Alive!

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Rummy?”

  “I like to keep my wits about me. Jason’s underage.”

  Jason, who had lifted his glass for pouring, colored and set it back down.

  “Far be it from me to break the law.” Smiling for the first time—a tight-lipped turning up at the corners that warmed his personality not a jot—Grundage filled his glass to within a half inch of the rim and then Lysander’s. The attorney’s hand shook a little as he retrieved it. Valentino wondered if he was a rummy, to use his host’s term; worry increased.

  “My old man was superstitious. I’m not. I don’t toast.” Grundage sipped from his glass and waved the waiter away. (Lysander, his guest noticed, took a healthier sample, replaced the glass on the table, and removed his fingers from the stem with what looked like reluctance.)

  “My stepmother’s a good woman. She spent a lot of time trying to keep me away from my father’s business; but I’m his son, and that’s that. I don’t want her mixed up in this.”

  “I can’t promise that.” Valentino picked up his fork. “Not until I know what this is. What did you mean about you and I having something in common? Don’t you know where the test is?”

  “First, we eat. The old man told me you can’t conduct good business on an empty stomach.”

  They dined virtually in silence, broken up only by the tink of silver on china and the strains of old standards performed by current artists on a sound system better than most restaurants’. The food was sumptuous to look at, cooked to a pleasing shade, the meat fork tender, the side dishes colorful, but the taste was lost on Valentino. Had he seen too many mob movies, or didn’t gangsters fatten their victims before sacrificing them? Jason, he saw, ate with apparent pleasure; the student union couldn’t compete with The Grotto’s kitchen, and thin people in general out-trenchered the rest of society.

  Grundage pushed away the remnants of his dessert and snatched his napkin from his collar: the only vestige Valentino had noted of his plebian ancestry. Their waiter materialized instantly to clear his side of the table. When he departed: “What’s in it for you if you lay hands on this gizmo?’’

  His guest applied sparkling water to his dry mouth. “That was an excellent meal, Mr. Grundage. I can’t imagine why I’d never heard of this place.”

  “I throw bums and food critics out of the joint. It’s crowded enough. We chew, we swallow, we shove it out the back door, then we think about the next meal and how do we get our mitts on it. So how do you?”

  He’d decided he couldn’t do business with Mike Grundage by appealing to his interest in history. This was nothing new. He’d spent his share of time in the hot seat at budget meetings, making his case for the profit potential in film preservation apart from its historical responsibility. Gangsters and boards of directors responded only to the promise of a healthy bottom line.

  “Laying hands on that screen test means we can market it through theatrical distribution followed by DVD rentals and sales. An investment of, say, a hundred thousand dollars could yield half again that amount retail. Universities are businesses, too.” He watched the wolf-eyed face for some reaction. He’d severely undervalued the item under discussion in the interest of horse trading.

  “Your friend Hunter offered my stepmother a quarter million.”

  Valentino smiled despite himself. “Craig would’ve been hard pressed to come up with a tenth of that.”

  “I’m just telling you what my stepmama done told me. You saying she’s a liar?”

  Jason burped and giggled. Valentino, knowing incipient hysteria when he heard it, pressed his knee against the young man’s. The giggling stopped.

  “I’m sure she’s a woman of integrity. I’m just telling you what I know about Craig.”

  Grundage seemed mollified, on the subject of his stepmother. “What’s this thing worth really?”

  “Do you have it?”

  “What’s that got to do with what we’re talking about?” The proprietor of The Grotto showed irritation for the first time. Valentino wondered suddenly if he had money troubles. The grand jury investigation, and his obligations to Lysander’s legal firm, must have been a constant drain. The man was strapped for cash. That was something Valentino could relate to.

  “Mr. Grundage, once I’m convinced you’re in possession of the property we’re discussing, we can move on to honest negotiation. Right now I can’t understand why you would be. Your father could have obtained it easily enough from a projectionist in the union he represented, but it seems to me he’d have sold it many years go. Why hoard it?”

  “Because that’s what he did. My old man was a packrat. After he died I moved my stepmother out of that barn they lived in and set her up in a luxury condo. I threw out most of the crap he piled up and put the rest in storage. He probably forgot he even had the film.”

  This sounded plausible. J. Arthur Greenwood had said almost the same thing about his own collection. “But how did Hunter find out about it?”

  “This whole town’s a chatterbox, just like L.A. I had all the stuff we kept in Elizabeth’s name inventoried for insurance purposes. Somebody spilled his guts.”

  “May I ask why she turned down Hunter’s offer?”

  “Horace told her if a grifter was offering that much, she should hold out for a million.”

  Valentino glanced at the attorney, but continued to address himself to Grundage. “He told me he advised her not to sell it on any terms, and that’s when Craig threatened him.”

  “I told him to tell you that. He called me, not Elizabeth, when you were in his office. I figured you’d lose interest if he said no way. I’m tired of people coming around asking questions. Hunter did call Horace and called him all kinds of an S.O.B. Why would he get so sore if he was fronting for somebody, unless he planned to double-cross him and hold him up for more?”

  “He was fronting for a man named Greenwood, a private collector. I talked to him.”

  “So how high was this Greenwood prepared to go?”

  “He hoped to get it for less than a million.”

  “Which means it’s worth more.”

  “Not much more, if it is. Things are bad all over.”

  Grundage smiled his chilly smile. “This is starting to sound like a haggling session. Who you working for, Hunter’s big fish or yourself?”

  “Neither. I got into this on his ex-wife’s behalf, to find out who killed him and why. When I learned the Frankenstein test was involved, I naturally became interested as a representative of the Film Preservation Department.”

  “You saying there’s nothing in it for you?”

  “A finder’s fee. I’ve got expenses.”

  Lysander spoke up. “You have more than that, young man. That eyesore in West Hollywood is eating you alive.”

  “I set Horace on you,” Grundage explained. “I like to know everything I can about a man before I set up a meet. What’s your fee?”

  “The amount depends on the profit UCLA realizes from DVD rentals and sales, less the cost of transferring the film from silver-nitrate to safety stock and restoring it as closely as possible to its original condition, which is likely to be substantial.”

  The racketeer made a yak-yak motion with one hand. “I didn’t bring you down here to ask how your business is run.

  “What’s your offer?”

  “Mike, we need to discuss this with Elizabeth before we commit to anything.”

  “Relax, Counselor. Everybody knows you got the hots for her.”

  “That’s an ugly way to put it.” Lysander’s face flushed deeply.

  Jason hadn’t spoken since they’d entered the restaurant. Now he said, “You haven’t mentioned whether you had the film.”

  Valentino glanced at him, surprised he’d broken his silence and by his own neglect in not pressing the question.

  Grundage was still smiling. “Kid’s got a head on his shoulders. You never can tell, can you? You might as well tell ‘em, Horac
e. They don’t have it.”

  The archivist’s heart sank. “You mean you don’t?”

  The lawyer answered for him. “Three nights ago, someone broke into the storage unit. Those two reels were the only things missing.”

  **

  CHAPTER

  15

  JASON WAS A good driver, careful and in control. He kept steady speed with most of the other cars on the freeway and didn’t lose his temper with southbound drivers who refused to dim their lights.

  “You think Craig Hunter stole the film?” He kept his eyes on the road.

  Valentino glared at the darkness outside his window on the passenger’s side. “A few years ago I’d have said no. But by the end he was capable of anything. If Elizabeth Grundage wouldn’t do business with him on Lysander’s advice, he might just have done it out of desperation. Maybe he made up his mind that night he called Lysander to chew him out. It would explain why he was so excited. He’d found a way to cut out the middleman and keep all the profit for himself.”

  “Mike Grundage must have suspected he was the thief. Does that put him back on the list?”

  “He was never really off. But if he did kill Craig, we know he didn’t get the film back. This trip was a fishing expedition on his part to find out if Craig had slipped it to me.”

  “What do you think he did with it?”

  “I’ve been racking my brain over that. If he had it in his apartment in Long Beach, the police would have found it when they searched the place for clues after he was killed. I hope he picked a stable hiding spot.”

  “Stable?”

  “That old silver-nitrate stock doesn’t hold up well to adverse conditions. If there was anything left of it after all those years in the Grundages’ possession—Lord knows how they treated it; winding up in an ordinary storage unit isn’t an encouraging sign—it might be turning to vinegar in a damp crawlspace somewhere.”

  “Maybe he put it in a bank safety deposit box.”

  “Not much better, but if he did, it will turn up when it’s examined by the authorities. That’s standard procedure after someone’s death.”

  “Then you can start negotiating with Elizabeth Grundage.”

  “Provided the police find and convict Craig’s murderer before nature takes its course in a muggy evidence room in San Diego. I’ve been down this road before.”

  “Can I help?”

  “Help me with what?”

  “Solving the murder.”

  But it was late, and the sleep he’d been missing caught up with him before he could answer. His last thought as he slipped under was that everyone he spent time with, no matter how casually, seemed to know him so well.

  **

  “Sound! Roll ‘em! Action!”

  The villagers, who have doused their cigarettes and put the occasional flask back on the occasional hip, respond with aching muscles to the commands issuing from the megaphone. They collect their torches, take the bloodhounds by their leashes from the trainers, and resume babbling nonsensical strings of vowels and consonants, tumbling over the brambles and uneven earth of the backlot and hoping this is the last take: It’s getting on toward midnight, and there is no Screen Actors Guild to demand decent hours and extra pay for overtime. The hounds’ baying echoes their own miseries.

  But none of the extras is suffering as much as the man in the heavy boots, steel braces, dense padding, and two sets of union suits still clammy with perspiration from yesterday’s shooting in a blazing Southern California summer. The man at his side has been drinking heavily between takes and gives him no help as he sags into his arms—all six feet and one hundred eighty pounds of him—and forces him to carry him on his shoulder up the steep hill to the gaunt windmill at the top for the seventeenth time since sundown. For some reason, the director has taken a dislike to the actor in the ponderous and painful makeup, and seems to draw sadistic delight from torturing him physically, wasting film in the process: But film costs only two cents a foot, and the actor himself is being paid less than the amount budgeted for that part of the production.

  So once again he hauls his heavy and inebriated colleague a quarter-mile up a sixty-degree slope, his breath heaving and sawing in his throat, sweat making gullies in the greenish greasepaint on his face and dissolving the mortician’s wax used to fashion his drooping eyelids into particles that burn his eyes like acid.

  “And . . . cut!”

  He lowers the other actor onto his unsteady feet and stands panting with hands braced on his thighs, the backs of those hands built up with thick artificial veins, waiting for his heartbeat to slow. If the windmill’s blades rotated at that same rate the entire building would take to the air.

  “You were a little slow on that one, Boris,’’ drawls the man with the megaphone in his meticulous (and entirely fabricated) West End accent. “Remember, you’re a superhuman creation. You’re not driving a truck. Let’s go again, shall we? Places!”

  He won’t even be invited to the premiere.

  **

  “Mr. Valentino?”

  Stirred from yet another dream in which he didn’t appear, he changed positions, wondering why his bed had so many hard surfaces suddenly. When Jason shook him by the shoulder, he jumped, bumped his head against the window, and remembered he wasn’t in The Oracle. A blinding light was shining in his face. He shielded his eyes against the powerful flashlight, saw the pale oval of a face beneath the visor of a uniform cap looking through the window on Jason’s side, and beyond it the blue-and-red strobes of a police car bouncing off the front of the theater.

  Taking Jason’s and Valentino’s driver’s licenses, the officer examined them with his flash, then returned them. “Come with me, please, sir. Not you. You can leave.”

  The boy had reached for the door handle. He looked at Valentino.

  “It’s all right. You can drive the car to campus in the morning. I’ll take the bus.”

  Jason opened his mouth to say something, but the officer tapped his flashlight on the window frame and he started the engine. Valentino got out and accompanied the man in uniform inside as the car drove off.

  All the lights in the foyer (those that had been replaced so far) were burning. He found the boyish sergeant with the eyes that were not boyish and the detective whose profile belonged on an Indian-head penny waiting there. Others in uniforms and plainclothes bustled about in the shadows.

  Gill spoke first. “We’re cooperating with LAPD on this one, since it involves our case. Would you mind telling us where you were this evening?”

  “San Diego.”

  “Wish I was in San Diego,” Yellowfern said. “Paying your respects to Mike Grundage?”

  “As a matter of fact, I was.”

  Detectives were very difficult to surprise, even more so to get a reaction from when one succeeded. The pair exchanged a glance. Gill said, “I got the impression you weren’t in each other’s social circle.”

  “He invited me to the Grotto for dinner. I was going to tell you about it later.”

  “How much later?” Yellowfern snapped.

  “Time enough for that,” said his partner. “One of your neighbors called in a possible B-and-E. Someone was prowling around inside with a flashlight. They saw it through the windows.”

  “What’s a breaking-and-entering in West Hollywood have to do with San Diego Homicide?” The reason for the crime was clear to him now. Grundage, suspecting Craig had given him the test reels for safekeeping, had lured him far enough out of town to give his people in L.A. time to search the theater. Gill and Yellowfern would have heard the report on their radio and investigated it on a hunch, based on the location.

  The sergeant said, “I said that’s how it was called in. It’s a little more than that now.” He made a beckoning gesture with his finger.

  Valentino followed the pair into the auditorium, where the recently rewired crystal chandelier made a pond of light reaching the base of the staircase to
the projection booth. The door to it was open and something lay at the foot.

  The woman was sprawled in an impossible position. She was dressed exotically even by entertainment-capital standards, in brilliant red and midnight black, the waist cut narrow and the shoulders square. Her face was in the shadow of the stairwell, but Valentino could spot Teddie Goodman, his arch-rival, under any circumstances.

  **

  CHAPTER

  16

  AS HE WAS staring, a foot twitched at the end of a shattered leg and a low, heartbreaking moan issued from the shadow of the stairwell. Valentino looked at the detectives, horror-stricken.