Frames

by Loren D. Estleman

“Shape of the pelvis. Also I caught him looking down my blouse when I bent over.”

  He grinned. “Was it murder?”

  “Tell you when I finish dusting, maybe. If there was bone trauma, a skull fracture, or a blade or a bullet nicked a rib, yes. Without that, or a loose slug coming to light when we move the cadaver, all we’ve got is—”

  “Improper disposal of a corpse,” Valentino finished. “Hey, you swiped that from me.”

  He turned at the sound of Fanta’s voice. He hadn’t even been aware she and Broadhead had followed him into the room. He made introductions. The reality of his proprietorship had only sunk in when Sergeant Clifford referred to him as the owner. Playing the host seemed appropriate.

  Ms. Johansen said hello and sneezed again. “Excuse me.”

  “Bless you.” All four spectators spoke at the same time.

  Clifford said, “Any sign of clothing?”

  “Not a scrap, and he hasn’t been here long enough for leather and fabric to decompose completely. That takes more than a century, under outdoor conditions. The building isn’t that old, and as I said his dental work postdates construction by thirty years at least.”

  “A stripped body spells murder to me,” said the sergeant. “What else?”

  “Ask me downtown in a day or two.” The criminalist peeled off her gloves. “You can tell the morgue team to bag him up anytime.”

  Valentino straightened. His back was sore from crouching, on top of helping carry more than forty cans of old celluloid up and down stairs and loading them into the trunk of his car. He was nervous about leaving them in that uncontrolled climate for long. He asked Clifford if she had any more questions.

  “Just one. What was removed from that shelf?” She pointed at the rack that had contained the film. “The dust is spread evenly everywhere but there.”

  Her steely tone, and that emerald stare, got to him. He took in his breath to confess. Broadhead gave him a sideways kick in the ankle. “Ouch!”

  Nothing good can come from underestimating a cop’s peripheral vision. She swung her attention to the professor. “What was that?”

  “Restless Leg Syndrome.” His face wore no expression.

  Just as she lifted an authoritative finger, a whey-faced plainclothesman Valentino had seen drifting in and out interjected himself into the group. “Media’s here, Sarge.”

  “How many?”

  “Three stations and the cop house guy from the Times.”

  “The gangs in East L.A. must be on vacation.” She stuck the finger at Valentino. “I’ve got your contact information. We’ll talk.”

  The three civilians migrated toward the jagged exit. Harriet Johansen, packing her whisk broom and other assorted tools into a black steel case, stuck her striking face into a tissue and sneezed again.

  “Bless you.” This time, Valentino was the only one to say it.

  She wiped her nose and smiled up at him. He’d been dead right about the candlepower. “Thank you.”

  Broadhead gave him a push. “Move it, Don Juan.”

  “That was Douglas Fairbanks,” Valentino corrected.

  **

  CHAPTER

  5

  VALENTINO BROKE THE silence of several blocks. “Restless Leg Syndrome?”

  “It’s a real condition,” Broadhead said. “Look it up.”

  This time, the professor sat in the front passenger’s seat while Fanta rode in back. Valentino had had to maneuver the car out of a tight space between satellite trucks double-parked in front of The Oracle. Evidently, the discovery of a vintage corpse was of sufficient human interest to attract the press to a crumbling landmark.

  “Clifford’s not an idiot,” he said. “She knows we’re hiding something.”

  “Not evidence,” Fanta put in. “Not technically. The film had to have been there since before the theater changed hands the first time, long before whatever happened happened. Connecting the two would be an impossible case to make in court.”

  “That’s for the police and prosecutor to decide. I’m not comfortable with lying to them.”

  “You didn’t,” Broadhead said. “I did, to prevent you from blurting out a truth that could destroy a seminal artifact from the first quarter-century of the cinema. I went to prison for less reason than that. At least the L.A. County Jail has central heating.”

  “If you think I’d let you go to jail while I kept silent—”

  “That’s for me to decide.” He filled his pipe. “Greed and I are near contemporaries. I’ve made most of the contributions to our common purpose I’m ever likely to, but that film, that wonderful crackbrained child of a mad genius, hasn’t even started. Irving Thalberg never gave it the chance. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to determine which sacrifice is better.”

  Fanta rapped her knuckles on her windowsill. “ ‘We, the jury, find the defendant not guilty on the grounds of common sense.’”

  “All the same, if Sergeant Clifford asks me again about that empty shelf—and she will—I’m going to tell her, Restless Leg Syndrome or no.”

  Broadhead got his tobacco going and opened his window to expel the smoke. “All I ask is that you stall long enough for us to look at the McGuffin and if it’s what we hope it is, strike off a new negative on safety stock. After that she can T.P. the squad room with it if she likes.”

  “That’ll take weeks! I can’t put her off that long.”

  “How is it done?” Fanta leaned forward in her seat. “I don’t guess it’s like copying a tape or burning a disc.”

  “Not with film,” Broadhead said, “and certainly not with anything as volatile as silver nitrate. Silver’s the culprit; the very stuff that made the silver screen sparkle. It’s a corrosive agent, carrying the seeds of its own destruction. You have to expose it onto new stock a frame at a time.”

  Valentino said, “That’s thousands of frames. In this case hundreds of thousands. You measure forty-two reels in miles, not feet.”

  Broadhead chuckled. “Thalberg called von Stroheim a ‘footage fetishist,’ just before he ordered the editors to cut it to two hours’ maximum running time. After months of shooting on location in San Francisco and Death Valley, and part of the cast still in the hospital, the studio scrapped seventy-five percent of the feature.”

  “Possibly eighty,” said Valentino. “No one ever sat down and watched the whole thing with a stopwatch.”

  “Professor, you’re going to have to refresh my memory on who Irving Thalberg was.”

  “Head of Production at MGM. Second in command to Louis B. Mayer, the M that roared.”

  She slumped back in her seat. “Fascist company freak.”

  “People are too harsh on him.” Valentino detoured around barricades on Wilshire. Gaffers were inflating a huge bag for a stunt jumper standing on the roof of Bullock’s Department Store to land on. You couldn’t drive a straight line across the city without running into an accident or a film shoot. “Thalberg greenlighted most of the studio’s greatest projects in the early years, including The Big Parade, often over Mayer’s objections. He was the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last novel.”

  “It’s so hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys in this business,” she said.

  Broadhead ground his teeth on his pipe stem. “That’s why they made the movies they did, where you could tell them easy.”

  Valentino said, “It’s a hard sell, piecing out evidence to the police. I should run it past Henry Anklemire.”

  “You mean Smith Oldfield,” Broadhead corrected. “He’s in the legal department. Anklemire’s Information Services.”

  “I mean Anklemire. Who better than an ad flack to make a difficult sale?”

  “Just don’t let the ignorant little motormouth into our building. When we finished restoring Johnny Tremain last year, he wanted to invite Walt Disney to the first public showing.”

  “That’s no reason to put him off limits.”

  “When I told him Disney’s heirs had him cryogenically froze
n in nineteen sixty-six, he said, ‘Gee, it’d be swell if we could thaw him out in time for the reception.’”

  “He was right.” Fanta met Valentino’s gaze in the rearview mirror. “Think what it’d do for contributions.”

  Broadhead told her she was going to make a fine intern.

  When they turned onto her street, she said, “Hey, don’t drop me off. I want to see what goes down with Greed.”

  “Those lab nerds don’t excite as easily as we do,” Broadhead said. “They’ll just sign it in, seal the cans, and stick them in the fridge. Then that little gnarled gnome of a librarian will insist on assigning it a priority at the bottom of a list of fifty other projects. Fortunately, the president of our illustrious institution has been after me for a year to get Francis Ford Coppola to speak at next year’s commencement, and Francis owes me a solid. That’ll nudge it to the top-”

  “Bogus Byzantine bullshit. I’m glad I’m studying law.”

  Valentino stopped in front of her house. “It’s been a real pleasure, Fanta. We’ll let you know as soon as we find out. Meanwhile—”

  “I know: Cool out. It’s like my first professional consultation, with attorney-client privilege and whatever. They won’t hear”—she uncased a smile that still showed the impression of braces—”boo!” She got out and waved at them from the porch.

  Both men were still grinning as they pulled away. “I see the attraction,” Valentino said.

  Broadhead’s face went sour. “That’s less funny now than when you thought it was genuine. Her old man was the best T.A. I ever had. He’d be an assistant professor by now if he hadn’t answered the call to duty.” He tipped open the dashboard ashtray and knocked his pipe out into it. “What’s the name of that big red dog in newspaper cartoons?”

  “Clifford.” Now Valentino frowned. “She’s big, and she sure is red, but there were no dogs in that room.”

  “That criminalist was pretty cute. You’re one to talk about academics in heat.”

  “It was the forensics I was interested in. I spent three weeks in northern Michigan tracking down the home movies Preminger shot on the Anatomy of a Murder set.”

  “You should open with that next time you see her. It’s better than candy and flowers.”

  “Okay, we’re even.” Valentino left the Beverly Hills city limits, and with them that subject. “What do you think of the skeleton in my closet?”

  “Nothing I hadn’t seen before. I took a shortcut through the Roman catacombs on my way to Quo Vadis.”

  “I mean the murder. If that’s what it was.”

  “If you’re worried about the Big Red Dog, don’t. The pressure to solve a crime more than four decades old ranks right up there with our obligation to restore Francis the Talking Mule. The TV morons will stop playing it up the minute some former kid actor gets arrested for beating up a transvestite, and the cops will move on.”

  “That’s not what I’m worried about. Well, I am, but that’s not why I brought it up. It’s an occupational hazard, I guess. There’s a fine line between scrounging up ten feet of early D. W. Griffith and sleuthing out a felon.”

  “You’ve fallen victim to your own PR. I told you I disapproved of putting that film detective tag on your business cards. I bet you got that from Anklemire.”

  “Guilty. But that doesn’t mean it was a bad decision. Archivist doesn’t open many doors.”

  “Speaking of doors, you’re about to drive past the one to our place of business.”

  Valentino signaled and turned abruptly into the North Campus entrance. The monster Hummer behind him screeched its brakes and blared its horn.

  “Bummer,” Broadhead said. “Now we’ve made an enemy of Governor Schwarzenegger.”

  The gray-haired parking attendant glared through his bifocals at Valentino. “Who’re you now, Ramon Novarro?”

  “I haven’t been home to pick up my parking pass,” Valentino said. “Mea culpa.”

  “I guess you Hollywood libs think that’s funny.” The attendant raised the gate. “My sister’s a nun, and my boy’s at the seminary.”

  “Sorry.” Valentino drove through.

  “First the cops, now God,” Broadhead said. “Man, you’re screwed.”

  “Don’t you have a parking pass?”

  “Our beloved department head got it revoked. He’s got a lease on an SUV the size of Sacramento and I drive a nifty little hybrid that gets a hundred and sixty miles to the gallon. He thinks I wrote in Stalin in the last presidential election. There’s a spot, next to that midlife-crisis Corvette.”

  They parked. Valentino said, “We can’t carry more than twenty cans between us. We’ll have to make two trips.”

  “Why take chances with our creaky knees when burly undergrads come twenty cents a pound? We’ll come back with two of them and a couple of cartons from Office Max.”

  “That’s like transporting the relics of a saint in a White Castle sack.”

  The professor shook his big shaggy head. “You’re too reverent, like our friend in the parking booth. I earned my first dollar in this profession pedaling reels of Wings between Toledo and Sylvania, Ohio, on a bicycle. I logged a hundred miles a night between showings.”

  “How old are you, Kyle?”

  “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you. This university has a mandatory retirement policy. I don’t play golf, and fishing bores me till I bleed.”

  “It wouldn’t be that much of a culture shock. You don’t teach more than four hours a year.”

  “Those four hours entitle me to use the film library and reference sources, which is what I do with the rest of my time. I’m writing a book at last.”

  “You wrote a book. The Persistence of Vision.” He wondered, with a prick of apprehension, if his friend’s memory had begun to fail. Even the most impressive and efficient machinery broke down with time. He opened his window, letting oxygen into the stuffy car.

  “That was a coffee-table decoration. I was a sprout in my fifties when I threw it together, blathering on for page after page about material I’d never seen because it had been dead or buried for a generation. Speculation and hearsay, the coronary and cancer of serious scholarship.” He sighed bearishly. “I wish flashbacks existed offscreen. I’d revisit that benighted period and horsewhip myself. Next best thing is to prepare a second edition; denounce my adolescent exhalations and set the record straight based on what’s come to light since sliced bread. It’s almost finished.”

  “When do you write? You come in early, go home late, and I never see you at your computer or even scribbling on a piece of paper.”

  “It’s all here.” Broadhead tapped his bulbous brow. “The rest is scutwork.”

  “The scutwork is what takes most of the time. What about notes?”

  “Scratch, scratch, scratch. These old knuckles are too stiff. But my cerebral cortex is covered with shorthand.”

  “But what if you don’t live long enough to share it?”

  “I am sharing it.” He reached across the console and patted Valentino’s knee. “Let’s go find those undergrads before that stuff in the trunk reaches the third stage of decomposition.”

  “What if it has already?”

  “Then we have all the time in the world. Unless, of course, it blows up.”

  **

  CHAPTER

  6

  “HERR VALENTINO, YOU have had your rest, ja?”

  He started awake; he thought. Afterward he wasn’t sure. A swatch of moonlight lay on the bedroom carpet like a gauntlet flung to the floor. A dark figure stood in the shadows to one side of the window.

  Valentino’s heart flopped over. Had he locked his door?

  “You will save mein Kindling, ja? I am counting on you.”

  The intruder’s guttural accent—his “will” sounded like vill, his “save” like safe—was as hard to follow as his German. The man in the bed had the wild thought that his apartment had been broken into by a neo-Nazi skinhead. All kinds of fanatic
roamed the streets of Century City late at night, along with garden-variety burglars and gangbangers off their turf.

  “My wallet’s on the bureau.” His voice wobbled. “There’s some video equipment in the living room. Please take them and go.”

  A bitter laugh escaped the shape in the shadows. It chilled the listener with its mercilessness and strange familiarity. He recognized it but couldn’t place it.

  “What do I want with your trinkets and money? I spent more than you earn in a month on one dinner at the Trocadero. I want mein Kindling.”

  Vot do I vant; it was maddening, that voice, so well known and yet just outside the grasp of memory, like a character actor in an old movie. That sparked a flash, but it faded before he could bring it into focus.

  The Cafe Trocadero had been gone fifty years, along with most of the stars, directors, and cigar-chomping moguls who had dined there. Mein Kindling? He scrambled to remember his high-school German. My child, my beloved child.

  “I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else. Another Valentino.” It sounded weirdly comical, even to him. He’d begun to believe he was dreaming. He’d fallen asleep straightaway after the long day of investment, discovery, elation, shock, and guilt.

  “Du lieber Gott!” roared the stranger. He stamped his feet twice in a goose step, thrusting himself into the shaft of cold light and halting with a click of his heels like a pistol shot.

  Valentino’s breath caught. The man was dressed head to toe in the uniform of an imperial Austrian officer. A visored cap perched at an arrogant angle above his shaved temples, his white tunic was buttoned to his throat and spangled with medals, and riding breeches were stuffed into the tops of gleaming black knee-length boots. In one hand he held a pair of gloves, in the other a leather riding crop, its braided-thong handle resting against one shoulder like an army rifle. A monocle glittered in one eye and a cigarette smoldered in a long holder clamped between his teeth.

  Erich von Stroheim. Foolish Wives, 1922; one of his frequent turns in front of his own cameras. It came to Valentino as clearly as if he were looking at a black-and-white publicity still.