Groucho Marx, Master Detective

by Ron Goulart

  “Good morning, Groucho,” said Jane, leaning against the doorjamb and smiling out at us. “What is that thing?”

  “Dorgan happens to be a genuine bloodhound,” explained Groucho, attempting to dissuade the dog from expressing quite so much affection for him. “I borrowed him from a lifelong chum of mine, whom I’ve known for well over a year. He trains animals for the films and happens to have this crackerjack bloodhound in his menagerie.”

  “You intend to take Dorgan up to Lake Sombra with us, huh?” I realized. “To help us search for traces of Babs McLaughlin.”

  “Actually, Rollo, it turns out that you are going to take this worthy canine up to the woodland glades,” he corrected. “And to help you in your quest, I’m entrusting to you this handkerchief I purloined from one of Babs McLaughlin’s other autos just as dawn was tripping in on little cat feet this morning. Or whatever it is dawn does at such an ungodly hour. Give Dorgan a whiff, then tell him to go find the lady.”

  “Wait a minute, Groucho,” I said, accepting the proffered silk hanky. “As I recall, you were extolling the team spirit only last night. We were going up to the Shadow Lodge area, side by side and hand in hand, to ferret out clues together.”

  “Well, there’s been a change of plans, Rollo, and you’re going to have to ferret alone,” he said, shaking his head. “As you may’ve heard, Harpo, also known as the musical Rover Boy, is scheduled to perform this evening at the Hollywood Bowl. Why otherwise rational people would want to sit out in the open air and risk respiratory illnesses merely to hear my brother plunk on a harp is one of the great mysteries of the world.”

  “So you’ve decided to attend the concert, is that it?” asked Jane.

  “Alas, no, dear child,” he said, sighing. “I’ve allowed my cold, ruthless heart to be melted by the pleas of my hapless sibling. It seems Adolph injured his hand while playing croquet yesterday afternoon with a group of his intellectual chums from the snobbish East.” Groucho put a restraining hand on the panting dog and stood up. “I’m alluding to Adolph ‘Harpo’ Marx and not Adolf Hitler, by the way.”

  “Come on,” said Jane, eying him. “You don’t mean that you’re going to take his place, do you? If they paid to hear harp music, are they going to sit still for a guitar and selections from Gilbert and Sullivan?”

  Groucho pressed a palm over his heart. “You haven’t, sweet innocent that you are, grasped the full extent of my perfidy,” he told her. “Nor, for that matter, the full extent of my stupidity. In a rash moment, I agreed to impersonate Harpo.”

  “Impersonate him?” I said, quite loudly.

  The bloodhound’s ears pricked up and he glanced at me.

  “Can you play a harp?” asked Jane as the dog began to howl.

  “Hush, Dorgan,” suggested Groucho. “There’s no trick to playing a harp, Jane. And, keep in mind, all the Marx boys have an ear for music. However, playing a harp with one’s ear is a feat that calls for extreme skill and concentration. I could go on and say something about playing a harp with one’s feet, but I’m hoping someone will call a halt to this whole chain of thought.”

  “You really think you can bring it off?” I asked him.

  “I was asked similar rude questions when I announced my plans for flying the Atlantic solo, Rollo,” he said. “And that was only last week.” He knelt beside Dorgan and glared at him. “Cease this yowling.”

  The dog stopped and resumed licking Groucho’s face.

  Jane said, “Frank, you can’t drive up to Lake Sombra and back alone and look after that creature.”

  “If I went on this jaunt,” said Groucho, standing again, “it would be impossible to get back to Los Angeles in time for the concert tonight. Besides which, blood is thicker than water. Though nowhere near as good for washing out your delicate things in.”

  “I’ll go along with you, Frank,” said Jane. “Unless you two want to postpone the trip until tomorrow.”

  “Time is of the essence,” reminded Groucho. “On top of which, we don’t have the use of Dorgan for very long. In two days he’s due over at Hal Roach’s wickiup to star in an Our Gang epic.”

  When Groucho said Our Gang, the dog began to howl again.

  I moved over beside Jane. “You can’t go with me, you have to report back to Tommerlin and toil away on Hillbilly Willie.”

  “I’ll tell Rod I caught his cold and am staying home for a day.”

  Groucho’s eyebrows rose. “I can’t believe, Little Nell, that you would tell such a fib.”

  “Hanging around with you two has eroded my moral sense,” she said.

  “Ah, you’re commencing to sound like my sort of woman,” he told her. “Well, my children, I must be going. I popped over bright and early to explain my plight and to deliver this splendid specimen of doghood. If you’d like a splendid specimen of dogwood, along with selected splinters from the True Cross, send ten dollars along with your name and address to the Convent of the Little Sisters of the Poor. Allow five to six weeks for delivery and then forget about the whole darn thing.” He bowed toward Jane, patted Dorgan on the head. “Stay, boy, you’re working for Master Frank now.”

  The dog stopped howling and licked at my bare feet.

  Thirty-five

  We arrived at the Shadow Lodge late that afternoon, just as twilight was beginning to move into the forest of pines, firs and oaks that surrounded the five or so cleared acres that the main buildings and the scatter of cabins occupied. The lake, which was roughly a mile across, was already looking murky as dusk approached and a thin mist could be seen drifting low over the surface.

  I’d done the driving and we’d stopped once for lunch and twice to let the bloodhound roam. By the time we reached Lake Sombra, Dorgan was asleep in the rumbleseat, breathing heavily enough so that you could hear him inside the car. There wasn’t much else to hear, since Jane and I hadn’t been speaking for the past twenty minutes.

  Parking in the guest lot to the left of the big two-story redwood lodge, I turned off the engine and said, “Okay, I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t sound it.” She was sitting right against the door on her side of the car, as far from me as possible, with arms folded. “You sound, in fact, extremely insincere.”

  “You’re jaded from living in the vicinity of Hollywood too long. Everybody sounds insincere to you.”

  “So now are you trying to say that you don’t think Hillbilly Willie is moronic drivel?”

  “Look, I was annoyed because you didn’t laugh at a pretty funny sequence in the third Groucho Marx, Master Detective script,” I explained. “That’s probably why I made those critical remarks about your strip.”

  “Hey, it isn’t my strip,” she corrected, arms still folded. “I only help draw it. However, whatever I may think of Rod Tommerlin as a person—well, I have to admit he’s a gifted satirist.”

  I took a slow breath in and out. Then I bit my lower lip for about thirty seconds. “Fine,” I said at last. “We don’t exactly agree on that, but there’s no reason to—”

  “The big mistake, I think, was my agreeing to jot down script ideas for you while you were driving us up here.”

  “It helped pass the time,” I reminded. “Besides which, I have to have the entire damn script done and over to the agency by Tuesday morning.”

  “I understand that. And, Frank, I am sorry I ripped those three pages out of my notebook, tore them in little tiny pieces and tossed them out the car window into the wind.”

  I stepped out of the coupe and onto the white gravel. “No great loss,” I said. “You’re probably right about that stretch of script being unfunny and dull.”

  “It’s funny enough, except for the harpoon gags.” She eased out of her side of the car, stood looking up at the rustic lodge. “What I was trying to explain to you before you flew off the handle, Frank, was that I rarely laugh out loud in situations like this. I usually don’t even laugh when Rod is trying out Hillbilly Willie dialogue on me.”

  “Right, and
that stuff is really funny.”

  “Don’t start again,” she warned, smiling, “or we never will work out this truce.”

  I smiled back over the yellow hood of my car. “The feud is over then,” I announced. “Although, if you want the damned truth, I am sorry you jettisoned those pages.”

  “I remember most of the stuff. I’ll recreate it once we’re in our cabin.”

  “Great, except leave out the harpoon gags.”

  “Mr. Denby.”

  I flinched and took a hopping step forward, then turned to my left. Standing there was a small, freckled man, somewhere in his forties and wearing a crimson and gold bellhop uniform. “You’re very light on your feet,” I mentioned, eying him.

  In a low even voice he said, “I wanted to talk with you before you checked in. I’m Dickerson.”

  Before leaving Bayside, I’d put in a phone call to Tim O’Hearn, my Angel’s Flight source of information. Even though he hadn’t as yet come up with much in the way of further news for me, I asked him if he could find out if anybody working up at the Shadow Lodge might be likely to sell information about past guests and activities at the resort. From our lunch stop I’d phoned O’Hearn again and he’d come up with the name of one of the bellboys, Neal Dickerson. He’d apparently also had somebody contact Dickerson and tell him to expect us.

  In case you’re wondering, Groucho was financing our overnight stay at the lake and had also provided me with sufficient cash to cover gas, food and bribes.

  “You’ll be in Cottage Thirteen,” Dickerson told me. “It’s one of the ones that allows pets and it has a very nice view of the lake in the daytime.” He rested the palm of his left hand on the hood of my Plymouth and nodded at Jane. “All you have to do, miss, is go into the lobby there and sign a card. Everything else is all set.”

  She raised an eyebrow and looked at me. I nodded and she, after a small shrug, climbed up the redwood steps.

  Dickerson said, “Very pretty, nice legs. Actress?”

  “Cartoonist. Do you have something to tell—”

  “Something to sell,” he corrected, chuckling very thinly and briefly. “See that boathouse down by the lake? Meet me there at seven-thirty and we can have a nice chat.”

  * * *

  When I came back into our cabin at a few minutes before eight, Jane turned away from the front window and let the slats of the blind she’d been holding apart snap back into place. “Well, you survived,” she said, “and that creepy bellhop didn’t lure you down to that rackety boathouse to murder you.”

  “Nope, he lured me down there so he could charge me twenty bucks for telling me who Babs McLaughlin spent the fateful weekend with.” I lifted a registration card out of my jacket pocket and held it up.

  “Well, who was it?”

  “A gentleman name of Edwin Kantor.”

  She blinked, moving closer to me. “Who in the heck is Edwin Kantor?”

  “From Dickerson’s description, I’d guess Eli Kurtzman,” I answered, putting the card back in my pocket. “You’ll notice both gents have the same initials.”

  “Did the bellboy—seems ridiculous calling him a boy, though—did he know anything about Tom Kerry’s activities while Babs was here?”

  “He told me that Kerry was indeed here over the same weekend and that he was with a girl who fits Peg McMorrow’s description,” I said. “But he never saw Kerry and Babs together, nor did he notice any communication between the Kerry-McMorrow team and the Babs-Kurtzman team.”

  “And the promise of another twenty-dollar bill didn’t help?”

  I shook my head. “I also asked him if he saw Babs leave here,” I told her. “Dickerson says he noticed her car drive off early on that Monday morning, but he won’t swear that she was at the wheel. In fact, he thinks maybe there was a man driving.”

  “Which man? Tom Kerry?”

  “Probably wasn’t Kerry,” I answered. “And he isn’t sure if Babs was in the car at all, even as a passenger.”

  “That’s not much information for twenty dollars.”

  “Well, Dickerson also promised he’d carry our bags out of here tomorrow for no extra tip.” I wandered over to the wooden-framed quilted bed. The bloodhound was sprawled at its foot, dozing with his paws in the air. When I sat on the bed, he rolled over on his side and made a snorting sound. “It’s possible that the woman never left here.”

  Jane grimaced. “You want to go hunt for her, huh?”

  “Since we’ve got Dorgan, yeah,” I replied. “But you can wait here. I don’t plan to start searching the woods until close to midnight.”

  “Yes, midnight,” she said, “that is the traditional time to do spooky things. Anyway, Frank, I am not going to sit here alone again, wondering if somebody’s murdering you out in the darkness. I’ll tag along.”

  Thirty-six

  At sundown, Groucho was driving up Cahuenga Boulevard, heading for the Hollywood Bowl. The afternoon had become increasingly hazy and the slowly disappearing sun had a bright orange color to it.

  On the car radio Johnny Whistler was winding up his evening movie news report. “We hear that the upcoming preem of Tom Kerry’s biggest epic yet, The Pirate Prince, is going to be gala and then some,” he was saying. “Eli Kurtzman, the Monarch mogul himself, is pulling out all the stops. Only snag, so we’ve been told, is the possibility that the dashing Kerry, suffering from a bad case of overwork, and on the orders of his sawbones, won’t be able to attend the festivities at Hollywood’s fabled Klein’s Babylonian. We’ll keep you informed. And finally—an open letter to Al Jolson. Dear Al…”

  “The things I’d write to Jolson,” said Groucho, turning off the radio, “you couldn’t broadcast.”

  Reaching the foothills, he turned onto North Highland Avenue.

  The guard at the performers’ parking lot said, “Evening, Harpo. I hear you’ve got a sold-out house.”

  “I used to have a birdhouse, but after the last sparrows moved out we haven’t been able to rent it again.”

  The guard eyed Groucho. “You know, Harpo, it’s amazing how much alike you Marx Brothers look,” he said, leaning closer to the open driver-side window. “I ran into that wacky brother of yours, Groucho, a few months ago and the resemblance between you two is uncanny.”

  Groucho lowered his voice a little and confided, “I’ll let you in on a little secret. The Marx Brothers are actually identical quintuplets. But back at the time we were born nobody wanted a set of Jewish quints, so the whole matter was hushed up. Had we but known, of course, I’d be as rich as the Dionne Quintuplets today and, if you want my opinion, I’d look a lot cuter in long curls and a pretty little dirndl than any of those tykes does. And I say that even though I haven’t the vaguest idea what a dirndl is.” He gave the guard a lazy salute and drove on into the lot.

  He parked, tugged a large black suitcase that was splotched with travel and hotel stickers out of the back seat. Groaning slightly, he carried it toward the dressing room area at the rear of the Bowl. The amphitheater covers a sort of natural hollow in the foothills and the stage is shielded in part by a huge concrete band shell that looks like some kind of giant white melon that’s been sliced in half.

  As Groucho made his way along a corridor, the suitcase banged into the wall and something inside produced a rude honking noise. The dressing room that had been assigned to Harpo was of modest size and two of the light bulbs in the border that surrounded the makeup mirror were defunct.

  Groucho hefted his suitcase up onto the small sofa that sat against the far wall. He opened it and extracted the curly red wig, horn, voluminous overcoat and disreputable hat that his brother had entrusted to him. Extracting his makeup kit, he carried that and the flamboyant wig over to the mirror and seated himself.

  He sat staring into the glass, studying his face, for several silent seconds. “Why, Errol Flynn, how did you get in there?” he asked his image. “Oh, silly me. It’s actually my own puss I’m seeing.” He sighed and leaned back, still lo
oking at himself. “Is this the face that launched a thousand ships? Next time, tell them to use a champagne bottle.” After a few more seconds, he said, “Let’s try that again. Is this the face that launched a thousand ships? Not to mention three dirigibles, a tuna barge and a garbage scow?” Groucho stroked his chin. “Remind me to have Frank write me some snappy thousand-ships material.”

  He hunched forward and started to apply his makeup. After he’d darkened his eyebrows, he was about to paint on a moustache when he remembered that he was going to be Harpo tonight. Exhaling slowly, he slapped the wig on his head and adjusted it. When he got the wig sitting just right, he tried the tongue-stuck-in-lower-lip-cheeks-inflated-eyes-crossed expression that Harpo called a gookie.

  “You make a very convincing Harpo,” he told himself, standing up and away from the mirror. “And if that isn’t a sobering thought, I don’t know what is.”

  * * *

  They didn’t start shooting at Groucho until nearly ten minutes later.

  Decked out in the full Harpo outfit, with the horn thrust in the waist of his baggy pants, he’d gone up to take a look at the stage.

  The members of the fifteen-piece orchestra that was going to accompany him weren’t on stage yet, but a uniformed guard was standing just inside the stage entrance that Groucho came slouching through.

  “Evening, Mr. Marx,” he said.

  Groucho waved, honked his horn and kept moving.

  “Yikes,” he observed, having forgotten that using a horn that’s stuffed in your pants can send a blast of air straight into your crotch.

  Walking a bit gingerly for a moment, he went over to inspect the harp that he was going to have to wrestle with during the concert. It sat at the front of the Bowl stage.

  The many rows of seats that fanned out across the open-air theater were all empty and twilight was filling the area. While the stage was fully illuminated, few of the audience lights were on yet.