Elementary, My Dear Groucho

by Ron Goulart

  “Dying messages always annoy me.” Groucho straightened up, with a slight creak, still looking at what the dead man had written on the cover. “Victims in B movies are always penning cryptic phrases in ancient Persian or gasping out a snatch of lyric from a fifteenth-century madrigal to give the sleuths a hint as to who did them in.” He paused to puff on his cigar. “Much simpler, in my opinion, if you just dashed off something like ‘I was knocked off by Erwin L. Hershman of Twenty-six-B Sycamore Lane in Pismo Beach.’ Or ‘My wife’s lover—I mean, the lout with the tattoo—did this, officers. It’s my guess they’re shacked up at this very moment in the Starcross Motel in Anaheim. Go get ’em.’”

  I took a look around the set, tapping my fingers on Holmes’s Stradivarius that rested on a table near the door. “Well, I guess we’d better alert the security people about this,” I said, “and they can call the local cops.”

  “Exactly, Rollo. There’s absolutely no need whatsoever for us to get any further involved.” Groucho was slouched in the chair that Dr. Watson usually occupied, gazing up into the crosshatch of catwalks and dangling lights high above us. “We’ll do our civic duty, pause only long enough to pose for a few flattering photos for the gentlemen of the press, then journey on to our appointment with Lew Marker.”

  “I hope,” said Isobel quietly, sniffling, “these things don’t really come in threes.”

  Groucho popped to his feet. “What’s that, Izzy?”

  I asked, “Somebody else has been murdered?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t a murder,” she answered. “But, you know, I can’t help wondering if this darn movie isn’t jinxed.”

  “Details, dear child, provide us with some details,” Groucho requested, easing in bent-leg strides toward her.

  Isobel rubbed at her nose with her thumb. “Well, Mr. Marx, it was only five days ago that Marsha Tederow got killed,” she explained. “She was an assistant art director here at Mammoth and was working with Mr. Denker on The Valley of Fear.” She gestured in a vaguely northerly direction. “It was really awful—car accident way up on Mulholland someplace. Her coupe went off the road and down into a gully. It exploded and … Marsha was only twenty-seven and very attractive.”

  Narrowing my left eye and nodding at Groucho, I said, “A coincidence?”

  “It makes no never mind, Mother Westwind,” he told me. “What you’re doing is letting these Holmesian surroundings affect your impressionable young brain. Although we performed brilliantly as amateur sleuths on a few memorable occasions in the past, we are not on the premises today in that capacity. No, I’m here, Mr. Anthony, simply to sign a contract to coauthor Cinderella on Wheels and then reap the huge financial rewards that Movietown bestows upon its truly gifted writers. While I’m at it, I might reap a few acres of alfalfa, too, but only so it’ll distract the farmhands and keep them from dallying with my daughters. For, as Salvador Dalí so wisely put it when he was halfway through a six-day bike race and realized he had neglected to bring his bicycle, ‘Six time six is thirty-six except in months that begin with a letter of the alphabet.’”

  “That’s a cute title,” said Isobel.

  “What’s a cute title—Salvador Dalí?”

  “No, I mean Cinderella on Wheels.”

  “We already registered it with the Screen Writers Guild, sister, so beware,” he warned as he lurched closer to her.

  I said, “Let’s find a telephone, so we—”

  “Would you folks mind putting up your hands?” inquired a voice off in the shadows beyond 221 B.

  Three

  Jane asked me, “This is a serious conversation we’re having? Not another sample of your kidding?”

  I was in a dim-lit section of the big soundstage, slumped in a canvas chair, using the first phone I’d been able to locate. “I’m being absolutely truthful, sweetheart,” I assured my wife. “We found Felix Denker in—”

  “He’s the German fellow who directed The Confessions of Dr. Medusa just before he fled Berlin in 1934, isn’t he?”

  “He’s that Felix Denker, yes. For a while Groucho and I thought it was the Felix Denker who’d invented peanut butter, but a quick check of his identification papers proved we were in error,” I said. “Anyway, my love, after we looked over the scene of the crime—”

  “You’ve taken to saying my love exactly the way Groucho does.”

  “Look, Jane, I just came close to being arrested for murder, so I’m not especially in the mood for tips on elocution.”

  “You’re absolutely right, darling,” she said. “Besides, I have to learn to resign myself to the fact that I married a hopeless wiseass. Who tried to arrest you?”

  “Fortunately it was only a security guard,” I continued. “He was passing this soundstage and noticed the door wide open. He came in to look around and spotted Groucho and me and Isobel in the vicinity of the corpse.”

  “Isobel? Who might she be?”

  “She works here at Mammoth as a script girl and she’s actually the one who first found Denker’s body,” I explained. “She was pretty upset and happened to come running out of the soundstage looking for help just as Groucho and I were passing on our way to meet Marker.”

  “So you haven’t seen him yet?”

  ‘‘We’ve been detained here and won’t be able to see Marker until this afternoon,” I told her. “Did I mention Felix Denker was directing a Sherlock Holmes movie and his body’s sitting in Holmes’s favorite chair?”

  “That’s probably too obvious to be ironic,” she said. “Was he shot there or just dumped?”

  “I’d say, from the look of things, that he was shot right where we found him.”

  “Are you and Groucho going to be investigating this one, Frank?”

  “Nope, no, not at all,” I said firmly. “It was pure chance we got tangled up in this mess at all. See, Jane, after the first guard spotted us and pulled his gun—well, then he called in three other guards. They eventually accepted the fact that he was Groucho Marx, even though he doesn’t appear in civilian life with his greasepaint mustache. So the consensus at the moment is that we probably aren’t murderers, but we have to stick around until the police arrive and talk to us.”

  “I have this feeling you won’t be home for lunch.”

  “Let’s try for dinner,” I suggested. “Anything new?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact, yes,” she told me, sounding happy. “I just heard from the syndicate and Hollywood Molly has picked up twenty more newspapers. Including—and I think that’s great—the San Francisco Chronicle.”

  “Keep this up and I’ll never have to work again.”

  “You really aren’t upset by the fact that I happen to be earning more than you are at the moment?” she asked me.

  “Not at all,” I said, trying to sound convincing. “Oh, and there was one other thing I wanted to tell you.”

  “Okay, what?”

  “Now, what the heck was it?”

  From out of the shadows stepped a uniformed policeman. He was tall and heavyset and he made a sour face at me, beckoning.

  “Frank?” said my wife.

  “I’m being summoned by the law,” I said. “But I just remembered what I wanted to say: I love you.”

  “I was about to say the same,” Jane said. “Don’t get arrested, okay? And when you arrive home we can celebrate the twenty new papers. If you’d like.”

  “I would, yeah. Bye.” I hung up the phone and stood to follow the cop.

  “Young love,” he muttered, making his way over a scatter of wires and cables. “It’s downright touching.”

  Sergeant Jack Norment of the Burbank police was sitting on the edge of Sherlock Holmes’s unmade bed. He was a middle-sized man, on the plump side, and about forty. I first met him back when I was on the police beat with the Los Angeles Times. Norment had a fondness for booze and always gave off a whiskey aroma, but he never seemed to be actually drunk. He was fairly honest, by Southern California cop standards.

  The Holme
s bedroom set was about fifty yards from the study. Over there a forensic crew and a medical team were going over the scene of the crime and the body of Felix Denker.

  Norment had just finished questioning Isobel Glidden and told her she could leave.

  Still upset, she took Groucho’s sports coat off her shoulders and returned it to him. “Thanks, Mr. Marx,” she said, giving him a quick kiss on the cheek before she left.

  “Aw, gorsh, not in front of all the fellers, Izzy,” he said.

  “I admire your capacity to play the fool even under such unpleasant circumstances,” said the sergeant with what looked to me like a mirthless smile.

  “If you think this is unpleasant, Sarge, you should’ve seen the audience we played once in Pittsburgh.” Groucho rose up out of the wicker armchair he’d been slouched in and started struggling into his coat. “They could never use the vaudeville house for a theater again because of the aura we left behind. They converted it into a funeral parlor. But even that didn’t help, because people complained it was too gloomy.”

  “Should I write all this down?” Detective Ernie Sales was leaning at the edge of the bedroom set. He was a lanky, soft-spoken man who, he’d mentioned earlier, had never seen a Marx Brothers movie in his life so far. He was holding an open steno book and a gnawed yellow pencil.

  “Use your own judgment,” advised Norment.

  “If Pittsburgh is too tough to spell, I can move the theater to Altoona,” offered Groucho as he settled back into the chair.

  Sergeant Norment fetched a pack of Camels out of a pocket in his rumpled suit coat. “It’s gratifying to have a jester such as yourself to question, Marx. Usually at a murder scene we get only grieving relatives and surly suspects.”

  “If you want to see grieving relatives, you can drop by my place any weeknight. Every time my wife realizes what a scoundrel she was hoodwinked into marrying, she breaks down and sobs. My two offspring, when not weeping into their gruel, spend all their time going over hospital records in the vain hope they can prove I’m not related to them in any significant way.”

  “You knew Denker?” Norment asked him.

  “For the past two years or so,” answered Groucho. “I met him and his wife, Erika Klein, at a rally staged by the Anti-Nazi League.”

  “You saw them socially?”

  Shaking his head, Groucho answered, “Even though they both shared my views of Hitler and what he’s doing to Europe, I didn’t much like them.”

  “But you got along with Denker?”

  Groucho left his chair, snatched out his book of Trocadero matches, and provided a light for the cigarette the policeman had just popped between his lips. “As I understand it, Sarge, Denker was shuffled off last night sometime.” He wandered over to the cabinet that held Holmes’s disguises. “Frank and I stumbled on the body this morning around ten and that’s absolutely the only connection we have with this murder. As the young lady informed you, she was the one who first spotted the corpse. And running into a spotted corpse can be very unsettling, although there are those who favor candy-striped—”

  “You didn’t see anyone else here on the soundstage, Marx? Or anyone else leaving the place?”

  “Not a soul.” He locked both hands behind his back, hunched, and scanned the disguises hanging in the open cabinet. “I wonder how I’d look in this Dutch-boy bob?”

  Norment was smiling his unhappy smile again. “You used to be a pretty good reporter, Frank.”

  “Meaning I’ve fallen from grace since becoming a scriptwriter?”

  “Meaning did you notice anything that Marx missed?”

  “Nothing you and your guys haven’t noticed, Jack,” I answered. “Denker was shot at close range and there doesn’t look to have been a struggle. Except for the bullet holes he wasn’t mussed up at all. I’d estimate he was killed last night about eight or nine, but that’s obviously a very rough guess. I think he was shot in the chair we found him in, not moved there from someplace else. Examining the armchair and checking the way the blood’s settled in the corpse will probably confirm that.”

  Puffing on his cigarette, Norment flicked ashes on Sherlock Holmes’s Persian carpet. “You think he was attempting to convey anything by what he appears to have scrawled on that old magazine?”

  I answered, “If that’s his own blood on his fingertip, it’s a possibility.”

  “Maybe somebody else dipped Denker’s finger into his wound and scrawled that shaky four just to divert us.”

  “Maybe King George V doodled part of one of his mistresses’ phone numbers on that copy of The Strand and, after surviving the sinking of the Titanic, it found its way to a quaint secondhand magazine shop in Santa Monica until a prop man from—”

  “If that is a four,” Norment asked me, ignoring Groucho, “and if the director did actually put it there, does it suggest anything to you?”

  “Not a hell of a lot, Jack.”

  “Are you guys here playing private detective again?” asked Sales, looking up from his notebook.

  “We visited this mecca of the cinematic arts for one reason only, my good man,” said Groucho, taking a shaggy beard out of the cabinet and holding it up to the light from overhead. “We are interested solely in peddling a script. Later on, I have to concede, we may take time out to pedal Madeline home. But that’s going to depend on—”

  “I want to see him, damn you,” shouted a woman’s voice from the vicinity of the study set. “He’s my husband, you stupid oaf.”

  “The grieving widow,” observed Groucho, swinging the beard from side to side a couple of times.

  Erika Klein also worked for the Mammoth studios. She’d been a professor of history before she and Denker had to get out of Germany. For nearly two years she’d been working at the studio as the head of their Historical Research Department. Supposedly she’d also been instrumental in getting the director his contract with Lew Goldstein.

  “I just found out that poor Felix has been slain,” Erika was shouting. “Let me see his body, please!”

  Norment nodded at Sales. “Go curtail the lady, Ernie,” he suggested. “Escort her to a quiet spot and muzzle her sorrow. I’ll be over to chat with her in a short while.”

  Shutting his notebook, the plainclothes detective departed.

  Norment turned to Groucho. “In some circles, unfortunately, it isn’t too popular to be openly opposed to Hitler and the Nazis. Anybody you know of—say somebody who’s active in the local German American Bund—ever threatened Denker or his wife?”

  “Not at any of the political meetings or rallies that I’ve attended, no.” Groucho hung up the beard. “Denker wasn’t an especially likable fellow—something of a roadshow Fritz Lang. But if they started bumping off every unlikable director in town, the studios would have to shut down.”

  “Okay, what about Erika Klein’s relationship with her husband? Did they get along well?”

  “Every time I snuck over to their place, stood in the tulip beds, and peeked into their bedroom window, Sarge, they appeared to be getting along famously.”

  “Okay, you can both go.” Norment gave us another of his humorless smiles and nodded at the way out. “You sure you aren’t going to try to investigate this mess, Frank?”

  “We aren’t, nope,” I assured the sergeant.

  I believed it at the time.

  We were nearing the doorway leading out of the shadowy soundstage when a policeman somewhere behind us shouted, “Hey, Sergeant, it’s another body!”

  Stopping still, Groucho said, “Dagnab it, Rollo, if that don’t get my curiosity up.”

  “We just vowed not to get involved in this mess,” I reminded him.

  “I once took a vow of chastity.” Pivoting, he started back the way we’d come.

  Sergeant Norment, skirting cables and equipment, was making his way toward another small set. As we caught up with him, more lights came on and the London pub became much easier to see into.

  A uniformed cop and a plainclothesman
were standing next to one of the three small tables on the wooden public house floor. Slumped at the table, her head next to a tipped-over beer mug and her fat arms dangling, was a heavyset woman. Her short-cropped hair was an unbelievable black and she was wearing a very rumpled navy blue suit.

  The plainclothes policeman straightened up, stepping back and shaking his head. “False alarm, Jack,” he said. “She’s only passed out drunk.”

  “My fault,” said the cop in uniform. “She looked dead when I first spotted her, Sergeant.”

  Norment stopped beside the unconscious woman. “Be nice to know who she is and why she went to sleep a few hundred yards from our corpse. Any sign of a purse?”

  “Nope, and she’s not carrying any identification.”

  I stepped onto the set. “I know who she is.”

  Frowning at me, Norment said, “Am I wrong, or didn’t I already send you home, Frank?”

  “We thought there was a national emergency.” Groucho came over, leaned an elbow on the dark wood bar, and planted a foot on the short brass rail. “We rushed back to volunteer our services.”

  “Shall I give these guys the bum’s rush?” asked the uniformed man.

  “Nothing so fancy,” said Groucho.

  “You know this dame?” Sergeant Norment asked me. “Siegel, go get a medic to take a look at her.”

  Nodding, the cop left the pub.

  I pointed at the loudly snoring woman. “She’s Clair Rickson, a writer here at the studio.”

  “Why in the hell do we find her sozzled on this set?”

  “Well, I think I heard she wrote the script for The Valley of Fear.” Standing this close to the sergeant, I noticed that he smelled more like a pub than the set did. “Although that doesn’t exactly explain why she happens to be dead drunk at this particular location.”

  “The lady,” added Groucho, “is noted for having been found drunk at any number of choice locations.”

  Clair Rickson, whom I’d met at a few gatherings of writers over the past couple of years, was in her middle forties. Born in Kansas someplace, she’d lived in Europe in the 1920s and early 1930s and been buddies with the likes of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fizgerald. For the past few years she’d made a pretty good living with a series of hardboiled, whimsical, and boozy mystery novels about a tough Hollywood lawyer named Jack Muldoon. Two of the novels, The Case of the Cockeyed Carhop and The Case of the Jilted Jitterbug, had been turned into successful programmers by Mammoth. Pat O’Brien had been borrowed from the Warner Brothers to play Muldoon.