by Ron Goulart
“How’d Siegel get from Bel Air to Coldwater Canyon?”
Taking his paper back, Groucho folded it to its original shape and then tossed it on the sofa. “The most likely explanation is that, as we both believe, some of Vince Salermo’s torpedoes took care of Siegel to keep him from peppering us,” he said, locking his hands behind his back and crouching slightly. “After you and I rushed off to wow the masses with a snappy rendition of your script, these goons slipped in and carted the corpse off.”
“Seems logical.”
“Or possibly, though I doubt it, Stander found the remains of Arnie Siegel and had some of the servants take the body out and dump it. Having to explain a corpse in your hothouse can be embarrassing for a high-placed broadcast executive.”
“Unlikely,” I said. “Now we’d better find out who hired Siegel.”
“Exactly,” said Groucho. “I’ve got another lead to follow up, which I’ll tell you about in a minute, so can you handle that?”
“Sure, yeah,” I answered. “I know a couple of reliable informants who specialize in information about the shady side of the movie business.”
“There’s another side?”
“And if that doesn’t turn up anything, I’ll track down Siegel’s next of kin.”
Jane emerged from the kitchen carrying a platter. “Toast is on.”
“You’ll forgive me if I eat and run,” said Groucho as he followed her to the breakfast room. “But I really think the game is afoot. In fact, by now it’s probably grown to two or three feet at least.”
Twenty-one
The Young Actresses’ Club was on a side street off Cherokee in Hollywood. It was a three-story imitation adobe building with slanting red tile roofs. To get to the lobby you had to cross a small walled-in courtyard that had a goldfish pond at its center and a half dozen bedraggled palm trees circling its fringes.
When Groucho, as I found out later, came striding purposefully across the bright morning courtyard, there was a fat calico cat sprawled beside the little pool, patiently watching the flickering fish.
“You’d make a great movie mogul,” Groucho mentioned to the cat as he pushed the lobby door open. “Or maybe an agent.”
The lobby was cool and shadowy. On one of the three fat sofas two pretty young actresses were sitting, sharing a copy of a movie script.
“I bet it is him,” whispered the blonde as Groucho drew near.
“No, it’s not,” said the redhead.
“It is.”
“No, because he has a moustache.”
Groucho had walked on past by this time. Slowing, he came to a full stop, pivoted and went back over to them. “It is me,” he confided. “But I left the moustache in the car.”
“Oh, we’re sorry, Mr. Marx,” apologized the redhead. “We weren’t meaning to be rude.”
“That’s a pity. Rudeness is a quality more young people ought to cultivate.” He bowed to each of them in turn and aimed again for the desk.
“I told you it was him,” whispered the blonde.
A heavyset woman in a flowered dress was sitting at the switchboard, smoking a homemade cigarette and reading last month’s issue of Dime Detective. “Why, it’s Groucho Marx,” she said, looking up and chuckling, “as I live and breathe.”
“I’m glad you confirmed that you are living and breathing,” Groucho told her. “Because when I first got a squint at you, I really wasn’t sure. ‘What are they doing with that stuffed hootchy-kootchy dancer in their lobby?’” I asked of myself.”
“Oh, you’re such a silly person, Mr. Marx.”
“I know, and that’s why they threw me out of the seminary,” he said, resting an elbow on the desk. “Now then, my dear lady, perhaps you can help me. I’d like to have a brief chat with Hulda Bjornsen if it can be arranged.”
Frowning, the woman snuffed out her cigarette in an abalone shell ashtray. “It’s the funniest thing, Mr. Marx, but she didn’t come in today,” she said, shaking her head. “Hulda is just about the most reliable maid we have on the hotel staff. Even though she doesn’t own a telephone, if she’s not going to be in to work, why, she makes sure to phone us from a neighbor’s. And, the fact is, she hardly ever misses a day at all.”
“But you say Hulda didn’t show up today—and she hasn’t phoned?”
“That’s it, yes, Mr. Marx. I’m been worrying if I oughtn’t to—”
“Where does she live?”
“Down in Venice, in a little house near one of those smelly old canals.” She gestured in the direction of a filing cabinet. “I can get you her address, if you’re thinking of running down there.”
“That’s precisely what I’m thinking of doing,” Groucho said.
* * *
At a few minutes shy of noon, I was climbing up Bunker Hill in L.A. The steep cement steps ran more or less parallel to the Angel’s Flight funicular railway and on my left a trolley car was bumping its way up the incline to Hill Street. I was heading for a boarding house halfway up the hill.
Tall palm trees dotted the climb, along with a large accumulation of shrubs. There were a couple of hotels on my side of the street, plus an assortment of once proud Victorian mansions, rich with spires and cupolas and intricate gingerbread, that now served as boarding houses and, in at least two instances, bordellos.
The informant I was going to see resided in a converted three-story Victorian that had, quite some time in the past, been painted lemon yellow and trimmed in chocolate brown. It had a wide porch, and sitting in a wicker rocker was a very fat woman of sixty-some years.
“Guess my age,” she requested as I climbed the swayback wooden steps to the wide, sheltered porch.
“Under a hundred.” I hit the top step and headed for the screen door.
“You must be Frank Denby.”
I stopped. “I am, yeah.”
“Tim’s not back yet, but he said for you to wait,” she said, nodding at a wicker armchair. “Would you like a glass of lemonade?”
“Not especially.”
“I was going to suggest that if you did, you go in and tap on Mrs. Sheridan’s door,” she said. “We don’t have an icebox ourselves, but she’s got one and she’s always brewing up pitchers of the stuff.”
I ignored the wicker chair and perched on the ornately carved porch railing. “You’re Mrs. O’Hearn?”
“I’m Tim’s common-law wife actually.”
“There’s no need to tell people your goddamn life story, Agnes.” A thin, pale man of about fifty came up the steps, carrying a quart bottle of Regal Pale Beer and a head of wilted lettuce in a green string bag. “Sorry I’m late, Frank.”
“We’ve been having a perfectly nice conversation,” she said.
O’Hearn grunted and pushed the screen door open. “Come on up to my room and we’ll talk,” he invited.
The dim hall of the venerable boarding house smelled of last night’s dinner, and O’Hearn’s dim apartment smelled of stale beer, dead cigarettes and spoiled food. A partially eaten cheese sandwich, fuzzed with greenish mold, rested in a cracked saucer atop the tangle of dirty underwear piled on the unmade bed. Another remnant of sandwich, thick with a white fuzzy growth, sat in an empty cigar box amid a scatter of mismatched shoes against the wall.
Spread out on the floor were a dozen recent racing tip sheets, each one annotated in the margins in O’Hearn’s jittery scrawl.
“Be careful who you shack up with.” My informant seated himself in a lopsided armchair, not bothering to move the pile of movie trade papers piled on the faded cushion. “Agnes is a lousy housekeeper.”
I sat gingerly on the edge of a relatively uncluttered straight-back chair. “What’ve you found out for me, Tim?”
He made a just-a-minute gesture with his left hand. He carefully placed the string bag on the floor beside his chair, reached in and pulled out the quart of beer. “Just let me find a church key and then I’ll report.”
He got up, wandered over to a small rolltop desk in the corn
er and rummaged around through the mix of newspapers, tip sheets, file folders and empty cigarette packs until he unearthed a bottle opener.
After opening the brown bottle, taking a drink and settling into the chair again, O’Hearn said, “Things are different these days than they were back when you were working for the Times, Frank. The depression has lessened, wages are going up again, people are—”
“How much for the information?”
“Ten bucks.”
“Five.”
“Hey, I was out in the hot sun for over two damn hours working on this,” he pointed out. “Eight.”
“Six.”
“Make it seven-fifty or we don’t have a deal.”
“Okay. What did you get?”
He drank more of the beer. “Arnold Siegel hasn’t worked for any of the studios for over a year,” he began. “A fondness for booze and a bad temper did the poor bastard in.”
“That takes care of whom he hasn’t been working for.”
“Hold your horses,” O’Hearn said. “Most recently, from what I’ve been able to dig up so far, Siegel’s been doing odd jobs for Justin LaSalle.”
“LaSalle, huh? What sort of odd jobs?”
“Donkey work mostly. Pick up a piece of antique furniture at an auction house, deliver it to a client of LaSalle’s. Heavy lifting, truck driving, stuff of that nature.”
I rubbed a knuckle across my nostrils. “Anything to connect Siegel with the Monarch or Paragon studios?”
“I can’t link up Siegel directly,” replied my informant. “But I can tie in LaSalle.”
“How?”
“LaSalle’s been doing a big redecorating job for Jack Gardella, the Monarch troubleshooter. Gardella just bought a beach house in Malibu and that swish is fixing it up for him.”
“Gardella,” I said, mostly to myself. May Sankowitz’s cowpoke had spotted Peg having dinner with Gardella not that long ago.
O’Hearn wiped beer foam from his lips with the back of his hand. “Want me to keep digging, Frank?”
“Yeah, at least another five dollars worth.”
“I’ll give you something right now for free.”
“What?”
“Gardella is a mean son of a bitch,” he told me. “You really don’t want to mess with the guy.”
“So I keep hearing,” I said and stood up.
Twenty-two
Like its namesake in Italy, the beach town of Venice, California, has canals, a series of them running from the Pacific and bringing in sea water. Each of the canals is about ten feet deep and something like fourteen feet wide. Small narrow concrete bridges arch over them.
Back in the 1920s the town was supposedly quaint and colorful, but now, a decade and more later, there’s a run-down feel to it, especially in the part that tried to recapture the charm of the original Venice. The water in the canals has a brownish scum on it and garbage, including beer bottles and an occasional dead cat, can be seen floating in it. The odors of brine and decay are strong in the air.
“This spa’s really in need of a plumber,” commented Groucho to himself as he drove across another of the small, curved bridges. He crossed one more bridge and spotted Napoli Canal. Driving over a third bridge, he turned onto the street that ran along behind the small stucco houses that faced the stagnant canal.
As he pulled up and parked behind Hulda Bjornsen’s little house, two sooty seagulls came fluttering down through the midday sky to light on the dusty red tiles of the roof.
The impact of their landing dislodged one of the curved tiles. It broke free, came plummeting down to the weedy back lawn. Surprised, both gulls gave complaining squawks and then flapped away.
“There’s a moral there somewhere.” Groucho stood for a few seconds watching the birds fly off toward the ocean.
The flagstone path leading to the back door was muddy, each stone making a squishy sound as he stepped on it. When he pushed the buzzer beside the wooden door, a metallic raspberry sound echoed inside the place. Nobody responded.
Groucho took a cigar out of his coat pocket, unwrapped it and poked the buzzer again.
Still no answer.
But he became aware of a faint thumping noise inside the maid’s little house. “Hulda?” he called, cupping his hands. “Are you in there?”
He heard the thumping again.
Groucho tried the door handle and discovered that the back door wasn’t locked. Hunching some, he opened the door and shoved it slowly inward. “Hulda?”
The thumping was repeated, from the front of the house.
He entered the shadowy corridor that ran from back door to front. As he passed the kitchen, Groucho noticed that it had been ransacked and that dishes, silverware and newspapers were scattered across the yellow linoleum floor. “Damn, they beat me to it,” he muttered.
The living room was equally disrupted, with books and magazines tossed hither and yon, a lamp on its side and the chair cushions slashed and their innards spilled. From a closet came three more thumps.
Carefully, crouched, he moved through the debris and took hold of the handle.
Inside, gagged with a towel and tied with lengths of white clothesline, was a thin blond woman in a blue terrycloth robe. She made a murmuring sound when she saw Groucho looking over her.
“I’m pleased to see you’re still alive,” Groucho told her as he reached in and, grunting some, hefted her out of the closet.
He tripped over a spilled box of chocolates, skidded on a fallen copy of the Saturday Evening Post and dropped her atop the disemboweled sofa.
“Relax, Hulda—well, actually, I suppose there’s not much else you can do at the moment.” He fished a pocketknife out of his jacket, opened it and started cutting the ropes.
The maid muttered against the gag.
“Oops, should’ve taken care of that thing first.” Shutting the knife, Groucho unfastened the gag.
Hulda coughed, cleared her throat, made spitting motions with her lips. “Thank you, Mr. Marx,” she said. “I suppose you came by for the same reason they did.”
“Not to tie you up and dump you in a closet, no,” he said, returning to cutting the clothesline. ‘But I am interested in the pictures Peg McMorrow gave you to take care of for her.”
“Pictures? What makes you think it was—”
“Wasn’t it photos?”
Hulda swallowed, allowing him to help her achieve a sitting position on what was left of her sofa. “Well, I think so, yes, Mr. Marx,” she answered.
“They got them?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, nodding. “They only had to slap me once and I took them right to where I’d hidden the packet. I had it fastened to the underside of a bureau drawer in my bedroom. Used bandage tape.”
“You gave them the pictures, but they tossed your house anyway?”
“They wanted to make sure, they told me, I wasn’t holding back anything.”
“When were they here?”
“Early this morning, just as the sun was coming up.” The last of the ropes fell away. “I was in the kitchen fixing myself a poached egg, when they came busting in.”
Groucho crouched, helping her rub at her arms. “How many louts and what did they look like?”
“Two of them,” answered Hulda. “One was a big fellow, blond, with his hair cut real short. What they call a heinie haircut, you know. The other one was smaller, about your size but very well dressed. Slicked hair, parted in the middle, little squiggly moustache.”
“Any idea who they were?”
She hesitated. “I don’t know them and they didn’t drop any hints while they were taking the packet and tying me up,” she said.
“But maybe you saw them before?”
“The smaller one,” she said finally. “I may’ve seen him a couple days ago. I think he’s the same man who came into the Young Actresses’ Club and asked for somebody at the desk.”
“Know who he was asking after?”
Hulda shook her head. “I was vacuum
ing the rugs and I couldn’t hear a darn thing, Mr. Marx.”
“Did they tell you, either one of them, how they knew you had the pictures?”
“No, but they seemed very certain that I did.”
“Might’ve been a bluff that they’ve been trying on all Peg’s friends,” he said thoughtfully.
“It’s very lucky for me you got here when you did, Mr. Marx. I live alone, you know, and I could’ve stayed in that darn closet all day.”
He righted a straightback chair that had been knocked over and sat, gingerly, on its slashed seat. “I’ll call your doctor for you, Hulda.”
“No, that’s okay. I’m all right and I can’t afford to pay for a visit just now.”
“I’ll take care of that if—”
“No, no thanks, Mr. Marx. I’ll just clean up a little here and then get into the hotel. They must be wondering where the—”
“Take the day off,” he suggested. “I’ll phone the hotel and explain that you’re under the weather.”
“That would be nice, although I hate to miss—”
“I can also make up what you’d be earning today,” he said, reaching for his wallet.
“No, I couldn’t let you do—”
“Sure, you can.” He took out a five-dollar bill and handed it to the maid.
“That’s too much.”
“Now perhaps,” said Groucho, ignoring her attempts to return the money, “you could answer a few questions for me.”
Hulda folded the five and slipped it into the pocket of her robe. “If I can, Mr. Marx, yes, of course.”
“You saw Peg for dinner a few nights ago.”
“Yes, the poor kid.”
“Okay, what did she say about this packet of pictures?”
Hulda leaned forward on the sofa, rubbing at her knee. “Well, in the first place, she never exactly said they were snapshots,” she told him. “Only that she had something that was valuable to her, but that there’d been some burglaries in her neighborhood lately and she’d feel a lot safer if I kept this packet for her.”
“What did she say was in the packet?”
Hulda shook her head. “Only that it was something valuable and that I should hide it in a safe place.”
