Modern Masters of Noir

by Ed Gorman (ed)

  I had told my story to the uniformed men four times before the men from Central Homicide showed. The detective in charge was Lieutenant Rondell, a thin, somber, detached man in his mid-forties with smooth creamy gray hair and icy eyes. His brown gabardine suit wasn’t expensive but it was well-pressed. His green pork-pie lightweight felt hat was in his hand, in deference to the deceased.

  Out of deference to me, he listened to my story as I told it for the fifth time. He didn’t seem to think much of it.

  “You’re telling me this woman was murdered,” he said.

  “I’m telling you the gambling syndicate boys were pressuring her, and she wasn’t caving in.”

  “And you were her bodyguard,” Rondell said.

  “Some bodyguard,” said the other man from Homicide, Rondell’s brutish shadow, and cracked his knuckles and laughed. We were in the garage and the laughter made hollow echoes off the cement, like a basketball bouncing in an empty stadium.

  “I was her bodyguard,” I told Rondell tightly. “But I didn’t work Sundays.”

  Rondell nodded. He walked over and looked at the corpse in the convertible. A photographer from Homicide was snapping photos; pops and flashes of light accompanied Rondell’s trip around the car as if he were a star at a Hollywood opening.

  I went outside. The smell of death is bad enough when it’s impersonal; when somebody you know has died, it’s like having asthma in a steamroom.

  Rondell found me leaning against the side of the stucco garage, lighting up my second Camel.

  “It looks like suicide,” he said.

  “Sure. It’s supposed to.”

  He lifted an eyebrow and a shoulder. “The ignition switch is turned on. Carbon monoxide.”

  “Car wasn’t running when I got here.”

  “Long since ran out of gas, most likely. If what you say is true, she’s been there since Saturday night . . . that is, early Sunday morning.”

  I shrugged. “She’s wearing the same clothes, at least.”

  “When we fix time of death, it’ll all come clear.”

  “Oh, yeah? See what the coroner has to say about that.”

  Rondell’s icy eyes froze further. “Why?”

  “This cold snap we’ve had, last three days. It’s warmer this morning, but Sunday night, Jesus. That sea breeze was murder—if you’ll pardon the expression.”

  Rondell nodded. “Perhaps cold enough to retard decomposition, you mean.”

  “Perhaps.”

  He pushed the pork pie back on his head. “We need to talk to this bird Eastman.”

  “I’ll say. He’s probably at his studio. Paramount. When he’s on a picture, they pick him up by limo every morning before dawn.”

  Rondell went to use the phone in old man Jones’ loft flat. I smoked my cigarette.

  Rondell’s brutish sidekick exited the garage and slid his arm around the shoulder of a young uniformed cop, who seemed uneasy about the attention.

  “Ice-cream blonde, huh?” the big flatfoot said. “I woulda liked a coupla scoops of that myself.”

  I tapped the brute on the shoulder and he turned to me and said, “Huh?” stupidly, and I coldcocked him. He went down like a building.

  But not out, though. “You’re gonna pay for that, you bastard,” he said, sounding like the school-yard bully he was. He touched the blood in the corner of his mouth, hauled himself up off the cement. “You go to goddamn jail when you hit a goddamn cop.”

  “You’d need a witness, first,” I said.

  “I got one,” he said, but when he turned to look, the young uniformed cop was gone.

  I walked up to him and stood damn near belt buckle to belt buckle and smiled a smile that had nothing to do with smiling. “Any time you want to pay me back, man to man, I won’t be hard to find.”

  He tasted blood and fluttered his eyes like a girl and said something unintelligible and disappeared back inside the garage.

  Rondell came clopping down the wooden steps and stood before me and smiled firmly. “I just spoke with Eastman. We’ll interview him more formally, of course, but the preliminary interrogation indicates a possible explanation.”

  “Oh?”

  He was nodding. “Yeah. Apparently Saturday night he bolted the stairwell door around midnight. It’s a door that leads to both apartments above the Sidewalk Cafe. Said he thought Miss Dodd had mentioned she was going to sleep over at her mother’s that night.”

  “You mean, she couldn’t get in?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, hell, man, she would’ve knocked.”

  “Eastman says if she did, he didn’t hear her. He says there was high wind and pounding surf all night; he figures that drowned out all other sounds.”

  I smirked. “Does he, really? So what’s your scenario?”

  “Well, when Miss Dodd found she couldn’t get into her apartment, she must’ve decided to climb the steps to the street above, walked to the garage and spent the rest of the night in her car. She must’ve gotten cold, and switched on the ignition to keep warm, and the fumes got her.”

  I sighed. “A minute ago you were talking suicide.”

  “That’s still a possibility.”

  “What about the blood on her face and dress?”

  He shrugged. “She may have fallen across the wheel and cut her mouth, when she fell unconscious.”

  “Look, if she wanted to get warm, why would she sit in her open convertible? That Lincoln sedan next to her is unlocked and has the keys in it.”

  “I can’t answer that—yet.”

  I was shaking my head. Then I pointed at him. “Ask the elderly gent upstairs if he heard her opening the garage door, starting up the Packard’s cold engine sometime between two a.m. and dawn. Ask him!”

  “I did. He didn’t. But it was a windy night, and . . .”

  “Yeah, and the surf was crashing something fierce. Right. Let’s take a look at her shoes.”

  “Huh?”

  I pointed down to my scuffed-up Florsheims. “I just scaled those two-hundred-and-eighty steps. This shoeshine boy’s nightmare is the result. Let’s see if she walked up those steps.”

  Rondell nodded and led me into the garage. The print boys hadn’t been over the vehicle yet, so the Lieutenant didn’t open the door on the rider’s side, he just leaned carefully in.

  Then he stood and contemplated what he’d seen. For a moment he seemed to have forgotten me, then he said, “Have a look yourself.”

  I had one last look at the beautiful woman who’d driven to nowhere in this immobile car.

  She wore delicate silver dress heels; they were as pristine as Cinderella’s glass slippers.

  The coroner at the inquest agreed with me on one point: “The high winds and very low cold prevailing that weekend would have preserved the body beyond the usual time required for decomposition to set in.”

  The inquest was, otherwise, a bundle of contradictions, and about as inconclusive as the virgin birth. A few new, sinister facts emerged. She had bruises inside her throat. Had someone shoved a bottle down her throat? Her alcohol level was high—.13 percent—much higher than the three or four drinks she was seen to have had at the Troc. And there was gas left in the car, it turned out—several gallons; yet the ignition switch was turned on . . .

  But the coroner’s final verdict was that Dolores died by carbon monoxide poisoning, “breathed accidentally.” Nonetheless, the papers talked suicide, and the word on the streets of Hollywood was “hush-up.” Nobody wanted another scandal. Not after Mary Astor’s diaries and Busby Berkley’s drunk-driving fatalities.

  I wasn’t buying the coroner’s verdict, either.

  I knew that three people, on the Monday I’d found Dolores, had come forward to the authorities and reported having seen her on Sunday, long after she had “officially” died.

  Miranda Diamond, Eastman’s now ex-wife (their divorce had gone through, finally, apparently fairly amicably), claimed to have seen Dolores, still dressed in her Trocad
ero fineries, behind the wheel of her distinctive Packard convertible at the corner of Sunset and Vine Sunday, mid-morning. She was, Miranda told the cops, in the company of a tall, swarthy, nattily dressed young man whom Miranda had never seen before.

  Mrs. Wallace Ford, wife of the famed director, had received a brief phone call from Dolores around four Sunday afternoon. Dolores had called to say she would be attending the Fords’ cocktail party, and was it all right if she brought along “a new, handsome friend?”

  Finally, and best of all, there was Warren Eastman himself. Neighbors had reported to the police that they heard Eastman and Dolores quarreling bitterly, violently, at the bungalow above the restaurant, Sunday morning, around breakfast time. Eastman said he had thrown her out, and that she had screamed obscenities and beaten on the door for ten minutes (and police did find kick marks on the shrub-secluded, hacienda-style door).

  “It was a lover’s quarrel,” Eastman told a reporter. “I heard she had a new boyfriend—some Latin fellow from San Francisco—and she denied it. But I knew she was lying.”

  Eastman also revealed, in the press, that Dolores didn’t own any real investment in her Sidewalk Cafe; that she made no investment other than lending her name, for which she got fifty percent of the profits.

  I called Rondell after the inquest and he told me the case was closed.

  “We both know something smells,” I said. “Aren’t you going to do something?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’m going to hang up.”

  And he did.

  Rondell was a good cop in a bad town, an honest man in a system so corrupt the Borgias would’ve felt moral outrage. But he couldn’t do much about movie-mogul pressure by way of City Hall; Los Angeles had one big business and the film industry was it. And I was just a private detective with a dead client.

  On the other hand, she’d paid me to protect her, and ultimately I hadn’t. I had accepted her money, and it seemed to me she ought to get something for it, even if it was posthumous.

  I went out on a Monday morning—four weeks to the day since I’d found the ice-cream blonde melting in that garage—and at the Cafe, which still bore her name, sitting alone in the cocktail lounge, reading Variety and drinking a Bloody Mary, was Warren Eastman. He was between pictures and just two stools down from where she had sat when she first hired me. He was wearing a blue blazer, a cream silk cravat, and white pants.

  He lowered the paper and looked at me; he was surprised to see me, but it was not a pleasant surprise, even though he affected a toothy smile under the twitchy little mustache.

  “What brings you around, Mallory? I don’t need a bodyguard.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” I said genially, sitting next to him.

  He looked down his nose at me through slitted eyes; his diamond-shaped face seemed handsome to some, I supposed, but to me it was a harshly angular thing, a hunting knife with hair.

  “What exactly,” he said, “do you mean by that?”

  “I mean I know you murdered Dolores,” I said.

  He laughed and returned to his newspaper. “Go away, Mallory. Find some schoolgirl who frightens easily if you want to scare somebody.”

  “I want to scare somebody all right. I just have one question . . . did your ex-wife help you with the murder itself, or was she just a supporting player?”

  He put the paper down. He sipped the Bloody Mary. His face was wooden but his eyes were animated.

  I laughed gutturally. “You and your convoluted murder mysteries. You were so clever you almost schemed your way into the gas chamber, didn’t you? With your masquerades and charades.”

  “What in the hell are you talking about?”

  “You were smart enough to figure out that the cold weather would confuse the time of death. But you thought you could make the coroner think Dolores met her fate the next day—Sunday evening, perhaps. You didn’t have an alibi for the early a.m. hours of Sunday. And that’s when you killed her.”

  “Is it, really? Mallory, I saw her Sunday morning, breakfast. I argued with her, the neighbors heard . . .”

  “Exactly. They heard—but they didn’t see a thing. That was something you staged, either with your ex-wife’s help, or whoever your current starlet is. Some actress, the same actress who later called Mrs. Ford up to accept the cocktail party invite and further spread the rumor of the new lover from San Francisco. Nice touch, that. Pulls in the rumors of gangsters from San Francisco who threatened her; was the ‘swarthy man’ Miranda saw a torpedo posing as a lover? A gigolo with a gun? A member of Artie Lewis’ dance band, maybe? Let the cops and the papers wonder. Well, it won’t wash with me; I was with her for her last two months. She had no new serious love in her life, from San Francisco or elsewhere. Your ‘swarthy man’ is the little Latin lover who wasn’t there.”

  “Miranda saw him with her, Mallory . . .”

  “No. Miranda didn’t see anything. She told the story you wanted her to tell; she went along with you, and you treated her right in the divorce settlement. You can afford to. You’re sole owner of Dolores Dodd’s Sidewalk Cafe, now. Lock, stock and barrel, with no messy interference from the star on the marquee. And now you’re free to accept Lucky Luciano’s offer, aren’t you?”

  That rocked him, like a physical blow. “What?”

  “That’s why you killed Dolores. She was standing in your way. You wanted to put a casino in upstairs; it would mean big money, very big money.”

  “I have money.”

  “Yes, and you spend it. You live very lavishly. I’ve been checking up on you. I know you intimately already, and I’m going to know you even better.”

  His eyes quivered in the diamond mask of his face. “What are you talking about?”

  “You tried to scare her at first—extortion notes, having her followed; maybe you did this with Luciano’s help, maybe you did it on your own. I don’t know. But then she hired me, and you scurried off into the darkness to think up something new.”

  He sneered and gestured archly with his cigarette holder, the cigarette in which he was about to light up. “I’m breathlessly awaiting just what evil thing it was I conjured up next.”

  “You decided to commit the perfect crime. Just like in the movies. You would kill Dolores one cold night, knocking her out, shoving booze down her, leaving her to die in that garage with the car running. Then you would set out to make it seem that she was still alive—during a day when you were very handsomely, unquestionably alibied.”

  “You’re not making any sense. The verdict at the inquest was accidental death . . .”

  “Yes. But the time of death is assumed to have been the night before you said you saw her last. Your melodrama was too involved for the simple-minded authorities, who only wanted to hush things up. They went with the more basic, obvious, tidy solution that Dolores died an accidental death early Saturday morning.” I laughed, once. “You were so cute in pursuit of the ‘perfect crime’ you tripped yourself, Eastman.”

  “Did I really,” he said dryly. It wasn’t a question.

  “Your scenario needed one more rewrite. First you told the cops you slept at the apartment over the cafe Saturday night, bolting the door around midnight, accidentally locking Dolores out. But later you admitted seeing Dolores the next morning, around breakfast time—at the bungalow

  His smile quivered. “Perhaps I slept at the apartment, and went up for breakfast at the bungalow.”

  “I don’t think so. I think you killed her.”

  “No charges have been brought against me. And none will.”

  I looked at him hard, like a hanging judge passing sentence. “I’m bringing a charge against you now. I’m charging you with murder in the first degree.”

  His smile was crinkly; he stared into the redness of his drink. Smoke from his cigarette-in-holder curled upward like a wreath. “Ha. A citizen’s arrest, is it?”

  “No. Mallory’s law. I’m going to kill you myself.” />
  He looked at me sharply. “What? Are you mad . . .”

  “Yes, I’m mad. In the sense of being angry, that is. Sometime, within the next year, or two, I’m going to kill you. Just how, I’m not sure. Just when, well . . . perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps a month from tomorrow. Maybe next Christmas. I haven’t decided yet.”

  “You can’t be serious . . .”

  “I’m deadly serious. I’ll be seeing you.”

  And I left him there at the bar, the glass of Bloody Mary mixing itself in his hand.

  Here’s what I did to Warren Eastman: I spent two weeks shadowing him. Letting him see me. Letting him know I was watching his every move. Making him jump at the shadow that was me, and all the other shadows, too.

  Then I stopped. I slept with my gun under my pillow for a while, in case he got ambitious. But I didn’t bother him any further.

  The word in Hollywood was that Eastman was somehow—no one knew exactly how, but somehow—dirty in the Dodd murder. And nobody in town thought it was anything but a murder. Eastman never got another picture. He went from one of the hottest directors in town, to the coldest. As cold as the weekend Dolores Dodd died.

  The Sidewalk Cafe stopped drawing a monied, celebrity crowd, but it did all right from regular-folks curiosity seekers. Eastman made some dough there, all right; but the casino never happened. A combination of the wrong kind of publicity, and the drifting away of the high-class clientele, must have changed Lucky Luciano’s mind.

  Within a year of Dolores Dodd’s death, Eastman was committed to a rest home, which is a polite way of saying insane asylum or madhouse. He was in and out of such places for the next four years, and then, one very cold, windy night, he died of a heart attack.

  Did I keep my promise? Did I kill him?

  I like to think I did, indirectly. I like to think that Dolores Dodd got her money’s worth from her chauffeur/bodyguard, who had not been there when she took that last long drive, on the night her sad blue eyes closed forever.

  I like to think, in my imperfect way, that I committed the perfect crime.