“It was worse after the First Citizen premiere. Everyone in town was calling Carson a genius, even the people who hated him. He barely involved me in The Imperial Albertsons. He would have shut me out completely if he hadn’t hated dealing with the studio executives. He used me as a buffer, so he could pretend the front office didn’t exist. He regretted that later. As did I.”
“Let’s talk about that,” I said. “What happened after the Albertsons preview in Yorba Linda?”
Whitehead drained his mug and pushed it across to me. We’d reached the point of diminishing returns as far as his drinking was concerned. He was slurring his words, and his cheery bonhomie was starting to turn belligerent. Worse than that, I knew my little flask was nearing empty.
“First the answer,” I said, “then the drink.”
“To hell with you, sir,” Whitehead said. “They sell the stuff across the street.”
“Sell it is right. I’m giving it away.”
“The devil you are,” Whitehead said. In the end, though, he came across.
“The preview was a disaster. There was talk of shelving the picture completely, of scrapping it entirely. Think of what that would have done to Carson’s reputation.”
“And yours,” I said.
“And mine. So I negotiated a way out for us. I agreed to make the changes the studio required. Our film editor was a talented young man who wanted to direct. Under my supervision he reshot Carson’s dark ending, substituting a positive, uplifting one.”
“A happy ending,” I said to sum up.
“We calmed the studio’s fears and got through a second preview. We saved the picture. I saved the picture.”
“Whose idea was it to burn Drury’s footage?”
Whitehead’s eyes took evasive action again. He pushed his empty mug forward an inch. “I don’t know. Someone in the front office.”
We’d returned to my first question. I poured out what was left of the rye. “Why are you still interested in Albertsons?”
Whitehead was muttering again. “Is that so strange? It was my film, too.”
To a greater extent than I’d been told. That suggested another possibility. “It won’t be your film if Drury pulls this off. He’ll do to your ending what somebody did to his. Does that bother you? Would you try to keep that from happening?”
“Why would I want to? That ending brought me nothing but misery. My friends at RKO didn’t keep me on a week after Carson was fired. They used me and discarded me. I curse the day I agreed to change Albertsons. I’d burn my ending myself if I could.”
“Three nights ago somebody tried to do just that. Only this somebody tried to burn the whole negative, Drury’s work and yours.”
Whitehead spilled what was left in his mug onto the rubber tabletop. We watched it run to a low spot under the napkin holder. Then he whispered, “You said tried. Is the film safe?”
“For the moment. It’s my job to keep it safe.”
Whitehead was closing up shop. He started to work his way out of the booth, a slow inch at a time. “Tell Carson I’ll call on him.”
“Why? What is it you want?”
A little of Whitehead’s belly fire flared back to life. “Haven’t you been listening to me? It was my film, too. All of it. My future, too. If there’s any future left in Albertsons, part of it is mine.”
10
After Whitehead stumbled out, I felt like taking a shower or a poke at someone. Hank Shepard again preferably. But Shepard wasn’t around and no volunteers stepped forward, so I used the diner’s phone booth to call Hollywood Security.
Peggy Maguire answered. I was used to her voice brightening at the sound of mine, but the reaction still gave me a lift. After I’d married, Peggy had stopped asking whether I’d eaten and reminding me to wear my hat in the sun. But I knew she still wanted to ask and remind. She and Paddy had no kids of their own, and she’d had to make do with her wayward employees.
When I asked for her husband, she said, “He’s off holding Joan Crawford’s hand.”
“What’s that pay an hour?”
“My guess is, he’s paying her.”
I asked if the boss had left me any messages about the Alora Land Conservancy. It would have been fast work if Paddy had traced the company’s ownership, so I wasn’t surprised when Peggy said, “Alora who?”
I rang off after promising, for old times’ sake, to eat a good lunch. First, though, I’d have to work off my second breakfast. Paddy had kidded me about detectives in the movies doing their own spade-work, but I knew from my own movie going that they often skipped the research and bluffed out a hunch. I decided to give that approach a try.
I got the address of the Lockard Development Corporation from the remains of the diner’s phone book. On my way across Olympic Boulevard, I thought about checking in at Maxie’s, the bar at the corner of Belmont, to see if Whitehead had stopped by for a nightcap. I decided I didn’t want to know.
The Lockard office was in Burbank, in a modest building surrounded by sample homes. Each show home had a name that had probably taken more time to work up than its floor plan. On my way to the office I passed the El Dorado, the Exeter, and the Petite Maison, dodging a different salesman at each house, bright young men with too many vitamins in their systems, like the Alora land agent, Eric Faris.
The interior of the office building was air-conditioned and deeply carpeted. I asked the receptionist, an ash blond with the posture of a gymnast, for Lockard.
“Sorry,” she said in the breathy kind of voice that was popular that year. “He’s not in the office. Too nice a day for that.” She was older than the salesboys out on the lot, but not too old. My age, in fact.
“Is he out on a building site?”
“Too nice a day for that, too,” she said. “Only the peons are stuck at work on a day like today. Is that your Fireflite parked out front?”
I said it was.
“Nice.” She ran the safe end of a gold ballpoint around the crisp edge of her lipstick. “Is it as fast as it looks?”
“No,” I said. On the off chance we weren’t talking about my car anymore, I added, “Not these days.”
“Too bad,” she said.
The phone on her desk rang. She answered it without taking her eyes off me. She was still playing with the golden pen, now tapping a desk calendar with it. She told the party on the other end of the line, “Let me check.” Then she swiveled her chair around to consult a ledger on the credenza behind her.
I stepped up to consult the open calendar. The spot she’d been tapping with her pen was a one-word entry for two o’clock. The word was Riviera.
She swiveled around again as I reached the office door. I touched my hat brim, and she winked at me.
Riviera Country Club was west of the city, just off the Coast Highway in Pacific Palisades. I’d filled a vacancy in a foursome there once for Olivia De Havilland on a sunny Sunday afternoon and come away dreaming of my own membership. I must have dreamt about it pretty damn intensely. That one round had been played during Roosevelt’s second term, but the clubhouse still looked familiar to me. It rose up from the rim of Santa Monica Canyon like a Spanish monastery standing guard over its vineyards–these vineyards being tight, wooded fairways and half-acre greens.
I asked the kid drafted to park my car if Ralph Lockard was on the premises. He directed me to a basement grill. There, feeling out of place in both my street clothes and my income bracket, I asked again for the developer. The bartender directed me back outside, to the practice putting green.
“Look for the Big Ten lineman,” he said.
My plan was to throw Lockard off balance by showing up unexpectedly and hitting him with his secret tie to the Alora Land Conservancy. If he didn’t look blank or faint dead away, I’d keep him off balance with one tough question after another until I knew everything ab
out him but his hat size.
The plan broke down shortly after I cast my shadow across the line of the developer’s putt. He looked up at me without coming out of his crouched stance.
“You’re Elliott, I presume,” he said.
He was certainly big enough to have played lineman, maybe without pads. His broad nose was as concave as Whitehead’s was convex, and his eyebrows were thickened by scar tissue. His eyes had a faraway look. I decided that it was a trick of their slate gray color. There was nothing faraway about the examination he was giving me.
“I’ve been expecting you,” he said, “but not here. How did you track me down?”
“The caddy master’s on our payroll.”
He stood up and pushed his white cap backward on his head. The resemblance to Ben Hogan didn’t end with his hat. He was dressed in a white polo shirt and black trousers. A gentleman golfer, down to the little leather kilts on his shoes.
“Whose payroll would that be?” he asked.
I gave him the business card I’d had ready for Whitehead and asked, “Your man Faris told you I’d be calling?”
“Let’s get this over with. Faris is my employee, and the Alora Land Conservancy is my company. You knew that already.”
“Actually, I was playing a hunch.”
Lockard shrugged. “You would have found out soon enough. It’s all a matter of public record. All legal and aboveboard.”
“No misrepresentation?”
“No.”
“Not even in the line you’re handing the farmers about saving their land from developers?”
“I am saving it from developers. Other developers. Look, we give the farmers a minimum number of years the land will be protected. That minimum will be met, believe me.”
“Then the farms get the Lockard touch.”
Another shrug. “It’d happen sooner without the conservancy. And the farmers wouldn’t do any better financially. We’re paying top dollar, and they know it.”
“How about the ones who wouldn’t have sold to a developer at any price?”
“You’re getting too hypothetical for me. I deal in facts and figures. Let me lay a few out for you. In 1944, only one hundred and seventy thousand people lived in the San Fernando Valley. By 1960, five years from now, there’ll be a million people out there. I’m selling homes as fast as I can build them, but I’m only one of the guys doing it. If I still want to be in business in ’60 when the last schmo moves in, I’ve got to line up the land now.”
He paused to greet a couple of gray-haired gentlemen who looked as if they were playing hookey from the top floor of the same bank. Then he stepped closer to me so he could continue his lecture in a quieter voice.
“The Alora Conservancy isn’t a scam to cheat the bean growers. It’s an end around the other developers, the chumps who think the western end of the valley is still sitting there for the taking.”
“Where does Drury’s ranch fit in?”
“Have you ever seen it?”
“No.”
“It’s the best land left in the valley–rolling pasture, some woodland, good water. It’ll be the best thing I ever do. No tract homes there, believe me. They’ll be little estates, no two alike, with a lake as the centerpiece and a private golf course. I may retire there myself.”
“Assuming you get the land. Or is that an assumption?”
Lockard tugged his cap back down and resumed his stance over his last three practice balls. “I don’t scare as easily as Faris. In fact, I don’t scare. We had nothing to do with any fire, if there really was a fire. Anyone who runs around saying we did is going to find himself in court. That goes for Drury and any shady characters working for him.”
Before I could express my hurt feelings over the shady crack, another golfer joined us. Judging by his straw hat and its natty Hawaiian ribbon, he modeled his swing after Sam Snead. “Ready, Ralph?” he asked. “We’re on deck.”
“Be right there,” Lockard said.
“Imagine how I felt,” he said to me when Snead had gone. “I’ve wanted Eden since I struck out on my own in ’49. Drury wouldn’t even haggle with me. Then he turns around and drops the ranch in my lap.”
“It hasn’t dropped yet.”
“It will. And without me shaking the tree. I may only be a social-climbing carpenter, but I have a lot of contacts in the movie business. I know Drury’s history as well as he knows it himself. Better, if he believes half the bullshit he spreads around. He needs my help to fail like the Dodgers need help to blow a World Series.”
“Checked the paper lately?” I asked. “Brooklyn is pretty hot this year.”
Lockard stroked the first of his three balls into the back of the cup. “It’s July, buddy,” he said. He rammed the second putt home, but it still dropped. “For the Dodgers, I mean.” The last ball hung for a second on the lip and then fell. “For Drury, it’s late September.”
11
I didn’t hang around to watch Lockard tee off. He was surely willing himself a long, straight drive, and I didn’t want to see it come to pass. I reclaimed the DeSoto and drove east to Beverly Hills where the originals of the little estates Lockard dreamt of building resided. My appetite hadn’t returned–if anything, it had wandered farther away–so I had to lie about lunch when I called Peggy to tell her where I’d be. On the same stop I bought a fresh pack of cigarettes, Old Golds instead of my usual Lucky Strikes. They were my ticket of admission for the visit I intended to make, not unlike the whiskey I’d used earlier with John Piers Whitehead.
I’d been thinking of stopping by to see Torrance Beaumont ever since Ella’s bout of déjà vu at the Club Satyr. The party she’d been remembering that night, the party at which we’d met, had promoted a Tory Beaumont picture that had ended up unfinished. It never would be finished now, not with Beaumont starring. The actor was terminally ill with cancer.
I’d been visiting Beaumont every couple of weeks or so for a year, as part of a rotation of his old friends and drinking buddies. During that year I’d watched him struggle back from eight hours on an operating table and then begin a long, steady slide. For one reason or another I hadn’t been by the estate on Summit Drive for a month, and I felt bad about that. But I wasn’t going now because my conscience bothered me. I was going because everything bothered me.
The wrought-iron gates on Summit were open, so I drove through them and parked on the curving drive, pausing to admire the Technicolor landscaping that Beaumont had paid for but probably couldn’t describe: the hibiscus, the oleander, the fuchsia. Then again, maybe Beaumont could name every gaudy plant and do it in Latin. Maybe he’d started them from seeds in his own little greenhouse. If he had, he’d never admit it.
Beaumont liked the tough guy image that Hollywood had given him, the most enduring of the several identities he’d assumed in the course of a long acting career. I’d always thought of him as a well-educated, sensitive man who wore his gangster persona for the same reasons he liked a beat-up old suit: because it was comfortable, because it helped him fit in. Since his illness, I’d come to see that I’d sold him short. Toughness was more than a pose for Beaumont.
His house was a Tudor revival whose previous owner had been a successful plastic surgeon. Beaumont called the place Nose Job Manor and liked to tell people that he got it as a settlement when his face lift didn’t take.
The heavy front door was answered by the English butler. Everyone called him Moody, but I was never sure whether that was his name or a brief description. After he’d greeted me, Moody managed to ask where the hell I’d been keeping myself without actually putting the question into words. Not trimming his eyebrows gave him certain advantages in the emoting department. He took me through the quiet, cool interior of the house. At the glass doors that overlooked the pool, he stopped long enough to ask if I required cigarettes. I tapped my pocket, and he led the way out
.
The big, kidney-shaped pool was backed by a bathing pavilion that looked like a Chinese pagoda. Either the pavilion’s architect hadn’t noticed the pile of Tudor on the other side of the pool, or else he’d wanted to make some personal statement on the East-meets-West debate. As we crossed the lawn, I noted two fresh wheel tracks in the grass and looked around for the wheelchair Moody had used to take his employer out to the water. It was hidden away somewhere safe. The chair Beaumont now occupied was wheelless and straight-backed, and it had arms flat and broad enough to hold a glass.
The man in the chair was wearing an old yachting cap, an older windbreaker, and gray suit pants that had been pressed sometime in the last twenty minutes. He sat with his feet and knees together, the knees leaning a little to one side. The glass on the arm of his chair was empty.
As Beaumont and I shook hands, Moody brought a chair around for me, placing it upwind of his boss.
“What brings you here, soldier?” Beaumont asked. “I thought you’d forgotten my address. The usual Gibson for Mr. Elliott, Moody, and another scotch for me. Better make it a pitcher of Gibsons. He looks like he’s seen a ghost.”
That was a joke at Beaumont’s own expense. He’d spotted how shocked I was at the change in him. Luckily, my reaction amused him. Or maybe my attempt to hide it did.
“And you wanted to be an actor,” he said. “Take off that goddamn tie and relax.”
I loosened my tie, dug out the Old Golds, and lit one, blowing the smoke in Beaumont’s direction. He drank it in with half-closed eyes.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“Swell. This has been a good day. If I could just put some damn weight on, I’d turn the corner.”
He’d been on the wrong side of that corner for months. Never what you’d call a heavyweight, he now had a quality in common with the very old: the ability to inhabit his clothes without really wearing them, without filling them out or giving them shape. Without bringing them to life. The only things alive about Beaumont were his dark eyes. The eyes had grown huge in his dried-apple head, as though they were the center of the cancer that was eating him, and not his lungs.
Come Back Dead Page 7
