by Ron Goulart
“You can,” I assured him.
“I didn’t kill Randy Spellman,” Dorothy told us. “Fact is, he was dead when I got there.”
“I figured as much,” I said. “But—”
“Why were you there?” Groucho asked.
She sighed, leaning forward and rubbing at her left knee. “Because I was set up. At least it sure as hell looks like I was.”
“Give them the details,” Enery urged.
“As most everybody knows, including the cops and the newspapers, I had … well, I guess you could call it a fling with Randy. It didn’t take me long to realize what a bastard he was,” said Dorothy. “Problem was, Randy could be very nasty if you called things off before he was ready to move on to another dame.”
Enery was sitting on a footstool near her. “Tell them about the pictures.”
“Randy took some pictures of me. You could call them embarrassing,” the stuntwoman continued. “After I broke off with him, Randy threatened to show them around. He wasn’t in them.” She leaned, took a cigarette out of the box atop the claw-footed coffee table. Enery lit it for her. “After a while, he didn’t mention the pictures, quit making threats.”
Wrinkling her nose, she snuffed the cigarette out in a yellow ceramic ashtray. “When I started working on this new Ty-Gor movie, Randy brought up the pictures again,” Dorothy said. “He promised to give them to me, negatives and prints, if … if I’d do him certain favors.”
“Told you he was a son of a bitch,” Enery said to me.
Sighing again, Dorothy said, “Two days ago I got a note from Randy. At least, I thought it was from him. He explained that he realized what a rat he’d been and that he had decided to give the pictures to me with no strings. I was to meet the guy in his dressing room at seven o’clock that night. Even though I still didn’t trust him, I figured it was worth a try.”
I asked, “You still have the note?”
“Nope, I tossed it in a garbage bin on the lot.”
“Handwritten?” asked Groucho.
“Typed.”
“Speaking of notes,” Groucho said, “what about the threatening one from you that the police found in Spellman’s trailer?”
She spread her hands wide. “I didn’t write him any damned notes, Mr. Marx.”
“What happened when you got to his dressing room that night?”
“Randy was already dead. He was sprawled out on his back in front of his trailer.”
I asked, “Did you see or hear anything?”
“There was an odd perfume in the air,” she answered. “I could smell it above the odor of gunpowder. Something like sandalwood, but not exactly.”
“Know anybody who wears a perfume like that?”
She shook her head. “No, Frank.”
“Anything else?”
Dorothy hesitated, finally replying, “I’m not sure.”
“She thought somebody might be watching her from off in the jungle,” said Enery, putting his hand on hers. “In the shadows, but she’s not sure.”
“It did cross my mind that whoever killed Randy might still be hanging around,” Dorothy said. “And I also was pretty damn sure somebody was trying to get me mixed up in his murder. So I got out of there.”
“You didn’t think about calling the police?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I didn’t want anybody to know I’d been anywhere near the guy that night. I didn’t know about that fake note, but I did know Randy had been telling a lot of people that I was still carrying the torch for him.”
“She was afraid,” added Enery, “that the police might jump to exactly the wrong conclusions they have jumped to.”
“I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to get Enery involved,” Dorothy said. “But I finally decided to call him.” She smiled at the actor.
Groucho asked her, “How’d you get out of the Warlock studio grounds?”
“Climbed over the back wall,” she replied, rubbing at her knee again. “Not too tough to do, except I took a spill when I landed outside.”
Enery asked me, “Can you help her?”
“We can try to find out who really killed Spellman,” I answered. “But she ought to come out of hiding, get a good lawyer, and then get in touch with the police.”
“Not yet,” said Dorothy. “I’m just not ready to—”
“Longer you wait,” I told her, “the guiltier you’re going to look.”
“I know, yes, but …”
Groucho stood up. “Who do you think might’ve killed Spellman?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But a hell of a lot of people must be happy that he’s dead and gone.”
Seven
The morning was gray, and by the time I reached Studio City at around 10 A.M., a misty drizzle had commenced. I turned off Laurel Canyon Boulevard onto Woodbridge and found a parking place just about across the street from the Stardust Diner.
The diner represented an architect’s idea of what a streamlined railroad dining car might look like, possibly one that both Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon patronized. It was sleek and silver on the outside, generously trimmed with swirling neon tubing in bright basic colors.
As I reached out to push the bright blue door, it was pushed open from inside. Chester Morris, looking dapper as usual, was coming out.
“Hi, kid,” he said. “Are you a father yet?”
“Couple weeks more.”
“Jane doing okay?”
“Fine thus far.”
The actor said, “Give the lady my best. And think about writing a movie for me sometime.” Turning up his coat color and readjusting his snap-brim hat, he hurried away into the fuzzy gray morning.
For some reason that was not immediately discernible, all the waitresses were wearing sombreros. I spotted my friend from the Studio City police force sitting at a silvery booth midway back.
“It’s Mexican Specials Day,” explained Detective Mitch Tandofsky as I sat down opposite him in the glittering streamlined booth.
“Hence the sombreros.”
“You ought to drop in on Alaska Fish Specials Day.” Resting next to his coffee mug was a new brown-leather briefcase. “Two reasons why I agreed to talk to you about the Spellman murder, Frank.” Mitch was a slightly overweight man in his middle thirties, a bit on the short side and with a bald spot starting to break through his tight-curling black hair. “First off, we’ve been buddies since the days when you earned an honest living with the LA Times. Secondly,” he added, lowering his raspy voice, “I don’t happen to agree with some of my colleagues.”
“About who actually killed Spellman?”
“Exactly, right. I happen to know Dorothy Woodrow. Used to date her. That was, oh, two, three years ago,” the detective said. “I don’t believe she could’ve killed the guy. Therefore, I am not buying the notion that she fled to avoid getting arrested.” He drank some of his coffee. “Besides, it looks to me like a whole stewpot of people had reasons for killing him.”
“That’s what, so far, Groucho and I think.” I didn’t mention that Dorothy herself shared our belief.
“Okay, Frank, I brought—”
“Can I interest you boys in a Mexican Special?” asked the pretty blonde waitress who’d materialized beside our booth and was tipping her sombrero by way of greeting.
“Not at this hour,” I replied. “Just coffee for now.”
“And a refill for me, Barbara,” said Tandofsky.
“I’m thinking, Mitch, of changing my name.”
“Barbara’s a fine name.”
“Sure, but Googins isn’t. Not for a marquee,” explained the pretty waitress. “Barbara Googins in Drums Along the Mohawk, Barbara Googins in The Mark of Zorro. No oomph.”
“Heck of a lot more oomph than Tandofsky,” he assured her. “Anyway, I wouldn’t change it until I got a studio contract, Barbara. Then let them think up a new one for you.”
“That may be a long time from now.” She smiled, somewhat forlornly, an
d departed.
“What about the alleged threatening note?” I asked.
Unzipping the briefcase, he reached inside. He brought out a photo of the letter that had been found in the murdered man’s dressing room, handed it to me.
It was typed, meaning anybody could’ve written the thing. I said as much, then asked, “Whose fingerprints are on it?”
Mitch narrowed one eye. “Nobody’s.”
“How’s that? Dorothy supposedly sent it to him, he supposedly read it,” I pointed out. “How’d they do that without anyone touching it?”
“That’s sure what they call an anomaly,” said Mitch, leaning back on his bench. “My colleagues can’t explain it, but they’ve still got Dorothy at the head of their suspect list. We got copies of both Dorothy and Spellman’s prints from their studio personnel files.”
“Can I keep this copy?”
“Go ahead. Show it to Groucho.”
Folding the photo in half, I tucked it into the breast pocket of my jacket. “Were Dorothy’s fingerprints anywhere in the dressing room?”
“Nope, but she could’ve been wearing gloves.”
“Who are your other suspects?”
“So far I’ve got a list of quite a few people who won’t mourn Spellman,” my friend answered. “I wouldn’t say they were all exactly suspects. At the moment, I’m not going to share that information with you, Frank.”
Barbara Googins brought us two cups of coffee. “If you change your minds and want a Breakfast Tamale, let me know.”
“We hear,” I said, “that besides fooling around with a wide range of women, I said that Spellman might also have dabbled in blackmail now and then.”
“I’ve heard that, too.”
“And specific targets?”
“That’s more stuff I’m not up to sharing just yet.”
I sampled my coffee. “Suppose something’s happened to Dorothy as well?”
“That’s a possibility, Frank, and we’re looking into it.”
“If she’s hiding for some reason and comes out into the open,” I asked, “what would happen then?”
“At the very least, she’d be held for questioning,” Tandofsky said. “And she might even be charged with murder. All depends. But maybe I can find the real killer before that happens.”
“Or maybe Groucho and I will find the killer.”
Mitch nodded, smiling briefly. “Stranger things have happened,” he admitted.
The windshield wipers on Groucho’s Cadillac were wiping in waltz time, or so he later told me, as he halted at the gates of the Warlock studios. The drizzle was in the act of converting into rain.
A guard, whose uniform fit him perfectly, except around the middle, leaned out of his hut to inquire, “Yeah?”
Rolling his window down halfway, Groucho informed him, “I have an appointment with Joel Farber.”
“And who might you be?”
“Well, if I had a choice, I might be the elusive Scarlet Pimpernel or, better yet, the sixth Dione Quintuplet,” he replied. “But, alas, I’m stuck with being a poor, but honest, country lad named Groucho Marx.”
After making a grunting noise, the guard reached into his hut for a clipboard. Consulting the mimeographed list attached, he said, “Says here you’re an actor.”
“Remind me to sue somebody for slander,” he said. “I take it you’ve never seen me upon the silver screen? Or even the kitchen screen?”
“I never go to the movies,” the guard confided, making a check beside Groucho’s name. “I spend my leisure time reading great books. I belong to a reading club.”
“I couldn’t afford the fee for the great books club and had to settle for the trashy fiction club.”
“Drive on in and park in Lot 3.” The guard ducked back into his hut.
The iron gates swung open inward, silently, and Groucho guided his rain-spattered car onto the lot.
Tall palm trees rose up on each side of the entrance to the visitors’ lot. Gathered under one of them for partial shelter were three cattle rustlers and two dance-hall girls. The red-haired dancer was holding a folded copy of the LA Times over her head, and the meanest-looking cattle rustler was attempting to roll a cigarette.
Groucho parked next to a silver Jaguar. “Ah, it must be pleasant to listen to rain go pitter-patter on a Jaguar roof.” He got out of the car, headed for the street.
“Hello, Groucho,” called the rustler, who was still trying to concoct a cigarette.
“Howdy,” Groucho said. “You ought to switch to cigars. Although, admittedly, they’re even tougher to roll.”
“Don’t you have an umbrella, Groucho?” asked the redhead.
He paused, patted himself, and then answered, “Apparently not.”
“Like part of my newspaper?”
“Only if I can have the pages with the funnies. Lately I’ve become obsessed with the peregrinations of Little Orphan Annie.”
The dance-hall girl separated off a section of the Times, handed it to him.
Unfurling it, Groucho held it over his head. “I’ll be eternally grateful, ma’m,” he assured her, “well into next week.”
The blonde dance-hall girl asked, “Are you really going to investigate that rat’s murder?”
“Be more specific, my child. Which rat?”
Her nose wrinkled. “I mean Randy Spellman,” she said. “Seems to me, now that he’s dead and gone, you should just forget about it.”
Groucho said, “If we did that, we wouldn’t be able to prove that Dorothy Woodrow didn’t do him in.”
A bearded cattle rustler said, “Dorothy didn’t kill Spellman.”
“Oh, so? Can you tell us who did, in twenty-five words or less?”
When the bit player shook his head, raindrops that had collected on his Stetson splattered the front of Groucho’s plaid sports coat. “Nope, it’s just that I know Dorothy,” he said, “and she’s not the sort of girl to kill anybody.”
The blonde suggested, “Maybe it was old Arthur Wright Benson himself. I hear he didn’t think Randy was right for Ty-Gor anymore.”
The other dance-hall girl said, “I worked on the last Ty-Gor—I was one of the Amazons. We shot a lot of that one out at Benson’s estate, and the word was that Randy was way too friendly with old Benson’s new wife.”
“You can’t narrow it down to the Benson clan,” said the rustler as he finally completed making the cigarette and stuffed the sack of tobacco back into his shirt pocket. “Most everybody who ever worked with Randy disliked the guy.”
Tipping his newspaper, Groucho said, “Thank you one and all. And now I must be going.”
Knees slightly bent, he went loping off in the direction of Joel Farber’s office.
Eight
Somebody had taped a slightly bedraggled black wreath to the metal door of Soundstage 3.
“What half-wit did that?” muttered Joel Farber as he opened the door.
“Apparently Spellman has at least one mourner,” observed Groucho, following the producer into the huge, shadowy building.
“Maybe it’s meant ironically.”
“A movie lot’s an odd place to encounter irony.”
The overhead lights in the vicinity of Randy Spellman’s trailer and the spurious jungle were on. Where the body had been sprawled in the floor, there was now a chalk outline of the jungle man.
In a canvas director’s chair a few yards from the trailer sat a uniformed studio guard, legs crossed, reading a tattered copy of Ranch Romances. “Nothing’s happening, Mr. Farber,” he announced, closing the pulp magazine and popping to his feet.
“Darn,” said Groucho, “I was so hoping the killer’d return to the scene of the crime. That’d make everything so much easier for us all.”
The young producer said, “You can take a break, Josh. Be back in fifteen.”
“Thanks, Mr. Farber.” Dropping his reading material on the canvas chair, the guard walked away into the shadows.
Groucho was gazing toward t
wo rows of ten palm trees that were lined up on the far side of Spellman’s portable dressing room. “Why,” he inquired, gesturing with his unlit cigar, “are all those extra palm trees lurking over there in redwood tubs? They ought to be in yonder jungle.”
Joel Farber halted on the first step leading up to Randy Spellman’s trailer. “They would’ve been if Randy hadn’t gotten himself bumped off,” he explained. “Arthur Wright Benson thought our jungle here on the set looked a mite tacky, so he uprooted some stuff from his private jungle and sent it over. It was delivered the day of the murder.”
Strolling over to the trees, which were resting in dirt and a scattering of pine chips, Groucho asked, “Benson deliver them himself?”
“No, they came in a truck from the famous Rancho Tygoro.” He climbed the steps.
“How much control does Benson have over your Ty-Gor movies?”
“According to his contract, not that much.” Farber was opening the door of the late king of the jungle’s dressing room. “But the studio heads are inclined to pay attention to the old boy The Ty-Gor movies do pretty damn well at the box office.”
Groucho followed the producer into the trailer. “Could Benson have forced the Warlock Studios to dump Spellman?”
“It’s possible, Groucho. Lately Benson had been complaining about Randy, and, let’s face it, Randy was pretty replaceable.”
The dressing room was large, its walls and ceiling buff-colored.
“Law me,” Groucho observed, “this is twice as big as the dressing room MGM provides me. And it’s not cluttered up with a lot of unsightly urinals the way mine is.”
There were signs that a police crew had been through the place. They’d searched drawers and cabinets, dusted for fingerprints. A spent flashbulb was lying on the mat carpeting just short of a wicker wastebasket. The only picture was a framed glossy of a grinning Randy Spellman standing on the deck of a sailboat.
Hands behind his back, softly humming “Lydia the Tattooed Lady,” Groucho started wandering around the room. Slightly slouched, he sniffed at the air.
Faint traces of gunpowder and that not-quite-sandalwood scent Dorothy had mentioned.
