging a handkerchief from a pocket.

  Padilla looked uncharacteristically uncomfortable. “Interviewing the widow’s the worst part of this job.”

  Valentino searched his face for irony, found none. The man wasn’t a machine after all.

  Their host returned. His eyes were red, but his face glistened as if he’d splashed water onto it. “Please forgive me. It’s very hard answering all these questions. Why are you so convinced this serial killer is the one?”

  “Call it wishful thinking. He’s crazy, but he’s smart. He worms his way into his victims’ confidence, then drops the hammer and arranges the scenario, coldly and methodically. Maybe I’m an optimist, but I don’t want to think there are two who operate that way.”

  “So it isn’t a hate crime, then.” Sheridan seemed to take comfort from the thought, as if his companion had been swept away by a natural disaster instead of evil intention.

  Padilla’s face was gloomier than ever. “They all are, in my book.”

  13

  THE LIEUTENANT ASKED Sheridan how well he knew Root’s friends. He seemed puzzled by the question.

  “As well as he did. Neither of us had any the other didn’t. Why?”

  “Can you give me their names and numbers? I just want to ask them some questions.”

  “What sort of questions?”

  “The same ones I’ve been asking you.”

  Sheridan paled another shade, if that was possible. “Am I a suspect?”
<
br />   “You were, but I’ve got a strong hunch you’re not as good an actor as your roommate was. I also have to ask you if you or Mr. Root made any new acquaintances recently. A fan, maybe. Someone one or both of you warmed up to right away.”

  “I can’t think of anyone who fits that description, but I’ll give you those names and numbers. I don’t want our friends harassed,” he added, his face darkening.

  Padilla’s patience was evaporating. Valentino stepped in to make peace. “I’m sorry I never got to see Jeff’s act, only the portfolio on his website. Do you have any other pictures we might look at?” He glanced sideways apprehensively, but the lieutenant showed no further annoyance. He seemed to understand that Sheridan needed a neutral few moments to collect himself.

  Indeed, the man brightened. “I can do better than that. I can show you his act.”

  He manipulated the arm of the sofa he’d sat in before, opening it to reveal a recess containing a row of switches. He clicked one and the portrait above the fireplace slid up noiselessly into a pocket in the wall, exposing a nylon screen.

  Valentino feigned delighted surprise. In fact he’d suspected the room doubled as a home theater: He’d conducted interviews with industry professionals in their private screening rooms and browsed brochures advertising sound equipment throughout his own adventure in theater design; those painted-mesh squares concealed stereo speakers.

  A low growl issued from Padilla’s throat. His approval had turned to disgust. Another chunk gone out of my working day watching movies, his throat seemed to say.

  Sheridan didn’t notice. He was busy playing eeny, meeny, miny, mo with the switches in the arm of the sofa. “Jeff preferred film to DVD and videotape. I came to this town looking for fame and fortune as an independent moviemaker. So did everyone else; it didn’t pan out, so I got a real job, but when he found out I knew my way around a handheld camera he put me to work recording some of his performances. He studied them over and over, looking for ways to improve the act. Which one is it? Ah!”

  There was another click. Suddenly a rectangular section of the wooden floor tilted down and rotated 360 degrees, replacing the coffee table and the rug it stood on with a plain metal cabinet like the kind room-service waiters used to deliver meals, bolted to the boards. On the platform, also securely clamped in place, stood a gray steel projector, obsolete by today’s laser standards, but in what appeared to be excellent condition.

  “He refused to upgrade to digital. See, we also used it to screen footage of the women he impersonated, and he was convinced the only way to study them was in the format they appeared in originally. Give me a moment while I change reels. Yesterday we saw excerpts from Some Like It Hot, Red-Headed Woman, and The Girl Can’t Help It. You know: Marilyn, Harlow, Jayne, with Cabaret as a chaser. At the last minute he’d decided to open with Liza instead of any of the others. The people putting on the benefit were expecting a younger crowd who might not warm to the d-dead stars.” As he spoke, he removed the take-up reel from the machine and switched it out with the empty feed reel. Then he fitted another in its place from a flat can he took from inside the cabinet and threaded the end of the film through the pulleys and onto the empty reel. All this was done with a good deal of fumbling, for which he apologized. “I’m handier on the receiving end. The projectionists’ union would never issue someone like me a card.”

  “Harlow?” Padilla whispered to Valentino. “Where’d I hear that name before?”

  “Jean Harlow. She’s one of the doomed blondes Beata was obsessed with.”

  “Who killed her, or is that another freaking mystery from the freaking Golden Age of freaking Hollywood?”

  “No one, unless you blame her Christian Scientist mother for delaying calling a doctor. She died of kidney failure at age twenty-six.”

  “Well, I don’t see how our scumwad can rig that.”

  Sheridan dimmed the lights and they made themselves comfortable in the upholstered horseshoe. Valentino couldn’t be sure, but he suspected even the hard-boiled Homicide man was impressed with the late Geoffrey Root’s performance. Slumped at first on his tailbone in the attitude of supreme resignation, gradually he leaned forward into the light flickering from the screen, his hands gripping his knees and his eyes riveted to the doppelgangers of entertainment’s most outrageous divas: Buxom Mae West in feathers and a gown shimmering like eelskin, warbling “Frankie and Johnny”; Judy Garland’s daughter Liza separating herself from her mother’s shadow as she sang, “Put down your knitting, your book and your broom…”; platinum-haired Harlow sultrily offering to slip into “something more comfortable” than skintight white silk; Jayne almost falling out of her strapless shift embracing her bleached pet Chihuahuas (comically, they were stuffed toys); and finally the immortal Marilyn “Runnin’ Wild,” complete with ukulele and trademark wiggle: The film archivist felt his own blood running cold at that point. It had been less than a week since he’d found Beata Limerick gone the same way as that particular candle in the wind.

  A ladder-shaped pattern of empty frames streaked across the screen, followed by the flapping of the tag-end of the film and the white glare of a vacant screen.

  “Wow!” Valentino said. “She—”

  “He.” Eleazar Sheridan smiled at him from his perch in the love seat facing him.

  “Not bad.” Padilla shot to his feet. “Thanks for everything. We’ll just take those names and numbers, and let you know if there are any more questions.”

  But his companion wasn’t fooled. The lieutenant had been moved; and he’d definitely been sensitive about the man’s loss. The spark of decency was buried as deep as a reel of half-decayed film in an Alaskan landfill; but like the film, Valentino knew it to be there.

  * * *

  They reversed directions, this time along streets waking up to face the day. The sky was turning pewter-colored in the direction of what Kyle Broadhead called “civilization” (meaning the rest of the continental United States) and traffic was picking up. They passed a city street sweeper with its nozzles closed, heading back to the barn at a speed approaching California Normal (meaning ten miles above the urban limit).

  Ray Padilla drove with his eyes bolted to the road, the long muscle in his jaw standing out like braided steel cable. “Next to pumping the grieving next of kin for information, I hate this part the worst. You can’t sweat the truth out of ’em without probable cause, and death has a way of washing the vic in the blood of the lamb. Any flaws in his character never existed. Everyone who ever died unexpectedly turns into a saint.”

  Valentino muttered something he hoped was appropriate. He was only half-listening.

  “You were a big help in there,” his companion went on. “I brought you along to give me the benefit of your showbiz know-how, not wangle a free show.”

  “I was stalling for time to think.”

  “As for instance.”

  “I wish I knew. It’s like when we were at Beata’s, and again when you told me how you found Karen Ogilvie. The connections to Monroe and Todd were obvious, but I didn’t see them until something jogged my memory.”

  “You were quick enough to spot the Mansfield thing.”

  “By then I was looking for it, or something like it. This is different. There’s a common theme apart from the similarities to the deaths of movie stars, I’m sure of it—I felt as if I were just inches away when that film was running—but I couldn’t quite jump the gap. It’s like needing to yawn and not being able to. You can’t force it. It has to come on its own.”

  Padilla yawned; whether he was mocking Valentino or truly exhausted was impossible to tell. Probably it was a little of both, but when the other spoke again he seemed to understand.

  “It’s more like an itch you can’t reach. You can throw your back out trying to get to it. So you try to think of something else until it lets up.”

  “Is that what you do? Stop thinking about it?”

  “Yeah, but don’t tell anybody I said so. My chief’s got
the idea the city isn’t paying me not to think about my work. Acts like it’s coming out of his pocket.”

  “It is. Part of it, anyway.”

  “I’ll give him his part back while I get some shut-eye.”

  He dropped his passenger off in front of The Oracle. The sun was visible now, a bloodshot orb that reminded Valentino of the grit in his eyelids. He decided there was something to that Sandman story parents told their children: The grains scratched his corneas when he blinked.

  The extension ladder belonging to Peter, the electrician, leaned against the marquee in its bag, an oversize version of the ones the city put on parking meters when they were out of service. The ladder reminded him of a strip of blank film, a line of empty squares that at the start of a feature promised everything, but at the end offered nothing but the signal that it was time to leave the theater. The image stayed with him as he dragged himself up the steep stairs to his apartment in the projection booth, and was the last thing he thought of after he threw himself onto the rollaway bed without bothering to take off even his shoes and drifted away from a landscape that seemed to be nothing more than a montage of death scenes spliced together for a documentary about Hidden Hollywood.

  As he slept, Beata Limerick, Karen Ogilvie, and Geoffrey Root leaned over him and shouted the answer; but when he awoke with a shock, it was garbled by three voices crying simultaneously, drowning one another out. He spent what remained of the morning trying to recall what they’d said, but then he took Padilla’s advice and stopped trying.

  14

  KYLE BROADHEAD WAS the only man Valentino had ever known who owned his own tuxedo. Full ownership of elegant evening address seemed to have passed out of fashion with the death of Dean Martin.

  As the Film Preservation Department’s designated fund-raiser (“arm-twister, confidence man, gigolo, professional blackmailer,” were his preferred terms), he wore it frequently to black-tie parties: “I never eat or drink at these functions, Val. They’re the equivalent of an open guitar case on the corner of Sunset and Vine and a rudimentary knowledge of ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ If I look like I’m enjoying myself, I’ll come away empty-handed.”