by Ron Goulart
Two tan young men in pinstripe blue suits and dark glasses were standing there. Groucho could detect the presence of a shoulder holster under the jacket of the huskier of the pair of hoodlums.
“Thank you very much, Mr. Marx,” said the husband as he and his wife went hurrying away along Sunset Boulevard.
“Would you mind telling Vince Salermo that I’ve retired to Tangiers?” he asked the hoods. “Yes, tell him I’ve retired to Tangiers to raise tangerines and learn the tango.”
“He doesn’t intend to harm you in any way,” the huskier one assured Groucho.
“Yet he’d be very miffed if you failed to accept his invitation to drop in,” explained the smaller hoodlum.
“I can’t begin to tell you how flattering it is to have one of the best-loved mobsters in Greater Los Angeles pay attention to little me,” said Groucho. “But this is not an appropriate time. In fact, there’s not a day in 1940 that looks good. How about trying again after the first of the year and—”
“Mr. Salermo made it clear to us,” said the huskier one, “that we weren’t to shoot you if you tried to turn him down.”
“Or bop you with a sap.”
“Or break any important bones. He did, however, give us permission to use some force to persuade you to pay this call on him right now, Mr. Marx.”
“In that case, it would be churlish of me to refuse, and so I accept. Whereabouts is your boss?”
“We’ll take you to him.”
“Will I need my overnight bag and a toothbrush?”
“He’s nearby, Mr. Marx.”
“You’re great at kidding around,” observed the huskier one. “That’s a swell way to be. But not always.”
Fourteen
The long black limousine pulled to a stop next to a fire hydrant on Hollywood Boulevard. The smaller hood came back to open the rear door. “Walk this way, Mr. Marx.”
“Ah, a perfect straight line, but I’m a little wary about following it up.”
There was a brand-new shop just opposite. Inscribed on the window was AUNT FRANNY’S OLD-FASHIONED ICE CREAM SHOPPE. “In here,” invited his escort, opening the door.
A friendly bell tinkled as Groucho entered. There were strawberry-pattern café curtains at the windows, over a dozen customers at the marble-topped tables, and the scents of chocolate, bananas, and chopped nuts thick in the air. Above the soda fountain that stretched across the rear of the parlor was a large blackboard on which was lettered, in colored chalks, FLAVOR OF THE DAY—ORANGE PAGO PAGO!
The young mobster guided Groucho to a rear door beside the fountain.
Pausing, Groucho leaned an elbow on the marble fountain top and inquired of the pretty blonde waitress, “Would you have anything in the way of chocolate matzos or an egg cream?”
“Through here,” urged his escort, taking hold of his arm.
After traveling down a spotless white corridor, Groucho was ushered into a spotless white office.
Sitting at a Swedish-modern desk was Vince Salermo. He was a small, compact man in his middle fifties, deeply tanned and with wavy black hair that was possibly not his own. “You know what annoys the hell out of me about owning an ice-cream joint, Groucho?”
“Not always liking the flavor of the day?”
“Not being able to smoke.” Salermo, who was the king of illegal gambling in all of southern California, stood up. “If I so much as take a few puffs of a cigar back here, they smell it out in the goddamn ice-cream parlor.”
“Why are you in this business at all?”
“Branching out into another legit sideline,” answered the mobster. “Sit down. Eventually I’ll own a chain of these Aunt Franny dumps.”
Groucho sat in a blonde chair.
In addition to Salermo, there were two other hoods in the room. Young men in dark suits, one on each side of the desk.
“Don’t get the idea, Vincent,” said Groucho, “that I don’t enjoy these occasional visits. However, could we get our chat over with so I can continue on my rounds?”
“In a minute,” promised Salermo, nodding at the hoodlum on his left. “What was that crap Nick came up with for tomorrow’s special flavor?”
“Raspberry Vertigo,” answered the young man.
“What do you think of that name, Groucho?”
“Makes me dizzy.”
“You like ice cream?”
“Not especially. An egg cream, though, is something else again. Well, obviously it’s something else again, or it’d be an ice cream.”
“Go get Groucho a sample of that raspberry crap from the test kitchen.”
“Sure thing, boss.” He left the office.
Groucho politely asked, “What was the purpose of kidnapping me, Vince?”
“All my boys did was invite you politely to drop over,” corrected the gangster, chuckling. “Okay, now here’s what I want to talk about, Groucho. I understand that you and your pal Frank are working on the Randy Spellman murder case. Am I right?”
“We already have a client, if that’s—”
“Naw, I know how you guys operate. You don’t take fees for being detectives,” said Salermo, settling back into his pale desk chair. “All I need is a small favor.”
“Such as?”
“While you’re digging up dirt on Spellman, could you see if you can maybe find some stuff I’m interested in?”
“Not if it means a conflict of interest.”
“All I want to and—”
“Excuse me, boss.” The young hoodlum had returned carrying two dishes of a blue ice cream. “Nick got his dander up because you didn’t like his Raspberry Vertigo, so he flushed it all down the sink. He’s come up with a brand-new flavor for tomorrow—Banana Bonanza.”
Salermo scowled at first one dish, then the other. “How come it’s blue?”
“When I tried to ask Nick that, he threw an eggbeater at me.”
Salermo asked Groucho. “You can’t christen something that’s blue Banana Bonanza, can you?”
“Not and keep the respect of gourmets. Now as to—”
“You two guys sample this stuff,” he ordered his bodyguards, handing each a dish of the blue ice cream. “Groucho, I got a guy working for me by the name of Val Gallardo.”
We had a photo of Gallardo in our collection. “I do believe I’ve heard tell of the lad,” said Groucho. “Has a way with the ladies.”
“That’s him. Horny as a toad, but not especially smart and … what are you gargling for?” He frowned up at one of the bodyguards.
The young man pursed his lips, made a few throat-clearing noises. “This doesn’t taste like bananas,” he managed to say. He ran his tongue, which he noticed was now bright blue, over his lips and winced.
“Take this crap back to Nick and tell him to start over again.” He made a shooing motion.
Both bodyguards, clutching their dishes of ice cream, left the office.
Salermo shook his head, muttered in Italian. “You’d think peddling ice cream would be fun,” he said. “Anyway, Spellman had some pictures of Gallardo that he was using to blackmail the sap with.”
“We’ve heard that Spellman had a profitable sideline. Paid even better, I’m reliably informed, than ice cream.”
“Here’s the favor, Groucho. If you guys come across any pictures of my boy in the sack with some dame he ought not to be in the sack with, I’d appreciate it if you’d keep the cops from seeing them,” said the gangster. “And make sure that I got hold of them. Can you do that?”
Groucho held up his right hand. “You have my solemn oath, Vincent,” he lied, “that any smutty snapshots of this amorous chap will find their way swiftly to you.”
“I appreciate that, Groucho.”
Groucho stood up. “Do you have any ideas about who killed Spellman?”
“We didn’t do it,” he assured him. “Gallardo didn’t. But that leaves a lot of other people who hated the guy.”
“How’d you find out your boy was being blackmailed?”
“He wasn’t going to tell me. But a few weeks back he got a call from the blackmailers at one of my nightspots, and I answered it. After that, I saw to it that Gallardo confided in me.”
“Blackmailers, plural?”
“The caller was a dame with a Scarlett O’Hara drawl, Southern belle stuff,” answered the mobster. “From what Gallardo tells me, she’d made calls for Spellman before, but he’s never laid eyes on her.”
“Wellsir, it’s been, once again, almost a pleasure chatting with you, Vince,” Groucho informed him. “And I do hope you find a new flavor of the day before tomorrow rolls around. I know that nothing annoys me more than having to consume the same flavor of the day two days running. And even when I’m not running, it—”
“I’ll see that some of my boys drop you off where they found you, Groucho,” promised Salermo.
For a moment I thought another Ty-Gor had been murdered. A man in a leopard-skin loincloth was lying facedown at the edge of the Soundstage 3 indoor jungle. But as I drew nearer, I saw that he was moving, apparently doing push-ups.
Carl Nesbit was about the same build as Randy Spellman, and his hair had been dyed to match the shade of his predecessor. That way Warlock could use most of the Spellman long shots already filmed, and nobody, except a few astute movie buffs, would notice the difference.
When Nesbit ceased his warm-up exercising, a makeup man hurried over to him and started frowning at the actor’s chest. Turning toward someone in the milling group of staff people, the makeup man asked, “Who in the hell shaved this guy’s chest?”
No one admitted to it.
Nesbit, whose voice was a shade high-pitched for a jungle lord’s, inquired, “Now what’s wrong, Eddie?”
Eddie poked the new Ty-Gor’s chest. “Stubble,” he explained. “Here, here, and here.”
“Who’s going to notice a—”
“Arthur Wright Benson, God bless him. He insists on absolutely no body hair.”
Nesbit shrugged, rubbing his fingertips over his recently shaved chest.
Spellman’s trailer was gone, replaced by a slightly smaller one. That probably indicated that the studio didn’t consider that Nesbit was quite as important as Randy had been.
Sitting on the steps leading up to the portable dressing room was Joel Farber. He was in the midst of an argument with a pretty, dark-haired young woman dressed in a scant costume composed chiefly of feathers and gauze.
“I am,” she was saying in a fairly thick Spanish accent that I won’t try to capture, “I am a goddess, Joel!”
“Only in the movie, Nova.”
“In the movie, yes, I am a goddamn goddess,” she said, angry, and pointing at the intricate feathered headdress she was wearing. “But you give me a headdress that is … how do you say it? … tacky. When I appear on the screen, all the critics—Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons, Johnny Whistler—they’ll say, ‘There’s Nova Sartain in a tacky headdress.’ It’s insulting to me.”
“Hedda, Louella, and Johnny wouldn’t be caught dead at a Ty-Gor screening, dear,” my producer assured the enraged actress. “So you needn’t worry about—”
“My fans, of whom there are multitudes, will gasp and exclaim, ‘How dare Warlock dress our screen idol in such a tacky headdress?’ They’ll riot and tear up theater seats all across the country, Joel.”
“I doubt that the majority of your fans give a damn, Nova.”
“Is that an insult?”
“Nope, a mere statement of fact.”
I kept at a distance, hoping that the debate would soon conclude and that I could find out what Joel wanted of me. While I was standing in the shadows, two stagehands grunted by, carrying one of the palm trees that Arthur Wright Benson had sent over on the day of Spellman’s murder.
They hefted it over to the studio jungle and took it in among the other trees.
It occurred to me that the batch of trees had been delivered in some sort of large truck. It wouldn’t have been too tough for someone to get smuggled onto the lot by hiding among the potted palms.
We’d have to look into that.
Whether this was a clever insight or what is commonly referred to as clutching at straws I wasn’t sure.
Nova Sartain suddenly ripped off her feathered headdress, tossed it at Joel along with an impressive collection of insults in Spanish. Turning on her heel, she went striding off to her trailer. It was even larger than Spellman’s, and there was a pale, frightened-looking girl in a maid’s uniform standing uneasily in the doorway.
“You summoned me, Joel?” I asked, walking over to him.
“Frank, yes, I did.” He stood up, and we shook hands. “Boy, I think that dame expects me to hire Edith Head to glue feathers on her ass. You understand Spanish?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d she call me?”
“The usual. Why’d you send for me?”
“Some of the guys in the front office decided that we don’t want very much funny stuff in this movie after all, Frank.”
“And why is that?”
“I don’t know. Respect for the dead, I guess,” my producer explained. “They’re going to stick a dedication at the beginning of the thing—saying something like ‘To the memory of a great actor, Randolph Spellman.’ It’s bullshit, but that’s what they want.”
“What they don’t want is Professor J. Darwin Underbrush and Groucho?”
He shook his head forlornly. “Afraid so, buddy,” he said. “I need the new pages by next week. What you have to do, Frank, is cut out the comedy scenes, toss in a few sentimental touches. Replace the Groucho character with a serious explorer—or a white hunter. Guy might even be a missionary who’s always mouthing off about how death is all around but we’ll get our reward in heaven.”
“How about a few angels dropping out of the trees and flapping their wings when Ty-Gor stumbles over a dead elephant?”
“Frank, you’re a terrific writer. Put your mind to it, and you can give me a serious script. Okay?”
“Okay.”
From Nova Sartain’s dressing room came the sounds of things being thrown.
Joel took hold of my arm. “Oh, listen, there’s one more thing, and don’t blow your top over this, buddy.”
“What already?”
“Arthur Wright Benson talked the front office into hiring an old pal of his for a couple weeks.” He tried to look apologetic. “Old pulp magazine hack writer named Wallace Deems. Ever hear of the guy?”
“A few years ago,” I replied. “Wait now, Joel. I’m not going to collaborate with him. Is that what—”
“Take it easy. Benson would just like Deems to do a little polish on your script. And on the new pages you’re going to do for me.”
“A polish? The guy who wrote stuff like ‘Voodoo Queen of the Bayou’ and ‘The Loco Kid Rides South’ is going to improve my script?”
“I don’t like the idea much myself, Frank. But the front office wants to pacify Benson, so—”
“All right, okay.”
“Fine, swell. I’d like you to go talk to Deems, long as you’re on the lot,” said Joel, giving me a tentative pat on the back. “He’s over in the Writers Building. They stuck him in MacQuarrie’s old cubbyhole.”
After about a half a minute, I said, “I’ll go over now.”
“Terrific. Now everybody’s happy.”
“Almost everybody,” I said.
Fifteen
His secretary scrutinized him as he came slouching in. “You’re looking bedraggled.”
“In point of fact, Nanette,” said Groucho, removing his stogie from his mouth, “I’m bewitched, bothered, and bedraggled.”
“Any particular reason?”
Perching on the edge of her desk, swinging one foot slowly back and forth, he replied, “I was dragooned. The chaps who did it weren’t all that enthusiastic, later admitting that they were reluctant dragoons.”
“They weren’t outraged citizens who’d seen At the Circus?”
&nbs
p; “No, they were torpedoes who invited me, rather politely, to visit good old Vince Salermo.”
Nan sat up. “Are those gangsters bothering you again? When you and Frank were working on that Broadway murder case, Salermo—”
“I suppose I ought to be flattered. Salermo actually wanted to hire us.”
“To commit what sort of crime?”
“To locate some incriminating photos of one of the more amorous members of his salon.”
“And what did you say to Salermo?”
“Good-bye, as soon as I safely could,” he answered. “He’s in the process of opening an ice-cream parlor up on Hollywood Boulevard. That’s where our rendezvous occurred.”
Giving a sympathetic sigh, Nan picked up a memo slip. “Salermo isn’t the only one interested in you and Frank.”
“Let me see if I can guess. Is it Chiang Kai-shek? Elsa Maxwell? Wee Bonnie Baker? Two-Ton Tony—”
“Nope, it’s Arthur Wright Benson.”
Groucho’s eyebrows went up. “The respected author of the Ty-Gor novels and owner of his own private jungle. My, my.”
“Benson’s son—who sounds like a true-blue twerp over the telephone—called to invite you and Frank to Rancho Tygoro for cocktails at 6 P.M. this evening, should you be available. The old boy wishes to discuss the progress of the Spellman case.”
“I was under the impression that he felt nothing but disdain for Spellman. Of course, I was also under the table for a while there and may have missed something.”
“According to sonny, the whole darn family is eager to see the killer brought to justice,” Nan told him. “They didn’t like Spellman as a person, but they consider the bumping off of the movie Ty-Gor an insult to the Arthur Wright Benson, Inc., empire.”
“Here Frank and I have been searching high and low for suspects, and we could have just waited around for them to come to us.”
“Oh, are any of the Bensons on your suspect list?”
“It would make things a lot simpler if they were,” he said. “Six o’clock, you say?”
“Or thereabouts.”
“I’ll call Frank’s place of residence to determine if he can join me on tonight’s trek.” Groucho reached for the telephone. “I, because of the monastic life I lead, am free this evening.”
