Valentino: Film Detective

by Loren D. Estleman

  “It sounds like the film was in better shape than the murder victim.”

  “Film isn’t flesh,” he said. “Different conditions apply.”

  “So it was Erich von Stroheim’s careless smoking that ended Pegler’s dream to direct. I’ve seen pictures of the German with a cigarette holder clamped between his teeth.”

  “Austrian. Anyway, who knows? Pegler believed it. He had to have already struck off an extra print of Greed and removed it from the Metro lot, to save it from destruction. He knew film and probably recognized a masterpiece. After the fire, it gave him the chance to revenge himself on the man he held responsible for his tragedy. Not to mention a great deal in ransom not to destroy the film. The cash from von Stroheim sweetened Pegler’s investments in the stock market. That’s how he managed to buy the Oracle.”

  “Spinoza’s skull was fractured,” she said. “Pegler must have hit him with something from behind, probably when he turned toward the vault to steal the film. After he fell inside, the rest was easy. Pegler stripped the body to stall identification, dumped it into the storage space, shut the vault door, and walled it up, just like Edgar Allan Poe.” She brightened. “Got any Vincent Price pictures?”

  “Next time,” Valentino said.

  “So vengeance was the motive.”

  “And greed.”

  “Hold your horses.” Broadhead sounded testy in the booth. “This isn’t like operating a VCR, you know.”

  The film began rolling. Ten minutes into the first reel, caught up in the story of the dullard dentist whose animal needs draw him into the abyss, Harriet snuggled close to Valentino and intertwined her fingers with his on the swanshaped arm of the seat. He smiled at her and used a corny old movie line. “Where have you been all my life?”

  “I know where I’ll be the next eight hours.”

  Bombshell

  BEATA LIMERICK HAD TURNED her back on stardom and fallen into a fortune.

  She’d been getting the big buildup at MGM in 1967 (“Not since Marilyn …”) when she walked out on her contract, offering no explanation. The studio sued, then withdrew its suit when she handed the head of production a cashier’s check for the entire amount she’d been paid while on salary. The money was accepted, but not before someone actually said, “You’ll never work in this town again.”

  She never did; but then, she never had to.

  Six months after she quit, she married the chairman of the board of the corporation that built Century City. When he died, shortly before their fifth anniversary, he left her forty million dollars in cash and securities and an additional sixteen million in real property, including four hundred feet fronting on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.

  By then, Beata had become a force to reckon with at Hollywood parties. Coatcheck girls who wanted to be starlets, starlets who wanted to be stars, and stars who didn’t want to be coat-check girls laughed at her jokes and gushed over her diamonds, then came away uncertain whether they should worry more about Beata discussing them behind their backs or Beata not discussing them at all.

  Valentino—who was related neither to the silent-screen actor nor the clothing designer—had no wish to star in anything, and so he enjoyed Beata’s company thoroughly and without fear. She in turn enjoyed his, having tested him and found that he wanted nothing from her. In addition, they shared a reverence for Hollywood’s rich and gaudy history. For his part, it was his job: He was an archivist with UCLA’s Film Preservation Department. For hers, it was a passion: She was the foremost collector of movie memorabilia on the West Coast. It was said that with one bid at Sotheby’s—$250,000 for the drapery-dress Vivien Leigh had worn in Gone With the Wind—Beata Limerick had upped the ante on everything from Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy hat to the chariot Charlton Heston had raced in Ben Hur.

  She and Valentino encountered each other frequently. Both were regulars at auctions and estate sales where newly discovered reels of film and motion-picture props and wardrobe shared the block. They rarely competed; Valentino was more interested in movies than memorabilia, and Beata’s preference ran toward items she could exhibit without having to set up a projector. Often they lunched afterward, celebrating their victories and commiserating over their defeats.

  “I don’t consider it a secret why I left MGM,” she told him on one such occasion. “It’s just easier to refuse to answer the question than it is to repeat the same story over and over. I was afraid of the curse.”

  “The curse?”

  She smiled, accentuating the striking beauty of her sixty-year-old face. Time, not surgery, had been kind to the woman whom Hedda Hopper had declared “Hollywood’s Alice Roosevelt Longworth.”

  “The curse, foolish boy. Thelma Todd. Jean Harlow. Marilyn. It was still around for Sharon Tate. All the great blond bombshells came to an early end. I was twenty-five; if I wasn’t going to be great, the hell with it, and I didn’t want to die. When that truck took off Jayne Mansfield’s head, I got the message. I didn’t walk away from my destiny. I ran for my life.”

  “She wasn’t really decapitated, you know. It was just her wig they found on the hood of her Buick.”

  She patted his hand.

  “I was being picturesque. I own the wig. I’d own the Buick, too, if Spielberg hadn’t outbid me.”

  “You seriously believe there’s a curse on blondes in Hollywood?”

  “I believe in astrology, tarot cards, and voodoo. It’s my birthright. I’m a native Californian.”

  They were serious rivals once only, years before they became friends. Beata had annihilated him in a battle over a rare unedited print of The Sandpiper at Vincente Minnelli’s estate auction. That was the first day they’d had lunch; her treat.

  “I couldn’t resist,” she said. “I doubled Liz Taylor in that one—it was my brunette period—and it’s all I have to show for my career in pictures, such as it was. Anyway, you’re better off without it. It’s a stinker.”

  “Stinkers have a way of making money. UCLA could have exhibited it in revival houses and made enough to restore half a dozen better films.”

  “I’ll make it up to you one day.”

  “One day” was fifteen years coming. Valentino had been very young at the time of his disappointment, an assistant to an assistant. In the years since, he had been instrumental in the recovery of many motion pictures long considered lost. Along the way he’d acquired character lines in his face, while Beata, at threescore, could still pass for forty-five. But she hadn’t forgotten her promise.

  “I’m cleaning house,” she told him over the telephone. “Bring your checkbook and I’ll let you have The Sandpiper for what I paid.”

  The film, he knew, had doubled in value since she’d bought it. But Valentino had learned never to display eagerness in a business negotiation.

  “I’ll need to screen it. Those old Metrocolor features are prone to bleeding.”

  “So are old actresses. However, I’ll forgive you for stabbing me in my aged heart if you’ll agree to sample my chicken cordon bleu during intermission. Two o’clock Tuesday?”

  At the hour mentioned, he came off the elevator opposite Beata Limerick’s penthouse apartment in Beverly Hills and read a sign written in a hasty hand, thumbtacked to the door.

  V.—

  Let yourself in and sit down on something. I’m putting on my face, and no man should be left standing that long.

  Love, B.

  He placed the package he’d brought under one arm to open the door. The two flat cans bound in gift paper contained Beata’s MGM screen test, which he’d acquired in a blind lot along with some more commercial items, and had been saving for a special occasion.

  Most of the apartment was one huge room, partitions having been removed to create space for some of the artifacts his hostess had collected over the years. Opposite the groaning shelves and display cases, a vast picture window looked out on West Hollywood and most of the Valley. A forty-year-old Bell & Howell projector in excellent condition stood on a sto
ut table facing a portable screen.

  Valentino set his package on an eight-foot chaise that had appeared in Samson and Delilah and examined the label on one of the film cans stacked on the floor beside the table. It identified The Sandpiper as the contents, along with the production number and a stern warning that it was the property of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

  He was accustomed to dining earlier. The aroma of the chicken dish coming from the kitchen made his stomach grumble. Music floated through the door of Beata’s bedroom. He distracted himself from his hunger by trying to place the melody. It was “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” Marilyn Monroe’s show-stopping production number from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

  Of all the storied bric-a-brac in Beata’s collection, he found two items most amusing: Margaret Hamilton’s pointed witch’s hat from The Wizard of Oz and Fred MacMurray’s crutches from Double Indemnity. Only someone of her eclectic tastes would assign equal prominence to props from a fairy-tale classic and the darkest of films noir. He put down Francis Lederer’s ruby ring from The Return of Dracula and looked at his watch. 2:21. Beata was rarely more than five minutes late for an appointment. She would have no one calling her a diva.

  The smell from the kitchen turned acrid. A loud, razzing noise drowned out Marilyn, who seemed to be singing on a continuous loop, returning to the beginning of “Diamonds” immediately after the closing bars. It was a smoke alarm.

  He pushed through the swinging door to the kitchen, eyes stinging, found the oven control, and turned it off. Tipping open the oven door, he groped for a potholder and swung the smoldering pan from the rack to the top of the range. He switched on the fan in the overhead ventilator.

  Soon the smoke dissipated and the noise stopped. Marilyn was still singing.

  Valentino passed through the living room and rapped on the bedroom door. There was nothing wrong with Beata’s hearing, he knew; she must have been aware of the alarm.

  He tried the knob. The door was locked. He banged again, harder, and called out her name. No response.

  Well, the worst that could happen was he’d catch her wearing only one eyelash and she’d accuse him of watching too many John Wayne movies. He backed off two steps and threw his shoulder against the door. It didn’t yield as easily as doors did onscreen. Two more tries and one giant bruise later, the frame split and the door flew open. He stumbled in and almost sprawled across Beata’s king-size bed, which already contained Beata herself.

  She lay on her stomach, diagonally across the satin comforter, clutching the receiver of a white French-type telephone (Ninotchka? An American in Paris?) at the end of one outstretched arm. Her hair, which she’d continued to bleach against relentless graying, was disheveled as in sleep, obscuring her profile. There were age spots on her shoulders and her skin sagged in places, but she was in remarkably good condition for a woman even much younger. A CD player built into the wall facing the bed continued to belt out Norma Jean Baker’s anthem for gold diggers from concealed speakers, but Beata wasn’t listening. She was dead, which was shocking enough. Even more shocking, she was stark naked.

  The detective lieutenant who arrived behind the uniformed police was an unexpected sight. Ranking investigators in Beverly Hills knew how to wear Armani and which gold clip went with which hundred-dollar tie. Ray Padilla wore pumpkin-colored polyester and a bowling shirt.

  “Valentino, huh?” Instead of commenting on the name, he barked at a young officer in a trim uniform to turn off the CD player. He needed a haircut, and the dead pipe clamped between his teeth managed to observe the department’s smoking ban while violating its spirit.

  “Lab rats don’t like us touching anything,” said the young man.

  “Use your elbow. I’ll be humming that damn tune for a week.”

  Marilyn stopped singing abruptly. Valentino answered Padilla’s questions and watched him scribble in a tiny memorandum book with a short mechanical pencil. The lieutenant wandered the room, recording details. An empty bottle of barbiturates on Beata’s nightstand took the better part of one page. Something about the scene reminded Valentino of something, but he couldn’t think what. It nagged him.

  Padilla leaned one ear close to the telephone receiver clamped in Beata’s hand, straightened. “This thing squawking when you broke in?”

  “Squawking?”

  “You know, that irritating noise telling you the phone’s off the hook. Ma Bell hates spending her monopoly money on a dial tone.”

  “All I heard was music,” Valentino said.

  “Makes sense. The noise cuts off after a minute. Her skin’s cool. She’d been dead awhile when you say you showed up. What is it you do?”

  “I look for movies.”

  “That shouldn’t take long in this town.”

  “Beverly Hills?”

  “Hollywood. The Monster That Ate Southern California. You can’t sit on the john without seeing Natalie Wood on a monitor in the stall.”

  “The movies I look for haven’t been seen in decades. I’m a preservationist, and in some small way a detective.”

  Padilla turned his bleak eyes on him. “She seem depressed when she called you?”

  “Anything but. So you think it’s suicide?”

  “No. I’m looking for a reason not to rule it out. I don’t like that she left dinner in the oven, or that she chose a time when she was entertaining, or that she’s naked. The telephone in her hand could mean she changed her mind and was trying to call for help when she lost consciousness, but it looks like set dressing to me. Also, I’m in some large way a detective, and I notice when something’s missing. How about you?”

  Valentino looked around, but the lieutenant wasn’t a patient man.

  “No glass, Sherlock. You can swallow a lethal dose of sleeping pills without water, but I don’t know why you’d want to. Why not hang yourself? I mean, as long as you’re making it uncomfortable.”

  “Marilyn Monroe.”

  “Yeah, that damn song. I can still hear it.”

  “I mean the missing glass. I’d wondered why all this seemed so familiar: the telephone, the pills, the nudity. It matches the situation in Marilyn Monroe’s bedroom when she was found dead. There was no glass there, either. The case was ruled a suicide, but to this day a lot of people are convinced she was murdered.”

  “Some think it was the Kennedys,” Padilla said. “On account of her relationship with Jack and Bobby. I really needed a nutball homicide. It’s been a week since the last one.” He took a Ziploc bag out of his pocket. It contained the note Valentino had found on the door and had given to the uniformed officer. “Would you swear she wrote this?”

  “I never saw her handwriting. It sounds like her.”

  “I’ll give it to the department graphologists. There ought to be samples in the apartment. Older woman living alone should know better than to leave her door unlocked. Was that normal?”

  Valentino smiled through his sadness. He and Beata weren’t close, but she was a bright daub of color in his often-gray academic life.

  “I’ve never heard ‘Beata’ and ‘normal’ used in the same sentence. But I wouldn’t say she tempted fate. She was superstitious.” He told Padilla about her belief in the curse of the blond bombshells.

  “Ironic; I don’t think. I wonder who else she told.”

  “I suppose I’m a suspect.”

  “If this happened anywhere but the land of fruits and nuts, I’d book you as a material witness. Where else would two grown people spend a sunny day indoors, watching an old movie on a creaky projector?”

  “A bad old movie,” Valentino volunteered.

  Padilla ground his teeth on his pipestem. “I wonder if ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ was part of her CD collection or the killer brought his own? You gave this young man your contact information?”

  Valentino said he had.

  “Good. Now all I have to do is call up Ted Kennedy and ask him where he was this afternoon.”

  Valentino spent much of the
next two days on the telephone, tracking down Beata Limerick’s executor and asking how he might bid on The Sandpiper before her estate went on the block. As an antidote to all the diplomacy involved, he devoted the rest of the time arguing with his contractor. He was in the midst of construction at the Oracle, which was the abandoned movie theater he’d bought to serve as his living quarters and private screening room. On the third day he attended Beata’s memorial service.

  Lieutenant Padilla plunked himself down on the adjoining seat. He had on the same combustible suit he’d worn to the crime scene, but had traded his fiery madras necktie for a sober black knot. “If I were half the people here, I’d think twice before going to a funeral. The ushers might not let them leave.”

  The film archivist surveyed the sea of white heads. “Thirty years ago, you’d have had to pay admission to see them. You don’t often find this much Hollywood history gathered in one spot.”

  “Thirty years ago they’d all have been suspects. I don’t see a set of muscles strong enough to force those pills down even an old woman’s throat.”

  “Was it the pills that killed her?”

  “M.E. says yes. She put up a fight; lesions and contusions and a fractured skull. No other Marilyn CDs on the premises, by the way, and no box for the one that was playing when you found her. No prints, either. And that wasn’t her handwriting on the note. Prints are yours.”

  “If I’d known she was dead, I’d have worn gloves when I took it off the door. What about Kennedy?”

  “Introducing a bill on the Senate floor at time of death.” He grinned joylessly at Valentino’s expression. “Did you think I was joking about calling him?”

  “I was just wishing I could have been on the extension.”

  “I never figured to make captain anyway. I’m not here about the Limerick woman. Where were you last night between ten P.M. and midnight?”

  Valentino felt as if the back of his seat had turned to icy metal. He’d heard some version of that question on the soundtracks of countless crime movies, but had never expected to have to answer it himself.