Alive!

by Loren D. Estleman

  He was hungry suddenly, for food and human contact. It was well past lunchtime, but he knew Kyle Broadhead paid as little attention to scheduling meals as he did, fueling up only when the tank was empty and impossible to ignore. Valentino found him in, and arranged to meet him at their favorite new restaurant.

  The Brass Gimbal catered to industry insiders. The photos on the walls were more likely to feature great cameramen than iconic movie stars. Broadhead waved Valentino over to the Billy Bitzer booth and they ordered beer on tap and burgers from a waitress wearing a necktie that looked like a film strip. Valentino chose the Smash Cut, a quarter pound of black Angus drenched in Technicolor Sauce (a rainbow of ketchup, mustard, and guacamole), Broadhead a vegetarian burger identified on the menu as the Green Screen. “I’m a little worried about the special effects, ‘ he said, “but Fanta wants me to start eating healthy.”

  Valentino wasn’t in the mood for small talk. He told him about Hunter.

  Broadhead nodded. “Ruth filled me in on the police visit. She made it sound like a raid. I’m sorry, but the way he was going, this end seems almost merciful.”

  “What’s merciful about a bludgeoning?”

  “You haven’t had the advantage of thirty-six months buried alive in a Communist prison, without clean linen or hope.”

  “So many of our conversations come back to that. Do I have to wait until your book is published to find out the details?”

  “You won’t find them in this one. I’ve decided not to write it as autobiography after all. I’d hate to invest so much angst in a project the CIA will never allow to see print.”

  Valentino had heard him drop hints before about his jailing in Yugoslavia on a trumped-up charge of espionage. Was it trumped up? This aging curmudgeon with unruly gray hair and a slept-in face was the least political person he knew; but wasn’t that part of the criteria? The archivist could focus on only one mystery at a time. “Explain that suitcase full of books.”

  “It may be significant or not. Maybe he got them cheap and hoped to lay them off somewhere and score dope with the profit.”

  “You don’t think there’s anything to my theory?”

  “Theories are based on fact, not guesses. Lugosi’s travails are a lesson in the danger of hubris—he turned down Frankenstein, for pity’s sake—but it’s certainly not unique in show business.”

  Something Broadhead had said resounded deep in Valentino’s subconscious. He tried to bring it to the surface, but lost it in the murk. His brain was a spare room crammed to the ceiling with running times, release dates, cast lists, and Hollywood lore, arranged in no particular order. At times it might have been empty for all it was of any use. “What about Karloff?”

  “We measure failures against successes. He started out the lowest of the low, you know.”

  “He drove a truck and performed menial jobs in between pictures when he was starting out. Nothing unique there either.”

  “William Henry Pratt”—Broadhead used the actor’s birth name—”was the son of a British civil servant and an East Indian woman: a half-caste. In Victorian society, that was the bottom rung of the ladder, with no hope of ascending ever. Then there were seven older brothers to bully him, mentally and physically. The abuse continued into adulthood, driving him into exile in Canada, then to the U.S. in search of work. He left at least three marriages in the dust before he was forty-five. Does any of this strike you as familiar?”

  “It’s the plot of Frankenstein—the Monster’s part, anyway, roughly. It’s no wonder he identified so well with a cobbled-up creature, alone and despised.” Valentino had noted the swarthiness of the gaunt actor’s features, which became more pronounced as his hair whitened. He’d assumed it was because of the California sun, shining down on him beside his swimming pool; stories had circulated of his eccentricity, basking beside it in a swimsuit and top hat, of all things. “How do you know this?”

  “How does a popular-culture historian know anything? I got it from the horse’s mouth.”

  “You knew Karloff?”

  “I made my first dollar in this town—and precious little more—working as a studio messenger. I delivered pages of Bogdonavich’s screenplay to him when he was filming Targets, the last year of his life. Age confides in youth, as I am doing now. He knew the end was near. He was confined to a wheelchair, except when he gathered the strength and courage to stand before the camera. Crippling arthritis was the culprit, abetted not a little by three unsuccessful spinal surgeries to correct the miseries brought on by that sadist James Whale. Did you know he forced Karloff to carry Colin Clive up the hill to that windmill in Frankenstein dozens of times? That experience made him an early activist on behalf of the Screen Actors Guild. A man will tell things to a complete stranger he would never share with his own flesh and blood.”

  Their meals came. Valentino took one look at his burger, an obscene lump of cooked flesh covered with blood-red sauce, and knew he would never bring himself to take a bite. He couldn’t erase the picture of Craig Hunter beaten to a pulp. He found the bitter taste of the beer more palatable. Was this how alcoholics were born? He couldn’t ask Craig.

  Broadhead, the healed-over cynic, poured ketchup on his sandwich and helped himself to it with apparent gusto. “All this is public knowledge now. Oscar Wilde said the posthumous biography brings a new horror to death. You’ve been preoccupied with your experiment in resurrectionist architecture, or you’d be aware of more recent discoveries in the history of our quaint industry. The ghouls who call themselves scholars would send George Romero screaming into the night.”

  “I first saw Frankenstein on my family’s old black-and-white TV set, in my bedroom after they replaced it with a color television in the living room. I was sitting up in my bed with Pepi, my Chihuahua-terrier, curled up in my lap. Every time I’ve seen it since, I’ve felt that same cuddly warmth. I’ll miss that next time, thanks to you.”

  “Don’t. Karloff wouldn’t appreciate your tears, nor would he feel he deserved them. His last marriage was a long and happy one, and it produced a well-adjusted daughter, who supplements her income talking about her father on DVD extras.”

  “What was he like?”

  Broadhead put down his burger and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “I keep forgetting you’re a sprockethead first and a scholar second. He was extremely gracious, in an Old World way you don’t find anymore, even in polite Europeans. His conversation grew tedious when he talked about his American family, which he did often; but he had that wonderful warm baritone and that marvelous lisp.

  “His famous gentle sense of humor was solidly based on irony,” he went on. “Lugosi, and for that matter your friend Hunter, might have been able to keep things in perspective had they possessed such a thing.”

  “You’re forgetting that Karloff was looking back from a position of triumph. Peering out from the depths of misery is a different thing altogether.”

  “True, although the aphorism rings false coming from one of your tender years. You have yet to experience true misery.”

  “Don’t give up hope. I just spent fifty bucks on a can of paint older than you are.”

  “If you’ve come to me for sympathy, you wasted a trip. I’ve advised you from the beginning to let that Hindenburg go down in its own flames before they consume you.”

  “Noted. None of this has helped me figure out why Craig was murdered.

  Broadhead raised his bushy brows. “I’m an academic, and by definition useless in all things practical. Please tell me you haven’t decided to play detective yet again.”

  “I don’t have any choice. I still have two hundred cards that say I’m a film detective, and I can’t afford to throw them out.”

  “That, too, is a decision I warned you against. Either I’m a singularly inept mentor or you’re the worst protégé who ever lived. You realize the police are fully equipped to investigate homicide, even in a wilderness like San Diego.”

 
“Granted, but with them it’s just routine. You can devote only so much time to one case in an eight-hour tour of duty. My involvement is personal.”

  “Yes. Emotional baggage is so much more portable than the professional kind.” Broadhead sipped his beer, made a face, and set down the mug. “Since counsel from me is so easily ignored, I offer more, knowing it will bring no repercussions. You should have a talk with that young man of yours. Find out whether he’s a threat to himself and others or just odd.”

  “My young man? You mean Jason? He does what I ask and doesn’t talk back. He isn’t exactly a conformist, but the university doesn’t offer credits for that. Did you forget you sent him to me in the first place?”

  “That was when I thought he was just another campus goof-ball. On my way here I saw him coming out of your office, dressed like an undertaker and wearing what looked like the cross-section of a submarine on his head.”

  “A submarine?” He remembered the high silk hat. “He said something about stopping by a junkyard. I guess he found something to modify his outfit and used my office for a workshop. It’s okay, as long as I didn’t need it.”

  “He was wearing a chain and padlock. When he said he was on his way to a party, I asked if he was going as a hardware store. He said it wasn’t a costume party.”

  “He told me the same thing.”

  “Well, he’s your intern, and your property, so to speak. But I’m locking my office from now on. Assuming he isn’t wearing a jockstrap made of skeleton keys.”

  Valentino was spared the labor of fashioning a rejoinder by his cell phone: the two-note theme of Jaws, which he’d downloaded for the Halloween season. He answered.

  He recognized the cool voice immediately. “Mr. Valentino, I’m calling on behalf of Mr. Horace Lysander. Are you free to meet with him in his office at four o’clock this afternoon?”

  **

  CHAPTER

  7

  NO SHADY MOB mouthpiece out of Central Casting, Horace Lysander was senior partner in a firm that took up two floors of a sparkling glass tower in Century City. The reception room outside the office was paneled in tiger maple, with ambient lighting that illuminated every square inch from behind soffits. The buff-colored leather upholstery gripped Valentino’s hips and buttocks like a giant and gentle toothless dog.

  He waited less than five minutes until the receptionist, a lacquered-looking redhead with the cool voice he’d heard over the phone, said, “Yes, sir,” into her headset and told him he could go in. He got up and had his hand out to work the knob of the inner door before he realized it didn’t have one. Something clicked and it drifted inward, then back into the frame when he was on the other side.

  The office was fifteen times the size of his own, with an enormous Turkish carpet that predated California’s founding and a glass wall looking out on the city, which appeared less smoggy from that point of view, as if that was the spot where the photographers who made picture postcards for the chamber of commerce set up their tripods. Built-in bookshelves held rows of legal volumes bound in cream-colored leather—superfluous in the Digital Age, but reassuring to clients—and German Expressionist paintings hung on the remaining two walls, their exaggerated perspectives and jagged lines reminding Valentino of cels from the original Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. There was about the place a sense of monolithic stability, with the cars looping freeway cloverleafs many stories below representing a world in a constant state of flux outside.

  Lysander himself was more animated than the interior, a large, soft, smiling pink bald man in a beautiful gray suit who popped up from behind his desk and strode around it to shake Valentino’s hand. The desk was a great oblong sheet of polished obsidian resting on a pedestal, heavy enough to require a reinforced floor to sustain its weight; an eternity in construction purgatory had made Valentino an informal expert on zoning restrictions in Los Angeles County.

  “Are you working with the police?” Lysander’s smile remained in place and his eyes on his visitor’s, who was nevertheless acutely aware that his daily uniform of sweatshirt and jeans was out of place.

  “No, they’re not so desperate they’ve taken to hiring film archivists to assist in their investigations. I’m looking into Craig Hunter’s death as a friend.”

  “Please accept my sympathy. At my age I’ve grown accustomed to burying friends, but it must be traumatic for one so young.”

  “Thank you. I’m older than I look, but I hope I never get so old I’ll take murder in stride.”

  “As do I. As a criminal attorney I’ve seen more than my share of crime-scene photos and autopsy reports. I despair sometimes for the future of the race. Two detectives interviewed Mr. Grundage in my presence this morning. We both assured them that we never had any contact with Hunter.”

  Valentino knew this for a lie, but it was too early to spring the trap. He wanted to know more about the man he was dealing with. “Craig was beaten to death and his arms were broken ritually above the elbows. Detective Yellowfern said Grundage practically has a patent on the method.”

  “If he’d said that here, in front of a third party, I’d seek damages for slander and defamation of character. Mr. Grundage has never been charged with a crime, much less indicted or convicted.”

  “That’s a sterling claim for an upstanding citizen to post on his website.”

  If he expected the lawyer to bridle at that, he was disappointed. Many hundreds of hours in court had sealed his emotions inside layers of hard shell. “His father, Anthony Grundage—Big Tony—worked his way up from a common longshoreman in San Diego to become an influential labor leader during the Depression. The competition developed its tactics with crowbar in hand, not from behind a desk. His son would be the first to concede that he responded in kind. The Kefauver Committee indicted Anthony on six counts of extortion in interstate commerce in 1951, then dropped all charges for lack of evidence. However, his exposure on national television during his testimony branded him a notorious character until his death. Whatever improprieties the father may or may not have committed, it’s irresponsible and actionable to apply them to the son.”

  “He’s being investigated by Congress, just as his father was,” Valentino said. “But you know that, having sat beside him during his appearances. Our senators and representatives don’t take that step for their own amusement.”

  “I agree. Are you a native Californian?”

  “No. I was born and raised in Indiana.”

  “I am. The first firm I interned with had a department that specialized in contract law and represented people in the entertainment industry. In your time here you can’t have failed to note that publicity is the coin of the realm. Washington is no different. Face time means as much to a politician as it does to an actor. When it comes to headlines, the name Grundage is magic. Now, if there’s nothing else you wanted to see me about, I have important calls to place.”

  It was a scene-ending line if ever there was one, but rather than turn away in dismissal, Lysander held his ground. Clearly he was expecting his visitor to make the next move. In that moment, Valentino realized the attorney had consented to the interview as much to gain information as to impart it. It was time for the archivist to play his card.

  “There is something else. You denied ever hearing from Craig Hunter, but he called you in this office last Friday night.”

  Lysander didn’t blink. “Who said that?”

  “No one. Your number was on his redial.”

  “Anyone is free to dial my number. It’s listed. Perhaps he misdialed.”

  “Angering you enough to tell your client, who had him killed using his modus operandi. That’s no sillier than to call it coincidence.”

  “Be careful, young man. The line between hypothesis and false accusation is very thin.”

  “I have a witness who says he was in conversation for some time with whoever answered. It was the last call he made from that phone before he was murdered.”

&
nbsp; “And the name of your witness?”

  Valentino shook his head.

  “Young man, I’ve faced many an ambitious prosecutor. I know when I’m being bluffed.”

  “I told you I’m older than I look. Telephone company records will show whether a call was placed to your number and for how long.”

  For the first time he saw an authentic-looking reaction on the lawyer’s face, a slight deepening of the pink on his cheek. “I need to confer with a client before I continue this conversation,” he said. “Would you step outside for a few minutes?”

  “Mike Grundage?”

  “Please step outside.”

  Valentino did so, strolling the reception room and reading certificates of public service preserved in clear Lucite as the woman behind the desk whispered her fingers over her computer keyboard. She stopped typing, listening over her headset. She gave the visitor a chilly smile and pushed the button that unlocked and opened the door to the private office.