“All Rankin ever saw was a photocopy. There never was an original.”
“Rankin knows his way around computers. You’d think he’d have noticed the suspicious consistency of the characters.”
“I didn’t, until it was explained. Neither did you, and we’re both trained to spot fakes. He was predisposed to accept it as genuine, based on his wife’s close ties with Garbo and his own fears for her good name.” She scrutinized the coffee spots on the paper, then crumpled it and used it to wipe her hands. “One snag. In order to forge this letter, Akers had to have had access to something fairly lengthy written by Garbo in her own hand, providing him with a complete alphabet and punctuation. You’d be surprised how many letters you can write without using everything. I know I was, when the graphologist told me.”
“Rankin said his wife burned all of her Garbo letters at her request. Of course, he also said this one might have escaped the fire to fall into Akers’ hands.”
“Too convenient.”
Valentino sat up, jerked taut by a sudden certainty. “A number of Garbo letters went missing from the Swedish Military Archives earlier this year. Rankin told me he’d just returned from Stockholm when the news got out.”
“Was Akers with him on the trip?”
“He didn’t say.”
“We’ll ask him. If they can place his assistant in Sweden at the time, and if he spoke a word of Swedish during his visit, they can close the file on this one. No jury would convict Rankin for defending himself against a confirmed blackmailer.” Her face softened. “You gain, too. Your goddess’s reputation is intact.”
“It is,” he agreed, and reached across the table to squeeze her hand.
Airline and hotel records and eyewitnesses agreed that Roger Akers had accompanied Matthew Rankin to Stockholm shortly before the theft of Garbo’s letters was reported. Further testimony and the discovery of Berlitz tapes in Akers’ West Hollywood apartment indicated that he could have forged a letter in convincing Swedish. Then bank records showed monthly deposits of several thousand dollars in Akers’ account and matching amounts withdrawn from Rankin’s. The district attorney, a stubborn man with eyes on Sacramento, refused to dismiss charges, but abandoned his opposition to bail. Rankin was released on his own recognizance pending further investigation. Few believed the case would ever come to trial.
Valentino and Harriet attended a party thrown by Rankin to celebrate his freedom, this time without costumes. Their host asked them to join him in his study, where he poured them each a glass of champagne from a stock unavailable to his other guests. The Persian rug had been removed, along with every other reminder of the tragedy that had taken place in that room.
“I won’t join you,” he said, pouring himself a glass of water from a pitcher. “I gave up the stuff when this mess began. You want your wits about you when you’re being bled dry.”
Valentino proposed a toast to liberty, but Rankin vetoed it. “To Miss Johansen.” He raised his glass. “If she hadn’t given me the shock of my life, my sad case might never have fallen into Valentino’s hands.”
As the pair stirred themselves to rejoin the others, Rankin held up a hand and slid aside a framed photograph of Garbo and Andrea Rankin, swathed in striped terry and wearing picture hats, laughing at some poolside. He worked the combination of the safe thus exposed and removed from it two flat aluminum cans nearly as big as bicycle wheels, which he extended to Valentino. “You went a roundabout way of earning it, but I’m not complaining.”
The cans were labeled in Swedish. Harriet translated. “How Not to Dress. Congratulations, Val. It’s the next best thing to a private conversation with her.”
“It’s better,” he said. “Silence lasts longer than talk.”
That night he screened Greta Garbo’s first picture on the reconditioned Bell & Howell projector in The Oracle, the dilapidated movie theater he lived in and had been renovating forever, and which was still forever away from completion. Harriet, who knew him better than anyone, had not asked to share this highly personal experience. A dreary period promotional feature, the two reels were notable only for the world’s first glimpse of the immortal star at sixteen, plump and awkward, yet possessing even then that Certain Something that separated the greats from the vast gray crowd. It was a valuable artifact, if undiverting for general audiences.
When it ended, he resealed it and threaded another film into the machine. It was one of two he’d signed out from UCLA that day, unaware of the boon coming his way from Rankin: The Temptress, one of Garbo’s very best silents, and Anna Christie, her first talking picture. Valentino watched them back to back. Whatever she’d sacrificed in the way of mystery during the transition to sound, she’d more than made up for in raw animal allure. That unexpectedly guttural voice, heavily accented, had made an instant classic of her first spoken line: “Gimme a vhisky. Ginger ale on the side. And don’t be stingy, baby.”
His telephone rang just as her order was delivered. He stopped the film, turned off the projector, and answered.
“I knew you’d still be up,” greeted Harriet. “You can’t sleep with a new acquisition burning a hole in your pocket.”
“What’s your excuse?”
“Too much champagne. It puts me to sleep, then wakes me up in the middle of the night. I turned on the TV for company. You’d be surprised what they pick out to put on the late news.”
After that conversation, Valentino dialed Rankin’s number. The master of the house came on after just two rings. “Housekeeper’s in bed,” Rankin said. “I seldom turn in earlier than three A.M. after a party. This old recluse can’t take the strain.”
“Have you been watching television?”
“No, just sitting here in my study, combing the ’Net for an estimate of how much my employees are cheating me out of.”
“Stockholm police arrested the man who stole the Garbo letters from the military archive. He’s a Swedish citizen. They caught him trying to sell the letters on eBay. They’ve recovered them all.”
“Oh.”
“Harriet told me. She called downtown. The D.A. is considering swearing out another warrant for your arrest. The way he sees it, if Roger Akers didn’t steal the letters he couldn’t have committed the forgery. No forgery means no blackmail, and the whole chain of reasoning falls apart right down to your self-defense plea.”
“That’s ludicrous! What about the photocopy? What about all the other evidence?”
“Circumstantial. He thinks you faked it all.”
“How could I forge the letter? Andrea burned all of Greta’s.”
“He says we’ve only your word on that.”
“Did it occur to him Roger might have found some unburned letters and used them to make the fake?”
“You had better access.” Valentino paused. “It would be different if they found some of them at Akers’ place, but they made a complete search and came up empty.”
“Complete, my foot. That headline-happy D.A. wanted me on a platter.” Rankin was breathing heavily. “Thank you for the warning. I’ll wake up my lawyer.” The line went dead.
The next morning, Matthew Rankin, in the presence of his attorney, surrendered himself to the police at their headquarters in Beverly Hills. The judge presiding at the arraignment, annoyed to find the case before him a second time, denied the district attorney’s request to hold the defendant without bail and released him on a $100,000 bond.
The news report was eclipsed later that day when a second search of Roger Akers’ apartment recovered a bundle of letters in Greta Garbo’s hand under a loose floorboard in the bedroom. All were addressed to Andrea Rankin and unsigned, as had been the star’s habit.
Valentino and Harriet were present as invited guests when the D.A., a solid, square-built fifty in a battleship-gray suit, met Rankin in his study to apologize. Three local TV stations were represented with cameras and microphones; part of Rankin’s terms for agreeing not to sue the city for false arrest. A Beverly Hills officer
was also on hand, carrying a video camera no larger than a squab.
Rankin noted the last with a malicious smile. “A personal record, to prevent you from repeating the mistake?”
The D.A.’s face was expressionless. “He’s not here to tape anything. Officer?”
Rankin stood in the center of the room. The officer stepped forward and turned the camera to show him the tiny monitor that flipped out from the side. The reporters moved in tight, their much larger cameras recording Rankin’s reaction to the tape that was playing. Valentino and Harriet stood clear. They’d seen it already: a clear image of Matthew Rankin prying up a floorboard in Roger Akers’ bedroom and depositing a bundle of letters in the recess beneath. Greta Garbo’s distinctive handwriting was visible on the envelope on top of the bundle.
“Nanny cam,” said the D.A. “Ironic, considering how much time Garbo spent on camera and how many years she spent avoiding them. We didn’t know where you’d hide the letters, so we set one up in every room. We barely got them planted in time. You moved pretty fast after Mr. Valentino called you.”
There was no response. The D.A. took the camera from the officer, freeing his hands to place manacles on Rankin’s wrists.
“I poisoned my wife.”
Matthew Rankin looked aristocratic no longer. Seated at a plain maple table across from the detective interviewing him, his well-dressed lawyer looking tragic in a corner, he was just an old man with a tired face wearing an orange Los Angeles County jumpsuit. Even his tan had begun to fade. Valentino and Harriet, whose credentials had gotten them in, watched him through two-way glass and listened to his beaten voice droning through the intercom.
“I started out as a chemist, you know,” he said. “I put in so much work developing a toxin that would counterfeit the symptoms of a heart attack I thought it was a shame I couldn’t market it.”
“Why did you kill her?” asked the detective.
“She inherited the department-store business. I was just a glorified employee, and when the malls threatened all the downtown stores, she blamed me for poor management. She was going to replace me with some young hotshot. I’m sorry she didn’t live to see me reinvest what she’d left me into the technology necessary to turn the business around. I designed the program. Compared to that, using an ordinary PC to forge that Garbo letter was kid stuff. A little public humiliation over having been married to a lesbian isn’t a patch on a first-degree murder charge.”
“How did Roger Akers find out you’d killed Andrea?”
“I got drunk and said something. I didn’t remember it later, but he made sure to remind me. That’s why I quit drinking. I couldn’t take the chance of betraying myself in front of someone else and adding another blackmailer to the list.”
“When did he start blackmailing you?”
“He sprang it on me just before the trip to Stockholm. I spent the whole trip worrying what a toxicologist would find if Akers reported me and the body were exhumed. I started paying right after we got back. Then when I heard some Garbo letters disappeared from the Swedish archives at the same time we were over there, I saw my way out.
“I went on paying him for months,” he continued, “building up evidence to support my story. Claiming I’d finally decided to stop established a motive for him to attack me, and I doubted the law would go out of its way to convict the victim of a rotten extortionist. I even tricked Akers into putting his fingerprints on the photocopy of the fake letter by pretending I’d mixed it up with another document I wanted him to handle. He gave it right back. He’d picked up just enough Swedish to get by in Stockholm; I was pretty sure he couldn’t read a word of the written language. That’s why I didn’t write it in English. I got a good education listening to Andrea’s conversations with her mother all those years ago. A little study helped me brush it up.”
“How’d you get Akers to put his prints on the murder weapon?”
Rankin smiled bitterly. “I told him his latest payment was in an envelope under the bust. He though I was being churlish. When he picked it up, I shot him.”
“What made you choose Valentino as your witness?”
“It could have been anyone. I made up my mind to plant the story with him right there in my study, that night I fainted.” He shuddered. “Lord, that girlfriend of his was the spitting image of Garbo in that costume. I thought I was being haunted for my sins. Anyway he was a civilian—a cop would have arrested Roger, and he’d have talked—and that ‘film detective’ conceit gave me a plausible reason to rope him in.”
“You need to have new cards printed,” Harriet whispered to Valentino. “ ‘Archivist’ wouldn’t have landed you in this mess.”
He shushed her. Rankin was speaking again.
“… overlooked a bunch of letters when she burned the rest; there were so many to begin with, I half suspected they were having a homosexual affair. I suppose that’s what put the idea in my head after that theft took place in Sweden. I only hung on to the leftovers because I thought they might be valuable. I was right; they gave me more than I needed to create a font using Garbo’s handwriting. It didn’t have to hold up to scrutiny. I just had to convince people I’d been duped.”
“For the record,” said the detective, “here in the presence of your attorney, you, Matthew Rankin, confess to planning the murders of your wife, Andrea Rankin, and your assistant, Roger Akers, and carrying out those murders.”
“Yes. If it will spare me from the executioner.”
In the elevator on their way to the ground floor and out, Valentino was silent. Harriet took his hand. “You didn’t betray him,” she said. “He used your relationship with him to get away with murder, and you used it right back at him to put a killer behind bars. The evidence might never have surfaced if you hadn’t tricked him into producing it himself.”
“I know. I’d feel better about it if he hadn’t given me How Not to Dress.”
“He saw it as paying you off for services rendered.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“It’s your life’s calling to rescue the past from extinction.”
“Yes, and that’s how I’ll get over it.”
She leaned against him and lowered her voice a full octave. “Do you vant to be alone?”
He pressed the stop button. As the elevator lurched to a halt, he took her in his arms. “What do you think?”
The Profane Angel
PEGASUS MADE HIS MAJESTIC WAY down the San Diego Freeway, waiting with wings partially folded through the relatively steady stop-and-go before the morning crush and the noon rush; took brief flight on Sunset Boulevard; and settled down to wait through the standard three light changes at each intersection in West Hollywood.
The sight of the mythical beast, painstakingly worked in plaster and spraypainted all the colors of the Day-Glo rainbow, drew no more than the occasional curious glance toward its perch on the open rented trailer. L.A. had seen stranger sights on an almost daily basis.
Nevertheless, Valentino was relieved when he pulled into the alley next to the Oracle Theater and found Kyle Broadhead waiting with a pair of husky undergraduates to help him unload the sculpture. He disliked attracting attention, and had chosen the one place in America to live where it was virtually impossible.
Broadhead wrinkled his nose at the garish paint job. “What a hideous way to treat a noble creature that never existed. Where’d you find him, Fire Island?”
“Close.” Valentino got out of the car and stretched. “An Armenian rug dealer in the Valley stuck it in front of his shop to attract business. Some students from State have been redecorating it once or twice a week for five years. It’ll take ten gallons of mineral spirits just to get down to the original workmanship.”
One of the burly UCLA students snorted. “Everybody knows you can’t trust a Statie with a box of Crayolas.”
“Spoken by the young man who credited Stagecoach to Henry Ford on his midterm.” Broadhead, rumpled and dusted with pipe ash, patted Pegasus on t
he flank. “Welcome home, Old Paint. Your brother’s missed you.”
Valentino untied the ropes that lashed the statue in place, the students bent their shoulders to their task, and after much grunting, mutual accusations of sloth, and two pinched fingers, the winged horse stood at last on a pedestal opposite its twin at the base of the grand staircase in the littered lobby.
“There’s teamwork.” Broadhead admired the tableau.
Valentino said, “What’s that make you, the coach? I missed your contribution.”
The professor took his pipe out of his mouth. “Do you realize how much concentration it takes to keep one of these going?”
The student who had suffered the casualty stopped sucking his fingers. “The new one’s bigger.”
“It won’t be when we strip off all those coats of paint,” Valentino said. “It isn’t any newer than the other one. They were sculpted at the same time by the same artist. If I hadn’t tracked this one down by way of the Internet, duplicating it would have cost me a fortune.”
“As opposed to the several you’ve already sunk into this dump.” Broadhead nursed his pipe.
“A man has to have a hobby.”
“Movies are only a hobby when your work hasn’t anything to do with them. You spend all week procuring and restoring old films and all weekend rebuilding a theater to show them in. Which reminds me. Someone called while you were out riding and roping.” Broadhead unpocketed a foil-lined wrapper that had contained tobacco and handed it to Valentino.
“What’s it say?” He couldn’t read what was scribbled on it.
“An old lady in Century City says she has something to sell. Probably a home movie of her playing jacks at Valley Forge. I told you that interview you gave the Times would draw more pests than genuine leads.”
Valentino went up to the bachelor quarters he’d established in the projection booth and dialed a number off Caller ID. He couldn’t distinguish letters from numerals in Broadhead’s scrawl. A young woman told him he’d reached the residence of Jane Peters. He got as far as his name when she interrupted.
Valentino: Film Detective Page 19
