AHMM, July-August 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  * * * *

  That, as far as I can judge, was two days ago. Time has ceased to have any significant meaning for me, but I have been able to track the passing of the hours by the moon and the sun, which shine in through the tiny window at the top of the wall. And an amusing little incident occurred last night, when a tiny ray of moonlight, passing through the framework of The Appliance, shone directly onto my leg. Despite my position, I could see a tiny glint of metal. This puzzled me for a while, until I realized that it was the missing overhead tracking brace swivel link pin, which must have fallen into my trouser turn-up during the unpacking process. This humorously ironic note made me rock with (obviously) suppressed laughter and lifted my morale to no end.

  I have to admit I am hungry and tired. I cannot sleep because of the pain in my arms and back and throat. But the picture is not all black. Because there is no heating down here, and the air is humid, during the night, moisture forms on the chrome handles of the handly-bar, and by turning my head sideways as far as it will go, I have been just able to lick it off with my tongue. So thirst, at least overpowering thirst, is not one of my problems.

  The telephone has rung several times. I imagined once or twice that it might be Mr. Patel ringing me to see if everything was going well with The Appliance. I invented a little scenario in which, warned by some sixth sense that all was not well and that I was in mortal danger, he marshaled his vast network of contacts and succeeded in contacting the local police, who broke in and released me. But this was only a waking dream brought on by hunger and thirst, and perhaps a slight case of chromium poisoning.

  And help will be at hand ere long.

  By my reckoning, Petunia will be returning tomorrow night. She will be coming in on the evening flight from Deauville St. Gatien, I remember quite distinctly her telling me. So she will arrive at the house after dark.

  She will enter the house, puzzled at the lack of illumination. But she will wipe her feet before entering the hall as I have trained her to do. She will hang up her coat and not throw it in a heap on an armchair in the sitting room, as the small printed notice pasted next to the hall stand will remind her. She will then try the light switch and when it does not work, she will understand the situation. She will therefore pick up the torch that I keep on the hall table for just such emergencies. At that point, I will call out to her as loudly as my condition permits.

  She will descend to the basement and open the door. She will shine the torch upon me and, with her handyman's wife's eye, will understand exactly what has happened. I may not be able to explain to her what is needed, but I will make such rudimentary gestures as I am capable of.

  But Petunia will already have assessed the perilous situation I am in. She will see that the handly-bar is pressing against my chest and the vibrating belt has a murderous hold on my throat. She will observe my position, enmeshed in this devil's spiderweb of metal and wood, pinioned like an insect. She will understand perfectly that if the motor starts again I will be a dead man, and she will discern exactly what it is she must do if she is to save her husband's life.

  So she will unplug The Appliance at the door before going upstairs to close the main circuit breaker.

  The idea, which has occurred to me in my darker moments, that she won't is, of course, ridiculous.

  Isn't it?

  Copyright (c) 2007 Neil Schofield

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  A PRISONER OF MEMORY by Robert S. Levinson

  "Hey, handsome! Need your help."

  She was a presence out of my past, but I knew at once it was Laura Dane. There was no mistaking the growl exploding in my ear with that trained stage actor's ability to send a whisper up to the back of the second balcony, every precisely enunciated word blasting its way out of a throat sandpapered by years of chain-smoking.

  I made sure anyway, verifying the source like the good newspaperman I am: “Laura?"

  "I should be insulted that you'd have to ask,” she said. Coughed out a web of phlegm. “I didn't have to wonder if it was you on the phone, Neil, did I?"

  "You called me, Laura."

  "Still smart as a whip, you are, the same way you were so snappy smart in untangling the truth about Elvis and Marilyn in the long ago.” She was talking about a rumored love affair, which led to a series of murders I had a hand in solving. “Got something for you not nearly as glamorous, but dangerous. Down the line it'll make front page headlines and some damn fine fodder for that Daily column of yours."

  "Dangerous how?"

  "Like I could be dead any minute, murdered, before you have a chance to mount your white charger and ride to my rescue, the way Errol Flynn—bless his dear, drunken soul—did in Fort Worth."

  "I remember Flynn in San Antonio and Virginia City,Santa Fe Trail, but Fort Worth? I don't know that movie. Is it out on DVD?"

  "Not a movie. We were in Fort Worth on a war bond tour, Errol and me and a bunch of other Warner Brothers contract players. That crazy galoot saved me from having to go to bed all by my lonesome.” She laid in a lusty groan. “Think he'd also saved all the other dames on the tour before the Superchief got us back to L.A.” Another cough from lungs that sounded in trouble. “So, what do you say, Neil? Come give an old broad a helping hand?"

  "As dangerous as you say, aren't you better off calling the cops?"

  "You hear why straight from the filly's mouth, you'll understand why not. At Burbank Studios. On the Melancholy Baby set the rest of the day. I'll leave your name on the pass list at the Barham gate."

  She was off the line faster than I could raise another question.

  * * * *

  A couple hours later, I tagged a “-30-” to tomorrow's column, an emotional screed decrying the destruction of another landmark, the Ambassador Hotel and its fabled Cocoanut Grove, where the stars came out to play when Hollywood was Hollywood and Laura Dane was a name-above-the-title movie star who specialized in playing “the other woman,” much as she had done in real life most of her life, wreaking havoc on Kay Francis, Miriam Hopkins, Claire Cavanaugh, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, and others of her peers.

  I e-mailed the piece downtown and took off for a landmark that had withstood the ravages of progress, the Warner Bros. Studio, renamed the Burbank Studios after a shotgun marriage of economic convenience with Columbia Pictures. It was a typical Los Angeles afternoon, the slate blue sky lush with cumulus clouds, the Hollywood Freeway flush with bumper-to-bumper traffic, impatient drivers answering one another with honking horns and expressive middle fingers.

  After forty minutes, I pulled up to the Barham Boulevard entrance. A gatekeeper hiding behind reflective shades checked my name against the list on his computer screen and overacted giving me a once-over twice over, logged in my aged Jag's license number, and directed me to the outdoor set where Melancholy Baby was shooting.

  The company had broken for lunch.

  Nobody seemed to know who I was talking about when I asked for Laura Dane, except a prune-faced actor in his late seventies or early eighties, costumed in Sunday best, an extravagant handlebar mustache, and a halo of thick white hair, who stepped over at the mention of her name and said, “Check Marnie Nichols's trailer. Back there, the biggest one of all. Can't miss it."

  Marnie Nichols.

  The name gave me a smile and a jolt of memory as electric as my first dose of morning coffee.

  When I met her, she was this fresh-faced kid from Columbus, studying acting with her Great Aunt Laura, driven by the usual wide-eyed dreams of fame and fortune that's oversold in bulk on television and magazine racks. She'd become one of the few who could cash in her bus ticket back home, as attested to now by the glitter-speckled gold star adhered to the door of her trailer. I rang the bell and when that got me nowhere hammered with my fist and called her name.

  After a few more failures, I turned to leave, till I heard the door creak open a crack. A voice full of challenge demanded to know: “That you, Neil Gulliver?"

  "
In living Technicolor,” I said, swinging around again to confirm it was Laura.

  "Get the hell hurry-up inside,” she said, pushing the door wide enough for me to see the Colt .45 caliber automatic she had aimed at my chest, struggling with criminal intensity to keep her two-handed grip steady.

  "That's a prop gun, right?"

  She ignored the question. “C'mon, handsome, give it the gas,” she said. “Inside before the son of a bitch spots me."

  * * * *

  There was more luxury to Marnie Nichols's motor home than to my Westwood condo, all the accoutrements of the stardom earning her twelve million dollars a movie and a modest chunk of the gross, more than your most basic math told me I'd make over my lifetime, however long or abbreviated.

  And nobody would ever mistake Marnie for trailer trash, especially not looking the way she looked now, in repose like Ingres’ Grande Odalisque, the risqué Mademoiselle Airière, on a plush chaise lounge covered in crimson velvet about halfway back, twenty-five feet or so, across carpeting a foot deep from an entertainment center out of Mission Control.

  Her smile was warm and inviting, her almond-shaped cerulean blue eyes ablaze with the suggestion of more than homespun hospitality—unlike Laura, who alternated looks of dread and fear. Laura's thread-thin lips ticked recklessly into her hollow cheeks, her gray eyes dulled by time, shifting left and right while she used the .45 to direct me to the driver's seat. The equipment that had earned Marnie the deserved sobriquet “Body Bountiful” was on full display under a pink silk camisole, and I made a mess of averting my gape, drawing a tinkling giggle of appreciation from her.

  Laura said, “You notice anything strange going on?"

  "Outside or in here?"

  "Not a laughing matter, handsome. Tell him, Marnie, how it's not a laughing matter."

  Marnie threw an arm across her breasts, putting an end to my peep show. “It's truly not, Mr. Gulliver. Somebody has been stalking my auntie, threatening to kill her."

  I returned Laura's anxious stare with one of my own, briefly bagging her head to toe with disbelieving eyes. Long gone was the sex kitten who could get a gent's pulse skipping beats with a simple wink, replaced by a woman somewhere in her mid eighties, with the sallow complexion and wasted body of someone ill beyond repair.

  Laura had turned into half the woman I'd dealt with before, when the astonishing key-ring waist and conical breasts of her stardom had given way to an elephantine body she routinely hid inside tent dresses. The hair she had let go naturally white then and wore like a tight snow bonnet had become a hodgepodge of cotton tufts and random strands.

  She coughed into her fist again and asked, “You heard her. More than having to take my word for it."

  I slipped Marnie a glance.

  She answered with a wink and a furtive nod that seemed to say, Play along with her.

  I said, “When did the stalking begin, Laura?"

  Laura closed her eyes and nodded to a silent count that ended with her deciding, “Forty years ago, maybe more."

  At once, I had visions of a stalker using a walker. “A pretty determined fellow. And the threats on your life? Also forty years ago?"

  "Starting ten days, maybe two weeks ago. Calling me up again and again, and how he got the unlisted numbers, I don't know. Every time telling me he's close as my shadow, and one day soon, he'll show himself, punch my ticket for good."

  Laura parked the .45 on the copilot's seat, studied my reaction while scoring a cigarillo from the flip-top box on the dashboard. She slotted it in a corner of her mouth, tossed me the Zippo lighter on the dash, and crooned, “Put your hot one to my cold one and make my cold one hot, baby.” Like I was Cagney in a scene burnt into my memory from the movie where he torched a cigarette for her, then used the smoldering butt to brand her on the neck.

  She said, “You're doubting me, aren't you, handsome? I see it written on your kisser as clear as a Catalina sunrise.” She shot a jet stream of smoke at me. “Marnie, handsome here doubts me. Tell him what else, go ahead."

  Marnie eased into a sitting position with her legs crossed yoga style, picked up a throw pillow, and hugged it to her chest. “Auntie Laura's been staying with me since her operation, my place at the Oaks. I'd come home from the studio and find her in a state of panic over the phone calls. Two nights ago, there was a break-in attempt. We both were awakened by sounds coming from downstairs, like someone trying to crack open one of the French windows. Armed security got there inside of ten minutes the silent alarm going off. Also police responding to my 911."

  "And?"

  "Whoever it was got away. Security said it was probably this band of gypsies that's been working Griffith Park, down over at the Estates and across the boulevard in Laughlin Park."

  "We know better, don't we, sweetheart?"

  "We do, Auntie Laura,” Marnie said, heaping on a patronizing smile.

  "Did you tell the cops about the calls?"

  Marnie said, “Yes. They even checked, but it was a dead end. They said it probably was a disposable cell phone he used."

  Laura added, “All they could do for now, they said, which is how I came to remember you, handsome. What a peach of a guy you were when it mattered."

  "I don't know that I can be of any more help than the police, Laura."

  "You're here, so already you're doing more than them, and—” She drew a puzzle on her face. “—just how did you know where to find me? I'd been on the lookout for you before the lunch break, but nobody at all knew I was even here."

  I told her about the actor who had directed me to Marnie's trailer.

  "And he was decked out in a bib and tucker?"

  "Resplendent. And a handlebar mustache begging for a barbershop quartet."

  She swung her face to Marnie. “You hearing what Neil just said, sweetheart? That's him, finally, the SOB who's out to get me. My stalker's here on the lot."

  * * * *

  I searched Marnie's for confirmation, saw it as her expression slowly dissolved into mild alarm.

  She said, “We were originally scheduled to do the ballroom scene today, but construction had a problem with the grand staircase collapsing, so word came down that we'd move instead to the standing outdoor setup. No fancy dress called for. Strictly street wear, me in one of the great Orry-Kelly outfits Bette Davis originally wore in Now, Voyager."

  "And the guy who steered me here—"

  "He wouldn't have known about the change unless he was on the cast list and got the late call from the A.D., same as everybody else—"

  "Not if he were working off a shooting schedule he somehow got his hands on. He would finagle his way onto the lot today dressed for the ballroom."

  "Exactly,” Marnie said.

  "But that doesn't explain how he'd know you'd be bringing Laura with you."

  "Stalkers stalk, that's how,” Laura said, her head unable to settle on a direction. “He saw us leave. It didn't take a crystal ball to figure out where we were heading in the studio limo.” She looked around for someplace to extinguish what was left of her cigarillo.

  The beanbag ashtray on the dash was a mountain of butts. Grumbling, she maneuvered to the door, pushed it open, tossed away the butt, and quickly pulled the door shut. “He's out there,” Laura said, struggling for breath. “I saw him right now, across the drive, not twenty feet away, and he saw me too. He waved at me. The SOB waved at me."

  It took a few seconds for the news to sink in.

  I grabbed the .45 and charged out the door after Laura's stalker, checking in all directions for a tuxedo among the dozens of extras returning from the meal break, all of them costumed for an afternoon stroll along a section of street dressed like a quaint New England village.

  Mustache Man had shown terrific speed for his age.

  No sight of him.

  Back inside the trailer, Laura was more distraught than ever, clutching Marnie like a life preserver, wailing about her stalker's ability to sneak onto the lot, get this close to her. Insisti
ng through crocodile tears that she'd be dead sooner rather than later if he had his way. Begging an answer from anywhere to questions that were on my mind as well: Why me, dear Lord? Why now, after forty years? Who is this creature?

  Before I could ask them, an A.D. was knocking on the door, calling out that Marnie was needed in wardrobe in ten to double-check a fitting. Laura made a sound like she'd just been pricked with a needle, and her eyes exploded with dread. She pushed away from Marnie and threw herself against the door. Her words a soulful moan, she begged, “You can't leave me now, not now, sweetheart, not with knowing he's right outside there somewhere."

  "Auntie Laura, of course not. You'll come along."

  "No, no, no.” Laura was adamant. “No. Outside, not safe, not safe at all.” She looked to me for confirmation. “Not safe at all."

  "I'll stick around and wait with you here,” I said. “It'll be you, me, and—” putting the .45 on display “—our friend Mr. Colt."

  The answer didn't satisfy her. “Not safe at all, not anywhere here,” she said, wailing the words like they were lyrics out of a Billie Holiday songbook. “Anywhere but here. Anywhere. Here, not safe at all.” The declaration set off a spate of uncontrollable coughing. She looked at her hand despairingly, rubbed it dry on the floral-patterned muumuu that fit her like a practical joke.

  Marnie said, “Would you feel safer at the house, Auntie Laura? I'm sure Mr. Gulliver would be happy to take you and would keep you company until I get home.” She gave me a hopeful smile.

  * * * *

  Her place took five or six minutes to reach once I turned off Los Feliz and onto Fern Dell Drive, gliding over the creek bridge, past the lush vegetation, the quaint waterfalls, and the cedar, pine, and leafy fern trees bringing modest relief from a summer heat now in the high eighties that had drawn an unusual number of midweek picnickers unconcerned about the shopping cart bums who'd made this part of Griffith Park their home and the gay extroverts sunbathing on the grassy slopes, to Star Bright Lane.