Alone

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Remind me to lay a wreath on my grandfather’s grave next Memorial Day,” he said. “My father always looked down on him because he didn’t finish his formal education.”

  “You know, thousands of ordinary homeowners do this kind of thing every weekend.”

  “I think you and I agree this isn’t an ordinary home.”

  Valentino thanked him for his help, even though he hadn’t provided much, sitting in one of the draped theater seats smoking and making observations, and drove them from there to Broadhead’s house in a cul-de-sac off Beverly Glen Boulevard, the unfashionable section north of Sunset. It was a brick box with functional shutters, a relic of the sleepy Los Angeles of retirement housing and milk wagons, just a five-minute walk from the UCLA campus. The professor seldom took his thrifty compact car out of the garage, and then only to annoy their department head, whose SUV burned gas like weeds. Broadhead directed Valentino to the guest bedroom and knocked out his pipe in a smoking stand by the dilapidated armchair in front of the TV while his guest carried in his suitcase and coffeemaker.

  The first eight bars of the theme to Gone With the Wind bleated; it was Valentino’s ring tone. He answered his cell clumsily. His thumbs were still throbbing.

  “I got your messages,” Harriet said. “If you’d told me what you were up to with Matthew Rankin, I might have answered them sooner.”

  “How’d you know about that?”

  “Garbo’s letter just landed on my desk. You also might want to check out today’s Times.”

  He walked out of the guest room holding the phone to his ear just as Broadhead was closing the front door. He had a rolled-up copy of the Los Angeles Times in one hand.

  Valentino took it from him and shook it open. His picture was on the front page with his name in the caption. His face looked washed out in the glare of the strobe with Rankin’s house in the background.

  **

  CHAPTER

  6

  “YOU’RE NOT VERY photogenic, you know. I guess it was your personality I fell for.”

  “I come off better when I’m not ambushed. They must have traced my license plate number. I didn’t answer any of their questions or tell them my name.”

  They were in the break room outside the forensics laboratory at Los Angeles Police headquarters, where Harriet worked six days most weeks. The Times was spread on the table between them, collecting crumbs from her tuna sandwich.

  ‘“Rankin confidant,’ it says.” She chewed and swallowed. “They probably connected his donations to the university to you. Beverly Hills cops put the wraps on tight or the newsies wouldn’t be snatching at straws.”

  “Meanwhile I’m fair game. They’re bound to link me to the Oracle. Having to clear out of there may turn out to be a blessing in disguise.” He hesitated. “Does this meeting mean I’m forgiven?”

  “Blackmail, it says here. I take it he asked you to help get him out from under. That’s a legitimate reason to keep a secret.”

  “I had a better one than just that. He wanted me to dig up dirt on Akers so he could bargain with him on level ground.”

  She met his gaze. In her work clothes and regular makeup, with no headdress covering her short, ash-blonde hair, she looked less like Garbo than last night, but she still had the chilly stare.

  “I wasn’t going to do it,” he said. “I went out of nosiness. And because he’d dangled How Not to Dress in front of me as incentive.”

  “Thank God.” She picked up her sandwich. “I was afraid you were leading a double life. Turns out the one you’re leading just got away from you. You told this to the police?”

  “Yes, and so will Rankin, if he has the kind of attorney he can afford and takes his advice. It helps corroborate his version of what happened.”

  “Tag. You’re it.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  She swallowed tuna and washed it down with diet Coke. “Hiding out at Kyle’s place won’t protect you from the press. You’ll need plastic surgery and a new name. I’d suggest Kato Kaelin, but that might make things worse.”

  He changed the subject. “How did the Garbo letter wind up in your caseload? Beverly Hills has its own facilities.”

  “Not as good as ours. We’ve got the best in the state. It’s a reciprocal thing: L.A. goes to the hills when we want to know which wine to serve with the veal at the commissioner’s banquet.” She took a folded sheet out of a pocket of her smock and spread it on the table. A glop of mayonnaise fell from her sandwich onto the text, smearing the ink when she brushed at it.

  “What kind of way is that to treat evidence?”

  “Chill out. We ran off a dozen copies from the fax they sent us. It’s Swedish, all right. Would you like a translation?”

  “I thought Johansen was Danish.”

  “It still is. My father taught Scandinavian Literature at the University of South Dakota. He believed in starting at home, and he felt about translations the way you feel about colorizing black-and-white films. I never got a handle on Finnish, but I aced the rest.”

  “How is it I’m just finding this out now?”

  “Do you really want to get back on the subject of full disclosure?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  She finished her meal, pushed aside the clutter, and gave the letter a pop. “This is a recap of a rendezvous between Andrea Rankin and Greta Garbo in New York City, sometime in nineteen forty-nine or fifty: They went to see All the King’s Men, and I looked up the running dates. The rest is pretty steamy. You want it grope by grope or just a summary?”

  “Neither. I can wait for the tabloids to get hold of it and spill all the salacious details. I’d sort of hoped there weren’t any, and that Rankin’s Swedish wasn’t as good as he let on.”

  “Sorry, Val. She was human.”

  “I know that. It would be nice if just one star were left to shine untarnished in the firmament.”

  “Apart from sounding pompous, that’s homophobic.”

  “That’s an automatic reaction on your part. If a person’s sexual preference didn’t matter, the columnists and talk-show hosts wouldn’t whisper and giggle so much whenever someone famous got outed. As for me, I’d be just as worked up if Garbo had a hot-and-heavy affair with Harry Truman. I prefer my Titanics at the bottom of the ocean, my Jack the Rippers unidentified, and my Garbos mysterious.”

  “But not your shootings.”

  “I like Matthew Rankin, but I have a professional stake in this one as well. If he goes to prison, my department won’t take possession of How Not to Dress until he dies and his heirs finish fighting over the will. He says it’s being kept under climate-controlled conditions, but that’s no guarantee someone won’t crank up the thermostat after he passes.”

  “Seems to me we had this conversation before, when Greed was in police lockup.”

  “There’s also the real possibility the will may be broken and we’ll never see those reels.”

  “That’s your obsession, and it got a man killed. If you’d told the police Rankin was being blackmailed, Roger Akers would be in jail instead of the morgue, and Rankin wouldn’t be in custody.”

  “I promised him I wouldn’t.”

  She put down the letter. “I may be part of the law enforcement community, but I’m also your friend. Didn’t you ever think you could discuss a matter of questionable legality with me and I wouldn’t go running off to report it?”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry.” He leaned his elbows on the table and spread his hands. “I never knew Andrea Rankin. She died of a sudden heart attack just when they were planning retirement together. He was as anxious to protect her privacy as I am Garbo’s. Neither one of us was capable of making a wise choice under those circumstances.”

  “For someone who’s a casual acquaintance, you make him sound like a bosom buddy.”

  “Kyle said the same thing. I denied it, but maybe you’re both right. At the very least I admire the old man. Whe
n the bottom fell out of the department-store business, right in the middle of his bereavement, he could have bailed, but he didn’t. Instead he pumped his personal fortune back into the chain to drag it into the computer age, at a time when most industries thought the technology was witchcraft. He kept thousands of people employed. Then when things turned around, he used some of the profits to help out the film preservation program, asking nothing in return. I’d have offered my help without his having to promise anything. Short of breaking the law,” he added.

  “I accept your apology.” She picked up the letter. “The fingerprint people in Beverly Hills are pretty good. They matched the victim’s prints to the letter and to the marble bust, so at least part of Rankin’s story checks out.”

  “Lieutenant Padilla says he could have pressed Akers’ fingers to the bust after he was dead. I guess the same goes for the letter. He might have had the time, since we can’t pinpoint the exact moment of death because nobody heard the shot.”

  “For that matter, getting Akers to handle the letter when he was alive wouldn’t have been much of a challenge. He was Rankin’s assistant, after all. Which leaves just the letter. The contents, I mean.”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘just.’ If your graphologist confirms it was written by Greta Garbo, it would go a long way toward exonerating Rankin. An extortionist couldn’t hope for better material.

  “We ran into a snag there,” she said. “He needs authenticated samples of her writing for comparison. We tried MGM, but all they have is her signature on old contracts on file. That’s not enough. None of the movie museums we tried could help us. What was she, illiterate?”

  “No, just very, very private. For years, MGM kept one of her friends on the payroll because they couldn’t make contact with Garbo except through her.”

  “Her own studio? Why’d they put up with it?”

  He stroked his thumb with a forefinger. There was a bruise under the nail where he’d smacked it with the hammer. “Money in the bank. She saved the studio twice: when she signed with it, and when talkies came along and she was the only player under contract who didn’t sound like Mickey Mouse.”

  “There’s a name for that kind of behavior. Sociopathic.”

  “Or maybe she was just ahead of her time. With all the paparazzi running around these days, celebrities have to live in armed compounds and never go outside without a platoon of bodyguards. But she did go to extraordinary lengths to avoid autograph hunters. I had one glimpse years ago of a brief inscription on an early photo. George Washington’s easier. Did you try the Swedish military archives?”

  “Why military?”

  “She never gave up her native citizenship, visited home often, and my guess is she was impressed by army security, so she donated her personal documents there.”

  “Okay, we’ll get them on the horn and have them fax samples.”

  “Law enforcement’s certainly come a long way since The Asphalt Jungle.”

  “I wouldn’t get my hopes up,” she said. “Our guy has doubts.”

  “Your graphologist? How can he, without the samples in hand?”

  She swiveled the paper on the table and slid it toward him. “Anything about this strike you as odd?”

  He studied the hand, which was simple but delicate. Finally he sat back shaking his head. “I’m an expert in one thing, and this isn’t it. And the only Swedish I know is Smörgasbord.”

  “Smörgasbord,” she corrected; but he couldn’t hear any difference in her pronunciation. “Remember, I said Garbo was human. We’re imperfect creatures. No one writes a character in cursive exactly the same way twice in succession. The shape and slant vary, so does the thickness of the line. But look at this.”

  She drew the plastic straw from her drink cup and used it as a pointer, leaving droplets of diluted cola wherever it touched the paper. “All these s’s are identical. Same goes for the t’s and y’s and the rest of the alphabet. Even the commas are the same. And don’t get me started on the umlauts.”

  “By all means, let’s forget the umlauts.” He bent closer to the letter. “It’s obvious, when you point it out. I’m impressed.”

  “Stop trying to butter me up. I’m not over my mad. It was the graphologist who spotted it. One of the supernerds in Cyber Crime came up with the explanation. Did you know it’s possible to create your own font, even from something as personal as handwriting? You know what a font is?”

  “The shape of a letter. I’m not a complete Luddite.”

  “All you have to do is scan it in, and if you’re handy with a mouse you can sculpt the alphabet in upper and lower case and all the punctuation, type it up on the keyboard, and print it out.”

  “Akers handled all of Rankin’s correspondence. He must have spent a lot of time at the computer. Experience is a great teacher.”

  “My eight-year-old cousin designed the logo for her mother’s home business. She flunked recess.”

  “But assuming the forgery fooled Rankin, he must have known it was printed out on a computer. A pen makes an uneven texture you can feel with your fingers.”

  “All he ever saw was a photocopy. There never was an original.”

  “Rankin may not have invented the microchip, but he was one of the first to recognize its importance. You’d think he’d have noticed the suspicious consistency of the characters.”

  “I didn’t,” she said, “until it was pointed out to me. Neither did you, and we’re both trained to spot fakes. He was predisposed to accept it as genuine, based on his wife’s close ties with Garbo and his own fears for her good name. Maybe he suspected there was more to their friendship than met the eye.”

  “Maybe he knew there was.” He was glum.

  She snapped her fingers, startling him. “Do us all a favor and get a grip on the twenty-first century, okay? She’s dead, Andrea’s dead, and Roger Akers is dead as hell. Matthew Rankin is alive and looking at prison or worse. If you’re serious about helping him, you need to stay out of soft focus.”

  “If Akers faked the letter, maybe the program’s still in his computer.”

  “Now you’re cooking. Padilla confiscated and tagged every modem in the house for evidence. That’s standard procedure. Beverly Hills has the edge on us when it comes to computer specialists. We gave them everything I’ve told you. If he didn’t wipe out the hard drive—and I mean times ten; you’d be surprised how much those geeks can squeeze out of one that’s been erased—they’ll turn it. But it’ll take time if he made a decent job of it.”

  “How much time?”

  Her smile was sour. “Time enough for you to get a good dose of what your idol spent most of her life running away from. Rankin, too.”

  “It’s too late to help him with that,” he said. “How’d you like to quit this job and come to work for me as my reverse press agent? Keep me out of the spotlight instead of put me in it?”

  “Hang on to that good humor. You’ll need it when you find yourself wading neck deep in media just to get to a public toilet. Now.” She scrutinized the cola spots on the photocopy, then crumpled it and used it to wipe her hands. “In order to forge this letter, Akers had to have had access to something fairly lengthy written by Garbo in her own hand, providing him with a complete alphabet and punctuation. You can write a lot of letters without using everything. Which brings us back around to the problem of securing samples. Where’d he get them? Padilla’s crew tossed the house and found nothing.”

  “Rankin told me his wife destroyed Garbo’s letters to her as a favor to her friend. But he also said this one might have escaped to fall into Akers’ hands.”

  “Too convenient, just the one he needed? That should have been a red flag.”

  “How important is it to clear up all the loose ends?”

  She sat back and crossed her arms. “How do you like it when you’re deep into a screening and all of a sudden a card pops up saying ‘scene missing’?”

  “I hate it. It takes
me right out of the story.”

  “That’s just how a jury feels.”

  **

  CHAPTER

  7

  ANARCHY WAS TOO conservative a term to apply to life in the Broadhead household. The situation teetered somewhere between eternal revolution and a full rout.