Bit Player

by Janet Dawson

  I walked toward the back of the shop, where Raina Mackellar stood behind the counter, talking with a trim, silver-haired woman in a green print ensemble. Raina glanced at me and smiled. “I’ll be with you in a moment,” she said.

  I plucked a photograph of Carole Lombard and Clark Gable from a nearby bin of movie stills and held it up by the edges of its protective sleeve. As I looked past Raina toward the doorway that led to the storeroom, I saw someone back there, but it wasn’t Henry Calhoun. Instead Chaz Makellar walked through the doorway, his bright yellow T-shirt a splash of color over his tight-fitting jeans. He carried a framed poster, an insert from Decision at Sundown, showing Western star Randolph Scott in a blazing orange shirt and blue pants, cowboy hat on his head and his hand on the six-shooter in his gunbelt.

  “Here it is, Mrs. Jeffries,” he said, turning up the wattage on his charm as he set the bottom of the insert on the counter. “Isn’t this a beauty?”

  “Oh, it’s wonderful,” Mrs. Jeffries said. “My husband just loves old Westerns, and Randolph Scott was his favorite.”

  “I really like the colors and composition in this one,” Raina said.

  “And it is a good price,” Chaz added. “Excellent condition, no tears or folds.”

  Mrs. Jeffries laughed, already reaching for her wallet. “It’s just perfect. He’ll love it. I’ll take it.”

  “Good choice,” Chaz said with a grin. “And since your husband likes Randolph Scott I’ll keep an eye out for other posters. I’ll wrap this up for you.” He disappeared into the storeroom while Raina took care of the credit card transaction. Then Chaz emerged with the woman’s purchase encased in bubble wrap, secured with tape. “Let me carry this to your car. Where are you parked?”

  “Thank you so much. I’m just down the street, near the produce market.”

  Chaz hoisted the package and followed the woman out the door. Raina stepped away from the counter, as stylishly dressed as she had been the first time I’d seen her, in slim black slacks and a long lilac blouse, large silver hoops dangling from her earlobes.

  “Can I help you find anything?” she asked.

  “I’m just looking right now,” I said. I put the photo of Gable and Lombard back into the bin and shifted my attention to a title card from The Buccaneer, starring Yul Brynner.

  Raina approached the man and woman who’d entered at the same time I had. The man had left the bin of lobby cards and joined the woman on the other side of the shop. Together they were looking at an oversized book of photographs from movie musicals. “Just browsing,” the man told her.

  She went back to the counter and took a sip from a take-out coffee container, another one of her caffeine fixes. Chaz returned and joined her behind the counter. “We will definitely have to look for more Scott posters,” he told her. “Mrs. Jeffries is a good customer. Say, where’s Henry? I thought he was going to be here at noon. We need to get over to Walnut Creek and pick up that lot of film noir stuff we just bought.”

  “He’s on his way,” Raina said. “I talked with him just before Mrs. Jeffries came in.”

  That answered one of my questions. I’d been concerned when I didn’t see Henry Calhoun in the shop. And if he and Chaz were planning to leave, I needed to make my move, and soon.

  Chaz pointed a finger at the coffee container Raina held. “I’m gonna walk down to Peet’s. You want a refill?”

  She smiled at him. “Sure. My usual.”

  Chaz stepped away from the counter, taking a few steps toward the front door. Before he got more than a few feet, I intercepted him. “I’d like to talk with you, Mr. Makellar. Both you and your wife.”

  Chaz Makellar smiled at me. “Of course. Can we help you with something?”

  “Yes, you can,” I said. “Back in April you purchased a collection of Joan Crawford movie memorabilia from a man named Lewis Cook. He was the executor of the estate of his mother, Mrs. Roberta Cook in Petaluma, who died in March.”

  Chaz nodded and went into salesman mode. “Yes, we did. That was a good-sized lot containing some rare and collectible posters. Are you interested in Crawford memorabilia?”

  “Mrs. Cook had a three-sheet poster from Rain, very valuable because it’s in mint condition. You’re selling that poster for ten thousand dollars. You paid Lewis five thousand dollars for the entire collection. I’d say that was a steal.”

  Chaz’s expression turned cagey. “Wait a minute. Are you saying there’s something wrong with the sale? Mr. Cook was relieved that I took the stuff off his hands.”

  “He wouldn’t have been relieved if he’d known how much it’s worth. I saw the inventory you did for him. You undervalued everything.”

  Raina looked alarmed and spoke to her husband. “Is there a problem with that lot? I told you I didn’t want any trouble.”

  “No, there’s not a problem. There’s no trouble.” Chaz’s tone was placating as he shifted his gaze from his wife to me, raising his hands as though to forestall any further questions. “That’s just business. With the collectibles market, we have to consider what the merchandise might be worth, and what we might get for it. The asking price on that Rain three-sheet may be ten thousand, but unless we can find a buyer to pay that, the poster doesn’t have any value.”

  “Let the seller beware, is that it? You saw him coming and took advantage.”

  “What business is that of yours?” Chaz said, his tone turning hostile. “If you’re not interested in buying, why are we having this conversation?”

  “We’re having this conversation because I think there’s a good chance Mrs. Cook was murdered.”

  Raina blanched. She set her coffee container on the counter, so hard that it tipped over. Brown liquid trickled onto the counter. She pulled a box of tissues from under the counter and mopped the spill. She tossed the wad of wet paper and the now-empty container into a trash can as she stepped out from behind the counter.

  The lines around Chaz’s mouth tightened. “What? What the hell are you talking about? That was an accident. That’s what it said in the newspaper. She fell down the stairs and hit her head.”

  “Why would you, a businessman in Alameda, read a newspaper article about the death of an elderly woman in Petaluma?”

  That stopped him short. Then he shrugged. “That? Well, I... Someone showed me the article.”

  “Would that someone be Henry Calhoun, your employee?”

  “You haven’t answered my question,” Chaz said. “Who the hell are you?”

  I handed him my business card. He looked at it and swore. Then he passed it to Raina. She put her hand on his arm.

  “A private investigator?” Raina looked from him to me. Then she cast an anxious look at the man and woman who were still looking at books near the front of the shop, apparently oblivious to our conversation. She lowered her voice. “I’d think you’d better tell me what’s going on.”

  “About three weeks ago, Chaz and Henry went up to Healdsburg to talk with a man named Mike Strickland, who owned a large collection of Hitchcock memorabilia. He wasn’t interested in selling any items from that collection. Five days after you visited him, Strickland was murdered.”

  “Murder?” Chaz ran a hand through his graying hair as Raina stared at him with alarm. “I don’t know anything about a murder.”

  “You knew Strickland was dead,” I said. “You called and left a message on his answering machine, a message saying you were interested in buying his collection, just like you did with Mrs. Cook.”

  “Yes, I knew he was dead. I read about it in the Chronicle. I figured it was an opportunity, just like the Cook woman. But murder? I’ve got nothing to do with that. I’m a businessman. I look for people with collections and I try to buy the merchandise, that’s all. I’ve been doing it for years, ever since I hooked up with Raina and her dad.”

  “Tell me what happened the day you visited Mrs. Cook.”

  Chaz was sweating now, moisture beading on his upper lip. “That old woman in Petaluma? She had so
me great stuff, all Joan Crawford. Once I saw that three-sheet from Rain, I knew that one item alone was worth a lot of money, that we could move if we found the right buyer. I tried to convince her to sell me some things from her collection. She didn’t want to sell. But she did say something about needing to get an inventory done, because her son didn’t have any idea how much it was worth. I told her I’d be happy to do the inventory. She said she’d think about it. That was it, we left.”

  “Did Henry say anything during all of this?”

  “He said she’d come around. That’s all he said. I didn’t think anything else about it. Then later, Henry came to me, said the woman from Petaluma was dead. He showed me her obituary from the Santa Rosa paper. He reminded me what she said about her son, that he didn’t know what the stuff was worth. Henry said I should contact the son and offer to take the stuff off his hands. It was a good idea, so that’s what I did.”

  “I suppose it never occurred to you why Henry was reading a newspaper from Santa Rosa.” I turned to Raina. “Tell me, does Henry borrow your car?”

  “Sometimes,” she said. “If he needs to run an errand. He’s very careful and he fills it with gas after he’s used it.”

  “Did he borrow your car the first Monday in June?” I asked, naming the date.

  “He told me he was going to the doctor.”

  “A maroon Lexus sedan with vanity plates was seen parked across the road from Mike Strickland’s house in Healdsburg the day he was murdered. The witness says the car had vanity plates, beginning with R and ending in K. You drive a maroon Lexus sedan, Raina, with license plates reading RNAMAK. Another witness saw a maroon Lexus with vanity plates starting with an R, in Petaluma the afternoon Mrs. Cook died. That was in March, a few weeks after Chaz and Henry visited Mrs. Cook.”

  Raina clutched Chaz’s arm, her fingers leaving white marks where they dug into his skin. “A Friday in March? He borrowed the car on a Friday, I don’t remember when. Another doctor’s appointment, he said. We were going out to dinner that night, in San Francisco, and we had to drive the SUV, because Henry didn’t get back in time. He apologized later, said it was raining, he said there was a lot of traffic.”

  “It was raining that afternoon. And I’m sure there was plenty of traffic. It was rush hour and he was driving all the way back from Petaluma.” I heard the front door of the shop open and glanced in that direction.

  Henry Calhoun looked as dapper and spry as he had the first afternoon I’d seen him, slender in a pair of gray trousers and a long-sleeved, cream-colored linen shirt. He paid little attention to the young couple browsing through the books near the door and walked toward us, his hand raised in greeting. I could see the gold cufflinks fastening his cuffs, heavy and square, decorated with a Celtic knot and in the center, a large distinct Celtic cross.

  The cufflinks Henry wore were exactly like the cufflinks in a couple of photographs I’d seen recently. One photo had been in the FedEx package from Pearl’s friend, waiting for me when I returned to my office Friday afternoon. The black-and-white publicity still of Ralph Tarrant was taken in January 1942, according to a notation on the back, a month after Sylvia Jasper gave him the cufflinks as a Christmas gift, a month before his murder. In the photo he held a cocktail in his right hand and a cigarette in his left, and the cufflinks he wore were clearly visible. The same cufflinks, or a pair just like them, were worn by Byron Jasper in the photo Sal Bianchi took at the Camp Roberts recreation hall.

  “Henry Calhoun,” I said. “Or is it Binky Jasper?”

  He stopped and looked me over with his dark, stony eyes. “You were in here a few weeks ago. You’re the woman who bought the Norma Shearer lobby cards.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Jerusha Layne’s granddaughter. You told me a yarn that day, about an unsolved Hollywood mystery involving the murder of an actor named Ralph Tarrant. You picked the wrong person. I don’t like unsolved mysteries. I’m a private investigator.”

  “So you investigated,” he said.

  “I did. I think you killed Tarrant back in ’forty-two.”

  I didn’t know why, though I had some theories. Anger, revenge, jealousy—perhaps all of these had combined into the fury that led him to shoot Tarrant at close range. There may have been some truth to what Pearl had told me, about a possible sexual relationship between Binky and Tarrant. If that were the case, Binky had a rival for Tarrant’s affections, his own sister Sylvia. She, too, had a relationship with the actor.

  “Sylvia was with you that night,” I said. “After you shot Tarrant, you set a fire, hoping to cover your tracks. You took something off the body.” I pointed. “Those cufflinks, a present from Sylvia to Tarrant. Then you made an anonymous phone call to the police, implicating someone else.”

  Henry’s smile was malicious. We both knew it was my grandmother he’d tried to tar with that brush.

  “Sylvia threatened to expose you,” I said. “You killed her, buried her body on a beach in Santa Monica, and reported her missing. Later that year, you got your draft notice. You reported to Camp Roberts in ’forty-three. The Army didn’t appeal to you, so you started looking for a way out. You killed Harold Corwin, put your dog tags on his body, and set another fire. Then you went back to Hollywood with a new identity, as Hank Calvin. That worked until someone who knew you as Binky Jasper recognized you. Pearl Bishop. Remember her? So you needed a new identity. You were sharing an apartment with someone who had a similar name. That was Henry Callan, who worked for Raina and her father.”

  Raina gasped and I glanced at her. “You weren’t mistaken about the last name, Raina. The man who lived in your aunt’s building and worked for your father as a scout really was Henry Callan. This man calls himself Henry Calhoun. He helped himself to another man’s name and social security checks after Callan died very conveniently by falling down the stairs. Maybe that was an accident, maybe not. He died the same way Roberta Cook did, by falling down some stairs. That was so Chaz could buy her collection, especially that valuable poster.”

  “You can’t prove any of this,” Henry said.

  “You were seen,” I told him. “Getting out of Raina’s car parked just down the street from Mrs. Cook’s house on the afternoon she was killed. And again in front of Mike Strickland’s house, right before he was shot. That wasn’t about the collection. It was because after all your efforts to bury Binky, Mike recognized you. He wasn’t sure of your name but he was sure he’d seen you before. He never forgot a face. That’s what he said to you the day you and Chaz talked with him. So you killed him.”

  The young couple who’d entered the shop after me moved closer, coming to stand on either side of Henry. Both of them had their shields out. They were plainclothes detectives from the Alameda Police Department. I’d spent the morning with them, outlining my evidence, with Sergeant Marty Toland of the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office and Detective Kevin Harper of the Petaluma Police Department participating in the conversation by speaker phone. The man took out a pair of handcuffs while the woman invited Henry down to police headquarters to answer a few questions.

  “You’ve racked up quite a body count,” I said. “By my count, you’ve killed six people.”

  His smile was brittle. “More than that. I’ll leave it to you to figure out who you’ve missed. The first one was hard. But it gets easier.”

  Chapter 35

  Thelma Darwell and her doubles partner were running their opponents all over the tennis courts at Lower Washington Park. I sat on a bench outside the fence and watched them, enjoying the breeze blowing off San Francisco Bay on this fine summer morning. When the tennis players finished the set, Thelma walked to the fence and set her tennis racquet on top of her bag. She pulled off her sun visor and ran a hand through her white hair. As she unscrewed the lid from her water bottle, she saw me and waved. A moment later she joined me outside the courts, sitting beside me on the bench.

  “I thought I might find you here,” I told her.

  “Every chanc
e I get. At my age, exercise is what keeps me going.” Thelma sipped her water. “Do you have news for me?”

  I nodded. “I’m almost certain the man who died at Camp Roberts was your brother Harold. The dog tags found on the body after the fire belonged to a recruit named Byron Jasper. I believe he lured Harold to that tool shed, killed him and set the fire. Then he took Harold’s identification and went AWOL. I found out the body is buried in a cemetery in San Miguel, near the base.”

  A shadow passed over Thelma’s face. “I knew it. So did my mother. We were so sure Harry would never desert. What happened to the man who killed my brother?”

  “Byron Jasper is still alive. He’s about the same age your brother would have been if Harold had lived. As far as I know, your brother is his third victim,” I added. “Jasper is responsible for a string of deaths going back to Los Angeles in nineteen forty-two. He’s about to be charged with two recent murders in Sonoma County.”

  A lot had happened in the few days since Byron Jasper, aka Henry Calhoun, had been taken into custody. After questioning by the Alameda police, he’d been transferred to Sonoma County. I called Nacio Lopez, the LAPD detective who’d inherited the file on Ralph Tarrant’s murder, and told him what I’d learned. Lopez was pleased at the prospect of finally closing the decades-old case. So was the Santa Monica detective who had the file on Sylvia Jasper’s murder. And my friend Liam Cleary had been in touch with the investigator who’d initially looked into the death of Henry Callan, Byron’s roommate who died in a fall back in the early eighties. He was interested in clearing that case, if there was enough evidence to show that Binky had killed Callan. Closer to home, the district attorney in Sonoma County thought the evidence was strong enough to convict Byron Jasper for the murders of Roberta Cook and Mike Strickland.