Bernard Leibowitz was Sassafrass.
“He was killed, wasn’t he?
“He got himself into a crooked pool game in Tijuana, as if there were any other kind down there. He squawked and somebody knifed him. What a waste.”
The curse of child stardom had stalked most of the Pint-Size Pirates later in life. Edward Washington, Moon Pie, had overdosed on heroin, and Shadow, born Toby Goss, had died fighting in Korea. The last Valentino had heard, Gerald “Mugs” McDermott was in prison for armed robbery. He might have died inside.
“What about Glory?”
“Gloria,” Chub said, smiling. “Sweet girl. She had a weakness for musicians.
She married a drummer who beat her like his traps, then divorced him and took up with a saxophonist who liked to wear her underthings. That was a happy marriage, I heard. Anyway, he died. I still got Christmas cards from Gloria until a couple of years ago. Maybe she’s dead, too. The reporters who write obituaries don’t always keep up on faded celebrities.”
“You came out all right.”
No trace of a smile remained on his broad features. “I managed to give divorce a bad name, peed away several fortunes, and unleashed eleven ungrateful children on a world that wasn’t in short supply to begin with. My own granddaughter’s the ringleader of the bunch that wants to stick me in a droolarium. She doesn’t even want my money for herself. She’s bleached her daughter’s hair, put her in braces, enrolled her in charm school, and is paying a speech therapist to—get this—give her a lisp. Six years old and she’s starred in six commercials on national TV. Blame that on me, too. If I hadn’t been such a pre-pubescent success, Melanie would never have got that idea in her head. At least none of the others managed to screw up two generations.”
“Judy Garland died of a deadly cocktail. The girl from Different Strokes stuck up a video store and committed suicide. Robert Blake, Little Beaver, stood trial for murder. All child stars. It’s not your fault.”
“You know what a wild wall is?”
“A portable wall made from canvas flats for a movie set. The grips can shift it around easily to accommodate the camera. During the famous dolly shot in The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles had them rigged to drop into place just before they came inside range. It made the house seem several times bigger than it was.”
“Yeah. The point is, a kid raised on soundstages is different from every other kind. When you grow up used to walls moving around, you’re not exactly prepared to live a stable life after they switch off the kliegs for the last time.”
Chub drove him back to his hotel, a small, elderly place maintained by a plump, red-faced couple who could have joined the cast of How Green Was My Valley, if that picture had been shot in Ireland instead of Wales. For all Valentino knew, they entertained IRA terrorists in the basement. He preferred John Ford’s Celtic paradise to the urban twenty-first-century reality.
He opened his door and turned to shake Chub’s hand. “I’ll do my best with the university brass. Can I reach you at home tomorrow?”
“Come for dinner. My cook’s off today, but I’ll have her set out a real Irish spread.”
“I don’t want to impose.”
“She’ll be delighted. Feeding an old man’s finicky appetite can’t be much fun for her. If the news is good, I’ll crack open a bottle of wine that’s almost as old as I am.”
“If I can make you happy, it’ll be the happiest day of my life.”
Chub Garrett shook his head. “I’m sorry to hear that. Take the advice of a disintegrating adolescent and start a family; one that won’t turn on you the minute you start forgetting where you put your glasses.”
That night Valentino placed a trunk call to California and smashed up against an accountant with the Film Preservation Department who talked in circles, coming around again and again to the same depressing sum. The man had obviously never enjoyed a movie in his life; he kept referring to Garrett as “Chubby” and thought he had something to do with the Andy Hardy series. To spare himself a restless night, Valentino programmed himself to dream about the Pint-Size Pirates, but they kept growing up on him and leading short, desperate lives.
Macaulay Culkin, Margaret O’Brien, Haley Joel Osment, Dickie Moore. There wasn’t a story of true contentment in the batch, and no upbeat ending with a slide-whistle and a merry iris-out.
In the morning, two calls to London revealed the Lassie lead was bogus. He rented a car and toured the countryside. Swelling hills, thatched roofs, and men and women in Wellingtons herding sheep took some of the weight off his heart. Low stone walls everywhere, and not a wild one to be seen.
A large American car was parked next to Chub’s squatty compact in front of the cottage. The front door was open and Valentino heard voices from inside.
“Hell’s sake, Melanie, let the kid go out and play. The place is fenced and there are no snakes in Ireland.”
“Shut up, you senile fool. I didn’t spend an hour fixing her up to let her slip and fall into a pile of sheep dung.”
“We can be civil.” A man’s voice, English-accented.
“That ship’s sailed. He ran out on my mother when she was six.”
“You want the girl to hang around for this?” Chub sounded weary.
After a pause the woman said, “Stay close to the house. And don’t get dirty!”
A small-boned, grave-faced girl came out in a white dress and white shoes with a red sash tied about her waist. She had a red bow in her astonishingly yellow hair and rouge on her cheeks. When she saw Valentino she made a wide detour around him, clutching a shiny red pocketbook in both hands, and altered her course again to avoid a thick-built man trudging up the lane that led to a fieldstone building forty feet from the cottage.
The man looked a proper Irish tough, closely resembling James Cagney at sixty, in overalls, hobnail boots, and a cloth cap pulled low over his eyes. Valentino guessed this was Chub’s groundskeeper. He tugged at his cap in greeting and continued past without speaking. At the door he removed the cap. “Would there be anythinq else, sor?”
“Did you get those potatoes to Cook?”
“Yes, sor. That’s them boiling.”
“Good. Thank you, Miles.”
He put on his cap and turned away. Valentino watched him until he hopped over the stone fence on the far side of the farm. Over by the outbuilding—the old smokehouse, apparently—the little girl stood with her chin down, clasping her pocketbook like a shield to her chest. She seemed afraid to move.
Chub’s face brightened when Valentino entered the cottage. He introduced his granddaughter, Melanie, and her solicitor, Clive Speedwell. She was a grownup version of her daughter, more conservatively dressed in a tailored tweed suit but with the same peroxided hair and too much makeup, although expertly applied. The lawyer was a sallow beanpole in Savile Row, with gold initials on his burgundy leather briefcase.
“Valentino’s interviewing me for the university archives,” Chub said, begging him with his eyes for affirmation. “I’m the last dodo.”
Melanie said, “I wouldn’t put too much faith in anything he tells you. His mind wanders.”
“They’re joining us for supper, a nice surprise. Speedwell’s brought papers for me to sign. In return for putting everything in Melanie’s name I get to live here the rest of my life instead of in a shelter for the criminally ga-ga.”
“A crude distortion.” The Englishman cleared his throat. “We’re anxious to spare him five years of painful litigation out of the time he has left.”
“Meanwhile his client sells my four acres in New Mexico to developers and I’m a prisoner here every damn wet Irish winter till pneumonia takes me. What a deal.”
The cook, a rawboned woman nearly six feet tall with her black hair in a net, announced that supper was ready. Melanie went to the door and called her daughter, Laurette. Minutes later the little girl came in with stains on the knees of her stockings and a three-corner rip in her skirt.
Her mother bell
owed. Laurette sobbed and covered her face with her hands, the pocketbook still clutched in one. When Melanie grasped her by the shoulders, Chub touched her arm. She wheeled on her grandfather. “Keep out of this or I’ll put you in the worst home in Ireland! She has an interview with a casting director for the BBC in the morning! If she’s skinned a knee, we’re finished! He’s cast all the street urchins he needs.”
“Let’s not say anything we’ll regret,” Speedwell said.
That set her off on a more strident plane, but the cook intervened, saying she’d help the child clean up; she had a sewing kit in her yarn bag, she said. Chub volunteered to serve the meal while she ushered the girl into another room.
It was an authentic Irish meal, as promised, with corned beef, cabbage, and boiled potatoes, each flavor distinct but harmonious with the others, not all mushed together as so often happened in American taverns on St. Patrick’s Day; but Valentino enjoyed little of it. His bad news from work, combined with the scene he’d just witnessed, Chub’s plight, and the unconvincing story the old man had invented to cover up the offer from UCLA, had destroyed his appetite.
He felt a little better when the cook presented Laurette, looking fresh, bright, and pretty with her dress restored to respectability. Her surprised mother hugged her and pecked her on a patch of cheek not covered by rouge. All seemed well, but Valentino declined a second helping of corned beef when the cook offered it. The girl took a tiny portion and passed the platter to Melanie. Her table manners, of course, were impeccable.
Such a mood could not be sustained in that company. When the cook served cake, Melanie scolded Laurette against crumbs. Chub told Speedwell to put down his briefcase because he wouldn’t sign so much as an autograph on anything that came from him or the woman he represented. Melanie tored into a litany of neglect and abandonment, he reminded her that he’d settled a huge sum upon her grandmother and paid her mother child support for twelve years, Laurette bawled. Speedwell said he was sorry that things had come to a legal-competency action. Finally Melanie complained she wasn’t feeling well and the trio took its leave.
As tires snatched at the turf outside, Chub drank from his water glass. “I thought that went well, didn’t you?”
“I wish I had something better to contribute.” Valentino told him about his conversation with the accountant. The cook was busy washing dishes.
“Oh, well. With any luck I’ll be dead before the lawyers suck me dry. Should we open that bottle of wine?”
“Not for me. I’m driving.”
“Stay here tonight. You can’t go home without having a genuine Irish breakfast.
Sausages and eggs.”
“What makes it Irish?”
“Killians instead of coffee.”
“Thanks. I’m taking the first flight out tomorrow. I’m sorry I couldn’t come through.”
“Funny. That’s the same thing I told seven wives.”
His guest thanked him for his hospitality and a lifetime of entertainment and drove back to town, where he used the telephone in the hotel lobby to reserve a 7:00 a.m. flight. Packing before bed, he heard banging downstairs; some inebriated fellow, he supposed, looking for a bed to avoid going home to an angry wife. Then someone called his name.
From the second-floor landing outside his room he looked down on the two innkeepers, hair tousled and worn robes flung on over their nightclothes, standing with Chub Garrett at the base of the staircase. The old man was dressed as Valentino had left him. The hotel guest told his hosts it was all right. They shuffled back to their quarters, muttering in Gaelic. Valentino went down.
Chub’s face was crimson; he was breathing heavily, and before the other cleared the last step he lunged forward and seized him by both arms in a grip Valentino’d have considered impossible for a man his age. “I accept UCLA’s offer. How soon can you put a check in my hands?”
“Are you all right? Is it your health?”
“I asked you a question.”
“It’s daytime there. I suppose I can have the accountant fax me a letter of credit to a bank in Dublin. Why the change of heart?”
“Criminal attorneys like their money up front.”
Valentino heard the sirens then, the insolent European kind, razzing off the surfaces of buildings as they neared the hotel.
“PIRATE” PINCHED! Crowed the headline on the first tabloid to hit the street. Beneath it, a preteen Chub Garrett in costume gripping prison bars in Jail Jitters appeared beside a color shot of a drained-looking old man being ushered in handcuffs up the steps of the local police station.
Valentino, who had caught very little sleep after Chub had been taken from the hotel, bought the paper from a stall and assembled at last a snarled course of events into a coherent, if highly sensationalized, narrative:
Shortly after returning to her hotel from her ugly encounter with Chub, Melanie, his granddaughter, fell violently ill. Within minutes of admission to St. Christopher’s Hospital, she’d died of what the attending physician theorized at first was acute food poisoning, but which the results of tests conducted in the emergency room determined was strychnine. After hearing her daughter Laurette’s half-hysterical account of her mother’s evening, police went to Chub’s cottage, where while they were talking with his cook, the master of the house went out a back door and drove away in his small car. The police pursued him to Valentino’s hotel, where they arrested him for suspicion of homicide.
Further investigation found a large supply of strychnine among the herbicides and vermin-killers in jars on shelves in the smokehouse behind the cottage. Although everyone in the house, including the cook, Miles the groundskeeper, and Chub himself had access to the key to the outbuilding on its ring near the front door, the circumstances of Chub’s relationship with Melanie, together with his flight when the police went to interview him, made him the chief suspect in her death. Outsiders were dismissed from consideration; the smokehouse was kept locked and the poisons were beyond arm’s reach of the tiny window.
Valentino read the article in installments at stops on his way to the bank in busy Dublin, where he exchanged his letter of credit for a cashier’s check. Back at the suburban jail, he was denied admittance to see the prisoner, but a sergeant gave him the name of the barrister who’d agreed to represent Chub at his arraignment. Back to Dublin Valentino went.
Weylin Fain, whose powdered wig and black robes hung on a peg in his office of glass and chrome, was too prominent in his profession to soil his hands with money. A large, dark man, built like a potato farmer, he instructed his secretary to take the check and give Valentino a receipt. Despite the man’s imperious manner, the film archivist was impressed by his industry. After less than four hours on the case he seemed to know more than anyone else involved.
“Mr. Garrett seems quite taken with you,” he said in his trilling Northern brogue. “He’s instructed me to be as open with you as with himself. I’m sure you know how bad things look.”
Valentino balanced himself on the edge of a sling chair facing the desk. “I’m a lifelong fan, but my experience with celebrities prevents me from being blinded by their public image. He’s innocent. His own grandchild? No way.”
“No way.’ An Americanism I admire. It brooks no argument. I’m not convinced either way, but then I’m the one who must plead his case.” He shuffled papers. “The groundskeeper, Miles, is promising. Were you aware that Garrett made arrangements to grant him permanent leasing rights to farm the property following Garrett’s death?”
“No. Do you think he became impatient, and that Chub was the intended victim?”
“It’s a splendid motive. Breaking one’s back for oneself is generally preferable to breaking it for another. Two witnesses overheard Miles tell Garrett he brought the potatoes the cook served that evening.”
“Make it three.”
Fain wrote on the sheet before him. “He’d have had ample opportunity to inject those spuds with poison. The only thing against it is how he thought onl
y Garrett would be affected.”
“Maybe he was too obsessed to care how many died with him.” But Valentino had already identified the flaw in the theory.
“No one else got sick,” said the barrister, nailing it also. “He left before the meal was served, so even if he mixed up Melanie’s and Garrett’s plates, he had no chance to contaminate either one. Everyone I’ve spoken to who was at that meal sampled every dish.”
“I did as well, although I didn’t eat much of any. It was a distressing affair. What about the cook?”
“I interviewed her this morning. Of course she denied it, but she confirmed that she was appalled by the way Melanie behaved toward her little girl. The woman took quite as much time calming her down as helping her clean up. As a motive for murder, however, I doubt it’s strong enough to take the jury’s mind off Garrett’s. Money and property are formidable, and the mutual animosity between grandfather and granddaughter had a lengthy history.”
“That leaves only Speedwell, but he’s no suspect. No client, no fee.”
“Exactly. Of course, the victim herself has provided us with a first-cabin way out of this, if I can but convince Garrett to go along.”
Valentino watched him moving his papers about his desk, like a magician testing his props. He was as suspicious of the barrister as he was of conjurors in general.
“Diminished capacity,” Fain said. “She half laid the case for us with that complaint she filed. An old man not in full possession of his faculties cannot be held accountable for his actions. He’d never even stand trial.”
“Incompetence? The court would put him in a nursing home. That’s just what he was desperate to avoid.”
“He said something on that order when I suggested it, although his language was more forceful.” Fain shrugged and gathered his sheets into a tidy stack. A blob of ink from his fountain pen stained his left cuff. “Nothing for it, then, but to plead him not guilty, with no reasonable scenario to offer in place of the Queen’s. In which case, our beloved Chub will expire in prison. Naturally, as his attorney of record I’ll see you take possession of those films he sold you straight away.” He raised his thatchlike brows. “Mr. Valentino?”
Valentino: Film Detective Page 22
