“He’s a bit more than just absent.”
“I’m aware of that. I didn’t realize the police had gone public with the information. At present I’m engaged in obtaining the release of personal property belonging to my client that is no longer evidence in a criminal case.”
That was the question he’d almost asked Gill and Yellowfern. “I don’t know why you called me, Mr. Pastern. My employers have no legal claim on the item.”
“I’m glad to hear you say it, since if it had been offered to you, the transaction would not have stood up in court. However, as I’m sure you’ll understand, Mrs. Grundage has no interest in retaining ownership of something that has nothing but sordid associations. By neither word nor deed did she ever encourage the late Mr. Lysander’s—delusions—nor ask him to undertake any unlawful action on her behalf. She is desirous of relinquishing ownership of the item, in return for acceptable compensation and provided no public mention is made of her part in the exchange. I cannot overstress the importance of that last demand. Her name must never appear, or the negotiations will be terminated with prejudice.”
Valentino sat back in the driver’s seat. The fact that he’d followed every word of this oration was evidence enough that he’d been spending too much time in the company of lawyers. “You have my assurance the university I work for is just as earnest as your client about avoiding negative publicity.” Henry Anklemire, he did not add, would be the exception: The little flack would cry murder from the roof of the administration building for the free advertising he’d get from the media. But he needn’t know about the business until it was too late for him to interfere.
The archivist gave Philip Pastern the number of Smith Oldfield’s office, and when their conversation concluded left a message with Oldfield’s voice mail to expect the call.
He felt the old thump of anticipation, like a motor kicking on in his chest. Then he leaned forward and started the car. Just because the thrill was still there didn’t mean he was fanatic enough to repeat the mistakes of the past.
*
He parked the car in his reserved space in the garage and walked to The Oracle, passing a van alongside the curb. Someone shouted his name, and he turned to see Harriet Johansen leaning out the window on the passenger’s side. The vehicle bore the markings of the Los Angeles Police Department. It was a coroner’s van. As he approached it, Harriet turned her head and said something to the man behind the wheel, who got out and walked away down the street. Valentino recognized him as one of her colleagues he’d seen in the break room at headquarters.
“How’s your head?” Harriet asked.
He reached up and pulled loose the bandage. “I just realized it stopped hurting. I guess I can take the stitches out anytime.”
“Let a professional do it.” She opened the door and stepped down. She was wearing her working smock, from a pocket of which she drew a vinyl case and removed a pair of surgical shears. In a moment the thread was snipped through and cast away. She frowned at the result. “It’s just a little scar. When the hair grows back in, no one will notice it.”
“That’s okay. I don’t need it to remind me to mind my own business and let the police mind theirs.”
“Actions speak louder than words. Or rather, the lack of them.” She leaned back against the side of the van with her hands in her smock pockets. “How have you been?”
“In a word? Miserable. These past few days I’ve felt farther apart from you than when you were in Seattle.”
“It wasn’t all you, you know. Would you like a detailed description of what’s been keeping me busy? I’ve been up to my elbows in—”
“Work,” he said, before she could get graphic. “I do know. But I also know I’ve failed to keep up my end of this relationship.”
“It isn’t just the meddling and the lying. There are trust issues.”
He said nothing. He’d feared this conversation almost as much as never having another one with her again.
“If I were going to cheat on you, Val, I could do it here in town just as easily as if I were two thousand miles away.”
“If?” He seized on the word as if it were a piece of floating driftwood.
“You have female friends—that Lorna, for instance—but I would never suspect you of fooling around with any of them without proof.”
In that moment he came as close as he knew he ever would to telling her what had happened just before the night at the wax museum. His regard for Lorna stopped him. In any case, something told him this wasn’t about her, or any other of his woman friends.
“I’m not entirely innocent,” she went on; and his heart plummeted. “You got so upset every time I mentioned him, I lied about attending a convention panel instead of telling you Jeff invited me to his home and I accepted. Then when I found out everything you’d been up to without telling me, I let you think there was something going on between us. I wanted to punish you.
“That wasn’t the way to go about it. At least when you lied, it was to keep me from worrying, dumb as that was, ignorant as it was of what relationships are all about. Lying with the express intention of causing pain is worse. Val, I’m sorry.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” he said, “but I have an idea I’m going to be very glad we had this talk.”
“I hope so, because as messed up as we are, what we have is healthier than anything I’ve ever had outside my family. I sort of left out that Jeff’s wife was there. Sheila’s a world-class chef, and a gracious hostess. What with the food and the conversation and the tour of their beautiful Queen Anne house, the time got away from me and it was almost dawn when I left.”
“Thank God. Thank God. Although—”
She smiled. “I know. You’d have forgiven me. I’m not so sure I would forgive you under the same circumstances; but it’s the differences between us that makes what we have worth fighting to keep.”
“So we’re okay?” He was almost afraid to ask the question.
“I have a sneaking suspicion we’re going to be better than that in a minute. Would you like to see the reason I took Jeff up on his invitation?”
“Did you bring back a covered dish?”
She laughed, pushed herself away from the van, and walked to the back, practically skipping. There she flung open the rear doors and stepped away so he could see inside.
It was a sunny day, no smog alerts in effect, and his eyes had to adjust to the dimness. At first he thought he was staring at a propped-up corpse, no unusual cargo for the vehicle. Then he realized it was a twin of the vintage Bell & Howell projector in The Oracle, mounted on a sturdy stand.
“Jeff bought it when an old theater in Yakima was condemned to make room for a city parking lot,” she said. “He told me he had it when I told him what you do and about the theater you’re restoring, and about how you needed two projectors to show old three-D films. None of his regular customers were interested; it was just taking up space in his basement. I offered to trade him even up for the sideboard my grandfather brought with him when he came here from Sweden. He took me up on it, sight unseen. Am I a good horse trader or what?”
“You love that sideboard,” he said.
“Nobody loves a piece of furniture, Val. Love is for people—and parakeets and such.”
“You and Jeff talked about me?”
“I talked. I think part of why he gave me such a good deal was to shut me up.”
He started to take her in his arms. Her partner came trotting up waving a cell phone. “We need to unload. We got a dismemberment in Inglewood, maybe two.”
“Go help them sort out the arms and legs,” Valentino said.
“You smooth talker, you.” She kissed him hard.
*
“Are you sure we’re up for this party?” he asked. “Our track record in costume occasions isn’t so good.”
“You know you never turn down an invitation to a Halloween blast. Anyway, we can’t disappoint Jason. We’ll probably be the only fossils in attendan
ce.” Harriet came out of the bedroom of her apartment, adjusting her wig, which was as tall as Martha Simpson’s hair but jet-black, with silver lightning streaks running up the sides. Between it and her high heels, concealed beneath the hem of a long white gown cinched at the waist and padded in the shoulders, she stood nearly as tall as Valentino in his built-up boots and flat rubber headpiece, an exact replica of the one Jack Pierce had designed for Boris Karloff and the host of other actors who’d inherited the role of the Monster; Kyle Broadhead and his contacts at Universal had come through in spades. What was a steampunk party without Frankenstein’s creation and his bride?
“You’re looking particularly hideous this evening,” he told her.
“How sweet. When they made you they didn’t just break the mold. They left plenty of it on you.” They hooked arms.
The roof of Valentino’s compact was too low to accommodate her skyscraper hair, so she’d borrowed the coroner’s van, which he thought a poetic touch.
On the way to the buzz-saw blade factory, Harriet watched a pair of youngsters dressed as Harry Potter and Lady Gaga carrying bright paper sacks along the sidewalk. “I can’t understand why he asked us to come so early. The trick-or-treaters are barely out.”
“Apparently it’s a surprise. He said it was something only you and I would fully appreciate.”
“I hope it’s not some sort of prank.” She turned the corner.
“This isn’t the way I usually go. Are you sure you’re not lost?”
“Shortcut. Every few months a homeless person takes a flyer off a roof or gets crushed in a Dumpster or comes out on the losing end of a fight with boxcutters in that neighborhood. I’m pretty sure we carried a frozen carcass out of that address a couple of winters back. The trick is not to break anything off on the way through the door.”
“I’ll make you a deal: Cut the CSI shop talk for one night and I’ll try to throttle back on movie trivia.”
“Bet you crack first.”
“Our usual wager?”
“Yep.”
“Either way I win.”
Jason Stickley was pacing back and forth in front of the building when they pulled up, looking like the Mad Hatter in his high hat and flapping coattails. His nervous energy always reminded Valentino of someone, possibly himself.
“Thanks for coming,” said the intern when they stepped out. “I was afraid some of the others might trickle in ahead of you and get in the way. Wow!” He was staring at Harriet. “No offense, Mr. Valentino; you look great. But—wow!”
She beamed. “You’re too kind. Just sing out when I get too close to a power line.”
Jason scampered up the steps ahead of them (Valentino providing support as Harriet lifted her skirts to climb them in her spikes) and turned one of his keys in the lock. It made a grating noise and he tugged open the door on shrieking hinges.
“How’d you manage that?” Valentino asked.
“I replaced the brass fittings with rusty iron ones I found in a bin in a junk shop. Then the caretaker came along and oiled them and I had to do it all over again.” He waved them in ahead of him.
A great deal had been done with the room since Valentino had visited it with Broadhead and Fanta. Someone with an expert knowledge of anatomy and metallurgy (a collaboration?) had welded full-size human skeletons of steel and aluminum and set them about the room in various poses and attitudes, and naked lightbulbs that might have come directly from Thomas Edison’s workshop hung from cords of irregular length, dazzling the eye and sparkling off the carpet of metal shavings on the floor. An old-fashioned cast-iron stove served as a refreshment table, with a coal-scuttle centerpiece filled with bloodred punch and surrounded by upended lugnuts the size of fists, salvaged from the great wheel of some obsolete steam-powered device to perform sociable duty as cups. Everywhere, candles blazed in silver and pewter holders, and in honor of the evening the papier-mâché horses hitched to the forklift truck wore gilded masks decorated with ostrich plumes.
However, Valentino’s eye was drawn past all these things to a number of infernal machines set up at intervals around the walls, as familiar to his memory as they were unknown to his personal experience: Roentgen rays, Tesla coils, gadgets whose names he didn’t know, studded with knobs and dials and row upon row of switches, feral and scientific at the same time, poised to crackle and hum and glow and hurl sparks willy-nilly, all for the dramatic purpose of directing current through an inanimate humanoid thing assembled from grisly spare parts found in crypts and mortuaries and suspended from gallowses and bringing life to something that had never lived. He’d witnessed the scene hundreds of times, beginning with a fuzzy image on a worn-out picture tube, and it had never failed to excite him.
“They’re all working replicas of the equipment Kenneth Strickfadden designed for all the Frankenstein films,” Jason said, his voice quivering with emotion. “Wilde Thing—you met him the other night, his real name’s Kevin—he built it all from scratch. He’s working his way to a physics degree as an electrician. I was sure you’d appreciate it.”
Harriet clutched Valentino’s arm tight. He scarcely noticed.
“Does it work?”
“Does it work!” Jason swept away the cloth covering a huge knife-switch with a varnished wooden handle attached to an electrical box on the wall. “Would you care to do the honors?”
“Careful, Val.” But Harriet let go of him, patting his arm on the way.
Valentino grasped the switch and threw it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank my wife, author Deborah Morgan, for Dumpster-diving the Internet for updated information on my outdated sources (any errors are mine), and for suggesting the perfect title for this book. I’m also extremely grateful to her for allowing me to borrow Jeff Talbot and his wife, Sheila, from Deborah’s Antiques Lovers mystery series, published by Berkley Books and available on audio from Books in Motion.
In addition, I wish to credit the late great Forrest J. Ackerman, founder and publisher of Famous Monsters of Filmland, and all the personnel behind TV’s Shocker Theater for conducting Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Lon Chaney, Jr., into my childhood home. (Yes, that was me watching Frankenstein, sitting up in bed with Pepi, my Chihuahua-terrier, curled up safe and warm in my lap.)
CLOSING CREDITS
A good cast is worth repeating.
—Universal Pictures, 1930s
The following sources were crucial in the writing of Alive!:
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Biographies
Bojarski, Richard, and Kenneth Beale. The Films of Boris Karloff. Secaucus, NJ: The Citadel Press, 1974.
Citadel, the gold standard for filmographies subdivided by individual stars and directors, continues its reputation with this lively biography of Hollywood’s greatest bogeyman (and an actor whose skills are greatly underrated [1945’s The Body Snatcher makes a sterling case for the defense]) and meticulous chronicle of his appearances on stage and television, as well as on the big screen. The man made 137 films—fifty-four of them before Frankenstein made his name a creepy household word—from 1919 through 1971 (two years after his death!), but as he noted himself, he will always be known as the tragic, inarticulate, misunderstood creation of reckless science and black magic whose flattened head and shambling, stiff-legged walk is familiar to every culture on earth.
Bojarski, Richard. The Films of Bela Lugosi. Secaucus, NJ: The Citadel Press, 1980.
Lugosi—the only authentic Transylvanian ever to play Count Dracula on screen, and the man whose interpretation will always be associated with the role—suffered through a career that was in every way the mirror image of Karloff’s. The same typecasting that assured his British rival a steady income and a comfortable old age kept him in poverty and helped to bring on the drug addiction that ruined his health and shortened his life. This fine study of his contribution to stage and screen justifiably tips the balance away from humiliation (Glen or Glenda?, et al) toward the sporadic but memorable high
lights (thousands of live theatrical performances as Dracula under his own direction, to rave reviews before standing-room-only audiences, two Oscar-worthy turns as Ygor, twisted in mind as well as body, but strangely sympathetic, and a brief but resounding role in Ninotchka, in which he managed to steal the scene from Garbo, in a rare foray into romantic comedy). This is a tragic but compellingly readable cautionary tale for anyone who considers himself too successful to fail.
Curtis, James. James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters. Boston: Faber & Faber, 1998.
The Frankenstein series is rife with genius gone horribly wrong. Whale, the brilliant director of Journey’s End on stage, the original Showboat on screen, and the first two talkies in the unstoppable Mary Shelley franchise, was flamboyantly gay at a time when homosexuality was still regarded as “the love of which we dare not speak” (Oscar Wilde), but it was his personal arrogance, insupportable by a string of box-office disasters, that led to his undoing in Hollywood. His 1957 death by apparent suicide in the swimming pool of his Pacific Palisades home, and the mysterious circumstances surrounding it, occupy much of Gods and Monsters (1998; see under Tributes), a film based on Christopher Bram’s novel Father of Frankenstein. Bram’s research and Curtis’s appear to be in close agreement.
Gifford, Dennis. Karloff: The Man, the Monster, the Movies. New York: Curtis Books, 1973.
This was the first Karloff biography to appear after his death, and it holds up remarkably well in a climate that generally produces gushy panegyrics in the afterglow of a life recently vacated, then character-assassinating “tell-alls” by hatchet-throwers freed from the restrictions of civil suits. Karloff’s East Indian ancestry is the only revelation that might have damaged his career in a time of relative intolerance, but since no shame attaches to it now, its absence from Gifford’s book is hardly a detraction. Much of it (as its title reflects) is filmography, but the background and personality of its subject comes through, and the details of the Frankenstein films—in particular makeup wizard Jack Pierce’s deeply researched and painstaking efforts to “create” the Monster we know and love (Whale’s claim to the design is specious)—were of inestimable value to Alive!
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