by Bill Bernico
I raised the camera over the window and snapped several quick shots before he turned and spotted me. I had no idea injured people could run as fast as he did. His three wood was poised over his head, ready to send me down the fairway when I pulled the camera in and floored the Olds. I aimed the camera in his general direction and snapped a few more of him running with the club over his head. I was down the street with my evidence before he reached my car. I wondered if they had a decent front nine in San Quentin. I delivered the pictures, collected my fee from the Alpine Insurance Company and returned to my office.
I’d almost forgotten about Mrs. Holquist’s hat but it was still hanging on my hat rack when I returned. I grabbed the hat and headed out again. Phil Hart’s office was just ten minutes from my own, in the Traxlor Building. I pulled up in front and found his office in the back on the first floor.
The office door was open and I could see a silhouette through the opaque glass room divider. Phil was seated at his desk but I heard no sounds coming from the office. Either he was asleep or listening to a long-winded client on the phone. I waited. Nothing happened. I knocked on his office door and pushed. It opened easily and I entered. Phil sat in his high back leather chair with his back to me. The phone was cradled on the desk and I couldn’t hear a sound coming from him.
“Wake up, Hart,” I said. “I’m here to collect my bird dog fee. Let’s go.” No answer. I spun his chair around and quickly stepped back. His right temple sported a bullet hole and a line of crusty black blood trailed out of it and into a congealed puddle on the floor. A .32 revolver hung from his right hand at his side.
I retrieved my handkerchief and lifted the phone and dialed the downtown precinct. Sergeant Dan Hollister answered. “Cooper, what is it this time?” Dan was always impatient with me. Since he was no longer my commanding officer I didn’t have to take what he used to like to dish out. I resisted the urge to crack wise with him.
“Better send your boys down to Phil Hart’s office,” I said. “Bring the coroner while you’re at it. He’s at Sunset and—”
“I know where his office is, Cooper. Don’t touch a thing, Cooper,” Hollister reminded me. “We’ll be there in five minutes.”
I hung up the phone and looked around the room. The place was normally neat as a pin, as was Phil. One thing looked out of place, though. It was a single white carnation on the floor under Phil’s chair. Phil never wore them and there was no vase anywhere in the room. I deposited the flower into my coat pocket and waited.
Four and a half minutes later Sergeant Hollister arrived with two uniformed officers. One was Jerry Burns, Hollister’s frequent partner. The other was Ned Kupsen, a rookie I’d met on a blackmail case several months ago.
“You’re slipping, Dan,” I said. “Two minutes and fifty seconds is the old record. What happened? Long line at the donut shop?”
Several minutes after the three police arrived, Jack Walsh, the coroner, entered the office with his assistant, both wore a white lab coat. Walsh was in his late fifties and had one of those mustaches that left a gap between his lip and his nose. His hands were clean and his nails were neatly clipped.
“What have we got here, Dan?” Walsh said, looking at the body in the chair.
Dan stopped jotting notes in his pad long enough to look up. “Looks like a suicide,” Dan said, “but Cooper, here, seems to know better. Ain’t that right, Matt?”
“You asked and I told you,” I said. “If you don’t want my opinion, don’t ask for it.”
“O.K., Cooper, pretend I never asked,” Dan said sarcastically.
“But since you did ask,” I said, “Phil didn’t do this to himself. I’m telling you, I’ve know him for years and this just isn’t his style.”
“Oh, really,” Dan answered. “And just what is someone’s style? What the hell makes you an authority on how someone checks his own baggage?”
“Well, for one thing,” I said, “he had no reason. For another, he was working on a case. And besides, he sounded happy enough to me this morning.”
“This morning?” Dan said. “Cooper, what the hell are you talking about? And how would you know if he was working on a case or not?”
I stopped talking and just stood there thinking for a moment before looking back at Dan with a blank expression.
“Come on, Cooper, give,” Dan demanded. “It’s not like you’re gonna breach any confidentiality or anything. I’m sure Hart won’t mind this time.”
I hesitated, looked at Phil’s body and then back at Dan. “Well,” I said, “you remember that lady who was looking for her lost daughter that you sent to see me? Well, when she came to me I told her—”
“What lady?” Hollister said. “I didn’t send any lady your way, Cooper.”
“Wait a minute,” I said “she told me she talked to some sergeant at the precinct and that he’d recommended me. I assumed it was you.”
“Well, it wasn’t,” Dan said. “I don’t know anything about any mother with a missing daughter.”
“You got another sergeant down there with you?” I said.
“You know as well as I do the only other sergeant is Beaumont and he’s been in the hospital with a bullet in his spine since last month. What about this lady, anyway?” Dan said. “What’s she got to do with Hart checking out?”
“She came to see me and I told her I was busy but referred her to Phil,” I told Dan. “I called him after she left my office and told him to send her back my way to get some stupid little hat she left in my office. That was the last time I spoke to him. When I didn’t hear from him, I came to see him and found him like this.”
Dan flipped over the page in his notebook, his pencil poised. “What was this woman’s name?” he said.
“Holman or Holsworth or something like that,” I said. “No, it was Holquist, Estelle Holquist. She said that her daughter had run away from home. Said she just got in from back east and that she’d been to see you.”
“Well, it wasn’t me and now I’ve got to find this Holquist woman,” Dan said. “She may be the last person to have seen Hart alive.”
“Except for his killer,” I said.
“Did she say where she was staying?” Dan asked.
“Didn’t tell me,” I said. “She never even came back for her hat.”
Dan deposited his note pad into his lapel pocket. “I’ll take that hat, Cooper,” he said.
I handed him the little pillbox hat.
“And I want you in my office tomorrow morning, first thing,” he added.
“Can I go now?” I said. “I’ve still got to make a living, you know.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Dan said, casually. “Get your ass out of my sight. I’m getting sick of seeing you, especially whenever a body turns up.”
I left with the same feeling I usually had after I’d talked to cops—a mix between nausea and tension. I didn’t hear anything more from Dan for the rest of the day. I needed a drink and decided to put real life on hold for a while. Matty’s Bar was handy and I was in no mood to be particular.
Later that afternoon I returned to my office. I pulled up to the curb across the street and several parking spaces south of my office building. I’d just shut off the engine when I spotted a large man in a brown suit coming out the front door of my building. He was straightening out his suit and shifting the fedora down over his eyes. He looked both ways and then disappeared down the street.
I took the stairs two at a time and made it back up to my office within a minute. The office door was open several inches and the glass partition separating my inner and outer offices was shattered. I stepped over some of the shards of glass and into my main office. It looked as if a heavyweight fight had taken place on my carpet.
From behind my desk I could see a pair of legs protruding around the side. One shoe was missing and the other dangled from the toe of the foot it once occupied. They were sensible shoes. I carefully leaned over the desk and looked down at the body lying next to my chair. It was Estel
le Holquist. She had my phone cord tightly wrapped around her neck, while her head rested on the mouthpiece.
I couldn’t hear the usual dial tone or pulsing from the earpiece. The body of the phone rested next to my chair. Holquist’s eyes were frozen in a horrified look and her lips were a bright purple. The rest of her face was a pale white with a single trickle of blood running out of her left ear. Ma Kettle had bought the farm.
I left everything as it was and quickly drove to the precinct to report my findings to Hollister. There was no one at the front desk when I arrived but there were several officers milling around the coffee machine. I walked right past them and down the hall to Dan’s office. Without knocking I entered to find Dan seated at his desk, talking to a middle-aged woman who was sitting across from him.
“Oops, excuse me,” I said. “I didn’t know you...” I started to say and backed out of the room.
“No, it’s all right,” Hollister said. “Come on in here, Matt.”
I entered again and closed the door behind me. Dan looked at the woman and then back at me. “Well, Cooper, where are your manners?” Dan said.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“I’m talking about Mrs. Holquist,” Dan said.
“How did you know already?” I said. “I just got here.” I must have looked surprised. “I didn’t want to talk about that in front of your guest.”
“My guest?” Dan said. “Cooper, are we on the same wave length? What about Mrs. Holquist?”
I looked back at the woman and then back at Dan. I leaned in and said under my breath, “can we talk alone for a minute?”
“Cooper,” Dan said in a regular voice, “this is Estelle Holquist, but I don’t have to tell you that. I understand you two have already met.”
Dan studied the quizzical look on both our faces before the silence was broken in unison by the woman and myself.
“We’ve never met,” we both said at once.
Dan’s eyes widened and he stood up behind his desk. He looked at me. “Cooper, you said you came here to talk about Mrs. Holquist. Well, go ahead, talk.”
I licked my lips and tried to find the right words. “Dan, something’s not right here,” I said. “I just came from my office and Mrs. Holquist is still there.” I tried not to blurt out the details in front of the other woman.
“What?” the other woman said. She turned to Dan and said, “What’s going on here sergeant? Are you going to help me find my daughter of are you going to listen to this lunatic?”
Dan sat back down and scratched his head. I leaned into him and whispered into his ear the gory details of what I’d found. Dan stood again and turned to the woman. “Would you excuse us for a minute, please?”
Dan took me out into the hall and closed the door behind him. I filled him in on what I’d found. “Why didn’t you call me, Cooper?”
“My phone was tied up,” I said.
A minute later we both entered his office and confronted the woman. Dan introduced me to her.
I sat next to her and said, “Mrs. Holquist, you say you’re looking for your daughter. Would her name be Selma?”
The woman looked surprised. “Now how would you know that?” she said. “I didn’t even tell the sergeant here what her name was.”
“Mrs. Holquist,” I said. “Another woman came to my office this morning and said she was Estelle Holquist and that she wanted me to find her daughter, Selma. Obviously it wasn’t you. I’ve got to know why someone else would want to locate your daughter. Can you help us?”
The woman’s eyes changed expression from impatience to panic. They filled with tears and her breath came in short, sporadic gasps.
I sat up and took the woman’s hands in mine. “Mrs. Holquist, maybe if you told us a little about Selma it might help us locate her.”
I let go of her hands as she raised them to wipe her eyes. “All Selma ever talked about was coming to California to be in the movies,” she said. “Ever since she saw Myrna Loy in all those Thin Man movies she’s wanted to be an actress. Well, this past July she turned sixteen and a change came over he like you wouldn’t believe.”
“A change?” Dan said, “what kind of change, Mrs. Holquist?”
“Well,” she continued, “Selma was always a good girl. She never gave me a minute’s trouble. Then when she turned sixteen I guess she just kinda got impatient to grow up. She just changed. I couldn’t talk to her anymore. Three weeks ago I went up to her room to have a talk with her and she wasn’t there. I noticed some of her clothes were gone, too.”
“Any ideas where she might have gone?” I said.
Mrs. Holquist dug into her purse and produced a copy of last month’s Modern Screen magazine, flipped it open to a dog-eared page near the back and held it out in front of my eyes. Circled in pen was an ad in the classified section. It read:
“Hollywood producer now casting roles in several
major motion pictures. Looking for girls 18-25 for
bit parts and extras. Contact Mark Stein at Behemoth
Picture Studio, Hollywood.”
“That’s got to be where she was headed,” the woman said, wiping at her eyes with a tissue.
“Can I keep this, Mrs. Holquist?” I said.
“If you think it’ll help, sure,” she said, handing me the magazine.
“Do you have a recent picture of Selma that I could borrow?” I said. “It will help in my investigation. I’ll make sure you get it back when I’m finished with it.”
The woman dug into her purse once more and produced a three by five of a lovely young girl. She looked at it one more time before handing it over to me. “This was taken on her birthday two months ago,” she said.
I got a physical description from Mrs. Holquist. Five-three, a hundred and five, brown hair, blue eyes, date of birth was July 17, 1930.
“Thank you, Mrs. Holquist,” I said. “I’ll do everything I can to find your daughter.” I rose from my chair and excused myself.
I headed for the door and Dan followed me out into the hall again. “Cooper, leave this to the police,” he said. “You’re out of it. You hear me?”
“You can’t keep me out of it, Dan,” I said. “Phil was a friend of mine and I feel somewhat responsible. I sent the lady to him and now they’re both dead. Besides, with sergeant Beaumont still in the hospital you’re a little short-handed, aren’t you?”
“Why do I bother with you, Cooper?” Dan said in that voice that told me he still objected but would give me the leeway I needed.
I turned to leave but added, “One more thing, Dan,” I said.
“What?” Dan said.
“Could you get that mess out of my office before tonight?” I said. “I’m gonna need my desk and phone if I expect to continue working.”
Dan went back into his office without looking back at me or saying anything. His open palm swept downward in that “Get outta here” gesture I’d seem many times before.
I returned to my Olds and looked over the photo of Selma again. She certainly was lovely, like her mother had said. She looked like the starlet type and that was the problem. The Hollywood predators had set out the bait and swooped down on their prey. It was anyone’s guess where I might find Selma Holquist.
I drove up to the front gate at Behemoth Pictures and stopped for the guard. I flashed him my I.D. and badge and told him I was looking for Mark Stein. He directed me to Stein’s office.
The buildings on this lot looked just about like the buildings on any other movie studio lot. They were mostly white stucco with black asphalt roofs. The parking spaces all had stenciled letters denoting the occupant’s name. M.F. Stein’s space was prominently lettered and located directly in front of his office building’s entrance.
The reception area was empty. It was near noon and the secretary was probably having lunch on some casting director’s couch. The office was decorated in modern jungle, with large fern and palm plants everywhere. The reception couch and chairs were upholster
ed in bright green vinyl and the carpet was a lighter shade of green as well. All that was missing was an ape-man swinging past my face.
Through a door I could hear pecking sounds. It was an inner office. An unguarded inner office. I walked in and found a man hunched over a typewriter. He was feverishly pounding away at the keys and didn’t look up at me when I entered. “Sit down, I’ll be with you in a minute,” he said and kept pecking away with three fingers and a thumb. The typewriter bell dinged as he smacked the carriage return handle one last time and added three more pecks before considering his project finished. The typewriter roller sounded like a casting reel with a large trout straining at it as he jerked the paper from the machine. He laid the paper on his desk and spun around in his chair to face me.
I stood up and walked over to his desk. “Mr. Stein,” I said, “my name is Cooper. Matt Cooper and I...”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Cooper,” he said. “I did tell casting we were looking for extras for my present project, but I’m afraid you don’t look like the type.” He looked me over for a few more seconds before adding, “However, I am going to be working on a film next fall that might be right for you.” He looked me over again and added, “Let me see your profile, Mr. Cooper.”
I humored him and did as I was told, turning back toward him. “Mr. Stein,” I said, “I don’t think you understand. I...”
“It’s a cops and robbers picture, Mr. Cooper,” Stein said. “You look like you could fill the bill as a cop,” he said, proud of the way he’d sized up my movie potential.
“You’re good, Mr. Stein,” I said, complimenting him with a smile. I produced my badge and I.D. and said, “Maybe you’ve got a part in your movie for a private eye.”
“You mean you’re not here looking for a part?” Stein said. He seemed disappointed.
“Actually, I’m looking for a girl,” I said, reaching into my coat pocket for the picture.
