“What did he want?”
She shrugged. “Maybe one of his snitches tipped him where to look for Von Stroheim’s Greed.”
“If he calls again, tell him the line forms to the left.”
He was at his desk, viewing outtakes from Easy Rider on the Movieola, when Ruth buzzed. “That policeman again.”
“Which line?”
“He’s not on the phone. He’s here, and he brought company.”
“Shoo them in, Ruthie. Shoo them in.”
“No more of that. I knew Bogie; you don’t sound a bit like him. And if you ever call me Ruthie again, you’ll end up sounding like Linda Darnell.”
He rose as two young men entered. The first had short sandy hair and clean-shaven cheeks with a suggestion of baby fat. His eyes were anything but babyish. The other, slightly older, had the bold nose and high flat cheeks of an Indian.
“Sergeant Fish?” Valentino shook the hand of the younger man, who looked as if he was in charge. His grip was moderate.
“Gill. Ernest Gill. This is my partner, John Redfern.”
Silently cursing Ruth’s bad memory for names, the film detective rescued his fingers from the Indian’s corded grasp. “Did I nick Al Pacino’s Mercedes in the Safeway parking lot?”
Gill didn’t smile. “We’re not with the L.A.P.D., Mr. Valentino. We’re San Diego Homicide.”
San Diego went off in his head like a late-night telephone bell. “Is it Craig Hunter?”
“Have you heard from him?”
“He called me last night from a bar there. He was drunk. If I’d thought he was driving—”
“He wasn’t in an accident,” Gill said. “His body was found in the men’s room of a place called The Grotto at one fifty-five this morning. He was beaten to death.”
Beaten to death. Numbly, Valentino cleared piles of bound scripts and publicity stills from a pair of scoop chairs and sank into his own behind the desk. While Gill sat, Redfern wandered the room, looking at the framed movie posters on the walls.
“Phone company says Hunter charged two long-distance calls last night to his home number,” Gill said. “One was to his ex-wife in Laurel Canyon. The other was to your place on Sunset.”
“He said he needed help.”
“What kind of help?” The sergeant had his notebook out.
“I hung up on him before he could tell me. I assumed he was putting the arm on me, as usual. I wasn’t up to it.”
“He didn’t say anything else?”
“He said he’d make it worth my while. He never had before, so I blew him off.” Valentino talked through his guilt. “What was it, a mugging gone wrong?”
“It wasn’t robbery. He still had his wrist watch and sixty dollars in his wallet.”
“Maybe the mugger panicked and ran.”
Redfern turned away from a scuffed and faded lobby card for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. “His arms were broken just below the elbows.” His voice was a flat guttural. “It’s a local signature. Grundage muscle does it all the time.”
“Mike Grundage?”
“You’ve heard of him?” Sergeant Gill leaned forward.
“It’d be hard not to have. He’s appearing before a grand jury investigating organized crime in the motion picture industry. What would Craig have to do with Grundage?”
“We were hoping you could tell us.”
“Have you talked to Lorna Hunter? That’s his ex-wife.”
“We talked to her.” Gill stood. “Thanks for your time. We may need a statement later. It’s possible you were the last person to talk to Hunter.”
The information did exactly nothing for Valentino’s conscience.
Once, working for Kevin Brownlow, Valentino had found twenty-six feet of a key sequence from Abel Gance’s epic Napoleon being used to demonstrate a home projector in a camera store in Lyons. Piecing together the circumstances of Craig Hunter’s murder couldn’t be much more difficult than assembling the scraps of a seventy-year-old movie.
Lorna Hunter lived in the house the court had awarded her, a pink stucco Spanish modern with a red-tile roof at the end of a street that twisted like a creek. Valentino had his finger on the buzzer when the door opened and he found himself in an embrace that smelled pungently of scent and gin.
“Thanks for coming,” Lorna said when they parted. “Craig didn’t have many friends left.”
“I wish I’d been a better one.”
“The better ones were the last to go.”
He touched her shoulder and they moved inside. A tall blonde with a clean profile that was even more classical at thirty-one than it had been at twenty, Lorna was slim and fit in a cashmere top, tailored slacks, and sandals on her bare feet. Six years earlier she had startled ABC and a million fans by dropping out of the number-three sitcom in America, announcing her plans to devote all her time to making one man happy. Two years after the divorce, she was still not returning agents’ calls.
Valentino accepted a glass of water and sat on the end of the big sofa that dominated the living room. Lorna curled up on the other end with a gin and tonic. He had never seen her drink before; at 9:45 A.M. she appeared to have a head start on the day.
“Did you know Craig was in this kind of trouble?” he asked.
“His gambling worried me. It used to be just recreation, but the last several times I saw him, all he could talk about was poker and the ponies and getting even. Until last Friday.”
“What happened last Friday?”
“He came here to use the telephone. He said his call couldn’t wait until he got to his apartment in Long Beach. Craig’s dream was to start his own acting school. He was drunk, babbling something about having enough money soon to open a chain. I assumed he had a hot tip and was calling his bookie.”
“Was he?”
“I don’t know. He made the call from his old office with the door closed. He left here more excited than when he came.”
Valentino sipped water. “Do you know if Craig owed money to Mike Grundage’s loan sharks?”
“That’s the assumption I made when the police told me Grundage was involved. He must have been borrowing to pay off his debts. I mean, why else would someone—” She drained her glass quickly.
“Lorna, the sharks don’t kill you for not paying up. It’s bad business. At most they would have roughed him up and then worked out some sort of payment plan. A dead man is a dead loss.”
“What, then?”
“I don’t know. May I look in his office?”
She rose, swaying a little. He followed her into a small den containing a desk and chair and a stereo system as complicated as a NASA control panel. Valentino pointed at a battered trunk in the corner. “That doesn’t quite match the room.”
“Craig brought it with him Friday. He said there wasn’t room in his apartment and asked if he could store it here. You can look inside; the police did. It’s just some books.”
He looked. They were filmographies: Heroes of the Horrors, The Films of Boris Karloff, The Films of Bela Lugosi, The Man Behind the Cape, Dear Boris—a dozen others, all similar. “Was Craig interested in horror films?”
“He hated them. His first part was a bit in Bloodbath IV. He said it was a junk genre and always had been.”
Valentino closed the trunk and stood. The console telephone caught his eye. “Has anyone used this phone since Craig?”
“No. I almost never come in here.”
He lifted the receiver and punched the Redial button.
A cool feminine voice answered. “Horace Lysander’s office.”
He hung up and looked at Lorna. “Who represented Craig during your divorce?”
“Cooper and Clive. Craig retained them ever since that phony paternity suit five years ago.”
“He never used Horace Lysander?”
“Is that who answered? I never heard of him.”
“You would if you watched the news. Lysander is Mike Grundage’s legal counsel before the grand jury.”
/> No shady Mob mouthpiece out of Central Casting, Horace Lysander was senior partner in a firm that took up two floors of a sparkling glass tower at Century City. A lacquered-looking receptionist let Valentino wait forty minutes, then waved him into an office nine times the size of his own, with a glass wall looking out on most of Southern California. A large, soft, smiling pink bald man in a beautiful gray suit, Lysander shook his hand and they sat down on either side of a desk the size of the battleship Potemkin.
“Are you with the police, Mr. Valentino?” The lawyer looked dubiously at his sweatshirt and brushed jeans.
“No, I’m looking into Craig Hunter’s death as a friend.”
“Two detectives were here earlier asking about Mr. Grundage, who’s in New York on business. I assured them that to my knowledge my client never had any contact with this man Hunter.”
“But you did, last Friday. He called you.”
Lysander smiled. “I’m an old courtroom attorney, Mr. Valentino. I know when I’m being bluffed.”
“So do I. Your office number was on his redial.”
“Granted that’s true, it proves nothing.” But he shrugged. “His business was with Elizabeth Grundage, not Mike.”
“His wife?”
“His mother. You’re too young to remember Mike’s father. Tony Grundage represented certain eastern interests in Hollywood during the so-called Golden Age of the thirties. He arranged the financing for All Quiet on the Western Front, The Wizard of Oz, Frankenstein—”
“Frankenstein?” Valentino remembered the books in Craig’s office.
“Yes. That was before my time, of course, but I became his attorney in his last years, and represented Elizabeth when his will was probated. She was much younger than Tony. The family has retained me ever since.”
“What business could Craig have had with a racketeer’s widow?”
“I can’t discuss details. He approached her with a transaction. When he found out I’d advised Elizabeth against it, he called me and became abusive, threatening. He was drunk. I hung up on him.”
“How much of this have you told the police?”
“None of it. They asked if Mike Grundage knew Hunter and I denied it. They didn’t ask if his mother knew him. I suppose I’ll have to tell them now that I’ve told you.”
“They’ll ask about the transaction.”
“That’s privileged.”
“It’s withholding evidence in a homicide.”
“Are you a lawyer, Mr. Valentino?”
“No, but I helped restore three Perry Mason movies starring Warren William.” He smiled briefly. “One way or another the police will root out the details. You might as well share them with me.”
“Not without my client’s permission.”
“I can wait outside while you call her.”
Lysander smiled again, somewhat differently. He had such an inventory that the single word “smile” was insufficient, like “snow” to an Eskimo. “What do you do for a living, Mr. Valentino?”
Valentino told him, as briefly as possible.
“If you ever need a change, this firm can use an investigator.” He lifted his telephone receiver.
After ten minutes, the film detective was invited back into Lysander’s office. The atmosphere seemed warmer.
“Are you familiar with an old-time director named Robert Florey?” the lawyer asked.
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Universal, nineteen thirty-two.”
“Also Frankenstein.”
“That was James Whale.”
“Not at the start. Florey, who wrote the screenplay, was to direct the picture originally as a vehicle for Universal’s hottest property.”
“Bela Lugosi,” said Valentino. “The star of Dracula. He tested for Frankenstein, then backed out.”
“I forgot you’re a historian. Florey shot two reels of Lugosi stumping around in a costume and makeup of his own device. No one was happy with the result. After Lugosi left, the project was taken away from Florey and given to Whale, who assigned the role of Frankenstein’s monster to an unemployed truck driver named William Henry Pratt.”
“Boris Karloff.”
“It looked better on a marquee. The picture made Karloff a star, saved the studio from bankruptcy, and assured Tony Grundage a power base in Hollywood. On his advice, his people provided the seed money for the project. By now the test was forgotten. The footage was considered destroyed.”
Valentino said nothing. In spite of his mission, he was beginning to catch that old familiar scent.
“When Grundage agreed to finance the property, all preproduction materials were turned over to him. Motion picture memorabilia didn’t command anywhere near the prices it does now. He placed the material in storage and apparently forgot about it. When Elizabeth came to me with Craig Hunter’s offer I advised her against accepting until we knew just what those test reels were worth on the open market.”
“How much did he offer?”
“Two hundred fifty thousand dollars.”
“Craig would have been hard pressed to raise a hundred dollars, let alone a quarter million.”
“Nevertheless, that was the amount.”
“Where does Mike Grundage fit in?”
“Nowhere. You’re the first person I’ve discussed this with. Mike never brought it up. He may not even know about the film.”
“Craig’s two broken arms say he knows something.”
“Say that in public and our next conversation will be in court.” Lysander’s expression went from severe to smiling, like water subsiding. “The police mentioned an ex-wife. Are you acting on her behalf?”
“I’ve known Lorna nearly as long as I knew Craig.”
“I understand. Elizabeth Grundage means more to me than just a client.”
Valentino watched the freeways clogging up outside the window. “Are you going to make the test footage available?”
“I’m afraid that’s a moot point.” The lawyer rolled back his chair and stood. “Two nights ago, someone broke into the storage vault and made off with both reels.”
Inching his way home amid rush-hour traffic, Valentino weighed what he’d learned on his mental balance scale. He had no doubt that Craig Hunter had stolen the Frankenstein test reels. He wondered if that was the original plan, or if Craig had lined up a buyer who would back his princely offer. It was a sound investment; recently an original preproduction poster for the same film had brought $100,000 at Sotheby’s. What Valentino needed to know was who was interested, and how Craig had found out about the footage to begin with.
At a video store three blocks from his house, the film detective rented Frankenstein and Dracula. The kid behind the counter tried to interest him in a low-budget slasher film instead. “You’ll wet your pants screaming.”
“As attractive as that sounds, I’ll stick with these.”
At home he called his contact at Sotheby’s and asked for the name of the party who had paid so much for the rare Frankenstein poster. Reluctant at first, upon being reminded how much of UCLA’s acquisition funds Valentino had channeled to the auction house, the contact came up with the name J. Arthur Greenwood.
“The magazine publisher?”
“He’s almost as regular a customer as you are.”
Later Valentino fixed a simple dinner and ate it in his screening room, where he watched the two horror classics on his front-projection system. Although creaky in places, both were entertaining, and occasionally still frightening. Karloff, he noted, brought a heartbreaking eloquence to Frankenstein’s mute monster that was missing from Lugosi’s stilted and somewhat hammy performance as the Undead Count. Valentino concluded that Frankenstein had benefited from the vicissitudes of fate.
He rewound the tapes and called Lorna Hunter. She sounded sleepy. He hoped she wasn’t still drunk.
“I just wanted to make sure you’re okay,” he said.
“That’s sweet of you. Now that the shock’s worn off, I’m actually relieved. I s
till cared about Craig; it hurt to see him going down and down. At least he can’t go down any farther.”
“Have you been eating?”
“You mean am I still drinking. It made me sick, so I stopped. I don’t know what Craig saw in it.”
Relieved, he said, “I’ve got a lead on the angle he was working. I’m going to follow it up tomorrow.”
“Shouldn’t you leave that to the police?”
“I will if it looks like anything. Right now it’s just one more theory they don’t need.”
“Be careful, Val. I’m running out of people I care about.”
He assured her he would and said goodbye wondering why he hated ending the conversation.
J. Arthur Greenwood said, “I’d kill for those test reels.”
Seated in a conversation area in the magazine publisher’s office the morning after screening Frankenstein and Dracula, Valentino noted the collector’s madness in his host’s eye. Greenwood, who in his sixties continued to dye his thin hair and pencil moustache a glossy black, leaned forward from his leather sofa, gripping the film detective’s knee.
The office was decorated to resemble a dungeon, complete with clammy stonelooking wallpaper, a ceiling fixture that might have been the chandelier from the original silent Phantom of the Opera, and an authentic iron maiden leaning in one corner, its deadly spikes glittering like needles. It all went perfectly with the image of the man whose flag-ship publication, Horrorwood, had communicated his passion for weird and fantastic movies to the entire baby-boom generation.
“I think Craig Hunter was killed for them,” Valentino said.
Greenwood straightened. “I heard he was killed. There wasn’t anything about the test reels on the news.”
“Did you know him?”
“Craig and I were poker buddies. Ever since I interviewed him on the set of Bloodbath IV, before he hit the big time.”
“What do you know about the Frankenstein test?”
“Everything. It’s part of horror film lore. But I’m the only one who had the interest and the energy to link the reels’ existence to Tony Grundage’s widow.”
“Then you were the one behind Craig’s offer to buy them.”
Valentino: Film Detective Page 3
