The auditorium came last, as if the designer had been saving it for dessert. Valentino entered behind him hesitantly, but this time no spirits were in attendance. The tatters of the screen were blank. Kalishnikov tested the floorboards in the aisles with his weight, plucked pieces of horsehair-laced plaster from inside the proscenium arch, pounded a quart of dust out of a brittle velvet seat, and dusted off his palms. Back in the lobby he slapped the corner of a silk handkerchief at smears on his trousers and used it to wipe off his alligator shoes, patting Pegasus on the side of the neck as he did so, as if to apologize for propping his foot up on the pedestal.
“I’ll do a computer search for its mate,” he said, “on the long shot an employee or someone took it home to jazz up his rec room. It’s custom work; there’s not another like it in any theater I’ve been to. We’ll probably have to build one from scratch. Fortunately, I know someone: Not a Michelangelo, but he could copy him so you’d never know the difference.”
“In the Valley?”
“Paris.”
“Paris, France”?”
“Ornamentation’s going to be the biggest part of the budget on this job. Hazmat comes next. That’s asbestos dangling from the ceiling in the ladies’ lounge.”
“Not rock wool.”
“You wish. Everything else is boilerplate: roof repair, carpentry, plumbing, and electrical. Wiring’s the first order of business, to power the equipment. That means strategic drilling and snaking out the precode stuff to replace it. We want to preserve as much of the plasterwork as possible. You can’t find people who can do that quality of work anymore, and even if you could, you couldn’t afford them.”
“I’m pretty sure I can’t afford most of it.”
“You might qualify for a federal loan under historic preservation.”
“Can you give me a rough estimate of the cost?”
Kalishnikov took back his jacket, coat, and hat, put them on, the hat on the back of his head, produced a leather notepad with gold corners from his inside breast pocket, and scribbled on it with his gold pencil. He tore off the sheet and handed it to Valentino.
He shuddered, but his heart kept beating. “Actually, I thought it would be a lot worse.”
“That’s my fee. Hold on.” The Russian closed his eyes, made some calculations in the air with his pencil, wrote again, and tore off the sheet.
Valentino read. He felt faint. “I don’t suppose this includes your fee.”
“No.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“Architectural Digest wants to do a feature on my home theaters. If you’ll let them include a spread on the Oracle before and after renovation, I’ll make you a present of my fee.”
“I can’t accept that. It’s too generous.”
“If you’ll put that in writing, I’ll throw in my expenses.” Kalishnikov smiled, showing off a beautiful bond job. “I’m kidding. My last client called me a pirate, and that was for a little fifteen-seater in his basement, with a foyer and a snack bar.”
“I get paid for my work. You should, too.”
“I share a tax bracket with the State of North Carolina. If I make any more money this quarter, I’ll have to sell the house in Malibu and set up a cot here in the lobby. I need to do the Oracle. All my work so far has been repro, on a domestic scale. I’ve never done a full-size theater with a legitimate history. And that murder-mystery scenario is primo advertising for my business partners.”
Valentino showed his own modest dentalwork. “Are you familiar with Henry Anklemire in UCLA Information Services?”
“No.”
“I think you’d get along.” He folded the two pieces of paper and put them in his wallet, which was looking slim. “It’s still far beyond my means, Mr. Kalishnikov. May I think about it and get back to you?”
“Certainly.” The extra y was audible between the t and the a; the Russian had squared his hat and put on his gloves, getting into character for the protesting students, who hoisted their signs and resumed chanting slogans when the pair emerged onto the sidewalk. The limousine was waiting, Rupert the chauffeur holding the door. Valentino shook hands and watched the preposterous car bear away its preposterous passenger.
His own car released an unfamiliar odor from inside when he opened the door. The ashtray was pulled out and a cigarette lay propped across it clamped in an old-fashioned onyx holder, lisping smoke. Instinctively he glanced at the seat on the passenger’s side, then at the backseat, checking for intruders. They were empty. When he looked back, the cigarette and holder were gone and the ashtray was closed.
He leaned across the driver’s seat and tipped open the tray. It was clean; he didn’t smoke and he’d emptied it of Broadhead’s pipe ashes a day or two before. There was no cigarette or holder on the floor. It had been an optical illusion, a trick of light and shadow. Yet a faint aroma of tobacco lingered. It smelled like just the kind of exotic blend that Erich von Stroheim would have smoked in his famous holder.
“I’m doing the best I can, maestro.”
Valentino slid behind the wheel, grateful for the warmth of the upholstery against his chilled spine. He opened his window to let in the combined stenches of smog and fresh-poured asphalt that bespoke West Hollywood in the twenty-first century. It wasn’t enough. He needed to hear a human voice, belonging to someone of flesh and blood. In the absence of the person who’d refused all day to answer her phone, he took out his cell and dialed the office.
Ruth answered. Harriet Johansen had called, and this time the only remaining secretary on the West Coast got the name right.
**
CHAPTER
17
“ARE YOU ALL right?” Harriet asked. “You look a little green around the gills.”
They were seated in the break room down the hall from the forensics lab and the autopsy room, at a laminated table littered with copies of Guns & Ammo, Popular Science, and Cinema Fantastique. He had coffee in a Styrofoam cup. She was dipping a tea bag in a mug with her name on it.
“I’m fine. I never held a man’s brains in my hands before.”
“Sure? I’ve seen sergeants faint dead away at the first incision, twenty-year men.”
“I’m fine.”
“Would you like something to eat?”
“No freaking way.”
She laughed.
He sipped. The stuff in the cup took skin off his tongue, but it sponged the postmortem smell from his nostrils.
A young criminalist with a puppy moustache took a bottle of water out of the refrigerator and went out, leaving them alone. Valentino reached across the table and squeezed Harriet’s hand. “Thanks for forgiving me. I was too tired to remember that practical jokes always backfire on me. I don’t have the talent for them.”
“Peer pressure. From a twelve-year-old coed.” Her eyes were still a little steely above the rim of her cup. But she didn’t withdraw her hand.
“She’s not much older than that, but she has a first-class brain. She’s been a real help with—the program.” He’d almost said the investigation. Even in those official surroundings, after a Cook’s tour of the billion or so dollars’ worth of facilities dedicated to the solution of crime in Los Angeles, it was easy to forget he was talking to an employee of the police department.
“Stop explaining before you land yourself back in the doghouse. I’m sorry I acted out. Apart from my not having the right to assume a damn thing about where this is going, playing the jealous hag is playing against type for me. I realized that even before I played back the message you left on my phone.”
“That awkward thing? It was all I could do not to call back and start over.”
“If you’d been glib I’d never have returned the call.”
“Took you all day.”
“I didn’t say you didn’t deserve to suffer a while.”
He smiled. “So I had you at hello?”
“Make you a deal. Try not to quote movies at me and I’ll try not to use words like ‘po
strigor putrefaction.’”
“Deal.”
She slid her hand free then and wrapped it around her cup. “So what did you think of our little shop of horrors?”
“It’s fascinating. But then I knew it would be. Our work isn’t so different after all. We’re both interested in piecing things together and preserving them. We even use some of the same equipment.”
“You mean like cold-storage facilities?”
“A stand-up comic could do an hour on that with the right audience. I mean like copy cameras and electron microscopes, even scalpels. In the old days, the editors at the studios used their teeth to part the film. Having front teeth was the only prerequisite for the position. Our splicers go through several dozen disposable scalpels a day just to avoid scraping a thousandth of an inch off a single frame.” He read her smile and sat back, raising his hands. “I’m hopeless, aren’t I? I can’t stop talking about my work even when I’m on your territory.”
“We have that in common. I’m not invited to dinner parties anymore. All my former friends are afraid I’ll dissect the roast to determine cause of death.”
“Maybe we can wean each other off shop talk.”
“Relationships have been built on less. Hello, Sergeant. What brings you downtown?”
Karen Clifford had come in, headed for the coffee machine. She changed course to stop at their table. From his seated position, Valentino looked up three feet to meet her startlingly verdant gaze. Her pile of red hair threw off halos from the fluorescents on the ceiling. “I came down to watch one of your colleagues spin sperm in a dish,” she said. “That’s how we investigate rape-murder now. I’m just a glorified trash collector.” She offered her hand to Valentino, who rose to grasp it. “Got those reels wrapped up and ready to go? We’re picking them up in the morning.”
“I guess that means you didn’t get anything off the cans,” he said.
“We didn’t expect to. We don’t expect to get anything off the film, either, but we live to get lucky.”
Harriet said, “I wondered about those film cans. I didn’t treat them, but I saw them when they came in. Greed; isn’t that the picture you wanted to show me last night?” She looked at him.
The sergeant lifted her chin. He was looking up at it as it was. “I didn’t get an invitation to that.”
“You didn’t ask for it,” Valentino said. “You just wanted to confiscate it.”
“I still do.” She looked at Harriet. “Your gentleman friend removed some evidence from the crime scene before he called us.”
“I gathered that,” Harriet said. “I might’ve been told. I’ve only been working the case since day one.”
Valentino sensed she was angrier at Clifford for the omission than she was at him. “That was a favor to me. The film’s a major find. The less it gets talked about now, the better the reception when we announce it. I was going to tell you all about it last night.”
“Now that that’s settled, will you surrender the evidence voluntarily, or will the officers need to bring along a warrant?”
“That won’t be necessary, Sergeant. Thanks for the three days. I’m sure you took some heat over that.”
She looked surprised. Then she nodded. “We’ll take good care of it. We’ve got a cold room for perishables.”
“That’s only good for the short term. If it’s going to run into months and years, the only really secure place to store it is in a salt mine six hundred feet deep, where there’s no humidity and the temperature never rises above thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit.”
“Well, we’re fresh out of those. Any other tips?”
“My secretary will give your officers a copy of our department manual. The first thing to remember is not to lose the molecular sieves from the cans.”
“What’s a molecular sieve?”
Harriet spoke up. “It’s a fancy name for those little packets they put in coat pockets to keep them from smelling musty in the stores. They allow vapors to be scavenged and contained. I’m a good listener,” she explained to Valentino.
Impressed, he began to compliment her. Clifford interrupted.
“Vapors? This stuff’s toxic?”
“Not yet,” he said. “Not until the second stage.”
“Then it’s also explosive,” Harriet said.
“You’re pulling my leg.”
They both shook their heads.
“Should I send the bomb squad to pick it up?”
Harriet spoke before Valentino could open his mouth. “Better safe than sorry.”
Sergeant Clifford wandered out, forgetting the coffee machine.
Valentino sat. “You’re not as good a listener as you think. That film is still a long way from volatile.”
“She doesn’t know that. Maybe if she thinks it is she’ll tell her people to take better care of it.”
“I knew you were smart. I never dreamed you were devious.”
“I may be the kettle, but you’re the pot. Did it ever occur to you my department will be in charge of the film, and that a word or two in my ear might improve its chances of survival? It’s time you put down the cloak and dagger and come clean.”
“You’re mixing metaphors.”
“BS.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m a bachelor of science, not arts. I can mix metaphors the same way I mix chemicals and compounds.” She took the tea bag out of her cup, sucked it, and laid it on the table. He’d never seen anyone do that before; they were a matched set of caffeine addicts. “I try to keep an open mind,” she went on. “That’s why I let you talk your way out of that stupid misunderstanding yesterday. That doesn’t mean I’ll let you keep half your life hidden from me. Even the moon shows its dark side once a night.”
“Douglas the negative cutter must’ve really done a number on you,” he said.
“Several. One of them was changing the subject every time the conversation became uncomfortable.”
He lifted his cup. It was cold. “Is it all right if I warm this up first?”
“Dump it out and bring me more hot water while you’re up.” She pushed her cup toward him and fished another tea packet out of a pocket in her smock.
He talked all through both beverages. He told her about the scheme to smuggle out Greed before calling the police and the decision to investigate the mystery of the skeleton. He left out the tentative identification of Albert Spinoza as the victim and his interview with Warren Pegler, but only because Fanta had brought those about through skills he couldn’t claim and he didn’t want to jeopardize her future as an attorney; he didn’t know Harriet well enough yet to trust her with someone else’s fate. About himself he was candid.
He even told her about the ghost.
He almost didn’t. It was okay if his friends thought he was a screwball; the local landscape was filled with those. He risked losing Harriet’s interest on the grounds of sheer humdrummery.
“The first time was in my apartment, the night of the day I bought the Oracle and found the film and the skeleton. I was in bed, so I put it down as a dream. Von Stroheim was in full costume, complete with monocle and riding breeches. He asked—commanded me to save ‘mein Kindling,’ meaning his beloved child: Greed.”
“He spoke in German? Do you know the language?”
“I studied it in high school. I’ve forgotten most of what I learned. Fortunately, he only used a phrase or two. The rest was in English.”
She nodded, encouraging him to continue.
“I saw him the second time in the theater just after you left. That time I knew I was awake. He was all in pieces on the torn fabric of the movie screen, but I could see he was dressed like Gloria Swanson’s butler in Sunset Boulevard.”
“I thought it was Norma Desmond.”
“That was the character. Swanson played her. Can I tell this? It’s difficult enough.”
“Sorry. I’ll try not to talk during the movie.”
“It was pretty much the same conversation,” he said; l
eaving out the personal part where von Stroheim told him to avoid feminine distraction. “He wasn’t satisfied with the progress I was making, which was in character for him. He could delay an expensive production to correct some minor detail on the set, but if an actor was on his mark three minutes late he flew into a rage. Only this time I knew it wasn’t a dream, because I was awake and on my feet.” He searched her face for traces of mockery. He found none. “The third time was today, in my car. I didn’t really see him that time, just the cigarette he left behind in one of those hokey holders. I guess he got tired of waiting.”
“Did you keep the cigarette and holder?”
“No. They disappeared before I could reach for them.”
“Too bad. We could’ve identified the tobacco, tested for latents, analyzed the saliva on the holder for DNA, matched it to a relative or a lock of hair in someone’s locket, and determined whether it was von Stroheim who smoked it.”
“I was afraid you’d make a joke.”
“That’s what ghosts are, a joke. Did you expect me to invite you to a séance? I haven’t lived here long enough to catch that disease. I still have my South Dakota immunity.”
“Fanta and Dr. Broadhead weren’t so quick to dismiss the supernatural angle.”
“Neither one of them is a scientist. I believe in things I can put under a microscope or on litmus or spin in a dish.”
“What about God?”
“That’s faith. I leave it in my locker when I put on the smock.”
“Maybe this is one of those times you should take it off.”
“Not unless you think God wears a monocle and speaks with a thick German accent.”
“Austrian, actually. The only time he played a German was in Five Graves to Cairo, when he was General Rommel.” He saw her expression. “Sorry. At least I didn’t quote from the film.”
“Do you think you saw a ghost?”
He considered. Neither Broadhead nor Fanta had asked that question.
“No,” he said. “Everything I’ve ever read about real-life sightings is vague. This was as vivid as if I were watching a movie.”
“You’re overwrought. My gosh, from what you said, Webster’s should put your picture in the dictionary next to the definition. Since movies are your main point of reference, you put all your anxieties into a cinematic context. In your position, I’d be seeing dancing test tubes everywhere I went.”
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