Groucho Marx, Secret Agent

by Ron Goulart

  The phone rang out in the living room.

  Jane, gently, left the bed to answer it.

  Rising up, Dorgan followed her.

  “Are you completely certain,” asked Groucho, leaning closer and lowering his voice, “that you are well enough to be up and doing tomorrow?”

  “Sure, yeah.”

  “The call’s for you, Groucho,” said Jane from the doorway. “It’s Dinah Flanders. She says she telephoned your home and your son told her you were probably here.”

  “So Arthur was home, eh? Gad, that’s the first time he’s been off a tennis court in a fortnight.” He stood up. “I was stationed at Fort Night when I was in the French Foreign Legion. Bit awkward that, since the fort’s in Poughkeepsie, New York, and the Foreign Legion’s off in the desert someplace.” He walked to the door. “I wonder what our client wants now.”

  Twenty-two

  The Mirabilis Hotel in downtown Los Angeles was at least ten years older than the century, and it smelled even more ancient. The high, wide lobby was thick with potted palms and the mixed scents of dust, decay, and old clothes. From the flawed front windows you could see across the street to the Sawdust Trail Saloon and Lulu’s All-Girl Barber Shop huddled beside it.

  Decorating the faded peach-colored walls of the lobby were dozens of faded sepia photos, all framed in dark wood, of stars from the days before talkies. I recognized Eric von Stroheim, Billie Dove, Wally Reid, Clara Bow, Harry Langdon, Barbara la Marr, and Joe Bonomo among them.

  The once-purple armchairs were sunburned a thin lavender, and most of them were occupied by weary-looking old men. In the venerable chair nearest the marble-topped registration desk sat a very thin man of about eighty with a guitar resting across his knees. The guitar had no strings.

  The woman behind the desk was over sixty and weighed something like two hundred pounds. Her hair had been dyed a pinkish blond, and each plump cheek had a circle of maroon rouge on it. She was rolling a cigarette. She looked up as I approached, saying, “You sure as hell don’t want to register, hon.”

  “I came to see Tim O’Hearn.”

  Grunting, she turned to glance back at the mailboxes. “He’s in,” she told me. “Room number is three-three-eight. You a buddy of Timmy’s?”

  “We went to Harvard together.”

  When she chortled, her body went through some jolly Santa Claus quivers, and she wheezed some. “I bet you’re that reporter buddy of his.”

  “I used to be a reporter.”

  She looked me over for a few seconds. “What happened to your head?”

  “I walked into a door—sideways.”

  She said, “You’re probably too young to remember me.”

  “Probably so. Movies?”

  “I’ve seen better days,” she admitted, sighing. “Back when I was younger and slimmer and my hair was really this color, I did quite a few serials. My name was Hazel Knight—my show-business name—and I was billed as the Lady Daredevil of the Silver Screen. In nineteen-twenty-one my Hazards of Hazel was the top-grossing chapter play in the country.”

  “Sure, I saw that when I was in high school,” I said, remembering. “You costarred with Fred Thomson.”

  She smiled the same smile she must have smiled back then. “It’s nice to be remembered.”

  “It is, yeah,” I agreed. “Well, I’ve got an appointment with O’Hearn.”

  “Drop by anytime,” Hazel invited as I headed for the elevator.

  There was a sign taped to the elevator cage, announcing that it was out of order. Jane wouldn’t have thought much of the eclectic hand lettering.

  I trudged my way up to the third floor, trying to keep my inhaling at a minimum. The shadowy stairways were thick with an aromatic blend of dust, mildew, and overworked plumbing.

  My arrival in the hallway leading to O’Hearn’s room caused a fat gray rat, who’d been lurking behind a potted plant, to go scurrying away, probably in search of a rat hole.

  Locating 338, I knocked on the slightly warped door.

  After a moment O’Hearn inquired, “Who is it?”

  “Frank.”

  Another moment passed. Then the door opened wide enough to allow the thin, pale informant to look out and scrutinize me. “How you been, Frank?” He had a bottle of Lucky Lager beer in his right hand. “I was just having breakfast. C’mon in.”

  When O’Hearn backed up, I nudged the frail door open wide enough to allow me to cross the threshold. A little midday sunlight found its way through the swaybacked venetian blinds, and dust flickered and danced in the thin strips of brightness.

  I started to lower myself down on the venerable sofa. “What have you found out about—”

  “Don’t squat on that one, Frank,” warned O’Hearn, making a back-off motion with his free hand. “It’s kind of rickety.”

  “Matches the décor.” I lifted a scatter of movie trade papers and much-annotated racing forms off a lopsided armchair and sat. Near my left foot I noticed a paper plate holding the mossy remains of an unfinished cheese sandwich. “What have you found out about James Pearson?”

  Finishing the beer, O’Hearn tossed the brown bottle onto a jumble of dirty clothes near the window. “You’re not the only one interested in this guy,” he told me, lowering himself into the room’s other armchair.

  “Who else?”

  “G-men have been trying to find out where Pearson is holed up,” he answered, standing again. “Think I’d like another beer. How about you?”

  “Not just yet, Tim. Who else is—”

  “I keep the beer in the bathroom,” my information source explained as he walked in there. “Sink the bottles in the toilet tank, keeps them cool. I used to sit them out on the window sill, which is cooler this time of year, but the asshole up in four-three-eight would fish them up with a looped length of—”

  “Who else?”

  O’Hearn, with a fresh bottle of beer—Regal Pale this time—started searching through the sprawls of old newspapers and discarded clothes spread on the thinning rug. “I’m going to need an extra ten spot, Frank,” he told me, crouching.

  “Why is that, Tim?”

  “This is dangerous, a lot more dangerous than I thought it’d be when you telephoned me last night.” He located a bottle opener under a copy of a magazine called Black Silk Stockings. “Gestapo agents are hunting for the guy, too.”

  “How do you know they’re Gestapo?”

  “Maybe not, Frank—maybe they’re simply everyday German secret agents.” Beer fizzed over the lip of the bottle after he pried off the cap. “Some kind anyway—so I hear—of German heavies.”

  “Know why they want him?”

  “What about that extra ten bucks?”

  “Five.”

  “Jesus, the Depression’s supposed to be over, but you couldn’t tell by me.”

  “All right, ten. Why?”

  O’Hearn shook his head. “They’re eager to have a heart-to-heart talk with Pearson,” he answered. “Not sure why yet.”

  “Can you find out?”

  “You’re not kidding about that extra ten?”

  “Nope.”

  “I’ll find out.”

  “Now, do you know where Pearson is hiding out?”

  When O’Hearn grinned, I noticed he’d lost a front tooth since the last time I’d consulted him. “Sure, because I have lots of contacts who’ll talk to me but won’t talk to the feds or the Nazis,” he answered. “Pearson is lying low out on Catalina Island; Frank, but not in Avalon. About ten miles from Avalon Bay, going north, there’s a little inlet they call Doubloon Bay. Back in the nineteen-twenties when Fox made a movie called Spanish Gold there, they built a small Caribbean village. Still standing, been converted into cottages and such. That’s where you’ll find this Pearson guy.”

  “Got an address?”

  “He’s at number one-thirty-three on Galleon Lane,” he told me. “Oh, and by the way, he’s not actually Pearson.”

  “So we suspected. Who
is he?”

  “Real name is Len Hickman,” said O’Hearn, pausing to drink about a third of his beer. “He runs a one-man private investigating office out of Santa Monica. A few months ago he was hired to go undercover and keep an eye—”

  “Hired by Warren Lockwood maybe?”

  “Lockwood, right, you got it, Frank. To keep an eye on Eric Olmstead,” said my informant. “They bribed the regular valet to take a new, better job down in Coronado.”

  “Do you know why Lockwood did that?”

  “After Dinah Flanders announced she was going to get hitched to Olmstead, Lockwood decided he’d like to have somebody inside the place to keep an eye on his box-office sensation.” O’Hearn finished his Regal Pale.

  This was backing up what Lockwood himself had admitted to Groucho. “Did he suspect Olmstead of anything specific?”

  “Such as what?”

  “Anything.”

  “Not that I’ve heard. I’ll keep digging.”

  “What have you unearthed about Pearson’s girlfriend?”

  “He had one.”

  “So we assumed. What we’d like to know, as I mentioned on the phone, is who she is and where we can find her.”

  “I’ll find out, Frank, but it may cost a little more.”

  Standing, I produced twenty bucks out of my wallet and handed the bills over to O’Hearn.

  After tossing the empty bottle in the direction of the other, O’Hearn unfolded up out of his chair. “Hey, I hear you and the missus are going to have a kid,” he said, folding the money up and sliding it into his shirt pocket. “Congratulations, Frank.”

  “Thanks. You’re very well-informed.”

  “That’s how I make my living,” he reminded.

  I walked to the door. “I’ll get back to you, Tim.”

  He opened the door for me. “Watch out for the Gestapo,” he advised as I stepped into the shadowy hall.

  The offices of Paul Temmerson, attorney-at-law, were just off Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills near Roxbury Drive. Groucho Marx arrived there at a few minutes after one, so he later told me.

  Most of the buildings on this block weren’t designed by architects inspired by Gone with the Wind but by those who had fallen under the spell of one of the movie versions of The Mark of Zorro. The lawoffice building was two stories high, built around a mosaic-tile courtyard and made of pale orange stucco. The slanting roofs were bright red curved tile.

  Bounding gracefully up the redbrick outdoor staircase, Groucho passed potted cactus of various kinds in fat, colorful pots imported up from Mexico. A parrot cage of dark wrought iron hung on a dark wrought-iron hook beside the entryway to the offices of Temmerson, Carnahan, and Temmerson.

  The green-and-yellow bird eyed Groucho, squawked, “Humbug,” and returned to pecking at a biscuit.

  “Very seasonal,” observed Groucho, entering the beam-ceilinged reception room.

  “May I help you, sir?” inquired the dark-haired young woman behind the heavy redwood desk.

  “Yes, I’m dying to know why there are two Temmersons and only one Carnahan,” he said as he approached her desk. “Did you run out of Carnahans, or—”

  “You must be Groucho Marx,” realized the receptionist.

  “Yes, I must. It has to do with a curse put on me while I was still in the cradle.”

  “Miss Flanders is already in with Mr. Paul Temmerson,” said the unsmiling young woman. “I’ll let them know you’ve arrived.” She flicked on the intercom. “Mr. Marx is here, sir.”

  A deep, handsome voice flowed out of the speaker. “Show him in, Francesca.”

  “The first door to the right of the desk, Mr. Marx.”

  He bowed, went loping in the direction of the designated door. Halfway there, he halted, spun around, and came loping back to the brunette receptionist. Taking hold of her nearest hand, he kissed it resoundingly. “I shall wear your name engraved forever on my heart, Francesca,” he said. “Right next to the place where it says, ‘If found, please drop in the nearest mailbox.’”

  He turned again, went into Paul Temmerson’s office.

  Dinah, wearing white bell-bottom slacks, a blue blazer, and a very cute sailor hat, was sitting on the edge of one of the redwood-and-leather chairs facing Temmerson’s wide redwood desk. “I wanted you to hear about this from Paul directly, Groucho,” she said as he took another of the chairs.

  The lawyer was a tan and handsome man of fifty. His graying hair was wavy, and his London-tailored suit was gray. “I advised Dinah not to bring any outsiders into this, Groucho, but she insisted … .” He paused to sigh. “And Dinah’s a very difficult women to disagree with.”

  “Just tell him about what you told me on the telephone yesterday, Paul.”

  “I was also Eric Olmstead’s lawyer,” the dapper attorney began. “A little over three weeks ago, he dropped in to give me some instructions on what he wanted done in the event of his death.” He opened a yellow legal tablet.

  Grouch asked, “Olmstead was expecting to die?”

  “Apparently so.”

  “By his own hand?”

  “C’mon, Groucho,” cut in Dinah, “you know damn well Eric didn’t—”

  “Let’s get to his instructions,” suggested Groucho.

  Temmerson consulted the penciled notes on the sheet of the tablet. “Eric wanted to be cremated, he wanted his ashes to be scattered over the Pacific Ocean,” he said. “He wanted me to provide Dinah with the combination to the safe in his den as soon as he was dead.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “Yes, Eric informed me that he had written … well, he referred to it as a sort of confession,” answered the attorney. “Eric said it would explain to Dinah why he’d been so depressed and anxious recently. The real reason he’d suggested that they separate. This statement was in an envelope addressed to Dinah that was locked in his safe. It was, as I mentioned, to be read only after his death.”

  “Isn’t that terrific?” Dinah said to Groucho. “Eric explains everything, and then some son of a bitch cracks the safe and swipes the damned paper.”

  Groucho asked the lawyer, “Olmstead didn’t tell you specifically what he was confessing to?”

  “It was something he wasn’t proud of, but that’s all I know.”

  “And he didn’t leave you an extra copy of this document?”

  “To the best of my knowledge, Groucho, there was only one copy, and that was placed in his safe.”

  “And that copy,” said Dinah, “went off with our safecracker.”

  Temmerson said, “When I informed Dinah about this document, Groucho, she insisted that I tell you all I know about it. I hope it’s been of some help.”

  “You’ve got to find that damn thing,” Dinah told Groucho.

  “I’ll add it to my list,” he promised.

  Twenty-three

  Some twenty-five miles off the Southern California coast lies Santa Catalina Island. The island is something over twenty miles long and about eight miles across at its widest point. As you approach it across the water, Catalina looks, as one guidebook puts it, as if a section of the Coast Range had been transplanted to the open ocean.

  Chewing-gum tycoon William Wrigley, Jr., bought the island back in 1919 and had long since converted it into a first-class tourist attraction. In addition to tourists and vacationers, a lot of movie colony people frequented Catalina.

  Sunday morning Groucho and I set sail from San Pedro for Catalina to locate and question Olmstead’s missing valet, the guy who’d called himself James Pearson. If the information I’d picked up from Tim O’Hearn was reliable, we might find the erstwhile Pearson in the vicinity of Doubloon Bay up the coast of the island from the town of Avalon.

  The November day was clear, warm, and blue, and the ferryboat was making good time across the fairly choppy ocean. The trip was supposed to take about an hour and a half. I was leaning with an elbow on the rail on the upper, open deck, trying to spot flying fish. All I’d noted thus far was
an inflated rubber sea horse that some kid must have lost at one of the beaches. The thing was yellow with blue polka dots and looked lonely and disoriented as it drifted out to sea.

  “Are you certain, Rollo,” asked Groucho, “that you’ve recovered sufficiently to embark upon an ocean voyage?” He was wearing a blue blazer dotted with gold buttons, grey slacks, and a pair of dark glasses.

  “I’m somewhere between feeling splendid and feeling so-so. But I’m in better shape today than I was yesterday.” I still had a moderate headache. “I can make this trip okay.”

  “Let us review, my dear Watso, the possible reasons why Pearson, alias Len Hickman, private eye, is attempting to elude all and sundry. Including Our Gal Sundry and—”

  “One possible reason,” I contributed, “is that he’s the killer.”

  “Perhaps,” said Groucho. “What’s his motive?”

  “Could be he was hired by somebody to take care of Olmstead.”

  “Hired by whom?”

  I gazed out at the morning Pacific. “The Nazis maybe or Warren Lockwood or possibly somebody we don’t know a damn thing about as yet.”

  Groucho rested both elbows on the ferryboat railing. “The Germans might have eliminated Olmstead because he’d failed in his mission or was balking at turning over the stuff swiped from Lockwood Aero,” he said. “They might also have gotten wind of the fact that he was planning to confess—to tell all and perhaps foul up their entire Southern California espionage setup.”

  “There’s no way of telling what was in that confession Dinah’s lawyer told you about yesterday. But it was probably something the Gestapo didn’t want made public.”

  “Now as to Lockwood,” said Groucho. “What would be his reason for having Dinah’s hubby bumped off?”

  I said, “Well, Dinah’s worth millions of bucks to his movie company. If it got out that she was married to a Nazi spy, that could pretty well screw up her career. And her earning power.”

  “True,” he acknowledged. “Among the other probable motives for Pearson taking a powder is the possibility that he saw the murder or at least knows who committed it.”