Hearing his name jarred him from his contemplation of the spot on the man’s sleeve. “No hurry. I canceled my flight to the States. I may have a scenario to offer. I know a thing or two about those.”
Near evening, Fain and Valentino greeted Chub Garrett in a room at the police station reserved for attorney-client conferences. The surroundings, although spare, were more comfortable than those Valentino had seen back home. The walls were painted a restful green and the chairs around the yellow-oak table were upholstered. The prisoner, still wearing the clothes in which he’d been arrested, appeared oblivious to such details. His eyes were sunken in their sockets and his skull seemed to have shriveled away from his features, which hung in gray folds. He sat with his hands palm-downward on the arms of his chair as if he expected a lethal electric current to flow through him at any time.
“You Yanks lead the world in everything but social science,” Fain told Valentino cheerfully. “Dr. Mooney may appear less compassionate at first glance than the child psychologists you employ, but she gets to the heart of the matter without all the soft music and scented candles. Are you up to this, old fellow?”
“Just say it,” Chub snapped. “If you’d asked me to sic the system on poor little Laurette, I’d have turned you down flat; but knowing the woman he married, I’m not surprised her father’s weak enough to fold right away.”
Valentino said, “He’s a good man. I spent a few minutes with him while Laurette was in session in another room. He knows his daughter hadn’t much chance at a normal childhood and seems determined to do what’s best for her from now on, without her mother’s ambitious influence.”
The barrister dumped a pile of papers from his briefcase and arranged them. “It was all open and aboveboard. Speedwell was present. He’s a good solicitor, whatever else you may think of him. He’s withdrawn his late client’s petition, by the way, at the widower’s request. You have Valentino to thank for the inspiration that led to the interview. That, and my carelessness with my linen.” Ruefully he displayed the inkstain on his cuff.
The film archivist read only betrayal in Chub’s tired gaze. “She was the only other person with motive,” he said quickly, “and the only one small enough to crawl through that tiny window in the smokehouse. She’s only six, and can’t be expected to understand the consequences of her actions, the finality of death. All she wanted was to stop her mother from making her sad. That’s what she told the psychologist in private: ‘I feel sad all the time when she’s there.’ Present tense.”
Fain said, “She tore her dress and soiled her stockings climbing into that smokehouse. She knew what a skull-and-bones means on a label; every child with a proper British upbringing is well schooled on that. She found her opportunity to sneak the strychnine into her mother’s corned beef when she passed her the platter. The chemists found traces of it in the leftovers. Laurette told Dr. Mooney the rest.”
“I’d have gone to prison to spare her that,” Chub said. “I’d have given up everything I own and died in a nursing home.”
“Her father will see she gets the counseling she needs,” said Valentino.
“He’d better have a firmer hand than he took with her mother.”
Fain said, “A less firm hand is just the thing for her, don’t you think?”
Valentino broke the silence that followed. “I won’t hold you to your agreement with UCLA. I’ll cover the part of the fee Fain’s earned out of my own pocket. In time, Laurette may learn to put what’s happened behind her. She has an excellent chance at a happy childhood and a normal life.”
Chub worked his hands on the arms of his chair. The eyes in the slack face resembled those of the carefree leader of the Pint-Size Pirates. “Maybe I should’ve killed my parents when I had the chance.”
Valentino returned to California and lost himself in the myriad mundane details of locating and preserving popular entertainment canned on celluloid. He resigned himself to the proposition that life was too depressing for the Hollywood Dream Factory to make inroads against it for more than an hour or two. For the first time in his career, he wondered if he hadn’t dedicated his life to a facetious lie. Progress reports from Weylin Fain about little Laurette’s progress in an ordinary school, with ordinary friends and the appearance of happiness in class and at recess, buoyed his spirits temporarily, but he kept returning to that sad old man and his empty victory brought about through circumstances diametrically opposed to the upbeat mood of his vehicles. Carefree comedy had lost its appeal.
Months passed with him in this frame of mind, and many attempts at other acquisitions had succeeded and failed, before Valentino allowed himself to spend any time thinking about the Pint-Size Pirates. In the celebrities column of the Los Angeles Times, he read a brief announcement of the wedding of Chub Garrett and a woman named Gloria Campbell in Dublin’s Christ’s Church. The photo that accompanied it showed the round, happy face of the groom beside the equally rotund features of his bride, who retained the mischievous eyes and dimpled smile of Glory, the puppy-love interest of Chub Garrett, Sassafrass, Shadow, and Moon Pie, and even the surly Mugs. The text explained that the couple had reunited when Gloria read of Chub’s travails in a newspaper in Sydney, Australia—where she’d lived for twenty years since the death of her second husband—and flew to Ireland to lend moral support.
A few days later, a huge carton arrived at the office of the UCLA Film Preservation Department, addressed to Valentino and plastered all over with certificates from Irish and U.S. customs. He spent the day watching reel after reel of the anarchical antics of a gang of Depression-era schoolchildren, blissfully unaware of what lay ahead when the kliegs were switched off for the last time and walls stayed put, and laughed himself to tears.
Preminger’s Gold
NORTHERN MICHIGAN WOULDN’T BE mistaken for Southern California, despite the presence of a rocky shoreline that might have stood in for the Pacific Coast Highway in a student film with no travel budget.
The differences were apparent as Valentino drove his rental car along reddish main streets paved with asphalt and slag from extinct iron mines. Video stores had taken the place of boarded-up neighborhood theaters for the entertainment of locals, and chain motels had begun to push out rustic log bungalows, but the villages were refreshingly free of McDonald’s and Wal-Marts, and when he got out with his bags, strangers on the street, dressed for the most part in ear-flapped caps and Mackinaws—the women as well as the men—greeted him in passing as if they were old friends.
“I may retire here in twenty or thirty years,” he told Kyle Broadhead from the telephone in his room; his cell couldn’t get a signal among all those pines and weathered granite.
His mentor’s chuckle reached him all the way from his faculty office in Los Angeles. “Have you ever even owned a snow shovel?”
“I was born and raised in Indiana. I think I can handle a few flakes.”
“A few flakes’ is what they call summer up there. You’ll be on your way back home as soon as they finish de-icing the plane.”
It was early autumn and the weather was quite pleasant; but Valentino had heard stories of winter residents tunneling through roof-high drifts to get about, so he chose not to strain the university budget in a long-distance argument. “I’m meeting Sigurson tomorrow for breakfast. He sounds friendly on the phone. I think this will be a worthwhile trip.”
“Sigurson. Bet he talks like those characters in Fargo.”
As a matter of fact, Leonard Sigurson had spoken with that lilting Scandinavian accent that the dialect coaches at all the studios claimed was vanishing from the northern regions of the U.S. and Canada.
Valentino didn’t address the remark. Broadhead was always right and reacted immodestly whenever his opinion was confirmed. “Goodbye, Kyle. I’m turning in soon.”
“So early? What is it there, eight o’clock in the evening?”
“Nine. Most of the state’s on Eastern time. Anyway, I had layovers in Denver and Chicago, then a pu
ddle-jumper and a long drive. The sun comes up here same time as back home.”
“Just don’t come back with plaid poisoning.” Broadhead hung up.
The contact had suggested an hour unknown on the West Coast, but Valentino fell asleep quickly with Lake Superior pounding not far away and arose at sunrise, lagged but alert. He put himself together and walked through chill air to the diner.
“I keep telling the owner he should knock down that wall and expand the place,” his waitress said. “We’ve got more customers than tables every day of the week.”
Valentino grunted and made room on the checked cloth for a large oval plate of bacon and eggs. The crisp climate made him hungry, and not inclined to lecture on the value of popular culture. The wall was the reason this beanery in a barely accessible region of the American Midwest had so many customers.
Famished though he was, after the waitress left he paused a moment longer to contemplate the signatures on the wall of his booth: Otto Preminger, James Stewart, Lee Remick, George C. Scott, Ben Gazzara, and of course Robert Traver, whose experience and imagination had started it all.
In 1958—well before that young lady’s time—Preminger, the most gifted and difficult Austrian film director since Erich von Stroheim, had led his troupe to Michigan’s wild, wind-lashed Upper Peninsula to film Anatomy of a Murder, based on John D. Voelker’s courtroom suspense novel inspired by his career as an attorney and judge, published under the Traver pseudonym. The result, daring for its era, was one of the three or four best legal dramas ever produced. Stewart had reestablished his star power as the quirky, canny country lawyer attempting to clear his client of a murder charge, and Remick and Gazzara, relative unknowns at the time of casting, had been catapulted into the ranks of the Hollywood elite.
Aware of good things coming their way, all had agreed to provide their autographs at the request of the diner’s owner, whose hearty fare and friendly service had helped sustain them through the rigorous weeks of shooting. Included was the immortal Duke Ellington, who had written the score and appeared in a cameo onscreen. Destroying those artifacts might not necessarily harm tourism—that harsh and beautiful country drew hunters, boaters, anglers, and even would-be Ernest Hemingways eager to fish the waters and hike the trails their idol had known so well—but the loss to cinephiles would be as great as the destruction of Da Vinci’s Last Supper.
The visitor’s empty stomach tore him at last from his meditation. The food was as delicious as it was unhealthy. But as he swabbed up the remnants with whole-wheat toast and drenched his broken inner clock with black coffee from a thick mug, he began to wonder if he’d been stood up. Every time the street door opened, tinkling the bell mounted on the frame above it, he looked up, only to return his attention to his plate when the newcomer joined friends at a table or tramped straight to the counter and straddled a stool. They let no more than a curious glance stray toward the unfamiliar figure in the booth. They probably dismissed him as just another cinema buff who’d requested the seat.
When the waitress refilled his mug, he asked if she knew Leonard Sigurson.
“Ziggy? Who doesn’t? He’ll bend your ear talking about his big movie career.”
“I was hoping he would, but he’s late.”
“I think his watch ran down years ago and he never got around to rewinding it. He rolls out of bed with the first shotgun blast in the woods and eats when his belly tells him to. Some nights he bangs on the door after closing and we have to fire the griddle back up so he doesn’t go to bed hungry. Ziggy, he’s a character.” She carried the pot to another table.
When the last of the morning crowd had paid up and gone and Valentino was testing his bladder with more coffee, he sensed that the small staff was growing impatient to clear the tables for lunch. Sigurson came in then.
Valentino didn’t recognize his contact at first. He’d spent some time studying the two scenes in Anatomy of a Murder in which Sigurson had appeared, but the old man in unseasonable shorts, polo shirt, and sailor’s cap didn’t bear much resemblance to that long-ago background extra. He glanced around, spotted the lone diner, and limped his way, hand outstretched.
“Keep your seat,” he said when Valentino started to rise. “I just got my hip replaced and it hurts to look at you youngsters popping up and down like a lake perch.” His hand was as strong as his features, bony and hawklike under sagging skin. “Cora! Over easy and burnt to a crisp.”
“Ziggy, you don’t think I know by now how you take ’em?”
The waitress sounded friendly, but she glared at Valentino, as if it was his fault the booth was unavailable for busing.
The old man peered at the card Valentino gave him. He didn’t appear to need reading glasses. “ ‘Film detective.’ I thought you said you was an archaeologist.”
“Archivist. It’s because people make that mistake I call myself a detective. Were you sitting here when that wall was signed?”
“No, this here was the grownups’ table. I was over there.” He pointed at a table in the corner. The worn oilcloth covering might have been the same one he’d sat in front of back then.
A scheduling glitch all those years ago was what had brought Valentino halfway across the country. Sigurson’s two scenes were shot weeks apart instead of back-to-back, so he’d been paid throughout the company’s time on location.
He’d filled the idle days taking home movies of the cast and crew. UCLA’s Film Preservation Program, tagged to remaster Anatomy for a special DVD release, had sent its crack archivist to upper Michigan to secure that amateur footage for a reasonable price to include on a second disc.
“I’d of went nuts without that little Bell and Howell,” the old man said. “That guy Preminger spent half a day setting up and the other half putting the same ten lines on film over and over. Inefficient. Kid here in town made a whole science-fiction picture in a week last summer.”
“Preminger was a perfectionist.”
“A nasty feller’s what he was. When he wasn’t trying to shove that pretty little thing Lee Remick into the sack he was cussing at her and everybody else. The colonel was the only one he couldn’t bully.”
“The colonel?”
“Jimmy Stewart. He was in the Air Force, you know, flew twenty missions over Germany. I guess the Kraut figured he’d bomb him if he didn’t back off, slobbered all over him when he found out he didn’t scare. He even laid off of Lee when the colonel was around. Sweet little thing, Lee. I bawled like a baby when I heard she’d died. Only fifty-five she was.”
“What was Ben Gazzara like?”
“Okay. Sort of standoffish. He was one of them Method actors. You couldn’t talk about the weather and such with him—you know, carry on a normal conversation. He was playing his part all the time, on and off the set.”
That checked with the Gazzara Valentino had interviewed; a polite man, serious about his craft. The subject had been the forthcoming debut on video of Run for Your Life, the series that had made the actor a TV star, but as the only surviving member of Anatomy’s principal cast he could not escape probing questions about the production. He’d mentioned the home movie in passing. A great deal of research on Valentino’s part had gone into identifying Sigurson as the man behind the camera and locating him, but elderly people often exaggerated their past exploits for the entertainment of a young audience. It was possible he’d come all this way over a couple of hundred frames of anonymous figures shot at a distance.
“You were a bold young man,” he said. “Most amateurs would be too timid to approach a credited player with a camera.”
Sigurson’s eggs arrived, charred and smoking. He chewed and grinned, blackened bits showing between teeth that showed far less wear than his baggy, humorous face. “I knew you’d think I was some old crank with a tall tale to sell. That’s why I brung these.”
Valentino watched him take a plastic photo wallet from the cargo pocket of his shorts and spread its contents like playing cards on the table between them. The
y were digital stills in full color of Stewart, Remick, Gazzara, and Arthur O’Connell, the character specialist who’d nailed the role of Stewart’s boozy associate, in costume and looking relaxed and casual—except Gazzara, who looked just like the simmering young man on trial for his life he’d played in the film. Surreptitious-looking shots caught the shaven-headed Otto Preminger with his mouth open, shouting at some hapless member of the talent or crew.
“After you called I had my son drive me to Marquette and paid a photo place to put the film on disc. Did you know they can print stuff on paper easier that way? I sure didn’t. You got an honest face, mister, but I’ll just hang on to the film and the disc till we have us a deal. Keep the prints; I got a second set for free.”
Valentino thanked him, shuffled the stills into a stack, and slid them back into the wallet. His hand shook slightly. From the evidence, Sigurson had been a gifted amateur, framing his shots with skill and maintaining focus. Snaring previously unknown footage intimately connected with a classic film was as exciting to an archivist as discovering a third part to Henry IV would be to a Shakespearean scholar.
He willed himself to appear calm. The department budget was tight, and he lived in fear of exhausting it on something tempting only to be approached soon after by someone in possession of the entire work of Theda Bara, or some other grail as holy. He couldn’t seem eager if he wanted a bargain.
“These are impressive, but I’ll have to screen the original before I make an offer, if I decide to. What are you asking?”
Valentino: Film Detective Page 23
