Brazen

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Hello, Ray. Why do you only use last names? You sound like a boardroom cartoon in The New Yorker.”

  “I lost two partners within a day after I started calling them by their first names. A shooting and a heart attack. Not that I’m superstitious.” He rapped his knuckles on the table and shifted his attention to Valentino. “I’m still working that projectionist angle. You didn’t think I forgot it, did you?”

  “No, but I thought you were satisfied with your suspect’s confession.”

  “I never liked it. Some guys got only so much fight in ’em, then they throw in the towel ’cause they feel guilty about some failure in the relationship. When the cell door slams shut they get second thoughts, and out goes the confession. I got to do the legwork anyway, so why not now? Maybe it’s nothing, but the only Social Security number we matched to a name on our list of projectionists the victims hired belonged to Brugh, the first one.”

  “What were the other names again?”

  Padilla produced his notebook, which had fallen further apart since the last time. “Bernard Schwartz and Mike Morrison. The union issued them both cards, but like most places they never bothered to validate the government numbers. That kind of thing only comes back months later, with a query from Washington; if at all. Right now the bureaucrats have got their hands full with affordable health care, what part of it’s deductible and what isn’t. It only came to light this time because like I said, I keep my briefs covered in court.”

  “That’s clever,” Harriet said. “I didn’t know you had a sense of humor.”

  “And you call yourself a cop?”

  “I’m not a cop. You watch too much television. They don’t give me a badge or a gun, and if they catch me in the same room with a real-live suspect, it better be a coincidence.”

  “I’ll put it this way: If I didn’t know a good joke when I heard it, you might as well start calling me by my first name right now, ’cause without it I’d put a slug in my skull.”

  Valentino said, “Hold on. Going back to the subject of first names, what was Brugh’s?”

  Notebook. “Said S. A. on the card. We got the rest from his union file.” He used both thumbs to turn pages hanging on by one or two holes to the spiral without losing them, stopped, grunted. “No wonder he goes by his initials. He must be good with his dukes or he’d never have survived grammar school with that moniker. Spangler Arlington. Pipe that, will you? Spangler Arlington Brugh.”

  Valentino looked at Harriet, but got nothing back. Well, he thought, you can’t tell someone everything you know in just two years.

  “Lieutenant,” he said, “I think you should consider releasing Eleazar Sheridan.”

  21

  THEIR WAITER CAME with their drinks. Padilla handed him a credit card. “Settle their bill; mine, too. I’m seated over there.” Once again he jerked his thumb back over his shoulder.

  “We haven’t eaten,” Valentino said.

  “At the rate this joint moves, you’ll starve to death before they bring out the artichoke dip. Hang on, I’ll call a cab and send my wife home.” He pushed back his chair and left them.

  “This is one anniversary she’ll remember,” Harriet said. “Him, too.”

  “I’ll say it to you before he says it to her: Sorry about dinner.”

  “That’s okay. I’ve always wondered where a man like Ray Padilla gets all his energy.”

  The lieutenant and the waiter returned at the same time; the couple barely had time for one sip. The shade of red in Padilla’s face told them how the domestic conversation had gone. He signed the receipt and they went out.

  “Blue Chevy.” He gave the valet his ticket. “We’ll come back for your car.”

  Valentino asked where they were going.

  “Best barbecue in town, and fast: in and out in fifteen minutes.”

  “With or without bicarb?” Harriet asked.

  The lieutenant drove fast, cutting in and out of traffic, passing fenders nearly close enough to skin off the top coat of paint.

  “If you’re in a hurry, why not use the siren?” Valentino asked.

  “Don’t have one. It’s my personal car.”

  His passenger consoled himself with Padilla’s story about patrolling Watts in a squad car; without professional skill, all they had to depend on was luck. On Central Avenue he swung into the curb down the block from a grimy brick building with a neon pig on the roof wearing a chef’s hat and waving a fork.

  Harriet said, “That’s a deeply disturbing image.”

  Padilla grunted. “I’d tell ’em to change the sign, but then the place might catch on. First you need to make a reservation a year ahead, then they start pouring the sauce from a jar.”

  The inside was garishly lit, with a low plaster ceiling and a visible path worn in the linoleum between the swinging door leading into the kitchen and the serving area. The air was so thick with fried onion Valentino’s eyes streamed water. Only half the tables were occupied during the dinner hour. Their menu was printed on plastic place mats stuck to the laminate with something that wasn’t glue.

  A chunky Mexican in a dirty apron—the proprietor, most likely—served them pulled-pork sandwiches, coleslaw, and Pepsi fizzing in waxed cups bearing the image of the porcine cannibal. The buns were glazed, irregular in size, and obviously baked on the premises.

  “It’s delicious!” Harriet wiped her mouth with a brown paper towel torn off the roll on the table.

  “Yeah. They start smoking it in the parking lot in back at sunup and don’t open till six P.M. I’m taking Grace here next year.”

  “Better make it tomorrow night,” she said.

  “This isn’t the first time I disappointed her; but yeah.” He took a bite and swallowed. “Spill it, Ebert. What makes Sheridan innocent all of a sudden?”

  Valentino ate. The meat was so tender he found chewing unnecessary. “The names of those projectionists. I should say, ‘the projectionist.’ Bernard Schwartz. Mike Morrison.”

  “You left out Brugh.”

  “I did that on purpose. Brugh’s the only one who gave you his real name.”

  “Get to the point. You’re slower than the Morocco Lounge.”

  “I should have seen it the first time you mentioned the names, but Bernard Schwartz is fairly common and I’m sure there are other Mike Morrisons. S. A. Brugh didn’t ring any bells, but when you told me what the initials stood for, I couldn’t miss it. There could have been only one other Spangler Arlington Brugh. That one changed it when he went into acting. The world knew him best as Robert Taylor.”

  “I know that one. I’ve seen reruns of The Detectives.”

  “He was around a long time before that. He acted opposite Greta Garbo in Camille in 1936. This Brugh’s parents may have been related, or just knew Taylor’s story because they happened to have the same last name, and thought it would be appropriate when they christened their child.”

  “Okay so far. What about the others?”

  “Other, period. Tony Curtis was born Bernard Schwartz, and Marion Michael Morrison took the name John Wayne when he came to Hollywood. One projectionist who shares his name with a movie star is coincidence enough without believing two others, both belonging to the same union.”

  “But we interviewed them.”

  Harriet pointed at him with a forkful of coleslaw. “You said you interviewed Brugh, but others talked to Schwartz and Morrison. Why should they suspect they were talking to the same man?”

  “So how come Brugh’s not a suspect?”

  Valentino said, “It’s easy enough to confirm he goes by his real name. He had a strong alibi for the time of Beata Limerick’s murder. What if another projectionist took his place, using his name to get in the door? We already know he’s familiar with industry legend. He must have been aware of the Taylor connection. Passing himself off as Brugh the first time is what gave him the idea to use other stars’ original names to get close enough to Karen Ogilvie and Geoffrey Root to kill them.”

>   “Why did Sheridan say he killed Root?” Harriet asked.

  “Lieutenant?”

  Padilla gurgled the last of his Pepsi through the straw. “I already said I didn’t like it. I told you before that sensitive type doesn’t break as easy as a tough guy. When they do, it’s usually because they don’t have the strength to go on denying it. I can usually smell a phony confession, but when a case involves so many people connected with the acting racket, I get to doubting my own instincts.”

  Valentino said, “Let’s assume the victims all called the union asking for the services of a professional projectionist. Say our man belongs, keeps in constant touch with the office, and takes the assignments he wants—meaning those involving the clients he intends to murder—so someone else doesn’t beat him to the job. He’s probably registered under those other two names, so if he did come up with that scheme after substituting for the real Brugh, it means he’s signed up recently. You need to concentrate on late joiners whose references were accepted without checking. It happens, especially when whoever’s in charge of registration is swamped.”

  “Which would likely be the case with a projectionists’ union in L.A.” Padilla scowled at his half-eaten sandwich.

  “There is a flaw in the theory,” Valentino said. “Is an insane serial killer capable of that kind of planning?”

  Harriet said, “Any forensics expert can tell you there are two kinds of serials, organized and random. The second kind wanders around until it stumbles on a convenient victim, then acts on impulse. That was Son of Sam, following the voices in his head. The first stalks his prey, sometimes for days or weeks or months, and sets an elaborate trap. That was Ted Bundy: His IQ was off the charts.”

  “There’s another kind.”

  She looked at Padilla. “Everything I’ve read says there are just the two.”

  “I’m talking about a serial who isn’t a nutcase. One with a clear motive and field experience who gets away with it longer than most because everyone’s out looking for Jack the Ripper when they should be looking for Pittsburgh Phil.”

  “Who’s Pittsburgh Phil?” Valentino asked.

  The lieutenant’s smile was grim. “Here’s where I get to be the buff. He was the most successful hit man in the history of Murder, Incorporated.”

  22

  DESSERT CAME, A mound of fried ice cream the size of a monkey’s head, with ground cashews sprinkled on top and a dark-chocolate candy bar embedded inside, to go off like a sweet bomb when one discovered it, with a blast of euphoria Valentino assumed was similar to a rush of cocaine. It was delicious and absolutely lethal.

  Padilla, it developed, had a sweet tooth. He finished half his portion before he resumed speaking. “There isn’t a thing about this case I like. Normally, the odds are with the house: Murders are committed by and large by amateurs; we deal with it on a regular basis and know all the things the perp never thought of, including the bright ideas he got about pulling off the perfect crime. Serial killers screw up the routine; their motives make sense only to them, and since they don’t have any sense to begin with, we’re always a step behind waiting for a break, or until somebody catches ’em in the act. The professionals, on the other hand, know as much about the act as we do, if they’re any good at it and have experience. That adds another whole step: We have to find out who hired ’em and what his motives are.”

  “What makes this one special?” Harriet asked. “Serial killings have gotten to be as common as earthquakes in Asia, and hit men have been around as long as the Mafia; long enough anyway to call for a protocol all its own.”

  “What makes this one special is for the first time in my career I’ve got to depend on a civilian for input. The only reason I’m telling all this to one is his girlfriend’s a colleague, kind of.”

  “Thank you so much.”

  “Forget it.” Nothing about the lieutenant’s response suggested he was aware of the sarcasm in Harriet’s tone. “Anyway that’s why I’m sharing stuff we generally sit on till it hatches.” With a noise that coming from anyone else Valentino would have called a sigh, Padilla left a spoonful of half-melted frozen sugar, egg, vanilla extract, and salt in the bottom of his bowl and shoved it away. “I’m kicking Sheridan. My chief won’t like it, but when you’re doing a jigsaw puzzle and you have to carve away at a piece to make it fit, the picture won’t work.” He looked at Valentino, and if the film archivist didn’t know better he might have thought there was a touch of respect in his expression. “That movie-star-name angle’s as nuts as the cashews I got chewing holes in my diverticulosis, but I probably wouldn’t have stumbled on it on my own. If James Stewart shows up, I’ll know I’m on the right track.”

  “James Stewart?” He combed his knowledge of cinema history and came up empty.

  Grinning, the Homicide detective glanced at the bill, took out his wallet, and started counting bills. A sign on the door to the restaurant read: CREDIT’S WHAT YOU GET WHEN YOU’RE DEAD. WE ACCEPT ALL KINDS OF CASH. “You don’t have the corner, Siskel. James Stewart was Stewart Granger’s real name. The swashbuckler? He couldn’t use it on account of it was already taken.”

  “What do you think of that?” Valentino asked Harriet, as their host approached the cash register.

  “I think that’s a very troubled man. He had to throw aside everything he learned the hard way and fight by your rules.”

  * * *

  LAPD LAYS AN EGG, ran the headline in Variety, when Eleazar Sheridan’s release was announced. Kyle Broadhead snapped shut his copy and slapped it down on top of the pile of pages he’d accumulated on his treatise on movie history and theory, his magnum opus based on a half-century of research. “The vultures are feeding on themselves now. It was fresh when they said the same thing about Wall Street in ’twenty-nine.”

  Valentino couldn’t help himself. “How much did you lose on that deal?”

  “I threw myself out of a window in the Empire State Building; I thought that was common knowledge. Just how old do you think I am?”

  “That’s the bonus question in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. The office pool is up to five hundred. I’ve got the slot between the signing of the Magna Carta and Truman’s second term.”

  Broadhead scowled at the African violet flourishing in a pot on his otherwise Spartan desk. The plant was a gift from Fanta, who’d challenged him to keep it alive. Taking up the gauntlet, he’d stashed a garden trowel, a pair of canvas gloves, and a sack of Miracle-Gro in the kneehole, amassed a botanical library to rival Luther Burbank’s, and fussed about grubs, Japanese beetles, and fungal blight with all the passion he brought to the seminal works of the cinema pioneers of turn-of-the-century France. If Valentino weren’t convinced his mentor considered his own past of less import than the history of film, he’d have accused him of trying to compensate for his own failures as a father to his estranged son. As it was, he considered this sudden passion positive evidence of his dedication to his forthcoming marriage.

  Valentino just hoped that Fanta herself hadn’t become lost in his attention to the institution. Certainly the old man, for all his labors on behalf of the art of the motion picture, seemed to take little pleasure from just watching a movie for its own sake. In that, the master and the student stood on opposite sides of an unbridgeable chasm.

  What the master said next caught him by surprise.

  “Is it grotesque I’m marrying a girl half the age of my Ph.D.?”

  Valentino hesitated. “That’s not my call, Kyle. I can’t believe you two haven’t discussed the situation.” He wouldn’t say it to his friend, but it was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in every water-cooler conversation surrounding the match.

  “I have; she won’t. Every time I bring it up she changes the subject. Is she ducking it, do you think?”

  “I can’t picture Fanta ducking anything. Next to Harriet she’s the most take-charge woman I’ve ever met.”

  “You’re forgetting someone else.”

  He knew immediately to
whom Broadhead was referring. “Thank God she hasn’t reared her head this time.”

  Simultaneously they knocked wood.

  “I don’t see the problem,” Valentino said then. “One of you with reservations is one thing, both another. If Fanta thought the generation gap was a problem, she’d have brought it up before now. She’s studying for the bar. They don’t face the exam without evaluating all the issues. In any case, you should discuss it. You didn’t become the head of the department, and twist as many arms as you’ve had to in order to squeeze donations out of those stones you corner at cocktail parties, by backing away from a fight.”

  “Which is another of those differences I have difficulty overcoming. Youth thinks it has all the answers.”

  He let that drift. One of the drawbacks of flying a permanent orbit around old movies was the persistent need to apologize to the people one dealt with for his date of birth.

  “Maybe it’s pre-wedding jitters,” Broadhead said. “A man gets set in his ways. What if she’s the kind who wants to rearrange the furniture all the time? One night I might take a flying leap into bed, hit a bare patch of floor, and wind up on life support.”

  Valentino laughed. “I wouldn’t worry about that. She’ll probably put you into cardiac arrest on your wedding night.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. I made an appointment for a complete physical the day I proposed—or to be honest, the day she proposed to me. My doctor says I’ll live to be a hundred if I don’t fall into an open manhole.”

  “Your doctor weighs three hundred pounds and smokes three packs a day.”

  “Why do you think he’s my doctor?”

  Ruth entered without knocking. Such amenities had dwindled away from her past working method in dealing with the last of the old studio moguls, if she’d ever observed them in the first place. “You’ve got a call,” she told Valentino. “You want me to transfer it to this line?” She made it sound as if expecting him to conduct business of any sort was an open question. He’d long since given up trying to convince her that preserving film classics was a real profession.