The Twenty-Year Death

by Ariel S. Winter

  Like Gilplaine before them, they were telling me too much. They were telling me they didn’t want this case solved by me or anybody, that there was something to hide. That was okay with me, it could stay hidden for all I cared, only there was the matter of a broken movie star and whether my word was worth a damn thing.

  I looked at Sturgeon. “You, too,” I said.

  He raised his shoulders and pushed out his chest. “Now, look here, Foster. I’m prepared to pay you a lot of money—”

  “That tune again,” I said, standing up. “You can’t decide if you’re sticking me up or bribing me.” I grabbed the edge of the door, preparing to close it. “Besides, you heard the detective, I’m not allowed anywhere near this case.”

  “Now, see here,” Sturgeon said, “he has no right—”

  “Neither do you,” I said, and I shoved him gently with the heel of my hand. When he’d cleared the threshold, I swung the door closed. I stayed close, listening, waiting for him to leave. There was no sound at first. He just stood there, trying to decide what to do. Then after another minute came the sound of his footsteps crossing the floor, followed by the outer door opening and closing. I listened for his steps in the hall to be sure he hadn’t doubled back. They were faint and grew fainter.

  That should have been the end of it. There was nothing that made staying in it make any sense. But there was nothing about any of it that made any sense. And even telling myself that Chloë Rose had been out of her mind when I had seen her last, and heavily sedated to boot, did nothing to quiet my conscience. My word was my word, and I’d given it.

  I went to the safe and got out the envelope with the check in it that Al Knox had given me the day before, and put it in my pocket, still sealed. Then I stepped into the waiting room, and locked the office behind me.

  Downstairs I got my car out of the garage and took it around the block, watching my rearview to make sure that neither Samuels nor Sturgeon meant to follow me. No car stayed with me the whole way, so I completed my loop out onto Hollywood Boulevard, and started for Daniel Merton’s movie studio.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The kid at the gate wasn’t Jerry, but it might as well have been.

  “I’m sorry, sir, your name is not on the list,” he said, holding up his clipboard. “You’re going to have to go through the gate and turn around and come back out again. There are people behind you.”

  I put on my most charming smile for him. “I was hired two days ago by Al Knox. You know Al Knox?”

  The kid nodded. “He’s my boss.”

  “Well, why don’t you call Al, and tell him I’m here. Dennis Foster. He’ll tell you to let me through.”

  Somebody behind me let go with their horn and held it down. I checked my rearview. There was a black coupe behind me and a truck behind that. It was the truck driver who was honking.

  The noise startled the kid, who ducked back into the box and picked up a phone. He came out a moment later.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Foster,” the kid said, back at my window. “Mr. Knox wasn’t in the office just now.”

  “Well, did you ask anyone else if they knew me? I was just here the day before yesterday.”

  The truck horn had not let up.

  “Look, call the office back, tell them I’m coming in, and open the gate before that truck driver ruins the soundtrack on all of the pictures being made.”

  “I don’t think I can do that, sir.”

  “I think you can. Just step back inside and try.”

  He blinked, looked back at the truck driver, and waved his hand. “Would you quit it?” The horn kept blaring. The kid looked all around again and shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir. You’ll have to come around.”

  He hit the button that made the bar go up and then stepped in front of my car, guiding me, forcing me to turn around unless I wanted to hit him. From the other side of the booth, he triggered the exit gate, and I pulled back out onto Cabarello Boulevard.

  The studio wall continued along Cabarello until the next intersection, where it turned right, maintaining the perimeter. I followed it until the next opening, a smaller gate just large enough to be used by one vehicle at a time. There were large wrought-iron gates that opened inward and would be shut at night. A heavy chain was suspended across the opening with a sign hanging from the middle that said, “Private. No Trespassing.” The security officer here was an older man with a soft belly, no doubt one of Knox’s retirees. I pulled up to the gate as another car was turned away.

  “Any chance of getting in here today?” I said.

  “About as good a chance as any other day,” he said.

  “I should be expected.”

  “Believe me, they all should be expected. You got a screen test with DeMille or Hughes or some other director that doesn’t even work at our studio but across town at the competitor’s? Or are you good friends with Chet Gelding or John Stark, or maybe it was Layla Carlton?”

  “Al Knox hired me a couple days back to work a private investigation. I’m just trying to get in to see him, but the boy at the front gate couldn’t get Al on the phone.”

  “Where do they find these kids?”

  “Will you at least call Al?”

  “You a cop?”

  “Not anymore.”

  He nodded. “What’s your name?”

  “Foster. And if you don’t get Knox, I actually am friends with John Stark,” I said, and smiled.

  “You can leave that one in your hip pocket. I’ll get Knox. Just a matter of knowing where to reach him. Hang on.”

  He went over to the side of the gate, opened a little panel there and brought out a phone receiver. He talked a few moments, waited, talked a bit more, then hung up and closed the little panel. He unclipped the side of the chain nearest him, and walked it across the opening, clearing the path through the gate. He waved me on. As I pulled up, I said, “Thanks.”

  “I guess it was about time for my daily exercise anyway,” he said.

  I pulled in to the studio. Security wasn’t as useless as Knox had made it out to be. It might not have been impossible for a strange man to appear on the set of one of their movies, but it would take a little doing.

  I followed the streets as best I could coming from the side entrance. I passed through the shadow of two soundstages and arrived at the four-story administrative building with the parking lot out front. I took a spot between what appeared to be an Army truck and what was for sure a Rolls Royce. I wasn’t too concerned about whether Knox was available or not; I hadn’t come to see him. Still, it was his house. I crossed the parking lot to the door on the end of the building with chicken wire glass, where three security golf carts were parked.

  The officer on secretary duty today looked up as I came in. “Mr. Knox just got back in the office. I’m sorry about Billy. He’s just doing his job.”

  “Aren’t we all?” I said, and continued past him and on into Al’s office.

  He was on the phone. “No, damn it. This has nothing to do with my department or anybody else at the studio. It was an unfortunate but unrelated event.” He gritted his teeth and shook his head at me. “There will be express instructions as always to allow no member of the press on the lot. And you’re not to bother any of our actors either. You say whatever you damn please, but we’ll sue you for slander if you get a word of it wrong.” He slammed the phone and a ghost of a ring hung in the air between us.

  “Dennis, what are you here for?” Knox said. His cheeks were red, and perspiration made his forehead shiny. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his mouth and then put it back in his pocket. “I don’t have time for anything but business. This Ehrhardt-Rose thing is a twister just waiting to happen.”

  “Fine with me,” I said. I pulled out the envelope and tossed it on his desk, much the way he’d tossed it on mine the day before.

  He looked at the envelope. Then he reached for it, his eyes searching for an answer in mine. “What’s this?”

  “Something you left in
my office. I’m returning it.”

  He puffed out his upper lip and looked up at me. “You know, sending Rose to the nut house was a fine idea you had there. Now everyone thinks she killed Mandy.”

  “No they don’t,” I said.

  “All right, no they don’t.” He held up the envelope. “You really should keep this. It would make me feel more comfortable.”

  “Who asked you to hire me?”

  “I hired you, what do you mean? Look, I don’t have time—”

  “Then don’t waste it repeating yourself. Who asked you to hire me? It wasn’t your idea. I’ve seen Sturgeon in action, it wasn’t his. All I want to know is, who wanted me—or some other sap like me—following Chloë Rose around?”

  “Dennis...”

  “I don’t get paid off. I get paid to do a job. And I definitely don’t get paid off when I don’t even know who’s paying me off and what they’re paying me off for. I got hired to do a job. I didn’t do it. So I don’t get paid.”

  Knox’s face sagged. “I was doing you a favor, goddamn it,” he said. “I was throwing a bone your way. Why the hell couldn’t you just take it and chew on it?”

  “Because I’m not a lapdog, Knox. I don’t fetch, I don’t heel, and I don’t roll over.”

  We stared at each other then. Taxidermied deer couldn’t have done it better. Knox tapped the unopened envelope on his desk. Someone in another part of the office yelled, but I couldn’t make out what it was about. Outside, the whole engine of Merton Stein Productions chugged away. Take an actress, an actor, and one of those scripts they were forever carrying back and forth out there. Slap some film in the camera. Plug in some lights, pay a violinist or two to add background melodies, and presto, you’ve got yourself a product you can show at theaters around the country, or drive-ins if it isn’t good enough for the indoor crowd. Then do it again. Fifty times a year. A hundred. No slowdowns along the line. One part in the machinery is broken? Get another. Mr. and Mrs. America need their Sunday double feature, otherwise it would be nothing but newsreels, and we need morale to be high. Leave your dime at the door.

  Knox set the envelope down. “Mr. Merton gave me the order personally. He said I should hire someone who could do a simple job, and I picked you. Okey, you bastard?”

  I nodded. “Okey.”

  “You’re not surprised.”

  “I can’t say that I am.”

  He watched me. The voice down the hall yelled again, a happy sound. “I’m working with children here,” Knox said.

  “I’ll leave you to it.” I started for the door. Behind me came the sound of his chair creaking and then an exhalation as he pulled himself out of his seat.

  “Now wait just a minute, Foster. Do you have something on this you want to tell me?”

  “No, like I said. I got the message from you yesterday. I did a bad job. I’m fired. I even worked another case since then. Fastest P.I. in the west.”

  “Don’t be like that, Foster. We’re all acting stupid around this. Damn it, I went into this security detail so I wouldn’t have to deal with this kind of thing anymore. I’m tired of blood.”

  I softened and leaned in toward him. “The police put me off of this thing too. Nobody wants me in it. I don’t want me in it.”

  He waited for more. When I didn’t say anything, he said, “Well, why are you here?”

  “To see Mr. Merton,” I said, and headed for the door.

  He caught me by the shoulder. “You can’t just go see Mr. Merton. You need an appointment.”

  “I don’t think he’ll make one for me, do you?”

  He didn’t stop me when I turned to go that time.

  Merton wanted someone to follow Chloë Rose, he wanted Chloë Rose’s horse, which used to be his horse, and he wanted a Jane Doe story to go away. Probably this Mandy Ehrhardt story, too. And Mr. Merton was a man who got what he wanted. So what else did Mr. Merton want? I figured I’d ask him.

  The exterior walkway on the second floor cast the ground floor walk in shadow. The main entrance was a pair of double glass doors that entered into a wind block, and then another set of doors. The Merton Stein crest hung on the wood-paneled wall behind the front desk, and there were two secretaries at the desk who looked more severe than any of the security officers I’d seen so far. But I walked as though I belonged, waving and nodding to both of them, and went straight for the stairs. They might have called out after me, but I didn’t wait to find out.

  Upstairs, I was in another reception room almost identical to the lobby below. There was no avoiding the secretary here, a middle-aged woman with the lined face of a gorilla, her hair pulled back into a tight bun.

  “May I help you?” she said. Her voice had the sandpaper rasp of a lifelong smoker.

  “I’m here to see Mr. Merton,” I said. I had my wallet out, already reaching for one of my cards. I held it out to her, and she looked at it without making any move to take it. Her expression did not change.

  “To see Mr. Merton, you must have an appointment.”

  “I think if you check with him, I have an appointment.”

  “I make Mr. Merton’s appointments,” she said. She was annoyed with me, but not so annoyed that it was worth exercising a facial muscle over.

  “Mr. Merton had me hired the day before yesterday. Last night—”

  “I know who you are,” the secretary said.

  “So do I,” said another voice, much friendlier, though no less stern.

  I looked up. She stood in the entryway of the massive double doors just to the left of the secretary’s desk. She wore a blue blouse with a red ascot tied around her neck and a tailored pair of khaki pants that ended mid-calf. Her open-toed brown heels showed that her toenails were the same color as her lips, rose red. The last time I had seen her, she had offered me those lips, and the time before that she’d been stuffing a drunk into the back seat of a car. Yeah, she was a girl that could make life very pleasant or very difficult, sometimes both at the same time.

  The secretary’s annoyance deepened then. “Miss Merton, I have already asked you to return home and wait for your father there.” Including me she said, “Mr. Merton isn’t here right now. As you know all too well, Mr. Foster, he is quite busy today handling the situation.”

  “That’s grand, Mr. Foster, isn’t it?” Miss Merton said, still from the doorway. “The ‘situation,’” she mimicked.

  The secretary turned white.

  Miss Merton nodded her head into the mysterious dark between the doors, and said, “Come on in, Mr. Foster. We can wait for Daddy together.” She passed through the doors without waiting to see if I would follow. I guess they always followed. I smiled my charming smile at the secretary and it got about the same response it had with the kid at the front gate. I walked around her desk, and let myself into Daniel Merton’s office.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The lights were off and the curtains drawn, giving the room the oppressive tone of sick days in bed. Mr. Merton’s desk stood by the windows, its footprint smaller than Al Knox’s office downstairs, but not by much. Beside the desk there was a small school chair with attached writing surface where the stenographer would sit when Mr. Merton wanted to write something down. There was a long boardroom table off to one side with high-backed leather chairs all around it. A clutch of cozy couches in burgundy upholstery with buttons on the cushions surrounded a glass coffee table on a zebra-skin rug.

  Vera Merton had chosen the couch with its back to me so that I had to walk around to the other side if we were going to talk. When I did, the shadows cut her features sharper. It didn’t hurt her any. Her legs were crossed at the ankles and extended under the coffee table where I could see them through the glass. She was a lifetime of getting what she wanted when she wanted it and no realization that that wasn’t true for everybody. Chloë Rose made you want to protect her. This one made you hope someone would protect you.

  “There’s a bar hidden away in the wall over there, if you’d like a drink.�
� She didn’t have one. In fact, it was unclear what she had been doing all alone in the dark. “I knew you were hired by my father,” she said as I sat on the edge of the opposite couch.

  “Only I didn’t,” I said, leaning forward on my thighs, my hat in my hands. “Daddy can’t pay the electric bills?”

  “Sometimes I like sitting in the dark. It helps me think,” she said.

  “And what do you think about?”

  She cocked her head. “If I’m not mistaken, that was a personal question. Did you just ask me a personal question?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes in my business I get personal when I’m not supposed to. Do you ask all the men that happen by to palaver in your father’s office?”

  “Only ones that work for my father,” she said.

  “So I guess around you that’s all of them,” I said.

  “If you decide to be fresh with me, I might decide I don’t like you.”

  “You liked me all right yesterday.”

  “That was yesterday.”

  “Well, take your time. I don’t need an answer today.”

  She laughed at that, though it sounded as sincere as an acting class exercise. “Are you auditioning for a part? You’re like a man out of my father’s movies.”

  I smiled along with her, but said nothing.

  She turned the laughter off but left the smile on. It was a perfect smile, barely a crease showing around it on her face. And it was a perfect face, a young girl’s face, nineteen, maybe twenty.

  “You have a knack for finding bodies, it seems,” she said.

  “You were there when Stark asked me to find Mr. Taylor. I didn’t promise I’d find him alive.”

  The smile went away.

  “Do you remember the question I asked you, and you told me to go ask Daddy? That’s why I’m here. But Daddy’s not here and you are.”

  “A coincidence. What was your question?”

  “You’re getting personal again.”

  “Sorry. I’ll try to cut it out. What was your question?”

  “What did my father hire you for?”