Male/Male Mystery and Suspense Box Set: 6 Novellas

by Lanyon, Josh

  “That’s depressing.”

  Amused, she turned the next page of her photo album. “And here’s me and Eva with Tony at the Troubadour.” I studied the three faces. Gloria and Eva had made a pair of knockout bookends, one fair, one dark, Snow White and Rose Red—and the frog prince sandwiched between them. Tony Fumagalli was not, by any stretch, a good-looking man: short, swarthy, heavy-jowled—and chomping on a cigar in every picture.

  “So what was the attraction?” I asked Gloria.

  “Money, I guess. Power, definitely.” She started to turn the page. I stopped her.

  “So what went wrong? Did he slap her around?”

  “Now that she would have understood.”

  I stared at her, trying to put two and two together. Something that Eva couldn’t forgive or understand, something that neither Eva nor Tony nor anyone else wanted to talk about…

  “He’d been married before, hadn’t he?” I was thinking aloud.

  Gloria’s baby blues remained pinned on the photo of her and Eva and Tony. The Three Graces: Faith, Hope, and I’ll Break Your Kneecaps. “Annulled,” she replied.

  Annulled. But that could have been because Tony was of Italian descent and—all things being relative—a good Catholic. I scanned his pug-ugly face. Or maybe not.

  “Was he…gay?” I asked slowly.

  Gloria’s head tossed like a pony slipping its bridle. “Baby, was he ever!”

  “Are you serious?”

  She nodded. “He was as queer as a two-dollar bill. Evie caught him one afternoon prancing around in garters and hose and a corselette. Red garters and red corselette.”

  What the hell is a corselette? I said, “Tony Fumagalli was a transvestite?”

  “Imagine if that had got around!” Gloria crowed with laughter and the poodle pack came scurrying in from the next room. She began tossing colored doggie candies out of the pockets of her mint green hostess gown. “Smoked chicken nothing! They should have named him rubber chicken.”

  Talk about a motive for murder. I could see Tony F. deciding he needed to shut Eva up before she spread that story around town.

  “Did he threaten her?” I asked Gloria.

  “I doubt it. He still thought he could get her back. You know, give her time to cool down. He didn’t know our little Eva. She had an appetite like a shark.”

  “An appetite for…?”

  “Sex, baby, sex!”

  I nodded understanding. “Do you think he was afraid she’d tell someone?”

  Gloria’s eyes were shrewd. “If he’d wanted to stop her mouth, he’d have had to kill her on the spot. What would be the point three days later? Besides, there are no secrets in Hollywood.”

  There were one or two left, but they did seem to be unraveling fast.

  * * * * *

  I was waiting for the bus on Beverly Drive when the long black limousine pulled up in front of me, and Mr. Clean, aka Clyde Wells, got out smartly from the passenger seat.

  My companions at the bus stop, all apparently employed in local domestic service, observed in interested silence as he opened the rear door and nodded encouragingly at me. “Mr. Fumagalli requests a word.”

  What word would that be? Murder? Unexplained disappearance? Granted, that last would have been two words.

  “I’ll give him a call,” I said. “Is he in the phone book?” As much as I’d have loved to talk to Fumagalli in controlled surroundings, I didn’t think going for a ride in his long black limousine was a smart move.

  “Mr. Fumagalli prefers face-to-face.”

  “Fist to face, did you say?”

  Clyde grinned. “That was a slight misunderstanding, Mr. North.” He nodded again to the dark interior of the car. I could see someone sitting there in the shadows: dark suit, dark sunglasses, and a giant pinky ring. “Please don’t keep Mr. Fumagalli waiting.”

  I thought it over. If Fumagalli wanted me dead, I’d already be dead. Of course he might want to oversee the next round of roughing up, but…probably not. I glanced at my bus stop companions.

  “My name is Timothy North. If something happens to me,” I said, “the last place I was seen alive was in Frankie Fumagalli’s limo.”

  An elderly woman in a peach-colored maid’s uniform giggled.

  “Now you’re just embarrassing yourself,” Clyde told me sadly as I moved past him and ducked into the backseat.

  Hey, I have seizures; not much embarrasses me anymore. I didn’t say that, though. I settled across from the man in the suit and Clyde slammed the heavy door shut. The limo glided off soundlessly. I watched my bus stop companions slide out of the frame of the tinted windows.

  “I appreciate your time, Mr. North,” said a dry voice, and I turned to check out Frankie Fumagalli. “May I offer you a drink?”

  He was in his late forties, slim and gray and tired-looking. He must have taken after his mother’s side of the family, because he had none of Tony’s ugly heaviness—or raw power. In fact, he looked like any worn-out corporate executive after a long, hard day of mismanaging employee retirement funds.

  Tony the Cock’s son, Frankie the Weenie.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  He turned to the built-in bar, used a pair of tongs to drop a couple of cubes of ice into a short glass, poured a generous dose of Bulleit Bourbon, and handed it to me.

  I took a mouthful. Oaky and smooth, like liquid smoke. I swallowed, comforted by the velvet burn through my belly.

  “I think there’s maybe been a misunderstanding,” my host remarked, watching me with his sad, dark eyes. “I got a very…troubling visit from a couple of detectives with the Glendale Police Department. They seemed to be under the impression that someone in my employ might have been harassing you.”

  I said, “Mr. Clean in the front seat there has tried to throw me down a couple of staircases; maybe that’s what they were thinking of.”

  “I have no control over what my employees do in their spare time. If there’s some history between yourself and Clyde, I’d like to see it worked out in peaceable fashion.” He studied my face in the sickly light. “What do you think the trouble is?”

  “I think the trouble is you’re afraid if I keep digging into Eva Aldrich’s death I’m going to discover Eva’s reasons for breaking off her engagement to your father, and that I am going to publish those reasons in this book I’m writing.”

  “You couldn’t be more wrong,” he said, and he smiled. His teeth were surprisingly yellow, but I guess when you’re a mob boss no one can make you go to the dentist if you don’t want to. “If you were to publish something scandalous about my father, I’d simply sue you for everything you own—and I’d make sure that you never worked again.”

  “But the damage would be done,” I said with a calm I didn’t feel. I’d never seen eyes deader than those gloomy black ones gazing at me unblinkingly now. “The book would be published and the secret would be out. It’s not much of a secret in this day and age, but you’re in a traditionally macho line of work, and image is everything, I guess.”

  After a moment, he observed, “I’ve noticed that cocky guys like you annoy a lot of other guys. Maybe that’s what’s happened between you and Clyde. Maybe you just…bug him. You’re starting to bug me.”

  I’d be lying if I said his words didn’t give me a qualm or two. I made myself ask, “Is that what happened to Raymond Irvine? Did he get on someone’s nerves?”

  “Who?”

  “Raymond Irvine. He started a book on Eva Aldrich back in 1963, but someone forced his car off the road on Mulholland Drive.”

  “Oh, the reporter,” Frankie said, lifting an indifferent shoulder. “Like I said, guys like you bug other guys.”

  My hands, clasped around the glass with ice, were growing cold. I said, “I’m not a tabloid writer. I don’t write gossip. Unless your father killed Eva, or had her killed, I’m not interested in writing about his sexual preferences.”

  “My father didn’t kill that bimbo! He didn’t give that for
her!” He snapped his fingers in front of my face.

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  His hand rose as though he was going to throw his glass at me. He screamed, “My mama, God bless her soul, is still alive. You think she should have to read that filth? I want you to drop this goddamned book.”

  “Someone is going to write it,” I told him. “Sooner or later this big secret that you’re willing to have Clyde break my neck over is going to come out. You’d be better off letting someone like me write the story because I don’t give a damn about your father’s kinks. I can write it so that no one will think twice about Eva breaking her engagement. But if you knock off another reporter looking into Eva Aldrich’s death, you’re going to alert the interest of a lot of people—including the cops—and a lot of writers who aren’t going to be as sensitive as I am to this particular angle.”

  He stared at me for what felt like a very long time. I didn’t look away, and I tried not to show that I was wishing I’d left some final word for my parents or bothered making a will. After a few moments, I put my glass to my lips and finished my drink.

  “He didn’t kill her,” Fumagalli said again, at last.

  “I believe you.” The car was slowing. I glanced out the window and we were drawing up to the sidewalk outside my apartment building.

  “You break your word to me and it’ll be all she wrote. You get my meaning, Mr. North?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I don’t want any visits from Glendale PD. This conversation never happened, you got that?”

  “Yep.”

  Clyde jumped out and opened the door for me. I unfolded and got out into the bright sunlight. The heat felt good after the unnatural cold of the limousine. I glanced back in, but Fumagalli was staring straight ahead.

  “‘Til we meet again,” I told Clyde.

  He slammed the door shut and grinned at me. “I’ll be counting the minutes.”

  “Do you have that many fingers?”

  He shook his head like he would dearly have loved to pop me if he only had the time, and jumped back in the limo. Watching the car pull away, I wondered if maybe Jack didn’t have a point about pushing my luck.

  Music drifted down from Jack’s apartment as I walked past the pool: Bob Seger’s “Beautiful Loser.”

  He’s playing our song, I thought grimly, letting myself into my own apartment. I was in no hurry to hear what Jack had to say. I already knew what Jack would have to say—about everything from my joyride with Frankie Fumagalli to our own doomed relationship.

  I loosened my tie and went to the fridge. I still had a couple of hours before my next interview with Roman Mayfield. I toasted sourdough bread, spread it over with cashew butter and sat down with a glass of milk, flipping through the old copy of Life magazine yet again.

  A picture of Eva standing in the pool yard at the Garden of Allah caught my attention. Or rather, not Eva herself, but the crowded pool behind her. There were a few familiar faces, nearly forgotten starlets and blandly handsome young men, but one face stood out. He had hair back then, which is why I’d never particularly noticed him in the bobbing mass of young, laughing faces. A slightly blurred face gazed past the camera, staring past Eva into the encroaching darkness.

  Roman Mayfield had gone swimming the night of Eva’s murder. And now I knew how, under the cover of darkness, someone could have waited for the right moment and washed away all that blood.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Did you bring it?” Mayfield demanded as I was ushered into the room with the starry ceiling.

  “Bring…it?”

  “The exact hour of your birth. For your chart.” He planted a bony index finger onto some papers on the desk in front of him.

  “I forgot,” I admitted as I reached his desk.

  “Forgot?”

  “I’ve had a lot on my mind.”

  He was staring at me as though he couldn’t believe his ears.

  I said, hoping to redeem myself a little, “I do have an astrology-related question, though.”

  He put his head to the side as though considering whether he should deign to listen to it. Then he nodded.

  “Would Sagittarius and Aries make a good team?”

  The mismatched eyes lit with interest, although he asked sardonically, “Were you thinking of playing baseball or getting married?”

  “I’m just curious,” I said. “This is mostly theoretical.”

  “Isn’t everything? Hmmm…the Archer and the Ram. Yes, that’s a very good match indeed. In fact, it’s a 5-9 sun sign pattern, what we call trine—which means positive and harmonious vibrations. Depending on the moon and other aspects, your chances for finding happiness and love in a permanent relationship with an Aries are excellent. In fact, the empathy and emotional fulfillment you’ll find with an Aries will rarely be as effortlessly achieved with another sign.”

  I felt a weird desire to burst out laughing. Maybe Mayfield read something in my expression because he tilted his head to the side and said, “Any misunderstandings with this person will soon be cleared up.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  He shrugged. “Mock if you will, but the stars don’t lie.”

  “I wouldn’t know about the heavenly ones, but the human ones sure do.”

  After a moment he indicated the chair behind me with his finger. I sat down. I felt nervous—not afraid. The only real danger, I believed, was that I might be wrong. I might be way off base in my speculations, but I didn’t think I was.

  “What have you learned?” Mayfield asked.

  “I think I know who killed Eva. And I think I know how. What I don’t know is why. That’s the part that puzzles me.”

  “That’s the only thing that puzzles you?” His tone was dry.

  “Well, I’m not sure why you agreed to talk to me,” I admitted. “And I’m not sure why you stuck that tarot card on my door. It’s almost as though you wanted me to…”

  “Discover the truth?”

  I nodded.

  He smiled. “Fifty years is a long time to carry the burden of grief and guilt, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes. I suppose so.”

  “Yes.” He stared up at the cobalt blue ceiling with its blazing gold stars and mysterious moons. “My time is coming to a close.”

  “Is that what the stars say?”

  “It’s what my doctor says.” He permitted himself a grim smile. “And two specialists. It’s a cliché, but as my hour wanes, I feel the need to…make peace with the past.”

  Since I had already worked out this much, I’m not sure why it felt like such a jolt to hear it out loud. “You killed Eva?” I remembered the horror of those blood-drenched photos and I just couldn’t seem to reconcile that manic violence with this quiet, gentle man.

  “You already know that, my dear.” When I didn’t have an answer, he said, almost reminiscently, “She’d discovered that Tony was queer. Eva was a naïve girl in many ways, but even so it shouldn’t have been such a shock to her. She was disgusted by what she had seen and it made her cruel.”

  “To you?”

  He nodded “She was angry and bitter and more than a little wild that night, and I…was in love with her.”

  “You were?” That hadn’t occurred to me. I had pegged him as gay; that he might be bisexual never entered my mind.

  “Very much so. And I made the mistake of trying to tell her so that night.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes.” A strange smile touched his pale mouth. “And, you see, at the time I had been experimenting with peyote—mostly for spiritual reasons, though not entirely—and we all drank a good deal all the time back then.”

  “You’re saying it was drugs and alcohol?”

  “The drugs and alcohol didn’t help, certainly.” He was silent for a moment. I thought of the times he had canceled our interviews, and I held my tongue.

  At last he said, “I was the only one by the pool when she came out of the hotel and walked through the
courtyard to Ball’s villa. I followed her inside. We argued. It was unlike either of us, really, those ugly, horrible things we said that night. She couldn’t separate me from Tony, you see, she thought we were the same, and she was worse after I told her I loved her.”

  He fell silent. I said, “And so you picked up a knife?”

  “There was a fruit basket on the table. She was cutting apples and pears up—using the wrong size knife, which was so like her—and—I don’t remember. I really don’t. I only remember standing there after it was over. It seemed like a dream. Far away and long ago—it felt more like a distant memory then than it does now. I remember I was very angry with her for making me do that. I picked up the tarot card from the table, and I placed it on her.”

  “Reversed,” I said.

  His strange gaze rested on me. “That’s right. The Lovers betrayed.”

  “And the fingerprints didn’t matter because the card was yours to begin with.”

  “That’s true.”

  “And then you went outside to the pool and jumped in.”

  “There was still no one in the pool. I jumped in and washed off the knife and let it sink to the bottom of the drain. By the time Stephen walked outside, the pool was full of people again, but everyone was so drunk that no one remembered who had been there first. I wasn’t clever at all, but somehow the fates worked to protect me, and I suppose I believed there was some purpose to that.”

  I didn’t know what to say. He was still the same person who had showed kindness and compassion to me and he had committed an act of monstrous violence.

  “And all these years you’ve kept silent.”

  “I couldn’t see any value in speaking. It wouldn’t bring her back, and—I was afraid. But I’m not afraid anymore, and I was almost happy when I heard this book was to be written. I thought that if you could discover the truth, I would confirm it for you, but you would have to do the work yourself.”

  “What do you expect me to do now?”