Angel of the Abyss

by Ed Kurtz

  “Stop it, Jack.”

  “Let me stay. Just for tonight.”

  “I told you no already.”

  “I’m wounded, Gracie. My pride is. I don’t want anything from you. Just let me stay here tonight.”

  “Get going, Mr. Parson. You’ve got a lot of self-pitying to catch up on and I don’t want to play.”

  He relented, released her. Narrowed his eyes to slits.

  “Cruel,” he groaned.

  “I didn’t get this part in any back room, yours or anyone else’s. And I won’t do any back-room foolishness to keep the part now. Leave this instant, or Saul Veritek is going to hear an ugly little story tonight and I really will have a new director on this goddamn picture.”

  Jack marched for the door, opened it, and grumbled low and indistinctly.

  Grace said, “Good night, Jack.”

  He slammed the door shut.

  * * *

  She dreamed of low, snowy hills and a gable-front house with icicles on the eaves, Daddy waving goodbye and somewhere her mother softly sobbing. Aunt Eustace would be along in the morning. There was going to be more for little Gracie than digging potatoes out of the cold earth. Much more.

  You get you some rest, Gracie, Californy is a long ways away.

  7

  L.A., 2013

  The two policemen who took me the handful of blocks to the station on Wilcox didn’t say much. They didn’t seem involved, or like they wanted to be. Just a pair of well-armed chauffeurs. Inside, I was guided to a dimly lit office that still smelled like the cigarettes they used to allow in there, in the previous century. I sat down in front of an old metal desk and waited for ten minutes, looking at a framed photo of a redheaded cop, his wife, and their daughter. The wife had red hair, too. The kid was Asian.

  When Shea came in, he had a Styrofoam cup steaming in each fist. He passed one to me on his way behind the desk, said, “Heard you were a bit stewed.”

  “Wasn’t planning on getting shot at,” I told him. He was about half-right; I figured I was well on my way to sobriety before the second shot stopped ringing in my ears. I sipped at the coffee—it tasted like pencil shavings.

  “Taxpayers’ best,” Shea commented, having noticed the sour look on my face.

  “Nice family,” I said, looking at the photo again. He ignored that, like it was meant to be an insult.

  “Tell me some more about this job you’re here for,” he said, leaning back in his chair. It squeaked loudly.

  “Nothing shady about it, at least not on my end. Look, I’m just a film geek. I teach a couple of courses about old flicks at a community college every year and spend the rest of my time digitalizing ones nobody really cares about before the celluloid dissolves. This lady—”

  “Leslie Wheeler?”

  “Yes. She called my office out of the blue a few days ago—”

  “In Boston.”

  “Right. She told me her little club had come into possession of a particularly rare film. Well, part of one, anyway. A reel.”

  “How’d she get it?”

  “Someone named Mrs. Sommer gave it to her. Them. Whatever.”

  “Her and Barbara Tilitson?”

  “I guess. I only really knew about Ms. Wheeler.”

  “All right, go on.”

  “That’s all there is, really. She offered me a gig to come out here and work on the reel. Good money in it, and she said they might even dig up the rest of the picture.”

  “From this Sommer woman?”

  “I guess. I don’t know.”

  “What’s the movie?”

  “It’s called Angel of the Abyss.”

  “Haven’t seen it.”

  “No one living has. Not in its entirety. It’s been lost for most of a century.”

  “But you have. Seen it, I mean.”

  “No, just the third reel. About ten minutes or so, twenty from the start.”

  “Tell me.”

  I washed the knot in my throat down with more of the terrible coffee, and then I told him. I told him about the scene I’d only seen by way of an emailed mpeg, its brilliantly stark lighting, Grace Baron’s masterful performance done without the benefit of dialogue. It occurred to me in retrospect how much she reminded me of the French silent actress Maria Falconetti—Dreyer’s Jeanne d’Arc—and I told Shea that, but he just shrugged and reprimanded me to stay on topic. He scribbled on a notepad the whole time, which made me chuckle. I’d have guessed an L.A. detective would have upgraded to at least a Blackberry by now.

  “And how about the rest of the thing? What’s it all about?”

  “I can only tell you what I’ve read. It’s a very dark melodrama, way I understand it. A peasant girl from a broken, abusive home heads to the city to improve her lot, ends up getting mixed up with a con man who arranges for her to be sold into a white slavery ring and, eventually, some kind of Satanic ritual where they sacrifice her.”

  “How sweet. You say this was a silent movie?”

  “1926.”

  “Didn’t know they made crap like that back then.”

  “Some people thought it was brilliant.”

  “Sounds like torture porn to me.”

  I snickered. “There’s more—she makes a deal with the devil, comes back to ruin the lives of the con man and his main lieutenants. So it’s got this whole supernatural revenge thing going for it.”

  “I’m more of a Steve McQueen guy, myself.”

  “I’d never have guessed.”

  He gave me a look.

  “All right, Woodard,” he said like it was an effort, “so a woman you’ve never heard of calls you out of nowhere to fly all the way across the country to work on this old movie. You agree, get here, find her dead. Right so far?”

  I shuddered, but not so he noticed. “Yeah.”

  “And the movie, the reel, is gone. Other valuable stuff left behind, but not this reel you’re supposed to be working on. Which means the job’s dead, so it’s time for Graham Woodard to buzz back off to Beantown, am I correct?”

  “That was my thinking,” I agreed.

  “Except maybe somebody would rather you didn’t.”

  “You don’t still have drive-bys in Los Angeles, Detective Shea?”

  “On that stretch of Hollywood? Sure, it could happen. I’d be surprised, but it could happen. But you factor in how much trouble somebody’s going to over this whole ‘angels in the abbey’ crap—”

  “Angel of the Abyss.”

  “—it does seem pretty damn coincidental to me, I got to admit.”

  I wasn’t arguing. Simply thinking about it got my skin prickling all over again.

  “So the way this goes,” Shea went on, absently worrying his necktie, “is that you tell me whatever it is you haven’t told me yet, because there are some awfully big pieces left out of this puzzle, Mr. Woodard.”

  Downing the foul dregs of the coffee, I made a tight knot of my eyebrows and locked eyes with Shea. I hadn’t said a word about Jake, though despite my diminishing liking for the guy concurrent with my rapid sobering up, I didn’t think for a second he had anything to do with any of it. My ex-wife, on the other hand, was another matter entirely.

  I said, “Helen.”

  “Yes,” he said. “The former Mrs. Woodard.”

  “I haven’t spoken to her in more than a year.”

  “But she got you the job, didn’t she? She recommended you to Ms. Wheeler.”

  “That’s what I was told.”

  “Are you not on good terms with your ex-wife?”

  “I’d say not. She left me for another guy. I didn’t take kindly.”

  “Then why would she want to help you out like this?”

  “It’s not that I need the help,” I said. “I’m not hurting.”

  “She pulled for you.”

  “I don’t know if she did. She knows—knew—Ms. Wheeler in some capacity. Dropped my name. Maybe she didn’t even think about it first.”

  “Just slipped ou
t.”

  “Like that,” I said.

  “For a gig a hundred people in Los Angeles could do without traveling.”

  “Probably a thousand. And a lot of them better than me.”

  “Isn’t that just a little strange?”

  “She said she wanted to keep the whole thing under wraps.”

  “Leslie Wheeler said that?”

  I nodded. “She wanted to maintain control over the project. Over the film. I think she was afraid if L.A. people got involved, it would get out of hand and it wouldn’t be her baby anymore.”

  “Wanted all the glory, then?”

  “Such as it would be, sure. Far as I know, nobody outside of me and that little knitting club knew a thing about it.”

  “Knitting club?”

  I grinned. “My nickname for their group.”

  “I see,” Shea said.

  He tapped the tip of his pencil on the notepad and made a guttural noise in his throat. When he glanced up at me again, his sourpuss had softened to a look of concern, or close to it.

  “Do you know where your ex-wife lives, Mr. Woodard?”

  “Somewhere around here.”

  “In Hollywood?”

  “In L.A.,” I said. “I have no idea where, exactly.”

  “We had a recent address for her and a Ross Erickson—you know him?”

  I frowned. “Yeah. That’s the fu—the guy she ran off with.”

  “Well. A couple of officers went to have a word with her this afternoon, after we last talked at Ms. Wheeler’s office.”

  “Fantastic.” My hand contracted, splitting the cup.

  “She wasn’t there, is the thing. Nobody was.”

  The last few drops of room-temperature coffee dribbled down my wrist, but I paid it no attention. “What are you driving at, Detective?”

  “Fact is, no one’s seen her or Mr. Erickson for about a week. Far as we can tell, they haven’t been at home at all. Their apartment doesn’t appear to have been tossed like Ms. Wheeler’s office was, and there was jewelry inside. A small amount of cash, too. No robbery, and no planned vacation in all likelihood. Folks don’t usually leave everything behind when they’re planning on going away for a week.”

  I mulled this over, unsure how to react. I wondered if they’d found anything approaching drug paraphernalia, and decided Shea wouldn’t tell me if they had. All I could manage to say was, “I don’t talk to her.”

  “You don’t seem very upset.”

  “I don’t know what I am. Today I’ve found a body, been shot at, and now I’ve just been told my ex-wife is—what, missing?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You’re suggesting it.”

  “Does she do anything with movies? Like you or Ms. Wheeler?”

  I moved my jaw without a sound a bit, jarred by the change in topic.

  “She—no. She’s in insurance. Or she used to be. She couldn’t care less about something like this.”

  “But she knew Leslie Wheeler.”

  “Apparently.”

  “Seem like strange bedfellows to you?”

  “I couldn’t say, as I never met Ms. Wheeler.”

  Shea grinned. “You have a point there. You want another coffee?”

  “I’d rather drink crude oil,” I complained. “Listen, how long am I going to have to stay in town?”

  “You watch too many old movies, Mr. Woodard.”

  “It’s what I do.”

  “You’re not obligated to remain here. Of course I’ll need to talk to you again as this comes together, but I can’t keep you from going home to Massachusetts. I’d appreciate it, however, if you’ll keep me apprised of your whereabouts.”

  Shea didn’t have anything else to drill me about after that. He asked a few pointless questions, small talk about where I grew up and what I’d done when I was in L.A. last, but I sensed it was all devised to let me down gently after informing me that Helen was missing. He gave me his card for the second time in one day and told me they’d posted a couple of guys in an unmarked car in front of the hotel—a security detail, he called it. As he was walking me back to my dour chauffeurs, he patted me on the back in a fatherly way and said, “Don’t worry about your ex, Mr. Woodard. I doubt it has anything to do with this mess.”

  I wasn’t nearly as confident as he was, but I didn’t say so. Outside, in the perfect Southern California night, Shea fired up a Parliament and offered me the pack. I accepted, delighting in the slight buzz I got from not chain-smoking all the time and getting used to it. We puffed in silence, waiting for the patrol car to come around, until he cleared his throat and narrowed his eyes.

  He said, “Whatever happened to this Grace Baron, anyway?”

  “She vanished,” I told him. “She was declared dead less than two years later. Some folks say she ran off with a Communist agitator, or that he killed her. It’s probably just an urban legend born of the McCarthy era.”

  “So that’s, what—ninety years ago?”

  “Thereabout, yes.”

  “Before Black Dahlia,” he mused.

  “Yeah,” I said, “but after Virginia Rappe.”

  “Good old Tinseltown,” the detective mused. “Cold-case capital of the world.”

  “Is that true?”

  The patrol car pulled slowly up on Wilcox and idled in front of us. Detective Shea shrugged and dropped his smoke on the sidewalk, grinding it under his heel.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Go on back to your hotel, Mr. Woodard. Try and get some sleep.”

  “Too bad the bar’s closed by now,” I said, and I got into the back of the police car.

  * * *

  The conscientious hotel staff had, however, restocked my expensive mini-fridge, so I made myself a fifteen-dollar highball and sat back on the bed. I reflected on how surprised I was that the detective seemed to know who Virginia Rappe was—the aspiring actress whose mysterious death ruined Fatty Arbuckle’s life and career—which led me to think about what a wild time the 1920s really were in Hollywood. Murders, drugs, prostitution, blackmail, organized crime…the modern movie business had nothing on them. Rappe died in ’21, followed by the murder of William Desmond Taylor in ’22 from being stabbed in the back. Plenty of grim tales of the like followed, from Thelma Todd to Elizabeth Short, but in the 21st century were they anything more than lurid stories from a bygone era?

  Perhaps they all were, I thought. All except the disappearance of Grace Baron. Gone since the year after my maternal grandfather was born, but still stirring the pot. Whatever had happened to her, to her only picture, the perpetrators thought them both to be buried forever. Now the picture was resurfacing and with it, maybe, something somebody needed to stay in its grave. Leslie Wheeler knew enough to get her killed; hell, I knew next to nothing and they were taking shots at me. And since I strongly doubted there was a gang of supercentenarians gunning for me, I was more puzzled than ever. Puzzled, and more frightened than I cared to admit to myself. It was insane to think anybody could resort to murder over something older than almost anyone living, but insanity was the order of the day.

  Lucky me, I was caught right up in the middle of it with one corpse behind me and God knew what ahead. I made a second highball with what remained of my cola and whiskey and I downed it into two Herculean gulps. Somewhere beyond the marginally safe confines of my police-guarded hotel, somebody was washing Leslie Wheeler’s blood from their hands—and making room for mine.

  But I wasn’t the only one. There was still Barbara Tilitson, Ms. Wheeler’s colleague. Shea hadn’t mentioned her, though he needn’t have—it wasn’t like I was his colleague. Still, I wondered what the police were doing to protect her. More than that, I wondered what she knew.

  It occurred to me that she might also have been acquainted with my ex-wife, and that a supposed expert on the era of American silent films could also shed some light on what the hell was going on. I was already stepping into my shoes and rinsing my booze-infused mouth out with mouthwash
before I’d made up my mind to go talk to her.

  The clock radio on the nightstand told me it was a quarter to three in the morning. The black-and-white monster movie playing soundlessly on the television backed up its sentiment. I sat back down on the mattress and, like I’d done before I found Leslie Wheeler’s body, I waited. While I waited, I zoned out, revisiting that reel in my mind, but subconsciously recasting Grace Baron’s role with Helen…

  I snapped out of it and looked out the window. The charcoal smog was settled over the tops of the buildings, obscuring antennas and bright neon signs and the distant Capitol Records tower, but the first orange light of morning was beginning to battle it back for another day. I snatched the room key from the dresser and headed out to find Barbara.

  8

  Hollywood, 1926

  Dearest Gracie (began the letter in a florid hand),

  How are things, my darling starling? Have they painted your portrait for PHOTOPLAY as yet? Just you wait, lovely child—in short time you shan’t be able to walk to the grocer without a mob of fans accosting you. Miss Mary Pickford will never know what hit her! (Once I met Mary, a sweet if aloof woman.)

  Gracie, please do forgive your auntie for her silence—I haven’t written in so long, and I am so close, but no excuses from me. It is unforgiveable! Here is the thing: I have made a great friend in a gentleman of the Valley. I call him Joe and he calls me his Old Girl. My Joe has a hand in the picture business himself, a distributor of sorts as I gather, and naturally he is positively dying to meet my niece, the soon-to-be Marchesa of Hollywood. Won’t you join us this Sunday for luncheon? We will lay out by the swimming pool and eat grapes and drink champagne, won’t it be divine! Do say you will come, Gracie—in fact, don’t bother writing back to me, but come!

  With all the Love in the World,

  Your devoted Auntie Eustace

  9

  L. A., 2013