The Monet Murders: A Mystery

by Terry Mort

  THE

  MONET

  MURDERS

  TERRY MORT

  PEGASUS CRIME

  NEW YORK LONDON

  For Izabella and Brooks.

  Someday I may tell you the circumstances that led

  to your coming to be. On the other hand, maybe I won’t.

  A little mystery is good for the imagination.

  THE

  MONET

  MURDERS

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was through Ethel Welkin’s influence that I found myself calling on Manny Stairs. Ethel was the pint-sized ardent admirer of one Riley Fitzhugh, although she didn’t know that was my real name. She was married to a big-shot producer, and she was the cousin of this Manny Stairs, himself probably the second most powerful man in Hollywood after Thalberg. I had shaken hands with Stairs at a party at the Thalbergs’ a few months ago. I had been there with Ethel. When I sat down opposite him in his office, Stairs was nice enough to pretend that he remembered meeting me. It was a cream-colored affair with polished stainless-steel accents and glass bookshelves filled with knickknacks, awards, and photographs—and no books. That was not surprising. I had learned by then that producers in Hollywood didn’t read; they listened—to pitches, arguments, whining, tantrums, and yes-men. What’s more, to put it delicately, they had not come from a tradition of reading and literature. They had come from a tradition of schmatta, which is their word for the garment business. Samuel Goldwyn had started out selling ladies’ gloves, or something. That was back when he was still Shmuel Goldfish.

  “What do you think?” asked Stairs. “Nice layout, eh?”

  “Very nice.” Why this guy would need or want affirmation from me tells you something about the town.

  “If you can’t get a good setup in Hollywood, where can you?”

  He was just an inch or so above being able to ride the roller coaster. Maybe five-two. He was wearing a double-breasted gray pinstriped suit cut beautifully and expensively and most likely designed to make him look a little taller. He wore a yellow silk tie any tap-dancer from Harlem would have been proud of. He had receding black hair, a sallow complexion that reminded you of old putty, and thick glasses that magnified his eyes and gave him the look of a walleye on a bed of ice. He was smoking a cigar just a shade smaller than a barber pole. The air in the room was a light blue and smelled Cuban. There weren’t the usual potted rubber plants anywhere to be seen; maybe the acrid cigar smoke had killed them off. The carpet was white, although there were cigarash blemishes here and there. No doubt they would be gone tomorrow, soon to be replaced by new ones. Aside from the office and his expensive clothes, it was hard to believe that Manny Stairs was one of the movers and shakers out here, but he was. He and cousin Ethel had been neighbors as immigrant kids back in Brooklyn. They grew them short in that family. But they grew them aggressive.

  “So. Ethel tells me you’re a private detective.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You look a little young.”

  “I’m older than I look.” In some ways, that was actually true.

  “Like that guy in the story who stays young while his picture gets older up in the attic? We’re thinking of doing that one.”

  “I’m familiar with the original.”

  “Original? What original?”

  “It was a book.”

  “No kidding?” He seemed genuinely surprised, although he could have been stringing me along. It was hard to tell with some of these guys. “You a college man?”

  “No. Self-taught. I read a lot.”

  “Lots of time to read when you’re on a stakeout.” It was not a question, so I let it ride.

  He studied me for a minute, just the way he had no doubt studied a couple of thousand would-be’s. “I’m surprised you don’t want to be in pictures. You got the looks. And Ethel could give you a hand in more ways than how she’s giving you the hand now.”

  “I tried it. But I like being my own boss.”

  “Too many phonies and jerkoffs in the business?”

  “That’s one way to put it.”

  “Tell me about it. How much do you make a week?”

  “My standard fee is twenty-five dollars a day plus expenses. Some weeks are better than others.”

  “Twenty-five a day ain’t much.”

  “I don’t eat much. Besides, it’s the going rate, and I’m the new boy in town.”

  “You could make a lot more in pictures.”

  “I could make a lot more robbing banks, too.”

  This brought a laugh.

  “How about a drink?” he asked me.

  “Sure.”

  “Bourbon suit you?”

  “Like a custom-made suit.”

  “This one’s custom,” he said, fingering his lapel lovingly. “Had it made in London. Savile Row.”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “Have you been there? London?”

  “No. But I read a lot.”

  “So you said. I been there lots of times. I go over there to hire writers and directors. You can’t hit a nine-iron in any direction without beaning a writer in London. And if you miss a writer, you hit a director. Same with New York. A lot of them are pansies, but we don’t care much about that out here. The only pansies we can’t tolerate are the ones on the screen—if the word gets out. Otherwise, who cares? Besides, word almost never gets out. The news boys like money as much as the next guy.”

  “So I’ve heard.” The sleazier the magazine, the happier they were to take a bribe to hush up a sordid story. Some of those rags were really just blackmail operations masquerading as sensational journalism—out to make news and then suppress it, for payoffs. One or two of them had approached me to do a little work for them—tailing some star into a bathhouse where he wanted to be but shouldn’t be—but I didn’t want that kind of work. It helped that I also didn’t need it.

  “These English and New York writers are all pains in the ass,” said Manny. “We give them a contract for more money than they ever imagined, bring them to Hollywood, put them in an office at the studio, and tell them to write. Nine to five. We want to hear those typewriters clacking. It’s piecework, like the old days in the ILGWU [the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union], only putting down words instead of sewing on sleeves. The system bewilders the hell out of most of them, especially when we introduce them to their collaborators. None of these guys ever worked with a collaborator before or been put on a schedule like a normal worker, and, to be honest, most of them can’t ever get used to it. Hurts their pride. Can you believe that?”

  “If you say so.” I wondered why he was explaining all this to me; maybe he just liked to talk. Or maybe it had something to do with the reason I was here. I assumed he’d get to it sooner or later; I wasn’t doing anything else.

  “I do say so. And we generally put another and different team of writers on the same picture at the same time, and they turn out some more bullshit, and then we have meetings and argue and paste all the pieces together and somehow it comes out all right. But the writers from New York and London never quite get used to the system. They think they’re making art. We think we’re making raincoats. And when we’re finished, what do we have?”

  “Raincoats.”

  “Right. With dreams attached on a tag. A combination that always sells in Peoria. Sometimes they’re artistic raincoats with nice linings, but that’s secondary. It’s a business, not the Sistine Chapel. Am I right?”

  “I’ve seen my share of movies.”

  “Ha! So you know I’m right. And you know the funny thing is, most of these creative schmucks are Reds, while the producers here, most of whom have actually done some real labor, are all goo
d Republicans. We understand sweatshops.”

  “You’d think it’d be the other way around.”

  “You can say that about a lot of things in this town. They’re only Reds because they hate the guys who control the money, meaning us. It fits with a simple-minded system of thought. Us versus them. Try to cut their salaries, though, and see what happens. They’re all for the proletariat unless they have to be one. You want ice?”

  “No, thanks. Bruises the flavor.”

  “Good. Private detectives are supposed to be hard-drinking cynical guys, quick with their fists and a rod. Right? At least that’s how we show them in the pictures. Which means it must be true.” He smiled in ironic appreciation.

  “Well, I’m not that cynical.” Nor did I carry a rod. I did have a thirty-eight police special in the glove box of my car, but carrying it around seemed a little melodramatic. Plus the thing was heavy, especially when it was loaded, and it was uncomfortable to wear no matter where you put it. If you wore it on your belt, it dragged your pants down; if you wore it in a shoulder holster, it spoiled the cut of your jacket. As for fighting, the last one I’d had was in high school during a football game against Boardman High, and I won’t say who won, though I will say a sharp kick in the shins is enough to discourage the average scrawny quarterback.

  But I didn’t tell Stairs any of that. Let him think what he liked.

  Stairs grinned and poured out a couple of man-sized slugs of bourbon, slid one to me, and then tossed his off without a wince.

  Then he studied me some more.

  “You don’t look like a Bruno Feldspar.”

  “That’s because I’m not. I’m not even the Bruno Feldspar, except during office hours.”

  “I didn’t think so. You look like a nice Presbyterian kid from the Midwest.”

  “Right on all accounts except one.”

  “Which one?”

  “I’m no kid. The name was Ethel’s idea. She thought it would go over better with the powers that be. And I had reasons to go along with it.” I said this in a way that made him think I had something to hide, which was nothing more than the truth. He seemed to buy it. Ethel thought my real name was Thomas Parke D’Invilliers, although it wasn’t.

  “No big deal. Everyone in this town has a different name than they were born with. Even me. I used to be a Shlomo Rabinowitz. You believe that?”

  “Yes.” It made me wonder, though, why he’d chosen “Manny Stairs.” Maybe it was a secret joke to himself—the idea of upward mobility in his adopted country. If so, it was harmless enough. Of course, “stairs” go both ways. Maybe that was the dark side of his secret joke. These guys played for high stakes and knew it. And when they lost, it was back to the bottom, with a long climb out again. A lot of times, they didn’t make it.

  “Let’s get down to business,” he said. “I got a problem.”

  “I figured,” I said.

  “Of course. Why else would the second-most important producer in this town call a twenty-five-dollar-a-day private dick?”

  It was a rhetorical question, so I didn’t answer, just shrugged.

  He got up and went to the bookshelves and grabbed an eight-by-ten photo in a silver frame.

  “Take a look at that,” he said.

  It was a platinum blonde. No surprise there. She had a sultry look that almost seemed genuine, and I recognized her as an actress who’d made a few movies a couple of years back. For a moment, the name didn’t come to me. Then it did.

  “Minnie David, isn’t it?” Then I remembered why she hadn’t made any pictures lately. She had died two or three years ago in a cheap motor court out in Joshua Tree. Some said it was an overdose, but it had been reported at the time as a heart attack. The guy she was with phoned it in and then took off.

  “Minnie David was my wife.”

  “I didn’t know. Sorry.”

  “We were Hollywood’s second couple,” he said wistfully, “after Thalberg and Norma. Minnie and Manny, Hollywood royalty. But then she died. It’s been three years now. And two months. And fourteen days.”

  If I’d been as hardboiled as private dicks are supposed to be, I’d have smiled at this bald-headed midget, as handsome as a vacuum cleaner, lamenting a lost love who was beautiful beyond words, with emerald eyes and breasts most men would risk hell for. And, although the word was that her brains had barely qualified her for licking stamps in a post office, that was irrelevant. Beauty may not be truth, but it’s a good substitute. And a lot easier to recognize.

  But I didn’t smile, because I understood. I’d been there too. Still was, really, though my lost love was alive and married, more or less, and spending her days at the country club and being photographed by the local newspaper. Her being alive and well and living in Ohio made losing her all that much harder to live with, because it held out false hopes that were hard to dismiss. So I understood Manny. It didn’t matter what a man looked like on the outside; we were the same sad fools on the inside.

  “But that ain’t Minnie David,” said Manny Stairs. “This is Minnie David.” He showed me another photo in another silver frame, and it looked to me like it was just another shot of that same woman in a slightly different pose.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Amazing, isn’t it? They could be identical twins,” he said. “But they weren’t. This one is named Catherine Moore. She’s the problem.”

  The story went like this—one day about three weeks ago, Manny Stairs had been idly looking out his office window just as some tourists were being ushered through the lot. There were maybe twenty of them, all the predictable kind from somewhere in Middle America, snapping pictures of the exotic sets with Kodak box cameras or looking with wide eyes at the pirates and cowboys and other assorted extras who were lounging outside the commissary, complaining about their agents. But then Manny had noticed one girl who was bringing up the rear, walking by herself, kind of aloof but obviously fascinated by the entire scene. Manny had almost keeled over from shock, because the girl was a near-perfect duplicate of Minnie David, his dead wife. After he got a grip on himself, he ran downstairs; but by the time he got there, the group had boarded their tour bus and left.

  So Manny called studio security and set them on her trail. It wasn’t hard to find her again, because the studio had a list of the tourists who came through each day. She was a local, living in a small week-by-week apartment in Santa Monica and working as a secretary in an insurance company. Manny called her up and introduced himself and asked for a date, and she agreed. And from there, things took off in a romantic whirl. Manny suddenly found himself being really happy again, swept away for the first time in the years since his wife had died. They went dancing at the Trocadero (he bought her the evening gowns), had lunch at the Brown Derby, dinner at Romanov’s, drinks at the Coconut Grove; and in between he showed her around the studio and they watched movies being made and sets being built, and they walked around the lot, moving easily from the OK Corral to the Great Wall of China and through the canals of Venice that had been drained recently to allow some leaks to be repaired, and it was all a wonderland to her, and he hoped that she was being swept off her feet by the glamour of the place. As they moved between sets and sound stages, he made sure to have a few angry confrontations with nervous directors, just to show her who was running the show. He also gave her a few baubles along the way—nothing that she could pawn and live happily ever after on, but shiny enough to indicate that the gravy train was gathering steam in the station.

  And Manny was no fool: he never introduced her to the male stars who might be dumb enough to make a pass at her. He knew the ones who were capable of that level of clueless narcissism and the others who were aware of who paid the bills. He restricted her access to these latter fellows. He also knew that all this glamour reflected on him and to some extent blinded her, and that if not for that glamour, she would probably not be so interested in a five-foot-two goggle-eyed producer originally from Brooklyn whose accents and inflection
s had come there via Minsk.

  But that was nothing new to him. It had been the same with his first wife, and that had worked out fine until she killed herself, accidentally, most likely. It was almost like she had come back to life, because this girl, Catherine Moore, was just as beautiful and just as dim-witted as Minnie had been. The crowning moment of the relationship had been when Manny took Catherine out to his beach house in Malibu—a house that was only just then being built and was only half finished—and they stayed there through the night and watched the waves rolling up onto the beach and the stars shining and the moon setting, while they talked of this and that and drank chilled champagne and ate cold lobster, until they got down to what Manny described as some really prime schtupping.

  This went on for three weeks and Manny was deliriously happy, until one day he got a letter from Catherine saying that her fiancé from St. Paul was coming to town and they were running away to get married. She was sorry, but she felt she owed it to him, her fiancé, because she had given her promise and although she had loved every minute of her time with Manny and especially going to the beach and the schtupping (which she misspelled, not being conversant with Yiddish), she felt it was her duty to marry this other guy, and so, wishing Manny the best of luck and hoping that he would always think of her fondly and hoping that one day they might even be friends, she told him good-bye.

  In short, she gave him the mitten.

  “So, what would you like me to do?” I asked when Manny had finished his story. To tell you the truth, I felt a little sorry for him, even though incongruity is the soul of comedy and there was nothing more incongruous than the thought of Manny and this beautiful airhead. He had met this woman in a dream, and he had dreamed it a while, and now had awakened to find that the dream girl had vanished. I understood.

  “I want you to find them. Her, I mean. I had the studio security boys look around, but she’s left her job and left her apartment, so they drew a blank. Besides, this is in the nature of a confidential assignment. It wouldn’t do for the story to get around that I was what you might call obsessed with this broad. The security boys are used to arranging quickies, but it’s gotten past the stage where I can use them safely without spreading gossip.”