Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 03 - Alive!

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Not if Grundage gets to him first,” Yellowfern said, no disapproval in his tone.

  “He’ll have to do it without Pollard and Wirtz. Without Lysander to stand up for them, there’s a chance they’ll tell us their hat size.”

  “They can beat the needle if they throw in Grundage. They didn’t learn to bust arms in medical school. Anyway, there’s plenty where they came from. Let’s put Valentino in with Pudge and Dickey. They can talk about movies they’ve seen.”

  “Not this time. We got our witnesses, we got our evidence, and we’ll get our man soon enough, feet first or no. Don’t think you did us any favors,” Gill told Valentino. “We didn’t run up the best conviction record in the department by holding hands with amateur detectives. We’re giving you a pass because your little stunt put two of the worst button men in the state of California in the bag. I won’t put that at risk by busting you a second time and handing the defense the opportunity of impeaching your testimony on the stand.”

  “We’ve got Hunter’s widow for that; no sense giving her grief over lying to us at the start. I never get tired of putting the cuffs on this guy.”

  “All bad cop, all the time. Give it a rest.”

  The detective jerked as if he’d been slapped. “Jeez, Ern; in front of him?”

  “Squawk to the skipper. Just because I spend more time with you than my wife and kids doesn’t mean I have to like it.” Gill’s face changed. “Forget I said anything, okay? It’s the overtime talking.”

  “It should keep its mouth shut.” But Yellowfern appeared mollified, or as close as he ever got to it.

  “Go home, Valentino, before I change my mind. Get your head clear before you make your formal statement.”

  He hesitated. “I know I’m not in a position to ask for anything.”

  “We’re keeping the film. That’s what you wanted, right?”

  “Personally, I never want to see it again, but I have a responsibility to UCLA and posterity. All I’m requesting is that your people consult with experts on how it should be stored. It’s the reason I got into this mess.”

  “I’ll pass it along. I wouldn’t hold my breath. We get chewed out by the board of commissioners every time we order fresh coffee filters.” The sergeant slapped shut the notebook and put it away. “Let’s go, Serpico. I’ll let you run the siren.”

  Yellowfern paused on his way out, looking at Valentino. “This picture you stuck your neck out for: Is it even any good?”

  “Not very.”

  “So how come all the fuss?”

  “Why are you a policeman?”

  “Free burial.” He left.

  *

  The nurse at the floor station was a strikingly beautiful woman with the longest lashes Valentino had ever seen outside a movie set. He wondered if she’d come to L.A. hoping to break into show business and had settled for medicine instead. She checked her records and told him Mrs. Hunter’s doctor had left instructions for the patient not to be disturbed. He asked what her condition was.

  “Are you family?”

  “Friend.”

  “I’m sorry. We can’t give out that information except to relatives.”

  “I have another—friend—in intensive care. Are visitors allowed?”

  “Not in ICU, family excepted.”

  He thanked her and used the pay phone in the lobby to call a cab. His cell was in police custody along with Pudge Pollard. When the taxi came, he changed his mind about picking up his car at the wax museum and gave the driver the address of The Oracle instead. He got the dreads just thinking about all those still cold figures. He dragged himself up the stairs to the projection booth and was unconscious the moment he fell into the ruins of his bed, many fathoms below the level at which he dreamed. It was an unexpected lucky break.

  24

  DURING THE NEXT few days he had only a few fleeting telephone conversations with Harriet Johansen. He told himself not to read anything personal into it: There had been a vicious gang fight in East L.A. the night after the wax museum incident and every CSI team in the county including hers had been called in to sort through the bodies and evidence. Their exchanges had been too brief to interpret anything beyond essentials.

  He’d slept around the clock, changed his dressing, swallowed three ibuprofen to dull the throbbing in his head, took another cab to where he’d left his car, which had three overtime parking tickets but miraculously had not been towed, and wolfed down a McDonald’s breakfast on his way to the university. The radio news was mostly concerned with the gang fight and there were no fresh details in the Hunter murder case and kidnapping. Horace Lysander was still being sought by police as a person of interest. Valentino’s name did not appear. Every investigation withheld some piece of information, and he was grateful that this time he was it. If the press ever tumbled to how often he found himself ensnarled in homicide, he’d never be able to go about his business without dragging along an army of paparazzi. The Fourth Estate had fallen to their level for good and all.

  Ruth, of course, was in the loop. Very little had happened locally since the Manson murders that the Film Preservation Department secretary didn’t know about before anyone else. From inside her doughnut-shaped fortress she peered up at the bandage on his temple. “I thought rubber hoses didn’t leave marks.”

  “I’m not quite the desperate character you think I am. Are there any messages?”

  “On your desk. You can’t miss them, although you might miss the desk under all that paper. If you showed up for work a little more often, you wouldn’t have to catch up.”

  “Do you think I only work when I’m in the office?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what I think. The mystery to me is why they ever converted this place from a power plant.”

  He spent the morning touching base. An early Fellini film was his for the taking if he agreed to fly the owner and his mistress from Florence to the U.S. and arrange visas at UCLA’s expense. (He heard from this person roughly once every six weeks, and invariably from his wife a few days later, canceling the offer.) The family of a retired studio executive currently in a nursing home in Oxnard threatened to sue the university for copyright infringement because their uncle/father/third cousin claimed ownership of a Mr. Moto film missing from December 1941 until last year. (He filed it with similar communications for Smith Oldfield to read and evaluate in Legal.) Mark David Turkus had called three times through an assistant, leaving only messages for Valentino to call back. (Clearly, the entertainment magnate had read between the lines of the adventure in the wax museum and wanted to shower the archivist in gold in return for betraying his employers and delivering the Frankenstein test to Supernova International. He crumpled this sheet savagely and launched it at his wastebasket.) His contact in San Francisco reported that the lead on London After Midnight had fizzled out. (No regrets. He’d had his fill of horror films for a while.) There was a routine request from Accounting to clear up discrepancies on his expense sheets, a probably drunken question about movie trivia placed from a nearby fraternity house, with a six-pack riding on the answer, and a wrong number from a woman interested in storm windows.

  He checked his e-mails and found them all to be more or less the same thing. He deleted them at a stroke. At such times he understood Ruth’s curiosity about the worth of the film preservation program.

  Jason Stickley knocked and opened the door wide enough to stick his narrow head through. “Mr. Valentino, are you busy?”

  “Never too busy for you. Come in.”

  Genuinely glad to see the young man, he got up and shook his hand. “I didn’t get the chance to thank you and the rest for what you did. You saved two lives at the risk of your own.”

  Jason flushed slightly. He wore ordinary campus attire: baggy cargo pants, scuffed sneakers, and a plaid long-sleeve shirt that concealed his tattoos over a Bruins T-shirt. “I was afraid you’d be mad at me for not staying put like you said.”

  “Don’t tell your professors I said
it, but some orders are meant to be disobeyed.”

  “The gang’s pretty jazzed about the whole thing. Whiz says you can blow her whistle anytime. Um, that means—”

  “I think I can figure it out. Tell her thanks, but I’m spoken for.” He had no idea if that was still true. “Listen, I’m recommending you for a job with the department, a paying gig. Not just from gratitude for what you did. You’re too valuable to waste as an unpaid intern.”

  “Thanks. I really mean that. People your age look at guys like me and make up their minds against me right away, but you never did. But I can’t take the job.”

  “If you’re worried about your classes, we can make the hours flexible.”

  “It’s not that. I’m transferring to MIT at the end of the term. I’m majoring in engineering. Big surprise, huh?” How his grin managed to extend beyond the margins of his face was a mystery best left to experts; which Valentino firmly intended to solve in the future.

  “Congratulations. It’s a fine school. Are you sure you can afford the tuition?”

  “Yeah. My dad gets a nice royalty from the U.S. Navy. He designed the hatch hinges they use on nuclear submarines. Tinkering with things sort of runs in the family.”

  “I’ll be sorry to lose you, and that’s a fact. Does this mean no more steampunk parties?”

  “No, sir. We’ve reserved the factory building for Halloween. That’s the reason I stopped by, to give you this.” He slid something out of a cargo pocket and handed it to Valentino.

  It was a formal invitation, lettered in elegant Victorian copperplate on linen stock. The florid language entreated him to bring a guest.

  “I’ll be there, although I’m not sure if I’ll be accompanied. The person I have in mind is pretty busy.”

  “I can help you with your costume.”

  “Actually, I think I can manage. Professor Broadhead has a friend in the Universal wardrobe department who can fix me up.”

  “Just so long as it follows the theme.” Another cargo pocket delivered a ruled sheet folded into a square, which Valentino accepted and opened.

  He looked up. “A list of movie titles?”

  “Steampunk films. The police kept Pat, Whiz, and the rest of us waiting at the wax museum before they talked to us. We put it together to pass the time.”

  “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?”

  “Totally.”

  “Wild Wild West, Van Helsing—these are all relatively recent. Some of them—” He stopped himself, not wanting to offend his young friend.

  “I know. Some of them we watch with the sound turned down. The look’s the thing. The art direction. They’re not all bad, and some of them have been around for a while. Turn it over.”

  He did so. “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is steampunk?”

  “Think about it. The Nautilus? All those exposed pipes and spinning turbines, that cool iris window? That one was my suggestion.”

  “I see all the classic Frankensteins are here. I never dreamed the movement went back that far.”

  “It didn’t have a name then. Like I said, machines are different now: no moving parts you can see. A computer’s about as interesting to watch in operation as a toaster oven, but any little kid can look at a belt spinning around a pulley and figure out what’s going on. When’s the last time you saw an ordinary person tinkering on his car with the hood up? The smallest thing goes wrong, they have to do a diagnostic at the dealership. No one can tell the difference between a good circuit board and a bad one just by sight. I’m not saying we want to bring back cholera and child labor, just—”

  “A sense of being in control.”

  Jason beamed, surprised. “Yeah!”

  “We can all use some of that.” Valentino thanked him. They shook hands again.

  After the intern left, Kyle Broadhead called.

  “I was planning to bake you a cake with a file in it,” he said, “but it’s just as well they sprang you. You’ve seen what I can do to a kitchen.”

  “Thanks for the thought. How are the wedding plans coming along?” Change of subject.

  “Fanta just called to report some new disaster or other. I confess I wasn’t listening. I’ve been a widower so long I thought I’d lost that particular nonskill. I’m relieved to learn I still possess it. It’s more useful in married life than you know.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  Something in his tone must have alerted the professor. “Do I detect trouble in paradise?”

  “You can probably guess its source, unless you’ve stopped listening to your fiancée altogether. Harriet pumped her for information.”

  “Fanta lacks guile. There are those who consider it a virtue.”

  “I’m not blaming her. If I weren’t up to my hips in guile through this whole business, we’d all be better off.”

  “Self-loathing. Charming. I’m a bit put out with you myself. How can you take on the mob and not include me in the fun?”

  “I didn’t exactly take on the mob. Anyway, I’d never have heard the end of it if you were to pick up a stray bullet, from Fanta or Harriet.”

  “Better I do that than blow an artery working at the computer or, worse, pass into my dotage. Frankly, the prospect of being bathed by your wife on a regular basis is far more attractive the first time around. I’m placing my reservation for a seat in your next escapade.”

  “There won’t be any more escapades, Kyle. I’m hanging up the deerstalker and assuming the life of the academic I was born to be.”

  “You’re not cut out for it. The faculty intrigues would slash you to ribbons. You’re much safer among gangsters and psychopathic attorneys.”

  “You’re joking. I’m not.”

  There was a brief silence on Broadhead’s end. “Was it that bad?”

  “It was too close. The world isn’t a Saturday afternoon serial. You don’t get out in the nick of time every week. Sooner or later the law of averages catches up with you and the cavalry comes too late. I’m not planning to stick around until that happens.”

  “Well, we’ll discuss it over lunch. Fanta’s meeting me at the Brass Gimbal, and I need your presence as a buffer when she starts in on exploding floral arrangements and vengeful bridesmaids in pomegranate and pink.”

  “I’d like that, if we can agree on some subject apart from homicide and abduction.”

  “I suppose there’s always politics. In which case I may get lucky and choke to death on a mouthful of Green Screen veggie burger.”

  *

  Valentino ate the Best Boy Bok Choy while his mentor studied the list of films Jason Stickley had provided. “Atrocious penmanship,” muttered Broadhead. “They’re not teaching it in grammar school these days. An entire generation can communicate only with its thumbs.”

  “He’d agree with you. It’s at the heart of his philosophy.”

  “Brazil, uh-huh. Metropolis; well, sure. Westworld, the Terminator franchise. Blade Runner. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. So far it’s ‘Gidget Goes to Dystopia.’”

  “Read on. These kids are aficionados, not activists. They’re not sci-fi geeks either. You won’t catch them at a Star Trek convention or playing Dungeons and Dragons. Modern Times is on the list. Breakheart Pass, Hell’s Angels, Shall We Dance—”

  “Doesn’t say whether it’s the Japanese version or the one starring Richard Gere.”

  “I’m sure it’s neither. Fred Astaire, tripping the light fantastic in the engine room of a luxury liner. See, there’s a theme: pistons and patent-leather shoes. It runs through every genre: comedy, musical, science fiction, western, romance.” He pointed at a title. “When’s the last time you saw Douglas Sirk lumped in with Otto Preminger?”

  “I sort of hoped I never would.” Broadhead folded the sheet. “May I borrow this?”

  Valentino was surprised. “Sure. I didn’t think you’d be that interested. Does this mean you’re not ready to pull the plug on everyone under thirty?”

  “Th
e jury’s still out, and I’m not excluding everyone between thirty and fifty. But our callow Mr. Joy Stick may have given me a hook for my wretched opus. This is the first film movement to transcend category since noir. Assuming, that is, it isn’t a flash in the pan.”

  “I doubt it. It represents a cultural backlash against technology on the order of the Luddite revolution.”

  “Let’s leave the hyperbole to the book section of the Hollywood Reporter, shall we? If it still has one. I had high hopes, too, for the young man who predicted the eight-track tape would change the face of music. I even offered to contribute an introduction to his thesis, which retired with him to an ashram in Yucca Valley.”

  “You had another protégé before me?”

  “I had several. Intellectuals are not monogamous by nature.” Broadhead put away the list, lifted the bun off his burger, and peeled away a layer of soggy arugula, revealing another underneath. He sighed and replaced the bun. “Right now I’d trade my tenure for a sparerib.”

  “Don’t be healthy on my account.” Fanta, materializing out of nowhere, plunked herself into the vacant chair at the table and flagged down a passing waitress. “I’ll have a zombie.”

  The young woman frowned. “We don’t have a full bar.”

  “In that case, bring me something to eat that would burn the hide off a rhinoceros.”

  “I can suggest the Hot Set. Jalapenos deep-fried in bacon fat with habanara sauce, onion rings on the side.”

  “With a pint of stout, dark as the abyss.”

  Broadhead looked up. “Does it come with a living will?”

  When the waitress left, he said, “My sweet, how was your morning?”

  Fanta shot him a look that would fell a Brahma. She looked uncommonly beautiful, with her color high against the black of her hair, shimmering like raw film stock to her shoulders. Her eyes glittered with red pinpoints that might or might not have been reflected from her turtleneck sweater. “You know, Kyle, sometimes you’re long on humor and short on sense. Do I look in the mood to banter?”