Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 03 - Alive!

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I’m a grown man, and reasonably free of dementia. The question is irrelevant.”

  “That’s funny. Seriously, what will she say?”

  “She’ll say, ‘That’s nice; have fun.’ She’s preoccupied with French lace and baby’s breath, which is the most revolting name for a flower one could possibly imagine. Women have been plotting and planning these barbaric rites since Charlemagne was in short pants; you could unplug one bridegroom and plug another in his place without even slowing the machinery. I’m neglected and bored. Any change of pace is welcome.”

  “What about your book?”

  “Undiverting. Méliés and Moliere are indistinguishable from each other at this point. My computer program almost crashed the other day, threatening to wipe out the work of months. It was the most entertainment I’d had since I started the book.”

  “Kyle, I wouldn’t dream of risking death or imprisonment with anyone else.”

  “Thank you, Val.” He sounded genuinely touched. “What will this be, the third police department whose rules we’ve flouted?”

  “Yes, but there are so many in the area.” He smiled into the phone. “You know, that speech about meddling in things man should leave alone isn’t from Frankenstein. It’s from The Invisible Man.”

  “I was aware of that. I selected it because it was a Whale project.” Broadhead went on without pausing. “If Hunter hoped to enlist Elizabeth Grundage as his partner, he must have had something to bring to the table. A prospective buyer.”

  “I thought of that. Could it be Turkus?”

  “Not if what you suspected about Teddie is right, and she’s just nosing around. She’d have been in on the deal from the first and way ahead of you. Think of someone else with interest in the subject and the capital required.”

  Inspiration flashed. “Who bought that Lugosi Frankenstein poster at Christie’s?”

  “I was hoping you’d say that before I suggested it. Collectors are completists: One purchase in a specific area leads inevitably to others. It was J. Arthur Greenwood. I feel certain you know the name.”

  “I’ve known it practically all my life. Isn’t he retired?”

  “Giving him ample free time to let his collectors’ mania run rampant. His place in Beverly Hills is a museum. Fortunately, you shouldn’t have much trouble wangling an invitation. When these packrats aren’t actually scrounging for more arcane bric-a-brac, they’re hunting for a fresh pair of eyes to appreciate their plunder.”

  Valentino knew that feeling. He’d had it himself often, in the days before he began dismantling his collection to raise money to continue work on the theater. “I don’t suppose you have his number.”

  “The man is listed, can you believe it? He encourages communication with readers who raised themselves on his magazine. I understand he made personal arrangements with the chamber of commerce to include his address on all the tour bus routes.”

  “Thanks, Kyle. I’ll call him later this morning.”

  “When you do, remember to keep your eyes on the prize. Once you film freaks get together, you talk about everything but what you came for.”

  He thanked him for the advice and said good-bye. Nobody knew more about film than Broadhead, but he parked his interest at the office. Striking up a conversation with him on the subject outside business hours was like trying to hitch a ride with a cab driver after his shift was over.

  With a clear course of action ahead of him, Valentino felt drowsy enough to sleep without wrestling the linens. He cleared the rest of the books off the sofa, unfolded it into a bed, undressed, and spent the next two hours in a state of complete unconsciousness, without dreaming about dead actors and real-life episodes he had not witnessed. When he awoke, he remembered Harriet’s text message and frowned. He texted her back:

  4:30 2 EARLY 2 B LATE

  But he didn’t send it. He cleared the screen and wrote:

  LUV U 2 GOT 2 RUN

  This one he sent. He could talk to her about her night later. She probably had a good explanation, and if she didn’t, he wasn’t going to be one of those techno-poops who fought by e-mail.

  J. Arthur Greenwood was listed, sure enough. The retired publisher had built his empire around Horrorwood, a fan magazine filled with fun facts and iconic stills connected with weird and fantastic movies beginning with the nickelodeon era and continuing through all the Friday the 13ths and Texas Chainsaw Massacres, until the material got too gorily graphic for a man who revered the classics. Many years after he’d sold out to a bigger chain, he’d continued to add to his world-class collection of horror and science fiction film props, posters, and press kits, and corresponded with the children and grandchildren of the original baby boomers who’d discovered their frightening favorites through his publications.

  In his eagerness to get to the bottom of the mystery, Valentino dialed the number before he remembered it was seven A.M., far too early to be calling a resident of Beverly Hills. But the voice that came on sounded alert. “Yes?”

  “Is Mr. Greenwood available?”

  “Speaking.”

  The voice was uncannily youthful for a man in his eighties. He proceeded cautiously, in case he’d connected with a son or grandson. “Sir, my name is Valentino.”

  “The fashion designer, or another? Certainly not the Valentino. The telephone rates from the Other Side are monstrous on weekdays.”

  The pleasant amused rumble convinced him he’d reached J. Arthur himself; his jokey sense of humor and reliance on puns had unnerved his early financial backers, who’d considered his target audience to be dead serious on their subject of interest, but he’d held out, and won the affection of tens of thousands of readers.

  Valentino told him who he was. “At the moment, sir, I’m on the trail of a certain film property that you may know something about.”

  “That hardly narrows it down. What property?”

  “I’d rather discuss it in person, if you don’t mind.”

  “You’re with UCLA, you said?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I hadn’t realized the competition in academics was so cutthroat. Is USC tapping your phone?”

  “I’m afraid this has to do with a police case.”

  The pause on the other end lasted a nanosecond long enough for Valentino to wonder if he’d frightened Greenwood off. But when he responded, the voice that was so much younger than the man was even.

  “If this has to do with Craig Hunter, I can see you here at eight o’clock.”

  11

  J. ARTHUR GREENWOOD had turned his house into a museum; not that it hadn’t been one for many years before he’d acquired it.

  It was one of the few remaining mansions built by a generation of actors who’d earned four-figure salaries by the week and paid very little in income taxes. Most of the silent stars’ homes had been dozed and replaced by housing developments, condos, and (as was the case in Beverly Hills) even larger and more opulent monstrosities sheltering highly successful producers, dot-com billionaires, and the occasional Arab sheikh, but Specs O’Neill’s sprawling stucco-and-tile Spanish Modern mansion remained, owned and leased by a succession of later movie and television players, some of whom had remodeled the interior beyond all recognition. The ballroom where Nazimova had danced with Rod La Rocque had been partitioned off to make guest suites, the walls of the servants’ quarters had been torn down to create an indoor spa, and the baronial dining hall where Oscar Levant had notoriously thrown a sloe gin fizz into the face of Miriam Hopkins had been retrofitted into a screening room; O’Neill’s original screening room having been converted into several nurseries to stack a later star couple’s litters of children adopted from Third World countries. Upon his retirement, the current owner had realigned everything to display the accumulated memorabilia of a lifetime, most of which had spent decades in storage.

  The estate had once occupied twelve acres, most of which had been sold off to take advantage of skyrocketing local real-estate values. Finally, a
sexagenarian British-invasion rock star had filled in the Olympic-size swimming pool with concrete and erected in its place an open-air recording studio, all the better to judge the sound quality of concerts in MacArthur Park. As Valentino passed it on the way from his car to the front door, he saw a bevy of laborers mixing cement and pounding the existing concrete with jackhammers, preparing yet another metamorphosis for some later tenant to veto and turn into something more ghastly yet.

  Specs O’Neill, the original owner and builder, was a silent-screen comic once regarded as a contender for the throne of King of Comedy, on a par with Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. His trademark Coke-bottle glasses and nearsighted “Mr. Magoo” shtick were no longer politically correct, but in their heyday had rolled audiences in the aisles. They’d failed to translate to talkies. He’d lost most of his fortune in the 1929 crash, and the Depression had reduced him to manual labor in order to keep up his alimony payments to three ex-wives. In his later years he’d supported himself sporadically as an expert consultant in comedy film productions, but the job was basically a bone thrown his way by film school directors motivated by nostalgia and pity, and by that time he was living in a trailer on Long Beach. He’d died in 1970 from a combination of old age, pneumonia, and complications of alcoholism. Valentino, who’d been instrumental in securing and restoring a dozen of his Mack Sennett comedy shorts, had found them hilarious and timeless; but the PC wheel would have to take another full turn before timid distributors allowed them to be released to DVD, or whatever jazzy new format took its place in the interim.

  Specs was just one more of the pioneers who’d been exalted, then humbled, then ground up into compost by an ungrateful Hollywood. It hadn’t been a new story when Billy Wilder exposed it in Sunset Boulevard in 1950, and it was far from over. Craig Hunter was its latest victim. Entertainment Tonight and its television-tabloid clones had already buried him and moved on to the next tragedy ripe for exploitation. That was good for Lorna’s privacy, but bad when it came to summing up a man’s life. Probably he wasn’t even bankable enough to make the In Memoriam feature at the next Oscars.

  The doorbell button was a tiny grinning skull exquisitely carved from ivory and set in bronze. When he pressed it, a recording of a virile organ playing Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor” issued forth. Lon Chaney played it every Halloween when a revival theater screened The Phantom of the Opera. Valentino planted his thumb where Vincent Price had planted his, as well as Christopher Lee and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.

  After fifteen seconds the door opened, appropriately on creaking hinges. Valentino thought at first the figure standing inside the frame was a dummy, something one could procure at any of the pricier novelty shops that appeared every October on the Sunset Strip and vanished November l, powered by batteries and howling prerecorded Halloween greetings. But this figure was flesh and blood, seven feet tall in a white houseboy’s coat, tuxedo trousers with stripes on the sides, and white hair worn in bangs like Andy Warhol’s famous plastic wig. His face was fully as pale, sunken-cheeked, with pink eyes rimmed by transparent lashes: a true albino, or whatever it was they preferred to be called these days. “Genetic freak” would not be it.

  “Yes?” J. Arthur Greenwood’s own greeting, delivered in a basso profundo that was intended to sound as if it had emerged from the crypt. Greenwood himself could not have approached it without his youthful tremolo betraying him.

  “Valentino. I have an appointment.”

  The lofty white head bowed and the figure pivoted to make room in the doorway. “Enter freely, and of your own will.”

  The foyer, as cavernous as it had been during the O’Neill residency (Valentino had seen pictures in an ancient copy of Photoplay), was tiled in black-and-white checkerboard marble, with framed original artwork for covers of Horrorwood illuminated in recessed arches in the walls that had once displayed the Irish Catholic comic’s plaster saints. They were expert renderings in oil of Lon Chaney, Jr.’s Wolf Man, Karloff’s Mummy and Frankenstein Monster, Lugosi’s Dracula, Gale Sondergaard’s Spider Woman, and the whole menagerie of gorillas, dinosaurs, blobs, alien invaders, and giant bugs that had crawled, slithered, stomped, and swooped through the backlot of every studio, major and minor, since pictures began to move.

  “This way, please.”

  The pallid giant led him past a grand staircase and down a corridor lined with first-issue movie posters mounted in archival frames, the images glowering and snarling at him across the decades. Valentino noticed two things apart from the décor: the presence at both ends of the hallway of surveillance cameras with angry red lights, and the fact that his guide wore shoes with built-up heels that elevated him beyond his already preternatural height. Whatever his eccentricities, the retired publisher placed as much importance upon protecting his possessions from thieves as he did upon presenting them in the most dramatic settings, both architectural and human.

  The door at the end of the corridor, the visitor felt sure, had not come with the house. It was made of dark oak planks pitted with wormholes, with a brass ring the size of a man’s head serving as a knocker, heavily coated with verdigris. It looked eerily familiar. He decided he’d seen it in many an A and B thriller; selected, in the latter case, to match new footage shot on the sets of catacombs and castles with stock bought from productions with bigger budgets.

  Greenwood, Valentino decided, had acquired much of his collection from the same auctions and estate sales the archivist himself had attended, and yet the two had never met. Probably the publisher had placed his bids by telephone through intermediaries, to keep the figures manageable. Reserve bids and fixed prices had a way of being artificially inflated once a wealthy hobbyist’s interest was known.

  The knocker made a reverberating boom when the albino used it, although nowhere near as resonant as after an experienced Foley artist got hold of the soundtrack in post-production. The light, friendly voice the visitor had heard on the telephone invited him to enter.

  The man turned a handle forged from iron and coated with rust; or some paint that aped the effect. Hinges creaked again as he pushed the door inward. “Mr. Valentino, sir.”

  The room was surprisingly cheerful—Valentino had expected a dank dungeon—with French doors letting in plenty of sunlight through sparkling panes and an impressive display of tropical flowers flourishing in a garden outside. The walls were painted a warm white, apparently so they wouldn’t distract the visitor from the room’s exhibits, arranged on built-in glass shelves and spotted about among comfortable-looking chairs and sofas upholstered in what appeared to be watered silk. There were photos in standup frames of smiling movie stars, most of them now deceased and all of the pictures inscribed to Greenwood; ray guns; carved Tiki gods; wooden mallets and stakes for vampire hunting; a Star Wars Stormtrooper helmet; swords and daggers of every description; a splendid four-foot miniature of the tramp steamer that had brought the original King Kong to civilization, probably used for long shots in the movie; and hosts of exotic and sometimes unidentifiable properties even Valentino couldn’t link to a particular film, and he flattered himself that he’d seen them all. A cluster of shrunken heads hung by their hair from the ceiling in a corner, like ornamental balls advertising a pawnbroker’s shop. A ten-foot robotic sculpture stood silent sentinel in another corner: a standin for the fearsome Gort in the first Day the Earth Stood Still.

  “Welcome to my depressurization tank. I come here to unwind whenever life in L.A. gets too bizarre even for me.”

  The young voice issued from an octogenarian dressed like old Hollywood, in a paisley dressing gown over flannel trousers and a foulard knotted loosely around his crepey neck, the ends tucked inside the collar of a salmon-colored silk shirt. Italian loafers gleamed softly on his rather small feet.

  Greenwood was a large man in spite of them, and burly, with a fine head of hair slicked back and dyed—as was his pencil moustache—a disconcerting shade of black. It called attention to the lines and sagging flesh
of his face; but inside the cobwebby wrinkles that surrounded them glittered the bright eyes of a happy child. He rose from his chair with the help of an ebony cane with a silver handle shaped like a wolf’s head (was it the same weapon Claude Rains had used to kill his son the werewolf in The Wolf Man?), and took his visitor’s hand in a firm grip.

  “Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Greenwood.”

  “Thank you. I’ve bored everyone I know with my interests. A fresh victim is always welcome. That will be all, Ronald.”

  The tall albino inclined his head and backed through the doorway, pulling the door shut. Greenwood watched Valentino’s gaze follow him out. He smiled, showing a set of teeth younger than anything in the room.

  “I found Ronald waiting tables at Olive Garden. They put him on only when they were short-handed. His appearance frightened some customers out of their appetites. Do you think I’m exploiting his unique physical characteristics?”

  “That’s not for me to say, sir.”

  “Well, I am; but I suspect he’s happier being employed because of them rather than in spite of them, and he doesn’t have to survive on tips.”

  Valentino smiled politely but said nothing. His work had taken him to many a wealthy household, but he had very little in common with people who hired other people to answer their doorbells.

  “Excuse me one moment.” Greenwood circled behind his chair and raised the ferrule of his cane to press a button set flush to the wall beside one of the display cases. Something made a whirring noise and a heavy pair of drapes, as plain as the walls, closed over the French doors, leaving the room illuminated only by canister lamps in the ceiling. The publisher’s smile narrowed a fraction. “I hope you’re not easily spooked.”

  “Not by anything in this room.”

  “Well said, and honest. You’d be surprised how many people who claim to be fearless find pressing appointments elsewhere once they’re shut up in here.”

  As a matter of fact, the enclosure with its grotesque objets d’art took on a far more macabre mien without the reassuring presence of sunlight, but the visitor found it not at all unpleasant. It reminded him of the pictures on the pages of Horrorwood, and of happy childhood hours spent lost in them.