Groucho Marx, Master Detective

by Ron Goulart

  “I was there. Nearly two years ago,” she said. “And, no, it wasn’t with Rod Tommerlin.”

  “I didn’t think it was.”

  “I went there, and probably stayed in one of those cabins you can see in the picture, with a man who couldn’t risk being seen openly with me,” Jane told me. “My only excuse is that I was much dippier then than I am now. But, since you haven’t much to compare it with, you may think I’m pretty thoroughly dippy right now.”

  Grinning, I reached across and took hold of her hand. “Why, missy, you’re hardly dippy at all,” I assured her. “And me and all the wranglers are right fond of you.”

  “You and Groucho,” she said. “Making jokes about things that hurt you.”

  “Okay, and now I’ll return to being the detached reporter I was trained to be,” I said.

  “Knowing where Peg was that weekend ought to help you,” she said.

  “Yeah, but it also brings up a lot more questions that have to be answered,” I said.

  Twenty-eight

  The Garden of Allah is at the intersection of Sunset and Crescent Heights Boulevard and spreads across three-plus acres. Back around the time of the Great War it was the private estate of Alla Nazimova. By the end of the 1920s Nazimova was no longer a high-paid movie star and she sold the property to some people who converted her mansion into a hotel and built a couple of dozen bungalows around it. There’s a swimming pool that’s supposedly shaped like the Black Sea, a lot of trees and shrubbery and a good deal of red tile and cream-colored stucco. Nazimova herself still has a suite, rent free, in the main building.

  On that particular bright, clear autumn afternoon Groucho was slouching along a flagstone path that led to the bungalow he sought. From behind a chest-high hedge came a hissing sound.

  Groucho slowed, frowning in the direction of the noise. “Charlie, is that you skulking in the underbrush?”

  Charles Butterworth rose up, wobbling some, until his head was completely visible above the hedge top. The actor beckoned Groucho to come closer. “Groucho, dear fellow, I wonder if you could lend me a hand?”

  “Plenty of black coffee is what you need,” advised Groucho, stepping closer.

  “Quite possibly, Groucho, but at the moment I need some help with Bob here.”

  Groucho went up on tiptoe to peer over the hedge. “Jesus, Charlie, is he dead?”

  Sprawled face-up in a bright red wheelbarrow was Robert Benchley. He was wearing a pair of polka dot swimming trunks and a very large yellow terrycloth robe. His eyes were closed, his mouth open, and his arms hung limply over the sides of the barrow.

  “Dead?” Butterworth blinked, glancing down at his friend. “I don’t think so, Groucho. I certainly hope not. I’d feel foolish if it turned out I’ve been pushing a dead man around in this damn thing. What I’m trying to do is get him back to his bungalow—but the task has proved too formidable.”

  “I’m not dead, I’m only sleeping,” announced Benchley, taking hold of both sides of the wheelbarrow, opening his eyes and attempting to sit up.

  That effort caused the barrow to teeter, sway and then topple over to the right. Benchley was dumped out onto a patch of pale green grass. He remained there, apparently asleep again.

  Groucho found a break in the hedge, pushed through and trotted over to the fallen actor. “Bob, sleeping on grass is the major cause of hoof and mouth disease. Especially if you happen to be sleeping with a cow.” He took hold of Benchley under the armpits. “Come, my lad, let’s be up and doing.”

  “He usually holds his liquor better than this,” remarked Butterworth, watching as Groucho succeeded in tugging Benchley up into a sitting position.

  Benchley brought up a plump hand and brushed at his moustache. “Groucho, you knew me when I was alive, didn’t you?”

  “We were chums on the sidewalks of New York,” Groucho reminded as he struggled to get the pudgy actor to his feet. “Whose robe is that, by the way?”

  “Am I wearing a robe?”

  “Okay, you’re upright,” announced Groucho, letting go of him and stepping back.

  Benchley teetered, stumbled and started to fall forward. “I have the vague recollection that I was an author of some distinction,” said Benchley while Groucho was catching him and pushing him back to a vertical position. “Is that true or merely the vague delusion of a doddering old coot?”

  “You were my boyhood idol, Bob, and we all ranked you right up there with Pearl Buck, Albert Payson Terhune and Richard Harding Davis.” Groucho eased around until he was standing on the author-actor’s right-hand side, then he put an arm around him. “And, although Woollcott never agreed, I thought you were funnier than all three of them put together. And I’ll never forget the night we did put all three of them together and Terhune made such a hullabaloo because he was in the middle again.” He turned toward Butterworth. “Is he still living in the same bungalow?”

  “He was this morning, Groucho.”

  “I awoke one fine day to discover I’d metamorphosed into an actor,” said Benchley, his legs buckling some.

  “I’ve had a similar experience,” said Groucho. “Only I used to be a boy tenor.”

  “I recall that,” said Benchley, rubbing again at his moustache. “You were known as the Bobby Breen of our set. Which made it rather hard going for Bobby Breen whenever he dropped in for a visit.”

  “I’ll see you home, Bob.”

  “Weren’t we on some sort of mission, Charlie?” the writer asked his friend. “I remember it was something risky, so I had to fortify myself with strong drink.”

  “It had to do with Nazimova, as I recall, Bob.”

  “That’s right. Lately I’ve been getting Natasha Rambova mixed up with Alla Nazimova in my mind,” explained Benchley. “One of them lives hereabouts and we decided if we dropped in and took a look at her, that’d settle it once and for all.”

  “It’s Nazimova,” said Groucho. “Now let’s get you home.”

  “You’re certain it’s not Rambova?”

  “Certain. In fact, it’s one of the few things I’m sure about in this vale of uncertainty.”

  Benchley considered that information for a few seconds. “Very well, I’ll return to my lair and begin a series of short naps,” he said, nodding his head. “But, if it’s all the same with you, Julius, I’d rather ride in the wheelbarrow.”

  * * *

  At about the same time that Groucho was helping Benchley climb back aboard the wheelbarrow, I was also in the vicinity of Sunset Boulevard. After parking my yellow coupe on a side street, I walked along the Strip until I came to the emerald green awning marking the entryway to the Club Tortuga.

  There was a tall, thick man in a plaid sport coat and tan slacks leaning against the imitation adobe bricks just to the right of the maroon-colored padded door. “Closed until nightfall, sport,” he informed me as I approached the doorway to the nightclub.

  “I understand Shel Leverson is here this afternoon,” I said. “I’d like to see him.”

  “Why?”

  “It has to do with Peg McMorrow.”

  “Who’re you?”

  “Frank Denby.” I answered. “I’m pretty sure Vince Salermo has mentioned me to Leverson.”

  He nodded and said, “Wait.” He turned toward the door, started to reach for the handle. Then he thought of something, smiled ruefully and walked over to me. “Just in case,” he said and proceeded to frisk me.

  Finding no weapons, he returned to the padded door, opened it a few inches and called, “Av, come here a minute, huh?”

  A thin, pale man, wearing a double-breasted gray suit appeared in the opening. He and the thickset man had a brief conversation in murmurs I couldn’t catch.

  The thin man went away and the door slowly closed. “Be a few minutes,” the big man told me.

  Five minutes later the door opened again and Av, the thin one, made a come-on-in motion at me. “It’s okay, Denby,” he said in a reedy nasal voice. “He’ll see you.�
�

  Soon as I stepped into the chill, shadowy foyer, I heard music and the sound of tap-dancing. A small band of five or six pieces was playing a swing version of “The Lady in Red.”

  A drawling voice suddenly requested, loudly, “Kill the music, Sid.”

  Everybody but the bass player quit immediately. He went on for another few bars before stopping.

  My guide said, “We have to cross the dining room and the show area to get to Mr. Leverson’s office.”

  “Fine.” I followed him into the large domed room.

  There were no tablecloths on the dozens of small round tables and the spindly-legged chairs had been upended and piled atop them. At the center of the room a small oval area was harshly illuminated by a single white spotlight. Six girls in a variety of rehearsal clothes were lounging in a half circle, watching a small, frizzy-haired man in white ducks and a candy-striped shirt.

  He signaled the piano player, a fat man in an overcoat who sat at a white upright on the small elevated bandstand. “Sid, just you on this. Give me the chorus again, if you would.”

  Sid rested his cigar in an ashtray on top of the piano, ran his tongue over his upper front teeth and went into “The Lady in Red.”

  The choreographer began a series of energetic dance steps, ending by slapping himself on the buttocks with both open palms. “Is that clear?” he asked the six pretty dancers.

  “He’s better than they are,” commented Av, “which isn’t saying a hell of a lot.”

  We wended our way through a scattering of tables. At a blank white door, he knocked three times. Then he opened the door and told me, “Go on in.”

  I crossed the threshold, said “Oops,” and nearly stumbled in avoiding the body stretched out a few feet inside the doorway.

  Standing beside the large clawfooted mahogany desk was a slim, vaguely handsome man I recognized as Shel Leverson. He was wincing, massaging his right fist. “I lost my temper,” he explained, indicating the unconscious thug stretched out on the ivory-colored carpeting. “Now, what can I do for you, Denby?”

  Twenty-nine

  Like many imported screenwriters, Fredric Weston dressed like an Ivy League professor. He had on a tweed sport coat with leather patches on the elbows, a pair of nubby slacks and tasseled brown loafers.

  He and Groucho were seated in canvas chairs in front of his Garden of Allah bungalow. From the unseen swimming pool came shrieks, splashes and laughter.

  Taking his pipe from his mouth, the small, tanned Weston sipped his scotch highball. “Drunks,” he said disdainfully. “I don’t have much use for a man who can’t hold his booze. Benchley is an especially annoying example of—”

  “He’s a very funny man.” Groucho, who’d refused a drink, reached a cigar out of his pocket.

  The screenwriter shrugged. “I never cared for his pieces in the old Life or in the New Yorker,” he said. “In the movies he comes across, at best, as a gifted amateur actor. Back when he was doing China Seas at MGM, he made an absolute fool of—”

  “The reason I set up this little rendezvous, Fred, is because—”

  “We miss you over at MGM, Groucho. When are you and the boys coming back to make another picture?”

  “We’ve hit a snag with Mayer,” said Groucho. “He insists that on all our future movies we have to pay to have the theaters fumigated after each showing.” He unwrapped the cigar. “I need some information on one of your fellow writers over there, Fred.”

  “I’m not much for gossip. Maybe you ought to try Johnny Whistler or that sow Louella.”

  “I’m trying to find out what happened to Peg McMorrow.”

  “Is she the cute little starlet who killed herself?”

  “I think she was murdered.”

  Weston chuckled. “You’re really a softie, worrying about a minor actress,” he observed, trying his drink again. “Most people think of you as a wisecracking cynic.”

  “No, actually most people think of me as the man who invented the electric light bulb,” corrected Groucho as he lit his cigar. “You know Benton McLaughlin, don’t you? As I recall, he has the cubbyhole just down the hall from you in the MGM writers’ building.”

  “Known him since Princeton, sure,” he answered. “You heard about his wife?”

  “Give me,” invited Groucho, “your version of what happened to her?”

  “Well,” said Weston, finishing his highball and setting the glass on the flagstones beside his chair, “the official story is that she went down to Baja a few weeks ago to get away by herself. She simply failed to come back and nobody’s been able to find any trace of Babs or her red roadster. Poor Benton’s been down there twice, scouring their little hideaway house, talking to the local law, trying to find out something, anything, from the border police.” He shrugged and spread his hands wide. “He hasn’t learned a damn thing.”

  “Okay, that’s the official story,” said Groucho, exhaling smoke. “What do you think really happened?”

  Narrowing one eye, the screenwriter watched Groucho for a moment. “How the hell does this tie in with the McMorrow girl?”

  “Maybe it doesn’t. But tell me anyway.”

  “Babs, God bless her, has never been known for her faithfulness,” said Weston. “I figure, and I don’t know who the gent is, she spent the weekend with one of her lovers. Maybe she was in Ensenada and maybe she was really at Pismo Beach or Oxnard.”

  “That’s a long shackup, Fred.”

  “Could be she decided to run off with this particular lover and simply hasn’t gotten around to notifying Benton.”

  “Has she ever done anything like that before?”

  “Not,” admitted Weston, “for this length of time. But, yeah, she’s been known to disappear for a couple days.”

  “And what did McLaughlin do about it in the past?”

  “You’ve seen the guy, right? Big husky son of a bitch, Benton is. More than once he slapped Babs around when he found out what she’d been up to—or when she came dragging home and gave him some bullshit story about where she’d been and why she happened to be two days overdue.”

  “Maybe he did that this time—and went too far.”

  “Killed her, you mean?” He shook his head. “No, and I admit this sounds goofy, but Benton would never do her any serious harm.”

  “What about her boyfriends? What did he do to them?”

  “He wasn’t above threatening a lover, if he knew who it was,” said Weston. “And on a few occasions he even decked one of them. You’d think all that violence would’ve convinced Babs not to stray, but some women just seem born to fool around. You know what I mean?”

  Groucho puffed on his cigar. “Ever heard anything linking Babs McLaughlin with Tom Kerry?”

  Weston chuckled again. “Sure, but that romance is over,” he answered. “Has been for weeks.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Didn’t you hear about McLaughlin’s run-in with Kerry a couple months ago?”

  Groucho gave a negative shake of his head. “Inform me.”

  “Well, McLaughlin punched him in the Coconut Grove.”

  “Oh, my. That’s a very painful place to be punched,” said Groucho. “And that ended the relationship with darling Babs?”

  “Far as I know,” answered the writer. “Kerry is pretty heroic on screen, but in real life he’s pretty much a chicken.”

  Groucho leaned forward, asking, “Did the lady take up with somebody else after that?”

  Weston glanced around. “Well, I heard a vague rumor,” he said. “Sounded strange to me, but you never can tell in this town.”

  “What?”

  “Somebody mentioned seeing her, in an out-of-the-way joint in the Valley, with the headman from Monarch, old Kurtzman himself.”

  Groucho straightened up in the canvas chair. “Interesting,” he said, standing and flicking cigar ashes into a nearby shrub. “Ever been up to Lake Sombra?”

  “Never,” answered Weston, “but I hear it’
s a great place if you want to shack up in relative privacy.”

  “I’ll make a note of that,” said Groucho. “Thanks for this enlightening interlude, Fred.”

  “Keep me in mind if you’re looking for a scriptwriter for your next movie.”

  “We’re not going to use a scriptwriter if we make another one,” explained Groucho. “We intend to ad-lib the whole damn thing.” He bowed and went slouching off.

  Thirty

  Leverson settled in behind his massive desk. “Sit down,” he invited. “Tell me something.”

  I inclined my head in the direction of the unconscious hoodlum. “Maybe,” I suggested, “we ought to do something about this guy first.”

  The gambler frowned. “I suppose you’re right,” he agreed after a few seconds. “Rob—that’s Rob on the floor there—is probably distracting.” He flicked on his intercom. “Cherry, come in here a minute. I’ve got something needs to be moved.”

  Very shortly someone knocked three times on the office door. Then a broad-shouldered man wearing a lime-green polo shirt, tan slacks and a yellow beret came in. “Is Rob the object that needs to be hauled out of here?” he inquired.

  Nodding in my direction, Leverson asked, “Don’t you think that goddamn hat makes him look like a fairy?”

  Sitting in a chair that faced the desk, I scanned the big man. “Nope, not necessarily. Berets are becoming fashionable. In fact, some very masculine guys are now—”

  “It makes you look like a fairy,” said Leverson. “After you dump Rob in the alley out back, toss the hat in a garbage can.”

  “I’d prefer to hold on to it, boss, and wear it elsewhere than here.” Cherry bent, grabbed up the stunned Rob by the front of his shirt and hefted him clear off the floor. Tossing him over his shoulder, he headed for the door. “The boss has very little fashion sense,” he said to me before departing.

  As soon as the door closed, Leverson leaned forward. “You came to talk to me about Peg,” he said. “So commence.”