SCRATCH ON THE DARK
Basil Copper
A Mike Faraday Mystery
© Basil Copper 1967
Basil Copper has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as author of this work.
First Published in 1967 by Robert Hale.
This edition published in 2016 by Venture Press, an imprint of Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
1 - Zarah Fayne is Missing
2 - Take One
3 - The Small World of Manny Freeman
4 - Point-Blank
5 - Strictly a B Production
6 - The Lady and the Lake
7 - The Scrap Business
8 - Starr
9 - Gun Stuff
10 - Reel Two
11 - Invitation to a Shoot
12 - Home-Movie Night
13 - Gala Performance
14 - The Big Wheel
15 - Stay Healthy, Live Longer
16 - End Title
FOR DAVID EDWARDS:
Who shares my enthusiasm for the art and history of the cinema
1 - Zarah Fayne is Missing
The thin pink finger of the Mylar Building pointed forty storeys to the sky of downtown L.A. I paid off the cab. He was one of those rare hackies who actually smiled when you tipped him. I looked up at the dirty grey sky and sighed. There was a flag flying on top of the building and it made the sky look dirtier than ever. I went on in and rode up thirty floors in an express lift that left most of my anatomy way down in the entrance hall. The elevator-boy was a snide character with slicked hair and a mean grin. He smiled acidly to himself. I bet he was great in a power dive with the old ladies.
I went on down a corridor painted pale lilac and listened to the typewriters pecking behind the doors. I found the place I wanted and went on in. There was a blonde girl with scraped-back hair, pale pink nails and a figure that didn’t hurt the eyeballs. She was stroking her typewriter with two fingers and making a lousy job of it. She had a nice smile though.
‘I’d like to see Dr Nathan Crisp,’ I said. ‘He’s expecting me.’
‘What name shall I say?’ Her smile was worth looking at.
‘Faraday,’ I said. ‘Mike Faraday. He phoned me this morning.’
She put down the neat sheet of figures she’d taken out of the machine and uncrossed her legs with a shirring of stockings. The noise sent up my blood-count. She smoothed down her dress with small pink hands. Her expression and the last faint trace of the smile made me figure she was reading my thoughts.
‘I won’t keep you a moment, Mr Faraday,’ she said. ‘If you’d take a seat.’
I sat down on a black leather divan and watched her walk away down the room. She had a beautiful walk and everything to go with it. She disappeared through a mahogany door at the end of the office. I sat and looked at the green filing cabinets, the tidy desk and the flower-prints on the walls and wondered what was giving Dr Nathan Crisp hot pants. Not that he’d been communicative on the phone. But he’d said just enough to get me interested.
The girl came back before I had time to put my thoughts together. ‘Dr Crisp will see you right away,’ she said. ‘Will you follow me, please?’
‘Anywhere,’ I said gallantly. She flushed. It looked good on her. ‘Dr Crisp might not approve,’ she said softly.
‘Why, has he got first option or something?’ I said.
She flushed again. ‘Certainly not,’ she said firmly. There was a touch of vinegar in her voice.
‘We’ll take this up when I come out,’ I said.
She stopped at the mahogany door, tapped on it and told me to go in.
Dr Nathan Crisp had a frosty halo of white hair trimmed close to his scalp which made him look like an animated puff of thistledown from way off. When I got up closer to his half-acre desk I could see that he was only in his mid-forties. His broad body was sheathed in a pearl-grey sport suit. He wore a pale lemon tie knotted in carefully under the points of his expensive cream shirt. His face was square and tough-looking, his complexion pink and inflamed as though with too much sun. His eyes were grey and penetrating. He had square, tough-looking teeth to match his face.
He gave me a fist to squeeze that was a chunky mass of bone and muscle. His broad fingers were well-kept. Altogether he looked as solid and expensive as his surroundings.
‘Sit down, Faraday,’ he said in a deep nut-brown voice. The voice went with his general image pretty well I thought.
I eased into an uncomfortable chrome-steel and beige leather chair and looked at the pine-panelled walls and the coloured eighteenth century maps and charts in their black and gold frames and wondered how much to bite him for. He looked like he could stand my rates and then some. He finished rustling some papers, scribbled his signature with a flourish and then sat back and looked me in the eye.
‘I suppose you wonder why all the mystery, Faraday?’ he said. ‘I have to be discreet in my business.’
‘That makes two of us,’ I said.
He blinked and shifted behind the desk. ‘Yes, so I’d heard,’ he said. ‘I wanted to retain your services in a delicate matter. It’s about my wife.’
I sat and waited for him to go on. He licked his lips and pushed over a box of cigarettes. I took one and lit up. He had an ash tray at my elbow before I’d finished with the spent match. He closed the box and put it down on the red leather surface of the desk in front of him. He didn’t take one himself.
‘What do you make, Mr Faraday?’ he asked.
I told him. ‘Plus expenses,’ I said. ‘And only on results.’
He nodded. ‘Sounds fair enough.’
He opened a drawer in his desk and took out a cheque-book with a mauve cover. He scratched in it and then tore off the slip and threw it across the desk to me. I picked it up. It was made out to me in the sum of three hundred dollars.
‘This seems an expensive way of putting a tail on your wife,’ I said mildly.
He laughed. ‘It’s not that sort of job,’ he said. ‘And that’s a retainer.’
I drew on my cigarette and left the next move to him.
‘This isn’t an ordinary job at all.’
He fished in his desk drawer again and got out a cabinet photograph. He stood it up on the desk facing away from him so that I could see it clearly. The picture was a good one. It showed a woman with dark hair cascading over bare shoulders; she would have been sensational once. Even in her forties and allowing for the flattering studio lighting she had a hard, striking beauty.
‘It looks like Zarah Fayne,’ I said cautiously. ‘The movie star.’
Crisp laughed again. He put the picture back abruptly into his desk. I heard the soft snip of the key turning in the lock.
‘I see you’re well up on the cinema industry,’ he said.
‘I’ve been known to take in the Animated Bioscope once or twice,’ I said. ‘Your wife?’
He nodded. ‘To my misfortune, yes. You’ve got quite a memory, Faraday. She hasn’t made a good movie in twenty years. Expensive tastes and hard drinking overlaid the talent long ago. She’s been doing B-stuff and TV shorts the past few years. It just about keeps her in bourbon money.’
He spoke without bitterness.
‘Where do I fit in?’ I said.
He swivelled in his chair and played with an ivory-handled paper-knife he picked up off the desk.
‘She left town about a month ago,’ he said. ‘I’d like to find out where she’s gone and with whom. I’m willing to pay well for the information.’
‘You’re still keen on her,’ I said.
; He gave a harsh snort, half laugh, half cry of pain.
‘Hell, no,’ he said. ‘I don’t give a damn where she goes or what she does. It’s just that she took something that belonged to me with her. I’ve got fifty thousand reasons for wanting her traced.’
‘And you can’t bring in the regular police because your fifty thousand was tax-free,’ I said, watching him from under my half-closed eyelids. I could have sworn he went up about a foot from his well-padded chair. Then he smiled ruefully.
‘That’s about the length of it, Faraday. Does it square with your ethics, or what?’
‘Tax evasion’s not my department,’ I told him. ‘Happens all the time. But just make sure I got it right from the start. In case of kickbacks.’
He nodded. ‘Sorry. No hard feelings. I think we’ll get along, Mr Faraday.’
‘I’m sure we shall, doctor,’ I said. ‘But I take it that this isn’t all of the story. Mrs Crisp’s disappeared completely, I presume?’
‘She’s got a bungalow in Santa Monica. She left there about the same time as our house in town. According to the housekeeper she put some things in a bag about a couple of hours after she left L.A., and then drove off. I’ll get the Santa Monica address for you before you leave.’
‘How was the money taken?’ I said.
Crisp winced. ‘In cash. Stupid, I know, but I thought it was pretty secure. Looks like Zarah must have got an impression of the safe key and had another made.’
‘What about the studio where she worked?’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘A blank there, too. But you might see what you can dig up. I’ll put that down for you.’
He scribbled on a piece of paper.
‘Just one more thing,’ I asked. ‘For the record. Any boyfriends?’
He drew down the corners of his mouth ruefully.
‘You don’t miss a trick, Faraday. There was one. I don’t know much about him. Man called Chuck Esterbrook.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘Former Western star, now doing bits and TV heavies. That where they met?’
Dr Crisp inclined his massive head towards me across the desk.
‘You’ll do, Faraday, you’ll do,’ he said.
‘The same studio?’ I asked, looking again at the piece of paper he’d given me.
‘Why not?’ he said. ‘He’s working there currently. I checked.’
‘I’ll go look him up,’ I said. I got to my feet and we shook hands. I had the door open when he spoke again.
‘And Faraday,’ he said. ‘Remember the priority. Like I said I don’t give a damn about my wife or Esterbrook. It’s the money I’m interested in.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Money interests everybody. It’s the big thing nowadays.’
‘No slip-ups,’ he said sharply.
‘I’ll count every bill,’ I told him. I shut the door to cut off the smell of greed from behind it.
The blonde job glanced up from her desk as I went out.
‘You look as if you’d be worth a good dinner one of these evenings,’ I said.
She grinned. ‘Try me. The name’s Carol Foster. I’m in the book.’
‘I’ll be seeing you then,’ I said. I stopped by the desk. I was hovering over the top of her when the mahogany door suddenly opened and Crisp came out.
‘Will you get me the file on the Aschoff albumen tests. Miss Foster?’ he said mildly. He didn’t look at me.
‘I’ll be drifting along then, Miss Foster,’ I said.
She smiled again. ‘Surely, Mr Faraday. I’ll bring them in, doctor.’
She went over to the filing cabinet. I went through the swing gate and out down the corridor. After waiting five minutes I went down in a crash-dive with two old ladies. The demon-elevator boy had a distinct gleam in his eyes as he helped us out at the ground floor. I figured he was at least ten points up. I called a taxi and rode over to my section of town. I paid off the cab and went along to the garage near my office block. I’d taken my old Buick in for a servicing that morning and it was going to be expensive without her.
A negro mechanic with a brilliant red scarf round his neck looked out of an office cubby-hole as I came up.
‘Just working on her now, Mr Faraday,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Ready in about an hour.’
I asked him to drop it around to my office for me after they were finished. Then I walked on over to my building. I rode up in the ancient elevator. I felt I needed a cup of coffee before I faced the Hollywood Actors Directory.
2 - Take One
‘Who on earth would want to see ‘Masked Night Riders of Nevada’?’ said Stella, flipping over a thick buff catalogue in front of her.
‘I might,’ I said. ‘If it had Zarah Fayne in it.’
Stella sniffed. She patted her honey-blonde hair into place with an immaculately manicured hand.
‘She wouldn’t be in those sort of pictures,’ she said. ‘Stag movies sold on off-boulevard locations would be more her line.’
‘Don’t be bitchy,’ I said. ‘I didn’t think you had a jealous bone in you.’
Stella grinned. ‘I might have had twenty years ago,’ she said. ‘Zarah Fayne must have been something then.’
‘You and your perambulator,’ I said.
Stella smiled again and took down something on her scratch pad; she frowned back at the catalogue.
‘Anyway,’ she said at last, ‘if you like Zarah Fayne’s old movies so much why don’t you go down to Paramount and ask them for some clips? They did most of her good ones.’
‘They wouldn’t have the sort I’m interested in,’ I said.
Stella looked quizzically up at the cracks in the office ceiling; the central heating made funny noises in the silence of the building.
‘I hear she did her best work for Keystone,’ she said.
I didn’t bother to top that one. I was having enough trouble with Chuck Esterbrook. Snag with these reference books is that you get so interested in other old movies you’d forgotten that checking takes you three times as long as it should do. I figured Stella and I had been at least an hour and a half on getting the record straight on Dr Crisp’s wife and her boyfriend. And that was an hour too long in my business.
‘It’s been great on this Movie Museum programme with you, honey,’ I told Stella. ‘We must do this again some time.’
She took the hint. She shut the catalogue with a snap and passed over a sheaf of letters for me to sign. She got up with a rustle of nylon and stretched; she was wearing a thick wool dress with a roll-top collar. The clinging stuff set off her figure in a way that would have kept my circulation warm even with the poor heating system in the office.
‘You’d like some coffee, of course?’ she said blandly.
‘I was wondering when you were going to ask,’ I said.
Ten minutes later I sat back, finished off my first cup and signed my eighth letter. Like always I couldn’t find a fault in them. I always said Stella could do my job better than I could; except for the rough stuff. She always left that to me.
‘What’s the first move?’ said Stella, in behind me. She took the empty cup, went over to the partitioned alcove where we brewed up. I heard the chink of the spoon on the cup. The fresh aroma of the roasted beans cut through the stale atmosphere of the office.
‘I thought I might try Santa Monica first,’ I said. ‘The Fayne woman’s got a beach house out there. The housekeeper might know something she wouldn’t tell the husband. Later or maybe tomorrow I’ll check on Esterbrook.’
‘Not much to go on,’ said Stella.
She put down the cup on the blotter in front of me. I sat and sipped the scalding hot coffee and thought about good-looking women who left good-looking wealthy men with fifty thousand tax-free greenbacks. Esterbrook was only about four years younger than her so this wasn’t a case of a young gigolo and an older woman. And Crisp didn’t know Esterbrook had anything to do with it any more than I did. And if he hadn’t Zarah Fayne might be anywhere. And the fifty thousand w
ouldn’t last a woman like her long. And the money her husband made plus her film and TV earnings would keep her comfortably. Somehow I couldn’t see her giving that up for an unspecified fling. Something didn’t fit somewhere; it was as queer as a three-sided penny. And I shouldn’t find the answer sitting on my butt in my office. I drained the last of my coffee, made a half-hearted pass at Stella, which she wasn’t in too much of a hurry to dodge and went on out.
‘Say hullo to Francis X. Bushman for me,’ Stella called after me. I didn’t bother to answer that.
*
The Pacific looked angry today, frothing in grey and white on the strip of foreshore edging the road, as I drove out. The beach-houses were closed and had that out-of-season shuttered look that made the summer seem a long way off. The wind blew keenly and scattered waste paper about the beach, and flung white spume through the rusty piles of a board pier. There was nothing on the beach but a bruiser-type character in a white turtleneck sweater who was exercising a couple of big black dogs. The dogs didn’t like the weather either, judging by the way they weren’t running into the sea to retrieve the sticks the man was throwing. Dogs aren’t anybody’s fools. Some of them have more sense than people.
There’s no freeway to Santa Monica but this time of year the traffic wasn’t too heavy and I made it out there in about half an hour. Santa Monica’s a dump compared to what it was in the heyday of the movies but it’s almost the only place around L.A. that’s free of smog so it made a change. I glanced again at the piece of paper Crisp had given me. The house was called Les Oleandres; it was way back off the beach, of course, on a place called Sundown Drive. The beach locations were too expensive up here these days, unless you’d bought in the twenties. The front lots went mostly to movie stars though even they were feeling the pinch now.
I hadn’t been through for some while; it looked depressing in the cold afternoon light. I tooled the Buick through a small shopping centre with its boarded beach-shops, found the intersection and turned off up the steep hillside. Many of the houses were cut out of the difficult terrain, the terraces and in many cases the buildings themselves supported on pins and props of concrete to stop them plunging down the slopes. It rather reminded me of Hollywood itself; everything slipping into a sunset sea.
Scratch on the Dark (A Mike Faraday Mystery Book 4) Page 1
