by Ron Goulart
“A cunning hiding place,” remarked Groucho.
Sutterford was perspiring more profusely when he stood up. “They’re really nothing special,” he said, handing the envelope over to Groucho. “You’ll see.”
“If they’re nothing special, why’d you stash them in a secret hiding place?”
“I didn’t do that until after I heard Peg was dead.”
“You figured these pictures had something to do with her death?”
“I didn’t figure anything, Groucho. I just felt uneasy—you know? Had a hunch I didn’t want anybody to come across this stuff.”
I left my chair as Groucho took the snapshots out of the envelope and spread them out on his side of the desktop. “This is it?” he asked, disappointed.
The snaps had been enlarged twice up. All five had the same location and showed a man and a woman, fully clothed, in a woodland setting. They were facing each other and appeared to be arguing. In the background you could make out a lake with a scattering of rustic cabins on its far side. All of the pictures looked to have been shot in a relatively short span of time. And it seemed obvious that the couple didn’t know they were being photographed.
Groucho tapped his forefinger on one of the images of the handsome blond man. “This is Tom Kerry, isn’t it? The second-rate swashbuckler at Monarch.”
“It’s Tom Kerry sure enough,” I agreed. “But he’s the top actor at the studio. And his upcoming epic, The Pirate Prince, is supposed to be a guaranteed box office smash.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Johnny Whistler said it on his morning broadcast.”
“Then it must be God’s truth.”
I picked up one of the pictures, nodded over at Sutterford. “Know who this woman is?”
“No idea. Never saw her before.”
“Funny, I thought you might.”
Groucho looked up at me. “I don’t know her either. Is she in the movie business?”
The woman who was arguing with the movie star was a slim, dark-haired woman of about forty. “Only peripherally. Her name’s Babs McLaughlin,” I said. “She’s married to Benton McLaughlin, a writer over at MGM. I met her a couple years back when I covered a burglary for the Times that they’d had at their Pacific Palisades place.”
“My God, are you a reporter?” asked Sutterford.
“Not anymore. Relax.”
Groucho took back the picture I was holding, gathered up the other four and shuffled them absently together. “Why did Peg bring these to you, Eddie?” he asked. “You could take stuff like this to the corner drugstore and not raise an eyebrow.”
Sutterford coughed into his hand. “Peg said she didn’t want anybody to know about these pictures.”
“Why?”
“She didn’t say, Groucho.”
“You sure?”
“Hey, listen, you knew Peg. She wasn’t especially confiding. Played it close to the vest.”
“She didn’t hint at anything?”
“Just that these were important and I was to develop them and keep quiet.”
I asked him, “She picked them up herself when they were ready?”
He nodded. “Yeah, and she was alone.”
Groucho dealt out the pictures again. “Recognize the spot where they were taken?”
“Some forest area,” I said. “Could be anyplace. California, Oregon, Washington.”
“Eddie?”
“Same here. I don’t know where they were shot and Peg never mentioned.”
“When did she bring them in for you to develop?”
“Three weeks ago Monday.”
Groucho collected the pictures into a handful, slid them back into the envelope and thrust the envelope into his breast pocket. “We’ll have to discuss the possibilities implied in these images,” he said to me.
“Do you mind if I get back to my starlet?” Sutterford was making his way toward the door.
Groucho said, “Go ahead, you don’t want to keep these lasses up too late on a school night, Eddie. Oh, and don’t mention that I’ve taken possession of these pictures.”
“You think I’m nuts?” He hurried out of the office.
Twenty-six
There was a cop waiting for me in my living room when I got home that night at a little after ten P.M. I let myself in and there he was, a tall, thin man, wearing a tan overcoat and a blue suit. His gray fedora rested on one sharp knee and he was seated in an armchair under one of my inherited floor lamps reading my rough draft of the second Groucho Marx, Master Detective script.
“You want to finish reading that,” I inquired, shutting the door behind me, “before you explain who the hell you are?”
“Branner,” he said, closing the script and tossing it back on my coffee table. “Sort of funny, your script.”
“You’d be Sergeant Branner of the Bayside police?”
He nodded. “Cold in your place.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” I said. “Would you have anything like a warrant?”
“Not necessary on a friendly little visit like this, Denby.”
“Most of my friends wait until I’m home before dropping in.”
“Mind if I smoke?” he asked, lighting a Camel cigarette.
“Why exactly are you here, Sergeant?”
He inhaled the smoke deep inside him, then gave me a sympathetic look. It was the sort of look your doctor might give you just before informing you that you’re dying of an incurable disease. “You’re interested in Peg McMorrow,” he told me.
Coming farther into my living room, I asked, “Yeah, so?”
“Don’t be.”
“What are you saying? You’re telling me to stop looking into the death?”
“How could I do anything like that, Denby?” He dragged deeply on the Camel. “This is a free country, isn’t it? You can go poking your nose into anything you damn well please.”
“You didn’t break in here just to tell me that, Sergeant.”
“Well, I did also want to mention that there have been a rash of assaults and break-ins in your particular neighborhood lately,” the lean cop said. “We find that people, such as yourself, who live alone are being robbed and beaten. Sometimes beaten quite badly.” He stood up. “It’s something to think about.”
“I suppose it is.”
“And you might warn your girlfriend, Miss Danner, about this, too.” He moved toward my front door. “She could get quite seriously hurt, if she’s not careful and—”
“You son of a bitch!” I made a lunge toward him.
He jumped back, held out a warning hand. “You don’t want to assault an officer, Denby,” he said. “It wouldn’t look good on your record.”
“Get out, just get the hell out of here,” I told him, fists clenching at my sides.
He gave me that sympathetic look again, added a pitying smile. Taking hold of the doorknob, he slowly turned it. “You might mention to that Jew friend of yours up in Beverly Hills that people can also get hurt even in ritzy mansions.” He let himself out.
I stood there, absently staring out at the darkness that was pressing against the windows. For a moment I had trouble breathing and my teeth came close to chattering. “Maybe it is cold in here,” I murmured.
* * *
Angry and uneasy, I left my place a few minutes after Sergeant Branner’s visit and went walking along the beach. Hands in pockets, I tromped over the damp sand. My shoulders were hunched, my chin was tucked down and I was getting a splendid view of the clam holes and the driftwood.
“It’s not that you haven’t been threatened by cops before,” I was telling myself aloud.
That had happened fairly often when I was working on the L.A. Times. In fact, my attitude toward certain officers of the law, in Bayside and other unsavory towns, had contributed to my leaving the newspaper.
“You shouldn’t have let him threaten Jane,” I said, kicking at a crabshell.
But Branner, the bastard, was right about that. Sl
ugging him wouldn’t have been an especially bright move.
“If he covered up Peg’s murder,” I reminded myself, “and Groucho and I can prove it, then we’ll have Branner’s ass in a sling.”
Not as immediately gratifying as hitting him, but a lot more devastating to him and his career as a crooked cop.
I noticed that I’d been walking in the direction of Jane’s cottage. It was about eleven, but the lights were still on in her living room and the spare room that she used as a studio.
“Might as well drop by.”
We hadn’t planned to get together that night, but I decided I wanted to make sure she was all right and that nobody had been around threatening her.
“And, hell, I just simply want to see her.”
I was about a half block from her house when the front door flapped open. A tall, heavyset man came hurrying out, something large and flat tucked under his arm.
He went striding off along the sidewalk in the opposite direction, climbed into a dark blue Cadillac and drove away.
The front door of Jane’s cottage had remained open.
“Something’s wrong,” I said, running up across the lawn.
Before I reached the lighted doorway, Jane appeared there. Her eyebrows did a Groucho climb when she noticed my approach. “I’m flattered,” she told me as I hit the porch, “that you came over here on a dead run.”
I paused, caught my breath. “Who the hell was that?” I gestured toward the place where the departed Cadillac had been parked.
“That was Rod.”
“Rod Tommerlin?”
“That Rod, yes. Come on in.” She smiled, turned and headed into her living room.
I followed, shutting the door. “What was he doing here?”
Jane came back to where I’d halted. Placing her hands on my shoulders, she looked me directly in the eye. “I work for him. He came by to pick up the Hillbilly Willie Sunday page I just finished ghosting for him. I am not having an affair with him. That is not to say that he wouldn’t like to have an affair with me, but then, Rod being Rod, he’d like to have an affair with just about every female from here to the border. It’s you I happen to be fond of at the moment, which probably indicates a lack of taste and discernment on my part, but there it is. Would you like a cup of hot chocolate?”
I leaned and kissed her on the cheek. “Fine, yeah,” I said.
She let go. “Accompany me to the kitchen,” she invited. “Why the late visit?”
“Love knows no boundaries.”
She lifted a tin of cocoa off a kitchen shelf. “Possibly, Frank, but you look a lot more distraught than usual.”
“I keep forgetting there are Celtic mystics on your family tree.”
“So explain yourself, huh?”
While the milk was heating in a saucepan, I told her about the visit from Sergeant Branner.
After she’d mixed two cups of chocolate and we were back in the living room, Jane said, “I seem to be changing.”
“How so?”
“Well, last night I probably would’ve advised, as I’ve been doing ever since you and Groucho embarked on this detective business, to take Branner’s warning to heart.”
“But you’re not going to suggest again that we quit?”
“No, damn it.” She set her cup down on the coffee table. “I don’t like Branner’s breaking into your house and ordering you around. Maybe Mussolini’s goons can do that, and maybe Hitler’s storm troopers. But this isn’t a fascist country—not yet anyway. You have to stand up to bullies like Branner and tell him where he can stuff it.”
“He’s also threatening you,” I reminded her.
“Listen, I figure if I can ward off Rod Tommerlin, I can handle a few local cops.” Picking up her cup, she sipped the chocolate. “Are you staying the night?”
“The thought hadn’t crossed my mind until you brought it up,” I said, trying to look guileless. “But it’s a fine idea.”
“I hope,” she said, “your radio dialogue is more believable than this.”
Twenty-seven
Jane answered the bedside phone when it rang at a few minutes beyond eight the next morning. “Hello?” she said after reaching across me to pick up the receiver. “Oh, good morning, Groucho.”
I yawned and sat up.
“Well, there is somebody here sprawled out in the bed beside me,” she was saying. “Hold on a minute and I’ll see if I can identify him.”
I held out my hand for the phone.
She kept it. “Well, it does sort of look like Frank,” she told Groucho. “Okay, I’ll see if he’s in any condition to talk to you.”
I took the receiver. “Hello, Groucho.”
“Let me give you a bit of cautionary advice that may someday save your life, especially if you happen to find yourself lost in the Himalayas,” he said. “Actually, this advice is also good for the Catskills.” He cleared his throat. “That woman you’re cohabiting with is much too flippant. Trade her in for a nice lumbering dimbulb if you want to live a life of serene and—”
“I appreciate your calling me to pass along advice to the lovelorn,” I told him. “Was there any other reason for—”
“Quite obviously her strain of flippancy is of the contagious sort. I’m afraid that I must inform you, young man, that you’ve caught a bad case of it,” observed Groucho. “But, yes, you may rest assured that I have a redeeming social purpose in disturbing you in your little love nest, Rollo.”
“Glad to hear that.”
“I had a late visit from Chico, also known as the fun-loving Rover Boy, last night,” he continued.
“Speaking of visits, Sergeant Branner of the—”
“We’ll get to that in a jiffy,” he said. “Or if all the jiffies are spoken for, we’ll have to travel by huff. Now to the point. I showed Chico the four photos I retained from the batch we got from our photographer chum. I assume, by the way, you haven’t lost the one you took or traded it to the natives for some of those bright colored beads you’re so fond of?”
“I still have it, yes. What does Chico know about Tom Kerry and Babs McLaughlin?”
“Nothing about that swashbuckling hambone,” said Groucho. “But Chico pointed out something that I, being a studious follower of the local yellow press, should have recalled reading. There were stories, albeit small ones stuck in the back pages, about Mrs. McLaughlin in the papers a few weeks back.”
“What sort of stories?”
“She’s missing.”
“Missing?”
“According to the reports that I unearthed out of the bundle of old newspapers I keep in the garage, Babs McLaughlin drove alone down to a small hideaway house she and her husband own down in Baja near Ensenada.”
“Are we talking about the same weekend we know she was with Tom Kerry?”
“Precisely.” I could hear Groucho taking a puff of his cigar. “She was seen in Ensenada on that Friday evening. But after that she seems to have vanished, along with her car. There are no servants at the little place down there and nobody who has any idea where she got to. She simply never came back.”
“Have there been any follow-up stories?”
“Both your alma mater, the Times, and Mr. Hearst’s rag, had small items two days ago to the effect that Babs McLaughlin remains among the missing,” he said. “And the law isn’t even bothering to pretend that they know where she might be.”
“She must’ve left Ensenada that Friday and driven somewhere to meet Kerry.”
“That’s my notion. And those pictures with him surely weren’t taken anywhere near Baja,” he said. “So what we have to find out is where that rendezvous took place and why in the hell Peg was anywhere nearby.”
“I’ve met Benton McLaughlin,” I reminded him. “I can try to contact him and see if he—”
“No, let’s hold off on that,” suggested Groucho. “I’m going to check with the few reliable people I know at MGM, where McLaughlin toils as a writer, and see if I can gather an
y information obliquely and subtly. I’ll give you another call toward sundown. Now what about your run-in with the minions of the law?”
“One minion,” I corrected and told him about Sergeant Branner’s visit.
“We must be on the right trail,” said Groucho when I’d finished. “Otherwise he wouldn’t be threatening you.”
“I’d be a lot happier if I knew where the trail is leading.”
“Well, just keep in mind that if you have sufficient pluck and luck then you’re bound to win and that if you keep your eye on the bluebird you’ll discover that every cloud has a silver lining, except on Tuesdays when we close early.” He hung up.
* * *
“I know where that is,” said Jane.
We were having breakfast and I had showed her the snapshot Peg McMorrow had taken of Tom Kerry and Babs McLaughlin arguing beside a woodland lake.
“Where?”
She held up the photo, pointing to the tiny images of cabins on the far shore of the lake. “These are part of Shadow Lodge. The cabins are to the left of the lodge itself,” she explained. “The place is on Lake Sombra, which is up in Northern California about twenty miles or so from Lake Tahoe.”
“Never heard of it.”
She placed the photo on the checkered oilcloth. “Well, Shadow Lodge doesn’t advertise, Frank,” she said. “It’s the sort of place you go when you don’t want to be noticed.”
“Exactly what Kerry would pick for spending a weekend with somebody else’s wife.” I retrieved the photo and took another look at it. “Wonder what they were squabbling about?”
“Maybe just a lovers’ quarrel.”
As I slid the snap into my shirt pocket, an unpleasant thought hit me. I kept it to myself, but my face apparently gave me away.
Jane said quietly, “You’re probably also wondering how come I know about the place.”
“No, what you did before we met isn’t—” I stopped talking, took a deep breath. “That sounds pretty damn patronizing, doesn’t it? Actually, yes, I am feeling jealous. Even though you were there, if you were there at all, long before we even knew each other.”
