by Ron Goulart
Our waiter was suntanned and muscular, and sometime in the recent past he’d had a nose job. He showed us to one of the several empty tables and took May’s order for a nutburger on Russian rye and mine for a glass of mango-papaya juice.
Resting both elbows on the tabletop, May said, “I’ll provide you with some background info on Spellman. In return, Frank dear, I’d appreciate it if you’d pass along to me whatever little tidbits you and Groucho gather. You know, stuff I can use on my nightly broadcast or in my column or even in the magazine.”
“Sure, I’ll—”
“Also, telephone me as soon as Jane has the baby,” my friend added. “Unlike you, she’s getting to be a celebrity. And try to get the news to me in time for one of my radio shows.”
“I’ll urge Jane to be prompt. Now about—”
“You working for Enery McBride?”
“Eh?” I said, cupping my ear.
“He’s a good buddy of you and Jane, he’s been Dorothy Woodrow’s lover for the past few months. So I figure you—”
“We’re trying to help him. But how’d you know about him and—”
“Finding out such stuff is my calling in life, remember?” she reminded.
The waiter brought her sandwich and my juice.
Taking an enthusiastic bite of her nutburger, May chewed for a moment and then asked, “How well do you know Dorothy?”
“Not well, know her from running into her at the studios now and then.”
“Enery’s not in for a long-term romance.”
“Meaning?”
She took another bite, shrugging one shoulder. “She’s a restless young lady,” she answered. “For a while it was Randy Spellman, then there were a couple of others, then it was Enery’s turn. No way to tell who’ll be next.”
“Whether she’s restless or not, Enery is convinced that she had nothing to do with the murder and that she was framed.”
“Hey, I don’t think she killed that bastard,” said May, taking a sip of her glass of mineral water. “She’s not the kind of dame to get that serious—serious enough to kill somebody—over any guy.”
“Suppose he was blackmailing her? That’d give her a motive.”
May shook her head. “Naw, not Dorothy Woodrow,” she persisted.
“He was a blackmailer, though. Do you know some of his targets?”
“I have a list of about a half dozen of his victims that I’m certain about back at my office. I’ll have one of my assistants type you a copy, Frank, and messenger it over to your place.”
“Anybody else who wanted to do him harm?”
“If I was digging into this mess, I’d take a good, long look at the Arthur Wright Benson family.”
“AWB himself?”
“Let me explain.” She finished her nutburger, signaled the waiter to bring another one. “Stop me if you’ve heard this basic scenario before. The old boy is close to sixty-five, and his newest wife is not quite thirty. Her name was Marge Rawson, and she’s been Marge Benson for two years. Before that, she was the runner-up in a Miss Montana contest and then journeyed to the Golden West to find fame, fortune, or a rich sugar daddy. Since she has good looks but not a speck of talent, it was lucky for her that Benson stumbled upon her at a party on one of his cronies’ yachts.”
“A heartwarming tale. What’s it got to do with Spellman?”
After beginning on the second nutburger, May continued. “As you know, Frank dear, the previous Ty-Gor epic was shot out at Rancho Tygoro.” She paused to chuckle. “Good thing that wasn’t Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s spread, or it’d be named Rancho Sherlocko.”
“You’re leading up to Randy’s having an affair with the current Mrs. Benson?”
“Bingo,” May said. “Old AWB was never quite certain anything had happened, but he decided he didn’t want Randy in any further Ty-Gor flickers.”
“So if he later found out for sure—he’d have a nice motive for doing away with Spellman?”
“Or for hiring some goons to do the job and try to frame Dorothy, sure,” she added. “As you have possibly noticed, Frank dear, Hollywood is a very superstitious town. If I believed in any of that crap, I’d say there was quite probably a jinx on Rancho Tygoro. Or maybe a hex.”
“How so?”
“Well, at about the same time Randy Spellman was sneaking Marge Benson up into his tree house, Alicia Benson—the old boy’s daughter—was losing her fiancée.”
“How’d she do that?”
“Not exactly her fault, although she’s known to turn nasty when she’s in her cups,” said May. “This latest beau was an accountant with Arthur Wright Benson, Inc. Named Cahan or some such, and one moonless night he decided he liked fifteen thousand dollars better than he liked fair Alicia and absconded with that sum. He’s probably far, far south of the border at present.”
I remembered to drink some of my juice. It tasted pretty good. “Don’t forget to send me that victim list.”
“And don’t forget to let me know as soon as your kid is born,” May said. “Call me from the hospital. It’ll make a nice folksy item for my show.”
I smiled at her. “You’ve become pretty crass.”
“I was always crass,” she assured me.
Hillcrest was high up on West Pico Boulevard, and rain was falling enthusiastically on the vast green of the golf course when Groucho guided his Cadillac into the members’ parking lot.
At their regular round table in the dining room, several of his pals were gathered, including George Burns, Jack Benny, Harry Ruby, and Georgie Jessel. Groucho, as he recounted to me later, paused beside the table while on his way to join Randy Spellman’s agent at a small table on the far side of the big room.
“As usual,” Groucho assured me, “this gathering of woebegone would-be wits tried desperately to come up with even one small clever remark. Alas, I regret to say, they failed miserably. Burns tried valiantly, but only succeeded in provoking a fit of giggles in Benny. And that’s not difficult to achieve. After scattering a few pearls of wit, I went on about my business.”
Lew Hershman was a sleek, graying man in his middle fifties. He wore a turquoise polo shirt and a blazer of indeterminate color. “Things are definitely looking up, Groucho.”
“Ah, would that all agents took the death of a client so well, Lew.” Groucho lowered himself into the seat opposite.
“Listen, I just got word that the client I been trying to sell Warlock to replace Randy as Ty-Gor is going to be hired.”
“And he is?”
“Carl Nesbit. I hear old Arthur Wright Benson thinks Carl’s perfect to take over as Ty-Gor.” Hershman smiled. “And unlike poor Randy, this guy can speak in whole sentences.”
“C’mon, Nesbit isn’t an actor, he’s a swimmer.”
“So who needs a Barrymore to wear a jockstrap and climb trees?”
Producing a cigar, Groucho lit it. “I’m hoping it won’t pain you too much to tell me a little about Randy Spellman.”
“I can control my emotions,” the agent told him, checking his gold wristwatch. “But let’s make it snappy, because I got a pinochle game coming up in about fifteen minutes.”
Eleven
Groucho heard the first scream while he was hurrying up the slippery marble steps of Laura Dayton’s sprawling Bel-Air mansion.
He’d arrived at her place just off St. Cloud Road a couple moments earlier, parked near the five-car garage, and dashed across the wide white-gravel drive.
The house had been built in the 1920s and looked like an uneasy partnership between a California mission and an Arabian Nights palace. Pale blue minarets were mixed with slanting red-tile roofs, and wrought-iron grillwork decorated walls rich with exotic mosaic-tile designs. The rain had turned to a misty drizzle, and twilight seemed to be closing in early on the foliage-filled acres surrounding the imaginary palace that had once belonged to a silent-movie comic.
Sprinting up the nine steps to the carved oak door, Groucho whapped on it with his fi
st.
He heard another scream, this one tinged with pain. Then a shattering crash from somewhere deep inside the actress’s mansion.
He knocked again, harder.
And still no one came to let him in.
Trying the big brass doorknob, he found that it turned. He pushed the door open, took a deep breath, and stepped into the house.
The long hallway had Persian carpets spread out along its length. On the stucco walls hung Eastern tapestries and brass ornaments. The whole area smelled of ancient incense.
“What ho?” shouted Groucho into the shadowy silence.
From above came a faint, hollow thump.
Feeling not a bit of fear, he later informed me, Groucho went dashing bravely up the curving staircase to the second floor.
Halfway along the hallway a door stood half-open. Inside the room someone moaned.
“I do hope that isn’t a death rattle,” Groucho said to himself as he edged closer.
The room turned out to be a large den, with a heavy wooden desk at its center. On the dark-paneled walls hung an impressive collection of framed publicity shots of Laura Dayton. On the Moroccan throw rug in front of the big desk, Laura herself was in the process of trying to sit up.
“Allow me.” Groucho trotted over to help the dark-haired actress rise.
“Can you beat the nerve of some people?” she said. “Hiya, Groucho.”
“What’s befallen you?”
Upright, she grimaced and touched her fingertips to her pale forehead. “Is there a bruise?”
“I fear so. Now what exactly—”
“Could you shut that darn window?”
The large window in the far wall was wide open. Mist was drizzling into the room, along with chill twilight air.
Edging around the scatter of papers and envelopes on the floor, Groucho gave the window frame a manly tug and shut out the cold. Narrowing his eyes, he looked down into the back acreage. There was no sign of anyone down there. Only a vast lawn and more trees and shrubs, all blurred by gray mist.
“Son of a gun,” observed Laura as Groucho helped her settle into a fat leather armchair. “I’m supposed to do the suicide scene in The Lonely Heart over at Columbia day after tomorrow. How am I going to do that with a big hickey on my noggin? They borrowed, you know, Mike Curtiz to direct, and he’s always chewing me out even when I don’t have any blemishes.”
“Makeup will cover it,” Groucho said, sounding a shade avuncular. “Suppose you tell me what’s been going on here, Laura.”
“You tell me, buster. Can you hand me that cigarette box?”
He fetched the japanned box from the disordered top of the desk, handed it to her. “Who slugged you?”
“Search me.” She selected a cigarette, and Groucho lit it for her.
“Would this have anything to do with the reason you called me?”
“You bet your fanny it does, Groucho.” She exhaled smoke, coughed twice. “First I’ll give you the lowdown on what went on here just now.” She took another puff, coughed once more. “See, it’s the servants’ day off—it’s kind of screwy, but I have five of ’em. Anyway, I got home from the studio about …” She checked her small platinum wristwatch. “Geeze Louise, it was only twenty-two minutes ago. I let myself in, and then I heard some funny noises from up here in the den.”
“Such as?”
“Nothing real noisy, but like somebody was opening drawers and such,” Laura told him. “So I came on up. Nobody’s going to go snooping around my house.”
“Breaking in on a burglar isn’t too—”
“You’re telling me.” She rubbed at the bruise, gently, with the palm of her hand. “I yanked open the door, and I see a guy all dressed in black rummaging through my desk and tossing stuff every which way.”
“Can you describe the fellow?”
“I know this sounds corny, Groucho, but I swear he was wearing a mask.”
“That’s wonderful,” he said. “In all my years as one of Greater Los Angeles’s best-loved amateur sleuths, I have never yet encountered a mysterious masked man. I was starting to feel neglected.”
“Well, this bozo sure was. He had on black trousers, a navy blue turtleneck, and pulled over his head some kind of black hood,” Laura continued. “Before I had a chance even to ask who the dickens he was, he lunges right at me and bops me on the sconce with a blackjack. As I’m sinking to the carpeting, this gink dives out the window. And that’s one heck of a long drop down to the grounds.”
“What do you think this mysterious intruder was after?”
“Obviously the little black strongbox.”
“Which little black strongbox would that be, Laura my child?”
“Let’s go down to the sunroom—even though it’s sun-free today—and you can fix us a drink, and I’ll explain the whole and entire screwy setup to you.”
Laura sat in a mission-style armchair, a highball in her right hand and her left holding a petite ice pack to her bruised forehead.
Groucho, nursing a ginger ale, was on a gilded Victorian sofa.
The sunroom was large, with one entire wall made of sheets of faintly blue glass. About a dozen yards from the house was an Olympic-size swimming pool, tiled in turquoise and pale orange. A thin gray mist hung over the water.
“This all has to do with Randy, rest his rotten soul,” she told Groucho. “I shed that crumbum three flapping years ago, and he’s still giving me grief. From beyond the damn grave he’s giving me trouble.”
“I feel in need of a few more details.”
“Sorry, but getting conked on the coco tends to make me dither,” she apologized, taking a taste of her drink. “Okay, here’s the scoop, kiddo. Randy was a louse, but a good-looking louse with plenty of sex appeal. So it took me over a year to get completely fed up with him. When we split, I vowed never to see him again. Ever.”
“But you did?”
She sighed. “Yeah, it was because of a sob story he handed me,” Laura explained. “Calls me up, out of the blue, and wants me to do a favor for him. He was in some kind of temporary trouble and needed my help. When I ask the lunk, ‘Why me?,’ he gives me a song and dance about how everybody knows I won’t touch him with a barge pole and so they won’t think of looking here for what he wants to stash for a spell.”
“But today they did come looking.”
“You hit the nail on the head,” Laura said, readjusting her ice pack and wincing. “Ouch. I’m going to look lousy on camera, even with pancake. Where was I? Yeah, so this egomaniacal bastard drops over and hands me a black strongbox. Nothing big—about, oh, a foot or so wide and two or three inches deep. Locked up tight. He tells me there’s some important documents inside and he’s scared to have them around his dump just now.”
“Did he tell you what was in the box—or why it was important?”
“Naw, but I can guess,” she said. “Maybe you don’t know this yet, Groucho, but in addition to being a crummy actor and a philanderer, Randy sometimes practiced a little blackmail on the side. My guess is that there’s some incriminating stuff in the box and that maybe one of his clients was getting tough with him. I never tried to open the darn thing.”
“He didn’t tell you who or what he was afraid of?”
“He didn’t, no,” she said. “You know, Groucho, I didn’t think I’d ever do that guy a favor, but there’s something about him … make that was something about him … that once in a while could get to me. I made sure, by the bye, that the night he dropped over, all five of my servants were on call.”
“And where’s the box now?”
“Not in the den,” she answered. “Did you know that Barney Kains, back when he was really in the chips, had seven—you heard me right, seven—different safes hidden in this joint. I stuck the box in one of those, and, so help me Hannah, I never once tried to pry the darn thing open. I want you to take it off my hands.”
“Maybe the police would be a better—”
“Police, my fanny. I
’m as deep in this whole frumus as I want to be,” she said firmly. “You take it and open it. Maybe you’ll find something inside that’ll help you guys find out who killed the poor bastard. Maybe you’ll even be able to establish that that bitch Dorothy Woodrow didn’t do it.”
“You’re not fond of Dorothy?”
“Not so you’d notice, no. But that’s another story.” She held out her empty glass. “Fix me another drink before you take off.”
Twelve
I watched Jane’s face as she sampled her coffee. “Well?” I asked.
“You’re improving,” she decided. “But I wish I could convince you that I’m still in perfect condition to brew a pot of coffee. And probably wrestle the Swedish Angel and beat him two falls out of three.”
“No doubt, but—”
A timid tapping sounded on the front door.
Rising up from his favorite patch of living room rug, Dorgan gave a tentative bark.
“This is the Easter Bunny,” announced a fluty falsetto voice out on our porch. “Let me in quick before all these eggs go bad.”
“Groucho,” said Jane.
“Groucho,” I said.
Our bloodhound trotted to the door, tail wagging.
I opened the door, and Groucho came bounding in, a black strongbox tucked up under his arm. “I’m with the Gallup Poll, folks, and we’re interested in finding out how many people in your cozy little neighborhood wouldn’t touch Groucho Marx with a ten-foot Gallup pole.”
“Put us down for two,” said Jane.
Nodding at the box, I asked, “What’s in that?”
“I’m not, as will soon be revealed, certain.” He placed the black box on the floor and settled into an armchair. “This could well be, Rollo—and Mrs. Rollo—a veritable Pandora’s box. I’m referring to Isidore Pandora, who ran a notorious fish market in Queens and surrounded himself with boxes full of gefilte fish.”
“Where’d you acquire it?” I sat next to my wife on the sofa.
“From the late Randolph Spellman’s erstwhile wife, Laura Dayton, soon to be starring at a movie house near you in The Son of Call of the Wild.” To Jane he said, “You’re looking well, Lady Jane. I wish to discuss the case with Franklin, but you can retire if you—”
