Hollywood and Levine

by Andrew Bergman

  Her voice turned conciliatory.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m not a relative, just an investigator. Could you tell me where Mr. Parker is staying in New York?”

  “I’m afraid I couldn’t,” she said pleasantly. “He does not wish that information to be divulged.”

  “Just this time or most times?”

  A telephone began ringing at her end.

  “Excuse me, Mr. LeVine, I have another call. Mr. Parker will be back in the office on Monday.”

  “Listen, this is a police matter and I urge you to tell me where …”

  But she pushed a button and left me addressing my remarks to an unsympathetic dial tone. I pressed down and released the receiver, then fed the black box another nickel.

  I got the operator and asked her to connect me with Denver Information. It took a while but Denver Information, sounding like Whistler’s Mother, finally answered. The connection was miserable; I had the sensation of calling a small shack in the Rockies.

  The old lady asked what city I wanted.

  “Denver, ma. Could you give me the number of the Denver Post?”

  “Surely could. I take the Post myself, don’tcha know.”

  She gave me the number right off the top of that sweet gray head. I thanked the lady and got the L.A. operator back. The business of reading and repeating the Denver number, then my number, the obtaining of a line to Denver, the wait until Denver picked up, the wait until the Post picked up, and finally, the dropping of a thunderous, chiming fistful of change into the correct slots—all of this, in our age of wonders, consumed fifteen minutes.

  Fortunately, matters accelerated from that point on. I was briskly connected to the city room and an amiable fellow who, unlike any newspaperman I have ever encountered in my life, wished me a good afternoon.

  “Afternoon,” I replied. “My name is Jack LeVine and I’m a private detective currently operating out of Los Angeles. That’s where I’m calling from.”

  “Yessir. Better keep it short, then. Those L.A. calls eat up the silver, don’t they?”

  “Certainly do. There a police reporter handy?”

  “You’re talking to him, Jack. Bud Murray. What can I do for you?”

  “Bud, I’m interested in an event that occured in Denver during the late twenties or early thirties, a rape charge pressed against a man named Pardee.”

  “Did it stick?”

  “I don’t know a thing about it. Pardee was also charged with disturbing the peace on New Year’s Eve in 1927, at a joint called the Big Sky Club.”

  “Hell, I disturb the peace every New Year’s! What kind of a chickenshit rap is that?”

  “He must have gotten way out of line. I’m basically interested in the rape charge, though, Bud.”

  “Doesn’t ring any bells offhand, Jack. Before my time. Only been in Denver since the war ended. There’s some old cases that are famous, of course, but this isn’t one of them.”

  “Anyway to check on it?”

  “If you don’t mind holding on, I could go downstairs to the morgue and see if we got any clippings on it.”

  “I’d appreciate it.”

  “Okay. Keep your quarters handy. I’ll try and make it fast.”

  I held on for about five minutes, during which I was shaken down for another buck-sixty.

  When Murray came back on the line, there was a note of curiosity in his voice.

  “Funny thing, Jack, that file is empty. Folder’s there, but nothing’s inside. I asked around a little, though, and an old-timer on the copy desk said he vaguely remembered the case as dating from early ’31 sometime. He wasn’t positive but I’d take a flyer on it; he’s usually right.”

  “I’m very grateful to you, Bud.”

  “Enough to tell me what it’s all about?”

  “No, but you’ve been a big help.”

  “That’s what they all say,” the reporter said good-naturedly. “Anyhow, if this leads you to Denver, stop on by. I always enjoy chewing the cud with big-city peepers.”

  “You just might see me. Thanks again.”

  I hung up and flew out of Schwab’s. That empty folder might have been an accident, but I convinced myself with no trouble at all that its contents had been lifted. Which meant that the clipping had meaning and that, in turn, meant finding a library extensive enough to carry back issues of the Denver Post. I therefore climbed into the Chrysler and pointed it in the direction of that palmy oasis of higher education, the University of California at Los Angeles.

  UCLA was a green and sprawling campus musical of a school located in the Westwood Village section of Los Angeles, due west of Beverly Hills. The student body consisted of young men and women so beautiful they looked to have been summoned from Central Casting. Heartbreaking blondes with flawless skin and tanned, muscular legs walked with verve and bounce across the wide lawns, waving at tall blond men, all smiles, perfect and uncomplicated. These golden, agreeable youths seemed to me not merely a new generation, but a new variety in the evolutionary garden, a new species entirely.

  To a City College dropout like myself, whose classmates had resembled white-skinned, bespectacled frogs, whose experience of co-eds was of an army of dark and large-boned girls already assuming the woeful countenances of their mothers, the spectacle of UCLA was disheartening. I felt old, ugly, and invisible. As I made my way to the library, students seemed to part around me as if stepping past a tree. Why look at a pale yid in a green hat with an army of beach boys to choose from?

  I was not surprised to find the library virtually empty. Perhaps a half-dozen people were seated in the main downstairs reading room, bent over textbooks and taking notes. From their pallor, I judged them to be Easterners hiding from the radiant good looks and sunny, sexy friendship of the California kids. I probably would have done the same.

  There was nobody at the main desk. I drummed my fingers and coughed: a middle-aged woman poked her head from an open door marked “Staff Only.” She emerged and strolled over to the desk, a chunky, buxom lady with petite features and a generous smile.

  “Hi!” she greeted me.

  “Afternoon, ma’am. I’m interested in checking some back issues of the Denver Post.”

  “All righty.” Her speech was as Midwestern as a hot pie cooling on a window sill. “Faculty?”

  “No, ma’am.” I removed my wallet. “I’m Jack LeVine, the private investigator from New York.”

  Her eyes widened, then twinkled.

  “Ooh,” she cooed. “Like Sam Spade, or Philip Marlowe. You’re one of those fellows?”

  “Something like that.”

  “My, my.” She leaned across the desk. “You read Raymond Chandler much, or Hammett?”

  “Do you read about libraries?”

  She laughed as shrilly as if I had thrust a feather duster beneath her dress.

  “I guess I don’t, that’s true enough. Dear me.” She sighed contentedly. “Is this a police matter, Mr. LeVine?”

  “It’s in connection with a police matter, yes ma’am.”

  “All righty. I’ll write you a pass and you’ll present it to Miss Anderson on the second floor.” She frowned. “The Denver Post,” she ruminated. “We’ll probably have it. Anything east of the Mississippi, except for The New York Times, and you’d be out of luck.”

  She scribbled on a piece of white paper and handed it to me.

  “Miss Anderson will be the gray-haired woman.” She lowered her voice confidentially. “Has a slight limp and kind of a bad eye.”

  “Bad eye?”

  “You’ll see.”

  I thanked her and went up the stairs, suddenly very excited about the prospect of reading a sixteen-year-old newspaper.

  I was seated at my own table in a small, curtained reading room. The place was empty but for me and the tiny, limping Miss Anderson, who cheerfully insisted on carrying over the half-dozen bound and dusty volumes of the Denver Post I had requested.

  “Now be very careful
with these,” she said in a librarian’s clear whisper. “Turn the pages slowly and not from the end; turn them down near the spine.” She opened a book and demonstrated the correct technique. “The pages will just flake off in your hands otherwise.”

  “Fine. I’m very much obliged.”

  “Anything for our lawmen.” She smiled behind rimless spectacles. There was a slight milkiness to her left eye. “If you need anything, I’m outside behind the desk. If you can’t find me there, try the staff room.”

  “Again, thanks so much.”

  She nodded, turned, and padded from the room on rubber-soled shoes. When she closed the door behind her, the room’s silence deepened; the only noise was the sleepy drone of an electric fan. That and the hush of turning pages as I began my search for the rapist Pardee.

  It took me nearly an hour to go through January. For one thing, I made the error of combing every item, no matter how patently trivial; for another, I got predictably enveloped in 1931 nostalgia, checking on prices, on clothing and automobile styles, on movie and radio listings. I couldn’t help myself, with the result that I wasted over an hour in an uneventful month.

  February and March went by more quickly, but no more profitably. Still no Pardee. My eyes had begun to hurt and I was dying for a smoke, so I arose, stretched, and went out to the stairwell. I drank some water, sat down on the steps, and puffed a Lucky. It was easy to recall the boredom that drove me out of college.

  I returned to my desk at a quarter to four and started leafing through April. The musty smell of the pages and the sunlight beating through the windows was making me drowsy; despite Miss Anderson’s strictures, I began turning the pages more quickly, impatient for results.

  April passed with nothing more meaningful than the start of the baseball season and predictions that the Athletics had a lock on the American League race. May began with a zoning dispute and a five-car pileup on the interstate. But suddenly, on May 8, my story loomed before me.

  And what a story.

  The headline read “MAN HELD ON RAPE CHARGE” and beneath it was a grainy two-column photograph of the accused being led into the police station. The caption read “James W. Pardee, 25, of Sedalia, entering police headquarters last night.”

  He was younger then, and angrier, but there was no mistaking Pardee’s face.

  I knew him as Johnny Parker.

  Denver police last night arrested James W. Pardee, 25, of Sedalia, charging him with the rape of a Central High School student last Thursday night. Pardee was apprehended in the Big Horn Diner on West Street.

  Arresting officers G. A. Charles and C. D. White said they had identified the suspect from a description given by the sixteen-year-old victim. The police are now awaiting positive identification.

  Pardee’s arrest on the rape charge is his second arrest, according to Denver authorities. He was charged with disturbing the peace during a New Year’s celebration at the Big Sky Club in 1927. The charge was dismissed.

  I read the story three times. Maybe “read” is the wrong word; I gazed at the newspaper page like a gypsy hag hunched over steaming tea leaves in a carnival tent. I attempted to divine an omen, to conjure a vision out of this fragment of 1931 Denver. Parker’s face? Sullen, stunned, but nothing unusual. An arm was guiding Parker into the station house. Officer G. A. Charles? Officer C. D. White?

  Clarence White?

  That was the big one, the lever to pry open this huge gray clam of a case. If C. D. White, Denver bull, was Clarence White, the FBI’s master Red-hound now imbedded in the leftist Hollywood community, then I was clearly open for business. If true it explained a great many things and suggested even more. White the FBI man knew of Parker’s background in Denver and used that knowledge to make the studio executive lean on Communist writers, spill to the House Committee, and make trouble for Walter Adrian. Larry Goldmark had told me that Parker used to be friendly with Adrian, Wohl and other “progressive” scenario writers: what had happened to make him shy away? The arrival of C. D. White in Hollywood?

  And Dale Carpenter, racing to Parker’s house with a folder and greeted at the door like a carrier of typhoid, then mysteriously murdered, his house torn apart. By White? And who was White? Could he have infiltrated so brilliantly that he was among the group of mourners congregated at Walter’s house the night of the “suicide”?

  All my theorizing, of course, hinged on the identity and whereabouts of C. D. White. If, in fact, he was the FBI undercover man, I could be on the verge of exploding the case. If, on the other hand, C. D. White was still swinging his stick on a Denver beat, all I had was a long and bloody shaggy dog story.

  The obvious move was to place another call to Denver. I left the reading room, proffered the bound volumes and my effusive thanks to Miss Anderson, and descended to the library basement, where a pair of empty phone booths were keeping company with a coffee machine. I made the mistake of trying the coffee—a thin brown gruel with specks of curdled milk spinning on its surface—before obtaining a line to Denver police headquarters.

  A young woman answered. I asked her where I could get some information about a past member of the Denver force.

  “That’s Personnel,” she told me, pulling the plug.

  Personnel picked up. An older woman, she courteously answered my query about C. D. White by announcing that such information could not be given out over the phone.

  “I don’t want a dossier on White, I just want to know if he’s currently a member of the force.”

  “I’m very sorry, but we cannot transmit such information over the phone.”

  I gripped the receiver until my hand hurt. If she didn’t spill, I’d be forced to go to Denver.

  “Ma’am, you’re speaking to Lieutenant George Wynn of the Los Angeles Police Department homicide squad. Are you telling me that I have to take a full day out of an important murder investigation,” I brought my voice up to a shout, “to find out whether or not C. D. White is currently a member of the Denver police?”

  Personnel turned a bit timid.

  “What is your name again?”

  “Lieutenant Wynn, George Wynn. You want to look it up, fine, but God help the next Denver cop who asks me for a break.”

  I heard her rifling through a book.

  “Oh, yes,” she said cheerfully, “here it is: Lieutenant George Wynn, LAPD.”

  “This is long distance, ma’am.”

  “Of course. You wanted to know about whom again? I’m afraid I …”

  “C. D. White. As in Sox.”

  “It’ll take a minute, Lieutenant.”

  I fed six more quarters into the phone while a brunette knockout in a low-cut sweater dropped her nickel into the coffee dispenser. She bent over to pull out the cup, affording me an unobstructed look at her remarkable nineteen-year-old breasts. When the girl stood upright, they bounced firmly back into place. She caught me gawking and drew her mouth into a thin line of contempt.

  “Lieutenant Wynn?”

  “Yes, I’m holding on.”

  “According to my card, C. D. White is no longer a member of the force. He left in 1940.”

  “Does the card say where he went?”

  “No. All I have is that he left voluntarily in 1940.”

  “I see. And the initials stand for what again?”

  “Clarence Depew.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “You’re welcome, Lieutenant. You understand, of course, why I hesitated to give the information out immediately. We have regulations, as I’m sure you do in Los Angeles.”

  “Of course. Thanks again.”

  I hung up in a high flush of success. Clarence Depew White was my man. I was sure of it, like a bloodhound with a shoe locked in his drooling jaws.

  An hour later I sat having Twining’s English Breakfast tea in Helen’s kitchen with the redhead herself, the sour and edgy Wohls, and Larry Goldmark, who had dropped by to leave off some manuscripts of Walter’s and a check from Warner Brothers.


  “What do the police make of Dale’s murder, Mr. Le-Vine?” asked Rachel Wohl. Her eyes looked as though they had been left out in the sun and she wouldn’t have been much paler if she had died. Her manner, however, remained forceful.

  “They’re pretty lost, I think.”

  “You have any theories, Jack?” asked Goldmark. The agent was chewing gum and smoking.

  I shrugged. “Theories are cheap. I’m only concerned with Carpenter’s death as it relates to Walter’s.”

  “You think it relates?” asked Milton Wohl.

  “You don’t?” I snapped. The words had come out a little harsher than I had intended. Wohl winced and his wife came bounding to his defense.

  “Don’t cross-examine Milton, Mr. LeVine. He’s gone through enough anguish without being treated in this police-station manner.”

  Now Helen came out of the bullpen for me.

  “Rachel, I don’t believe Jack is cross-examining Milt; he’s just trying to get at the truth of all this.”

  The wifely tone of Helen’s remarks was lost on no one. Goldmark inhaled enough smoke to fill a zeppelin and shot me a sly, somewhat sickening, glance.

  “You think that Carpenter’s death makes it unlikely that Walter killed himself?” the agent asked.

  “Absolutely,” I told him.

  “I see,” he said, but didn’t. “Why?”

  I shook my head.

  “You’ll have to take my word for it, but suicide appears to be out of the question.”

  Rachel Wohl eyed Helen.

  “Has he told you this before?” she demanded. “You knew this before?”

  Helen nodded.

  “Then why not tell us?” The screenwriter’s wife got shrill and anxious. “For God’s sake, we can’t be trusted? There’s some nut loose killing progressives and Milt and I aren’t told? We’re supposed to go about our business and if someone wants to shoot us through the heart …”

  “Honey,” Wohl said a little sheepishly.

  “No, don’t stop me, Milt,” she continued. Wohl shrugged and looked into his tea. “I’m deeply hurt. That information of literally a life and death nature is kept from us … the only justification could be that we are prime suspects. A husband and wife murder team.”