Shoot It Again, Sam

by Michael Avallone

  "Do you like him?"

  The bartender sniffed. He was sallow-faced, moustached and badly cynical in the eye.

  "That your business, mister?"

  "It is." I put another tenspot on the bar. "That's for the drinks. And whatever carfare he needs to get home. Where does he live?"

  Money makes everybody friendly. The bartender smiled a little.

  "Riviera Village. Over Redondo Beach way."

  "Okay. You see he makes it or I'll come back here and have your bar condemned as a fire hazard." I walked toward the door, through the fishnets, barnacles and all the fake marine world of the bar. Behind me, the bartender spoke up, bridling a little but still sold a bill of goods. His voice cracked in the quiet.

  "Hey. Anything you want me to tell him when he comes around?"

  "Sure," I said, over my shoulder. "Tell him he's a great actor."

  Behind the wheel of the Buick, I had a solitary smoke before pulling out. I watched the highway and the many makes of cars flashing by. Far off, the blue skies and the white clouds were mixing, deciding on what blend of color to make before the night came on. I saw a flock of gulls wheeling silently in the West. They were too far away for me to hear their cries. I flung the cigarette out the side of the car, put the Buick in gear and got the hell away from The Little Clam as fast as I could.

  Dead hands were pushing me.

  Haunted faces were shoving me.

  The distorted soundtracks of a hundred movies were all running on, colliding, Donald Duck squawks and gunfire and great lines and poor lines. The harrowing kaleidoscope was crowding me in. Like I couldn't breathe. My muddled brain was being scored by a maniac.

  I broke the speed limit racing back to downtown Los Angeles.

  The silver screen stayed with me all the way.

  Maybe nothing ever should be put on imperishable film. Maybe we'd all be better off if the dreams and fantasies of childhood and youth and long ago were never instantly available on flickering celluloid. Let the silver nitrate do its dirty work. Let the millions of feet of reels dissolve forever.

  You can go home again on film.

  In the end, it seems to be the thing that destroys all of us, one way or another.

  As it did Dan Davis—and a lot of other people.

  ". . . look into my eyes. Go deep! Tell me what

  you see there . . ."

  Fredric March as Prince Zirky in

  Death Takes A Holiday. (1933)

  PEOPLE

  □ I gave the Buick back to the Hertz outfit and took the midnight flight out of Burbank Airport that night. A big DC 6 lifted above still-awake Burbank and I turned my back on Hollywood. I was in no hurry to get back to Manhattan. I had a lot of thinking to do. All of the checking in the world from the L.A. end had proved exactly nothing. Whatever Dan Davis' secret was, it wasn't in California. With the millions of lights below and the canopy of stars above, I was hanging in space, both literally and figuratively. It was all tinsel and colored bubbles below. Only the sky seemed pure and untouched. Man will just never improve on nature. The deck and the game was set up that way too long ago to ever be changed by automation, technology or any kind of super-thinking of the future. IBM loses.

  I had the last seat in the left aisle to myself. Before me was a hump of two seats filled with a married couple dozing on each other's shoulders. Down the aisle I could see the unlit NO SMOKING and deadly FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS signs just over the entrance to the cockpit section. To the left my curtained windows showed the panorama of civlization sleeping below. The seat right next to me was empty. I stretched myself and closed my eyes. The darkened interior of the DC 6 was one big happy quiet family. The engine pound steadied down to a dull roar. Like a sound from the sea. The twinkling stars vanished. We rose to twenty thousand feet to clear the Rockies and not a bump in the night stirred the passengers. It was perfect flying weather and conditions. We'd touch down at La Guardia in New York about two o'clock in the afternoon of the next day, with a brief stopover in Chicago. I had made the trip before. Many times.

  You have to if you don't go by jet to the Coast.

  In my mind's eye, I walked among the facts I had sifted from the mountainous pile of Hollywood memories. It was a human junkyard.

  Lila Park Davis had loved her husband very much and would probably remarry sooner than anyone expected, thanks to a proclivity for the bottle and a morbid fear of being old. Also, she hadn't known a damn thing about his other life.

  Abe Fogelman was one of the smartest, most genuine human beings in a business not known for such odd specimens and he would mourn Dan Davis for the rest of his ten percent days. Also, he hadn't known a damn thing about Dan Davis' private life.

  Henry Winters was a rum-soaked, old dinosaur from the Hollywood past, still alive but not well and living in Redondo Beach and his memories of King Davis were beautiful. But the Crown Prince hadn't known a damn thing about Dan Davis being maybe a secret agent.

  But all of them would survive, one way or another.

  Dan Davis wouldn't. He was dead.

  The rest of the facts?

  There was a will and it was being probated and nobody so far had come forth to indicate there was anything faintly suspicious or unusual about it. Dan Davis had left no weird bequests that might have been connected with his dying message in New York.

  He hadn't left anything with Lila Park, Abe Fogel-man or Henry Winters, the only three people, from all reports and the evidence, whom he might have remotely trusted in the land of the Kleigs and the crooks. And the disillusionment. There had been nothing in the Hollywood Colony to draw Dan Davis' genuine affection or fondness in more than fifteen years. He'd made more films abroad and on location since the emergence of Television as a celluloid threat.

  The family?

  I'd done a lot of checking and legwork at my hotel. Via the phone to city newsrooms, calls on libraries and a little of this and a little of that by way of Dan Davis homework. Gossip mills go on.

  Rita Carlino, the dancing star who had been Dan Davis' first wife way back in '38 had flunked in Hollywood after her divorce from Big Dan in '40. The stormy union culminating in a nasty front page scandal which named a big director in adulterous terms, won Dan the split and Rita went back to her native Spain never to return again. She died in Toledo at the age of twenty-five from a strep throat and the too many aspirins she foolishly took to kill the pain. The only movie I remembered her well from was something with Fred Astaire, full of a lot of production numbers, little plot and plenty of the Carlino bust which was fairly sensational for the Victorian late Thirties.

  Second wife, Winifred Talmadge and the mother of Pamela, Georgia and Thomas Davis, was a famous dress designer who was a bigger name on the Continent than in America. The resulting schism made her spend more time there than here and somewhere along the way, the marriage soured. Dan had been happy with her though as the three children seemed to indicate but after the divorce, Winnie went to Europe and stayed there. The last I had on her was that she was living as a plain housewife somewhere in the south of France with a larger family due to her union to an Italian count of some kind. She had never tried to patch it up with Dan Davis, nor had she ever come back to see her three little Davises. I found no trace of lesbianism in such a biography and wondered if Lila Park hadn't just been bitchy.

  Third Wife, Joanna Conklin, heiress to one of the largest cosmetics fortunes in the world, Fanton Products, had had almost as tempestuous a union with Dan as he'd endured with Rita Carlino. The Davis-Conklin idyll lasted exactly nine months. During which the young and beautiful and much-too-thin Joanna resented being a stepmother finally, made no bones about it and cleared out on her own. The reasons she gave out to the newspapers were all about Dan's "being away from home so much" and "we drifted apart"— but insiders laughed up their sleeves. Joanna proved to be a nymphomaniac, first class, and many a big name had tried her on for size. That had been a long time ago and then Joanna Conklin died of cancer only a year ago
and there had been no husband to mourn at her bier. No ex-lovers, either. Though according once again to Lila Park Davis, Joanna had been the only one of three Davis ex's whom she had liked. Go figure that one out.

  I couldn't tell whether the heavy drinking had come before or after the marriage but it didn't matter, really.

  Nothing about the four wives, living or dead, tied in with what he had been doing in New York the last week of his life.

  The Davis heirs and heiresses?

  Pamela Davis, first child, had made Lila Park a grandmother by proxy twice and was now living in Canada with her husband who seemed to be a Canadian mountie, so help me. She hadn't seen Dan Davis at all in the last year of his life. She seemed to have gone Canadian.

  Georgia Davis, a lovely young girl still in her twenties, was a research lab assistant at the University of Wisconsin. Dad hadn't been in touch with her since the spring of this year when he sent her a Jaguar for her birthday. She had sent the Jaguar back, asking him for cash instead, in the form of a donation to the research lab. I didn't find out whether or not Davis had complied. But that didn't matter, either. The point was that Davis and his kids were almost strangers as he got along in years. Or so it was working out.

  Thomas Davis, as Lila Park had indicated, was the vice-president to a toy manufacturer in New York City. One of the biggest—Arlo Toys, Inc. But the crusher here was that the kid was a dove with a vengeance who worked at it. Long hair, marched in peace parades, gave his time and money to all forms of non-violent protest, despite his affiliation with a dollars and cents business company. Davis and Thomas had fallen out years ago. To Thomas Davis, Ronald Reagan was a menace, as was Agnew—this proved something Dan Davis could not live with. He backed off from his young progeny and never tried to mend the breach. The kid hadn't either, obviously. Though he had attended his father's funeral. As all the kids did, according to the photo coverage in the Los Angeles papers. Of which there was a bonanza. Davis' funeral had been the biggest thing since Gary Cooper's.

  Peter Davis, the second boy and the baby of the brood, was the only enigma in the Davis Family Album. It was obvious that he was the only productive thing from the nine months' liaison with Joanna Conklin though he was hardly mentioned in any reports of the divorce proceedings. Young Davis, all of nineteen now had disappeared one night in his seventeenth year. A postcard had come from Hong Kong, telling everybody he was all right and was just out seeing the world. He was still out because no one had heard from him in something like two years. Dan Davis had tried to find him but with no luck. And then he seemed to lose himself in making six big-budgeted films over that period of time, including the last one that he was never to do, The Night Man.

  And that was it.

  All I had.

  The Hollywood end was dead.

  Ditto the family and friends.

  The President had told me the New York end was cold. That there was nothing to be learned from The Night Man production. I hadn't argued because he was calling the shots and who was I compared to the FBI and The Secret Service—if they had looked over the field and said it was cold, why it was cold and that was that. But I wondered.

  Was it?

  I had gone to Hollywood and come up empty.

  I was going back to New York, still empty.

  The plane throbbed on, the motors lulling me deeper into sleep. All around me, the darkness and the throaty roar filled what was left of my mad universe. I barely remembered the Chicago stopover.

  It looked like a shutout from the word Go.

  I hadn't learned anything at all. Dan Davis' secret was still just that. No one could say what might happen now.

  And I hadn't found Goolsby or Dr. Hilton or my lost Brigid or even that Halloween-faced ghoul who had popped out of the coffin in the baggage car of The City of San Francisco.

  I had gotten precisely nowhere in the investigation, except to tie up a few loose ends and cancel out some possibilities. But that didn't mean a hill of beans in the overall scheme of things.

  If the world as we knew it was still in danger I hadn't done a damn thing about it but collect a lot of ashes in my mouth, some more sad memories and an acute feeling of loss that would remain with me for the rest of what was left of my life, probably.

  But there was one consolation.

  Consolation, enough!

  The glittering shaft of the UN Building, its glass sides reflecting a gorgeous Manhattan sun, was still there as the DC 6 made its approach descent toward La Guardia Airport at two o'clock the next day.

  Dan Davis or not, the damn thing was still standing.

  "Make that a cloud for two, Baby."

  Clark Gable as Verne in Strange Cargo. (1940)

  HOME

  □ I saw a ghost at the airport.

  As I was crossing through the terminal. A tall, long-haired, striking brunette. I stopped dead in my tracks, the blood filling my face, things crawling up and down my spine before my legs pushed me after her. It was hard to keep my heartbeats controlled as I reached her at the glass doors and spun her around by the elbow before she could step through. When she faced me, rage and surprise in her creamy complexion, I felt like seven kinds of a fool and ready to drop through the floor beneath my feet.

  "What do you mean by—" she started to explode but something in my eyes or face must have checked her. She was a fine-looking woman, a ravishing brunette, good enough for a movie star but it wasn't Brigid O'Shaughnessy. Dreamboat Dr. Dayton had been right.

  "Sorry—real sorry—I thought you were someone else—"

  ". . . I don't promise you won't have a bad dream or two, may be even a lapse into nightmare sometime when an incident might . . ."

  "Obviously!" she crackled, laying a whip across me and then turning with a sexy flounce she vanished through the glass doors, dragging her hatbox and portmanteau behind her. And my mind.

  I stood where I was, collecting myself, before I took the same route out, crawled to where I could find a cab and went home. Back uptown to the hideout on Central Park West. It took a lot of minutes before my heart stopped racing and my color returned. I lit a shaking cigarette and stopped thinking all the way up to the only civilization I really knew and understood. Mad Manhattan. It's my favorite city, come what may.

  It looked perfectly wonderful in the sunshine of a new day. I should have gone direct to the office to say hello to Melissa Mercer who must have been worried sick about me but I was still feeling a little rocky. Mel could wait another hour or two. The Man's phone call could wait, too.

  My building lobby was deserted when I finally set foot in it once again. There was no sign of the familiar doorman or anybody I knew. Somehow I was grateful for that, too. I took the elevator upstairs without even checking the mailbox. I was sure Melissa would have kept that empty anyway. People seldom wrote me at the Central Park West address anyhow.

  When I keyed the lock on the front door of my apartment and stumbled in, I realized two things. I was tired to the bone and I was damn glad to be home. Like Judy on the fade-out of The Wizard Of Oz, I wanted to cry out—"Oh, Auntie Em, there's no place like home!" I didn't have an Auntie Em but I had something else all right. Or it had me. And no two ways about that.

  Hollywood, U.S.A., still had me by the throat.

  I went quickly into the living room and poured myself a drink from the custom-built bar in the corner by the windows overlooking the park. A real, big drink.

  I needed to feel no pain.

  Real bad.

  Later on, with the living room in darkness because I didn't have the lights on and the late afternoon sunlight over on the far side of the park, I called the office. It was a quarter to five. I wasn't tight but I felt good and lethargic. And ready for crises, both large and small. The phone whirred maybe five times before she picked it up at 'her end. I had forgotten all about Operation: Dan Davis.

  "Noon Agency," she said crisply, as late in the day as it was. My heart filled with gladness.

  "Don't drop de
ad," I begged softly. "But it's me."

  She began to cry, right away. Just like that and without asking me a thing or saying anything. I tried to console her on the line but it wasn't easy. I could hear all the love she had for me exploding all over the wire. In soft sobbing and broken murmurs.

  ". . . you . . . you . . . bastard," she said simply, without anger. It was a caress. "Where are you?"

  "Home," I said. "The door is open."

  "Give me twenty minutes." Her voice soared on a note of joy.

  The phone clicked and I hung up, feeling every bit of her old black magic right down to my toes.

  Somehow, I felt like crying, too.

  I was home, after all.

  We didn't talk maybe for twenty minutes after she got there. She just came rushing through the door of the apartment, I met her halfway in the foyer because I heard her heels clicking in the corridor and after that, it was something else.

  Our kisses flooded the room. She kissed me all over the face, crying and mewing like a frightened kitten and I blubbered, too and finally we were on the big lounge in the living room, fighting to get as close to each other as we could without breaking the laws of space and solidity. I loved her. I always had. Just as she did me. And somewhere in the crazy-quilt pattern of man and woman, employer and employee, black woman and white man, we had kicked over about a thousand basic differences in thinking, life's work and ambitions. I didn't want her stopping any of my bullets nor did I want her to go through life tasting my food but what the hell could anybody do about it? Except make love, go on making love and go on caring. That's what it really meant to me. Melissa had never put a gun to my head about anything. Women's Lib would have flogged her in Times Square at high noon but she would have told them all to go to hell and meant it.

  "Oh, Ed—I'm going to go to my grave worrying about you—"

  "I know and it's awful—"

  "I don't care though. If it's got to be that way."

  "You. You're something. You know it?"

  "Look who's talking. You're like a nosey kid the fixes you get yourself into . . ."