by Ron Goulart
“They all think Mr. Salermo is a saint hereabouts,” Bud added.
Groucho gave an annoyed sigh and nodded at the chair. “Sit down, Frank.”
“Thanks.” It was the only chair in the room besides Salermo’s, so I dropped into it.
Groucho turned to the gangster. “Okay, this wasn’t a kidnapping, you didn’t slug my friend,” he began. “Suppose you tell us now why the hell we’re here.”
“That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do, Groucho,” Salermo said. “It recently came to my attention that you were interested in the same unfortunate young lady that we are.”
“Peg McMorrow,” I said quietly.
Groucho took a step in the gangster’s direction. “What did you have to do with her death, Salermo?”
Salermo held up his left hand and made a stop-right-there gesture. “Hey, you’re missing the point,” he said. “From what I’ve been hearing, Groucho, you don’t believe the girl committed suicide.”
“I don’t, no.”
“We don’t think so either,” continued the gambler. “Who do you think killed Peggy and passed it off as a suicide?”
“We haven’t gotten that far yet,” Groucho answered. “But you’re supposed to have a fairly cordial relationship with the law. They know a hell of a lot more about Peg McMorrow’s death than we do at the moment, Salermo. Why not ask them to show you what—”
“I’m working on that angle, too,” said Salermo. “Trouble is, Groucho, the cops in Bayside aren’t as cordially disposed toward me as the cops in some of the other towns around here. In fact, a few bastards on the Bayside force hate my guts.”
“Sergeant Branner,” Bud muttered, making a spitting noise.
I rubbed at the back of my head again and asked Salermo, “Why are you interested in Peg McMorrow at all?”
“I liked the kid, in a purely avuncular way,” he replied. “She came out here to the boat a few times with Shel Leverson, a business associate of mine.”
“She was going with him,” said Groucho.
“Not recently. They broke up a while back, but naturally Shel’s concerned about what’s happened.”
“Why isn’t he at our little powwow?”
“He wanted to be, Groucho, but he had to go down to Mexico yesterday on important business. Naturally I’ll tell him whatever I find out.”
“She was out here on the Encantada just a few nights ago,” said Groucho.
Salermo shook his head. “No, that’s not true, Groucho. Is it, Bud?”
“No, Peggy hasn’t been around here for a hell of a long while.”
Groucho’s eyebrows rose and fell. “All right, Salermo, she wasn’t here,” he said. “Suppose you tell me your theories about what happened?”
“To put your mind at ease,” he said, smiling, “I didn’t invite you guys out here to sell you a line of crap, Groucho. What I mean is, we didn’t kill her, nobody associated with me killed her. I really am interested in the truth here—I want to know who killed the kid.”
“Rivals of yours maybe?”
“Possibly, but I doubt it.”
“Who then?”
“We don’t know yet,” admitted Salermo. “Maybe some of her movie friends, maybe some bastard she gave the cold shoulder to. I want you to tell me what you’ve dug up so far.”
Groucho moved nearer my chair and rested his right hand on the back of it. “We haven’t come up with much of anything yet,” he told the gangster. “And, I must tell you, Salermo, that being kidnapped by goons and taken on long ocean trips is simply going to interfere with any sort of investigating we are doing.”
“It won’t happen again.” He stopped smiling, studying Groucho’s face. “You really haven’t found out much?”
“Little of value,” Groucho said. He let go of the chair, took a few sliding steps to the right. “I hope you won’t think me unreasonably curious, but have you had us followed in recent days?”
Salermo said, “I instructed a few of my associates to keep an eye on you.”
“Did one of them telephone me,” I asked, “and suggest I get out of town?”
The gambler shook his head. “Nobody was told to threaten either one of you,” he assured us.
“And you didn’t send a lad with a forty-five to take a few shots at us this afternoon?”
“You have my word.”
“Then did the chap you had watching us happen to pot him?”
Salermo coughed into his fist. “You fellows are looking tired, Groucho,” he said, nodding toward Bud. “See that they get run back to shore and taken home. And no rough stuff, understand?”
“Absolutely not,” Bud said.
Salermo remained in his chair as Groucho helped me up. “We’ll keep in touch, Groucho,” he said, smiling. “And I hope there are no hard feelings. After all, we’re on the same side in this.”
“Why should we have hard feelings about being kidnapped and beaten?” asked Groucho, smiling a smile that was a parody of Salermo’s.
Bud crossed over to open the door of the cabin. “C’mon,” he said to us.
Salermo called, “By the way, what’s the title of your next movie, Groucho?”
“20,000 Years in Sing Sing,” answered Groucho and stepped out onto the deck.
Nineteen
I was in the bathroom, trying to get a view of the back of my head by using the mirror in the medicine cabinet door and one of Jane’s hand mirrors.
“Hey, get in here quick,” she called.
I spun, causing my head to suffer a zigzag burst of pain, and ran to the breakfast nook. “What’s wrong?”
She pointed at the portable radio that was sitting atop the breakfast table.
Johnny Whistler was doing his regular Hollywood segment on the morning news hour. “… And now, as I promised before the commercial break, friends, a word about Groucho’s upcoming venture upon the kilowatts. Broadcast execs, and those in the know in radioland, are predicting that Groucho Marx, Master Detective, is going to be one of the top new shows of the season,” the gossip was saying in that piping voice of his. “A sneak reading of the script for a select audience of Tinseltown celebrities and radio moguls yesterday at a palatial Hollywood mansion, so my sources inform me, was a decided hit. So good luck to you, Groucho. You’ve always been my favorite Marx Brother … Over at Monarch Studios, so we hear…”
Jane reached out to turn off the radio, but I caught her hand. “I want to hear this.”
“… the often grumpy studio boss, Eli Kurtzman, is smiling from here to here. Reason why? Well, the sneak preview the other P.M. of the new Tom Kerry swashbuckler, The Pirate Prince, got a one hundred percent enthusiastic response from the audience. Looks like it’ll be the biggest box office hit yet for the dashing Kerry … Speaking of the Marx clan, Harpo, the one who doesn’t talk much, is giving a harp concert this Friday eve in the Hollywood Bowl and, so they tell me, it’s sold out already … And here’s a word of caution to George Raft. George, I’m one of your biggest supporters, but—”
I clicked off the radio. “Enough of that.”
She went back to setting the table for breakfast. “Why the interest in old Kurtzman?”
“There’s a possibility,” I said as I headed for the small kitchen, “that Peg McMorrow was in the midst of making some sort of deal with Monarch when she was killed.”
Jane caught up with me as I was reaching for the perking coffee pot. “Don’t you pay a damn bit of attention to anything I say to you?” There was both annoyance and anger in her voice.
“Your every word is indelibly engraved on the tablet of my memory and—”
“And quit talking like Groucho.”
“Groucho would never respond that mildly and gently to such violent nagging. Honestly, Jane, I don’t see—”
“You come dragging over here last night, hours late as usual. You’ve got a fractured skull and all sorts of other—”
“Bump,” I corrected, turning the gas down under the coffee. “
All I got was a bad bump on the skull.”
“Furthermore, you looked like you’d been swimming in a sewer, you’d been abducted by gangsters. But now you—”
“Possibly I exaggerated a little, to get your sympathy,” I told her.
“What I told you last night, Frank, I still believe this morning,” Jane said, unsmiling. “You absolutely have to drop this whole mess right now.” She crossed to a cabinet and yanked out two coffee cups. “You’ve been shot at, beaten, kidnapped, threatened. That’s plenty. Quit, please.”
“I admit that some unsettling things have happened to me since I started working on this case,” I conceded. “But I’m more than ever convinced that Peg McMorrow was murdered. I can’t drop this now. I can’t let Groucho down.”
“Groucho’s a millionaire, isn’t he? Tell him to go hire a private detective to do his dirty work. Hell, he can probably afford to hire a whole detective agency. There’s no reason he has to send a bumbling amateur out to risk—”
“Whoa now,” I cut in. “I did get shot at and hit on the head, granted. But that sort of stuff happens to professional operatives, too. And for quite a long time, damn it, Jane, I was a pretty good reporter who wasn’t afraid to—”
“You don’t have to yell at me in my own house,” she yelled. “I’m trying to keep you alive, you damn idiot.”
“I think I’ll go now.”
“You haven’t had breakfast.”
“Even so.”
“Well, at least stop long enough to put on your shoes.”
I looked down at my bare feet. “Okay, and I might as well at least have a cup of coffee.” I smiled tentatively at her.
She smiled back and then carried the two cups into the breakfast nook.
* * *
At about the same time that Jane was trying to persuade me not to get killed, Groucho was sitting in the den of his Beverly Hills home. As happened often, his family had scattered and, except for a couple of servants, he had the place pretty much to himself.
Using a legal tablet he’d bought two days ago in a dime store in Westwood Village and a fountain pen he’d borrowed from his attorney last autumn and never returned, Groucho was making notes on the Peg McMorrow case. “How much does Salermo know?” he was asking himself while doodling in the margin. “One of his thugs must’ve shot that goon who was going to pot us in the greenhouse. But who hired him? And here’s another pertinent question—What’s the capital of North Dakota?”
The telephone atop the desk rang.
Grabbing up the receiver, Groucho said, “Sixth Day Adventist Headquarters. Call us back in a couple of days, when we hope to have graduated to Seventh Day—”
“Is that you, Mr. Marx?” asked a young woman’s voice.
“Sally?” He sat up straighter in his chair.
Sally St. Clair said, “You told me to telephone you if I thought of anything about Peg.”
“That’s right. Have you got something?”
“This isn’t exactly something I thought of, but it could be important, Mr. Marx.”
Nodding, he said, “Okay, tell me.”
“Well, I don’t know if you remember Hulda Bjornsen, but—”
“She used to be a maid at the Young Actresses’ Club, didn’t she? Peg and she were friends, as I recall.”
“That’s right,” said Sally. “Hulda is still working there and she happened to come into Marcus’s Department Store, to the section where I work, on her day off yesterday.”
“Uh-huh?”
“Anyhow, Mr. Marx, we talked about poor Peg and Hulda told me she saw Peg just the other night. Peg telephoned her, after they hadn’t seen each other for months and they got together for dinner.”
“At the True Blue Cafeteria,” supplied Groucho.
“Oh, then you already know about all this?”
“Nope, I only knew that Peg had eaten there. No details as to who or why.”
“I really think you should talk to Hulda. I have a hunch Peg gave Hulda something to keep for her,” said Sally. “You know, something important that she was concerned about. My feeling is that Peg made that dinner date with Hulda—and Hulda is somebody everybody trusts—just so she could give her something to look after for her.”
“Did she actually tell you that?”
“No, not directly, Mr. Marx. But when I asked her if Peg had entrusted something to her, she got very flustered and then started talking about something else,” answered Sally. “You really ought to look her up. She might confide in you.”
“Is she working at the place today?”
“As far as I know.”
“I’ll drop around for a chat.”
“Oh, and another thing else, Mr. Marx. This has nothing to do with Peg, but I wanted to thank you,” the young woman said. “Your brother did … well, not Zeppo himself, but someone from his talent agency. They called me last night and said they thought they might be able to place me in a small little part over at RKO.”
“That’s splendid, Sally,” said Groucho.
“So … well, I’m sorry I thought you were just conning me the other day.”
“Why do you think it says ‘In Groucho We Trust’ on all the coins, my child? You’ve got to have faith. Good luck.” He hung up, put the cap back on the fountain pen and stood. “Could be we’re getting closer to some answers.”
Twenty
I still didn’t have my shoes on when somebody started pounding on the front door of Jane’s cottage.
“Open in the name of the law,” shouted someone in a hardly convincing Irish brogue. “Faith and begonias, ’tis no good you’re up to in there, to be sure.”
“Groucho?” said Jane, setting down her fork.
“Groucho.” I was already up from the table, heading for the doorway of the breakfast nook.
“Bejabbers,” Groucho was calling out. “If you don’t open up soon, it’ll be tear gas we’ll be after using. Or you might prefer the bloodhounds. If you can wait till next week, we’ll be having a special and you can get dogs and gas for the same low price as—”
“Come in,” I invited, pulling the door open wide.
“Do you realize what your being found here will do to this poor child’s reputation? Why, until you came into her life, she was as pure as the driven snow,” Groucho said. “And if you’ve ever driven snow around for any length of time, you know how pure that can be.”
Reaching out, I took hold of the sleeve of his checkered sport coat and tugged him across the threshold. “Having crazed comedians bellowing on her doorstep isn’t going to do her reputation much good either.”
The morning paper he’d had tucked up under his arm fell to the carpet as he came, a bit lopsidedly, inside. “Oh, I don’t know. If I lived nearby, I’d be immensely impressed to notice America’s best-loved jester cutting capers on my neighbor’s stoop.”
“We’re not talking about W. C. Fields here.”
“Youth can be so cruel.” Groucho, squatting, retrieved his newspaper. “If you’re finished insulting a poor broken old man, my boy, we’ll get down to brass tacks,” he said, straightening up. “And if you expect me to make some lowbrow remark about sitting on tacks—you’re absolutely right. Wait now, while I dredge up something apt.”
“Good morning, Groucho.” Jane was standing near the kitchen doorway, eying him.
“Top of the morning to you, colleen.”
“Would you care to join us for breakfast?”
He studied the ceiling for a few seconds, considering the invitation. “Well, I’d be delighted—if you could provide something like cinnamon toast.”
“How about cinnamon toast?”
“Close enough. I’m yours.”
Jane gave him a very brief smile and stepped into the kitchen.
Groucho proceeded to unfold the paper. “Perhaps you’ve been wondering, between bouts of lust, whatever happened to that dead chap we bumped into in the hothouse yesterday.”
I frowned. “Damn, I forgot all about h
im. I guess because of all the other stuff that happened subsequently.”
“Yes, a blow on the bean can do serious damage to the thinking process and the memory.” He turned to an inner page of the first section. “Once, some years ago, I was strolling along Cahuenga Boulevard—I had, mind you, no earthly business on Cahuenga Boulevard. It was simply that I loved the sound of it. When friends would inquire where I’d been, I reveled in responding, ‘Oh, just strolling along Cahuenga Boulevard.’ It often struck them dumb with awe and envy to hear me pronounce Cahuenga Boulevard so trippingly. Those who were already pretty dumb, it made dizzy and gave prickly heat. At any rate, while strolling along Cahuenga Boulevard on this particular fateful day, a safe dropped out of an upper-story office building window and smacked me square on the noggin. Well, sir, I have to tell you—I couldn’t remember a darn thing for days on end. And for about a week after that, even when I wasn’t on my end. Among the things I couldn’t remember were the capital of North Dakota, the boiling point of borscht, the middle name of the first girl who ever kissed me in the ear, the capital of South Dakota and—”
“Am I wrong in assuming there was something in this paper you wanted to show me?”
“Well, of course, Rollo. You don’t think I came all the way to this shanty merely to eat toast and deliver sentimental recitations on the cognitive processes.” He folded the page in half and pointed to a small story just below the fold. “I found this item while reading the morning paper.”
The headline said FORMER STUDIO TECHNICIAN FOUND SHOT and the subhead added Body Discovered In Canyon. It seems the body of Arnold Siegel, 46, had been discovered the night before in a stretch of woodlands up in Coldwater Canyon. He’d been shot twice in the back, then dumped there. Unemployed in recent months, Siegel had worked as an electrician for both Paramount and Monarch. The police had no immediate leads, but hinted at a gangland tie-in.
When I’d finished reading the story, I said, “Siegel has to be the same one.”
“Since nobody’s mentioned finding a similar corpse on Warren Stander’s premises, I’m betting it is, sure.”
