Brazen

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Who is it?”

  “She wouldn’t leave her name.”

  He told her to go ahead, and she withdrew without another word. When the light on Broadhead’s phone came on he answered. His colleague perked up at his tone.

  “If you must know, yes, I’m trying to help out the department in my small way. What’s your interest? Seriously? I can’t answer that.” The dial tone sounded in his ear. He hung up. “I’m never going to knock wood again.”

  “Really? Her?”

  Valentino nodded. “Teddie Goodman, as I live and breathe. It was a fishing expedition. She thinks I’m stringing along the Los Angeles Police Department in order to beat Mark David Turkus to the punch. It must be hard work being Theodosia Goodman. When Iraq lobs a missile into Israel, she thinks Tel Aviv has a line on The Thief of Baghdad.”

  Turkus, the billionaire media baron who’d outbid the UCLA Film Preservation Department on more acquisitions than Valentino cared to remember, only put his ace sleuth on a project when he intended to play hardball. She was the third take-charge woman neither one of them had wanted to name, for fear of summoning the devil.

  Broadhead blew air. “A thing like that can destroy one’s faith in superstition. When that woman fishes, she packs a shotgun.” His eyes narrowed. “You haven’t been holding out on me, have you? Beata or Karen or Root didn’t promise you the lost last reel from Casablanca: the one where Bogart runs off with Bergman, leaving Paul Henreid to face the Nazis alone?”

  Valentino went stiff in his chair. “Such a thing exists?”

  “Idiot. I was being ironic. Now you’re the one ducking the issue.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. She waltzed all around her point; if there was the smallest doubt in her mind I didn’t know what she was getting at, she wasn’t about to give me anything I could get my teeth into. But if she’s got the scent, the fact that there’s something significant on the other end of her nose is something you can take to the bank.”

  23

  TEDDIE GOODMAN EXPLODED into Valentino’s office less than forty-five minutes after she’d called. Exploded was no exaggeration. She swept through doors as if they didn’t exist, wearing outfits one saw only in Harper’s Bazaar the very day she appeared in them in public: Outlandish things that clove to her skeleton frame as closely as if she’d sloughed off the last, like a snake. This one, white with a scarlet spiral that put Valentino in mind of a barber’s pole, culminated in a burst of crimson daffodil on her left shoulder, echoing the bloodred lipstick she wore in contrast to her black-black hair, swept behind one ear and lacquered tight to the temple.

  Her name, as it happened, belonged to silent-screen vamp Theda Bara, before she’d sought fame. Valentino, who owed his own name to Bara’s contemporary through an accident of birth, had sought to soft-pedal that connection by grooming himself more casually than the slick original, but Teddie seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time in replicating the slinky image of her namesake. She appeared to feel the necessity to feed her employer’s romantic fantasies about early Hollywood. Considering her obvious skills in sniffing out forgotten gems, Valentino thought she must feel some deep-seated insecurity concerning her station; which was why he gave her more latitude than most.

  “I’d sit,” she said, looking around his office cluttered with scripts and related detritus, “but the place is a deathtrap. I might have to make for the fire stairs any minute.”

  “Good day to you, too, Teddie. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “Can it, Sherlock. If you’re so tight with the cops, it means you’re snitching on someone for a quid pro quo. What’ve you got, Marilyn’s testimony against the Kennedys on tape?”

  He was surprised. Ordinarily he had a line on some item of interest to them both, but in this case his efforts were directed to something entirely different from their stock-in-trade. “If I did, what possible interest could that have to the Turk? He deals in entertainment, not conspiracy theories.”

  “These days, what’s the difference? You’ve been spending a lot of time lately in public with an up-and-comer with the department. Given your past record, something on celluloid’s in the hopper. What’d Beata promise you, a complete print of Marilyn’s last, outtakes from The Misfits, what? If you’re sitting on it for the sake of your blessed department, we’ll split fifty-fifty on distribution; with a substantial fee for your mug on the Special Features; goes without saying.”

  “Just what are you fishing for, Teddie?”

  She leaned against the door, putting in a respectable imitation of Barbara Stanwyck in anything. “I read the papers. I know as much about what happens to bombshell blondes in this business as you. Mark’s burning his tires on a package deal—a bargain, if it pays out at the finish. He’s paying me to get the inside track. If there’s nothing to it, he’s stuck with a lot of junk that goes straight to video, right along with that crap about the history of the Mafia and Ernest Meets Gerald Ford.”

  He asked her again what she was fishing for.

  “You should know. If Eleazar Sheridan didn’t kill Geoffrey Root, someone else is out to kill the great blondes of Hollywood. With Marilyn, Thelma, and Jayne out of the picture, who’s next? I smell an award-winning documentary, and tons of press.” She struck a match off his plaster bust of D. W. Griffith and set fire to one of her eight-inch Egyptian cigarettes wrapped in brown tobacco. “I’ll drop you a hint: When you throw a Hollywood party, bear in mind a hangover’s not the worst thing you can expect.”

  “What’d you think she meant by that?” Valentino asked Broadhead, back in the latter’s office.

  “Don’t be obtuse. You know exactly what she meant. We’ve been discussing it since before Padilla fixed on Sheridan.”

  “You mean a gathering.”

  Ruth, always and forever a harbinger of doom, entered without knocking. “You could save this university a ton in maintenance fees, and incidentally my heels, if you’d move all your junk into this room.”

  “Who’s calling this time?” asked Valentino with a sigh.

  “Who else? You’re more popular with the Los Angeles Police Department than the Zodiac Killer.”

  “What line?”

  “The one that’s lit up, Einstein.” She pulled the door shut behind her just short of a slam.

  Broadhead said, “I’d ask the department to give her the sack, but she’s got more tenure than I have.”

  Valentino punched the button. “What’s up, Lieutenant?”

  “A thin maybe. Computer crapped out on Morrison and Schwartz, but it pulled up a union projectionist that listed his mother as next of kin on his application; then it matched her to a babe that camped out in casting offices forty years ago with a portfolio of cheesecake shots. She was tanked once on a D-and-D; no other priors. Our shrink likes that kind of home environment. Got a pencil?”

  “Always.” He made it a point to keep a pad and a writing instrument on his person at all times. Many of his contacts were elderly, and hazy on important details regarding their careers. He always wrote down what they remembered, with an eye toward cross-referencing them with accredited sources. “Shoot.”

  “Not a good term to use when talking to a guy who’s required to carry a firearm twenty-four-seven. Name’s Arthur Augustine. He had a permanent gig at Grauman’s till he refused to screen a Blondie marathon on the eighty-fifth anniversary of the first appearance of the comic strip.”

  “An exaggeration; but just slightly. As someone who would have the same argument with the head of my department, I’m loath to admit a point of agreement with a potential serial killer.”

  “Reason I’m calling, apart from the fact you speak the same language with these geeks, the union reports a Joe Yule, Junior volunteered to run the projector for a party at Orson’s Grill this coming Friday.”

  Gathering, Valentino mouthed to Broadhead. Into the receiver: “You know by now that Jerry Lewis changed his name from Joe Yule, Junior when he went into show business. Who’s hosting?”
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  “That’s the rub. My wife talked me into seeing Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, which is where I got that line. The secretary who booked the party’s hiking in Alaska, in one of the nine-tenths of the state where there’s no cell signal, and some dynamo of a janitor took her notes for a piece of trash. I got men combing through the refuse at Sanitation, but while that’s going on I need an interpreter to interview Augustine’s dear old mom. He lives with her: If I weren’t convinced we’re dealing with a hired hand, I’d say he fits the profile of the nutjob murderer we all know and hate.”

  “How soon can you pick me up?”

  “This soon enough?”

  Valentino got the last in stereo; through the telephone and from Ray Padilla opening the door to the office, cell in hand.

  “Can I go?” Broadhead got up and hooked his tweed hat off its peg.

  * * *

  The house was an anomaly in twenty-first-century L.A.; white clapboard with a steep peaked roof and a picket fence, held over from the forgotten days before the movie colony was founded. Valentino half expected to be met at the door by Andy Hardy.

  Instead it was opened by a woman in her fifties, with skin brown and crinkled by too many tans and a head of fried hair, aggressively peroxided. She was dressed too young, in a tight pink halter and canary-yellow Capri pants that squeezed her bare midriff into something resembling a bicycle inner tube, with a gold ring pinned to her navel. The rest was rouge, mascara, and vermilion on her fingers and toes in sandals.

  “Arthur Augustine.” Padilla held up his shield.

  She looked from him to Valentino to Broadhead: surely the strangest trio even someone in the movie capital had seen in a spell. “Artie’s at work. I’m his mother. May I take a message?”

  “Where’s he working?”

  She drew in her chin and turned to Valentino. He pulled a sympathetic face.

  “It’s important we find him, ma’am. He may be of assistance in a police investigation.”

  “If you were any sort of police, you’d know he works at the Wilshire. He’s the headwaiter there.”

  “Waiter?” Padilla jumped on it. “Not a projectionist?”

  “Oh, that was ages ago! Running the restaurant in a hotel like that is a much greater opportunity.”

  The lieutenant’s eyes brightened. Witnessing the event, Valentino realized the detective’s mind was a cross-reference guide that rivaled the police department’s mighty computer: It had been the headwaiter at the Wilshire who’d identified Eleazar Sheridan as the man who’d waited on the Limerick and Ogilvie parties; he’d had the very same connection with the victims as Geoffrey Root’s partner.

  Padilla unveiled yet another side of his personality. His tone became reverent. “Do you know if he was on duty the night a political fund-raiser was held for a candidate for governor some months ago?”

  “If the event was important, you can be sure he was there. They’d be lost without him. He hasn’t been in an accident?” She touched her throat, a theatrical gesture.

  Padilla’s charm fell away. “He causes accidents.”

  Quickly, Valentino said, “We just want to ask him some questions. Could we see his room? He might have an appointment book. We have to be sure we don’t miss his shift,” he added.

  “He rents an apartment upstairs. Artie’s no mama’s boy. You won’t disturb anything? He’s particular about his things.”

  The lieutenant let Valentino mouth the comforting response, and she stood aside. The front parlor (as it would have been called when the house was new) glittered with professional-quality photographs of a young Mother Augustine in silver frames: cheesecake shots in two-piece swimsuits, glamour poses in evening wear, tough-girl tableaus with a pistol in one hand and a cigarette dangling between red-red lips. She’d chosen to display her aspiring-actress portfolio.

  “You’ve stumbled upon my secret,” she said from the doorway. “I tested for everything in town, from soap operas to deodorant commercials. I finally landed a part opposite Bobby Darin, but I got pregnant and had to bow out. Sandra Dee stepped in. I tell Artie it took my little man to knock the stars out of my eyes.”

  “Tease him a lot, do you?”

  She tipped back her head and looked down her nose at the lieutenant. Valentino wondered if she’d had it bobbed; shiny patches on her face testified to extensive plastic surgery, recently enough to leave ruddy swellings awaiting the healing process. “He pretends to be annoyed and I pretend to think he’s ungrateful, after I gave up the bright lights for him. We laugh.”

  “Where’s his room?” Padilla said.

  “Apartment.” She led the way up a narrow staircase and flicked her bright nails in the direction of a closed door. Padilla tried the knob.

  “He keeps it locked,” she said with satisfaction. “As if I’d pry.”

  “As if.” He produced a ring of keys from an inside pocket. “Okay if I try these?”

  “Knock yourself out,” she said with satisfaction.

  She shot Broadhead a look. “You don’t look like a policeman. Are you by chance in the industry?”

  “Documentaries,” he said. “We’re doing a series on aging. Are you interested?”

  Which visibly ended her interest in him.

  The latch clicked halfway through Padilla’s ring.

  “Oh, my stars!” The woman’s voice was a squeak.

  Posters leapt out from the walls when the door was opened. Some were pricey originals, others reproductions: Marilyn Monroe sprawled before the falls in Niagara, Jayne Mansfield’s vapid face grinning between cotton-candy hair and her ice-cream-scoop breasts in The Girl Can’t Help It, Thelma Todd looking fetching in a lobby card for one of her comedy shorts, a chilling rendition of Sharon Tate wielding a bloody stake in The Fearless Vampire Killers. There were other four-color images, all of them tragic blondes: Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, Dorothy Stratten, Inger Stevens (a suicide, in the midst of what had seemed a promising career), the long sad Parthenon of yellow hair, gaudy lives, and early death.

  Someone had taken a four-inch brush and slashed a ghastly X in scarlet paint across every lovely face.

  Oh, my stars, indeed.

  24

  ARTHUR AUGUSTINE’S LIBRARY, encased in steel utility shelves decorated on the top corners with ceramic Greek masks representing Comedy and Tragedy; the latter painted the same shade of scarlet as the X on the doomed stars’ faces), was a miniature version of Valentino’s, eschewing its bright spots in favor of the Industry’s dark side: Hollywood Babylon, Fade to Black, Hollywood’s Unsolved Mysteries, A Cast of Killers, Helter Skelter. The volumes, bound in paper, were bloated, thumb-smeared, and dog-eared to pages containing especially lurid passages, all having to do with blond stars and starlets.

  A CD box atop a Sony player caught his eye: a single of Marilyn singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” It was empty. Valentino had a good idea where its contents could be found: in the LAPD evidence room, with the rest of the material pertaining to the Limerick homicide.

  Padilla had left the group gathered in front of the grotesque shrine. He summoned Valentino and Broadhead to a small writing table, where yesterday’s L.A. Times lay folded to a gossip column, with a checkmark beside the fourth paragraph:

  … Holiday O’Shea, popular road-company star of Hello, Dolly! Gypsy, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, celebrating her 55th with husband and friends with a private screening of a local cable documentary of her life at Orson’s Grill Friday …

  Padilla looked at the archivist. “What day is today?”

  * * *

  The lieutenant drove with the pedal pasted to the firewall and his phone to his ear. He hit END. “That was the Wilshire manager. Augustine’s on duty. The hotel’s ten miles from Orson’s Grill: a good half-hour in early evening traffic.”

  Valentino gripped the dash with both hands. “Do you think he changed his mind?”

  “No, and neither did I. I told you the one thing we didn’t take into account was the possi
bility of a hired killer. I ran it past the department shrink; he was more interested in my issues than Augustine’s.” Padilla banged the steering wheel with his palm. “Can’t say as I blame him. Most serials do their own dirty work. This guy’s got all the rage against his silly-ass mother you expect from the type, but instead of doing it himself, he has it catered. Where’s the thrill in that?”

  Broadhead said, “It’s Hollywood, Lieutenant. Stars don’t do their own stunt work. With a wannabe mom like he’s got, he’s probably a native. It’s hardwired into him not to buck the union.”

  “I’m lost. Where’s a hotel headwaiter figure into what we know?”

  Padilla said, “It was the headwaiter at the Wilshire gave us the personal connection between Beata Limerick and Karen Ogilvie. Sheridan worked there, too, which would be where our guy got the idea to kill Geoffrey Root and finger him for it, and we fell for it like a ton of bricks. We were so sure we had the curse killer we never suspected we were interviewing him. His name’s buried so far in my notes I’m not surprised I didn’t remember it. Since he worked for a while as a projectionist at Grauman’s, it’s no big leap to figure he made contact with a colleague who moonlighted as a hit man.

  “Maybe he isn’t so yellow after all,” he went on. “He was clever enough to cater the jobs through a second party while we worked the case according to theory. We got a squad of eggheads that studies serials and another squad that specializes in pros. They don’t hang out together and compare notes.”

  “Nobody can know everything,” Valentino said. “I get some of my best bargains from people who don’t understand the value of what they have to sell.”

  Broadhead straightened in his seat. “So where does that leave us?”

  “Let’s ask the maestro.” Padilla looked at Valentino. “Who was that other blonde Beata Limerick mentioned, after Marilyn and Jayne and Thelma?”

  Valentino tensed. “Sharon Tate.”