Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 03 - Alive! (12 page)

Specs O’Neill, the original owner and builder, was a silent-screen comic once regarded as a contender for the throne of King of Comedy, on a par with Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. His trademark Coke-bottle glasses and nearsighted “Mr. Magoo” shtick were no longer politically correct, but in their heyday had rolled audiences in the aisles. They’d failed to translate to talkies. He’d lost most of his fortune in the 1929 crash, and the Depression had reduced him to manual labor in order to keep up his alimony payments to three ex-wives. In his later years he’d supported himself sporadically as an expert consultant in comedy film productions, but the job was basically a bone thrown his way by film school directors motivated by nostalgia and pity, and by that time he was living in a trailer on Long Beach. He’d died in 1970 from a combination of old age, pneumonia, and complications of alcoholism. Valentino, who’d been instrumental in securing and restoring a dozen of his Mack Sennett comedy shorts, had found them hilarious and timeless; but the PC wheel would have to take another full turn before timid distributors allowed them to be released to DVD, or whatever jazzy new format took its place in the interim.

Specs was just one more of the pioneers who’d been exalted, then humbled, then ground up into compost by an ungrateful Hollywood. It hadn’t been a new story when Billy Wilder exposed it in
Sunset Boulevard
in 1950, and it was far from over. Craig Hunter was its latest victim.
Entertainment Tonight
and its television-tabloid clones had already buried him and moved on to the next tragedy ripe for exploitation. That was good for Lorna’s privacy, but bad when it came to summing up a man’s life. Probably he wasn’t even bankable enough to make the
In Memoriam
feature at the next Oscars.

The doorbell button was a tiny grinning skull exquisitely carved from ivory and set in bronze. When he pressed it, a recording of a virile organ playing Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor” issued forth. Lon Chaney played it every Halloween when a revival theater screened
The Phantom of the Opera
. Valentino planted his thumb where Vincent Price had planted his, as well as Christopher Lee and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.

After fifteen seconds the door opened, appropriately on creaking hinges. Valentino thought at first the figure standing inside the frame was a dummy, something one could procure at any of the pricier novelty shops that appeared every October on the Sunset Strip and vanished November l, powered by batteries and howling prerecorded Halloween greetings. But this figure was flesh and blood, seven feet tall in a white houseboy’s coat, tuxedo trousers with stripes on the sides, and white hair worn in bangs like Andy Warhol’s famous plastic wig. His face was fully as pale, sunken-cheeked, with pink eyes rimmed by transparent lashes: a true albino, or whatever it was they preferred to be called these days. “
Genetic freak
” would not be it.

“Yes?” J. Arthur Greenwood’s own greeting, delivered in a
basso profundo
that was intended to sound as if it had emerged from the crypt. Greenwood himself could not have approached it without his youthful tremolo betraying him.

“Valentino. I have an appointment.”

The lofty white head bowed and the figure pivoted to make room in the doorway. “Enter freely, and of your own will.”

The foyer, as cavernous as it had been during the O’Neill residency (Valentino had seen pictures in an ancient copy of
Photoplay
), was tiled in black-and-white checkerboard marble, with framed original artwork for covers of
Horrorwood
illuminated in recessed arches in the walls that had once displayed the Irish Catholic comic’s plaster saints. They were expert renderings in oil of Lon Chaney, Jr.’s Wolf Man, Karloff’s Mummy and Frankenstein Monster, Lugosi’s Dracula, Gale Sondergaard’s Spider Woman, and the whole menagerie of gorillas, dinosaurs, blobs, alien invaders, and giant bugs that had crawled, slithered, stomped, and swooped through the backlot of every studio, major and minor, since pictures began to move.

“This way, please.”

The pallid giant led him past a grand staircase and down a corridor lined with first-issue movie posters mounted in archival frames, the images glowering and snarling at him across the decades. Valentino noticed two things apart from the décor: the presence at both ends of the hallway of surveillance cameras with angry red lights, and the fact that his guide wore shoes with built-up heels that elevated him beyond his already preternatural height. Whatever his eccentricities, the retired publisher placed as much importance upon protecting his possessions from thieves as he did upon presenting them in the most dramatic settings, both architectural and human.

The door at the end of the corridor, the visitor felt sure, had not come with the house. It was made of dark oak planks pitted with wormholes, with a brass ring the size of a man’s head serving as a knocker, heavily coated with verdigris. It looked eerily familiar. He decided he’d seen it in many an A and B thriller; selected, in the latter case, to match new footage shot on the sets of catacombs and castles with stock bought from productions with bigger budgets.

Greenwood, Valentino decided, had acquired much of his collection from the same auctions and estate sales the archivist himself had attended, and yet the two had never met. Probably the publisher had placed his bids by telephone through intermediaries, to keep the figures manageable. Reserve bids and fixed prices had a way of being artificially inflated once a wealthy hobbyist’s interest was known.

The knocker made a reverberating boom when the albino used it, although nowhere near as resonant as after an experienced Foley artist got hold of the soundtrack in post-production. The light, friendly voice the visitor had heard on the telephone invited him to enter.

The man turned a handle forged from iron and coated with rust; or some paint that aped the effect. Hinges creaked again as he pushed the door inward. “Mr. Valentino, sir.”

The room was surprisingly cheerful—Valentino had expected a dank dungeon—with French doors letting in plenty of sunlight through sparkling panes and an impressive display of tropical flowers flourishing in a garden outside. The walls were painted a warm white, apparently so they wouldn’t distract the visitor from the room’s exhibits, arranged on built-in glass shelves and spotted about among comfortable-looking chairs and sofas upholstered in what appeared to be watered silk. There were photos in stand-up frames of smiling movie stars, most of them now deceased and all of the pictures inscribed to Greenwood; ray guns; carved Tiki gods; wooden mallets and stakes for vampire hunting; a
Star Wars
Stormtrooper helmet; swords and daggers of every description; a splendid four-foot miniature of the tramp steamer that had brought the original King Kong to civilization, probably used for long shots in the movie; and hosts of exotic and sometimes unidentifiable properties even Valentino couldn’t link to a particular film, and he flattered himself that he’d seen them all. A cluster of shrunken heads hung by their hair from the ceiling in a corner, like ornamental balls advertising a pawnbroker’s shop. A ten-foot robotic sculpture stood silent sentinel in another corner: a stand-in for the fearsome Gort in the first
Day the Earth Stood Still
.

“Welcome to my depressurization tank. I come here to unwind whenever life in L.A. gets too bizarre even for me.”

The young voice issued from an octogenarian dressed like old Hollywood, in a paisley dressing gown over flannel trousers and a foulard knotted loosely around his crepey neck, the ends tucked inside the collar of a salmon-colored silk shirt. Italian loafers gleamed softly on his rather small feet.

Greenwood was a large man in spite of them, and burly, with a fine head of hair slicked back and dyed—as was his pencil moustache—a disconcerting shade of black. It called attention to the lines and sagging flesh of his face; but inside the cobwebby wrinkles that surrounded them glittered the bright eyes of a happy child. He rose from his chair with the help of an ebony cane with a silver handle shaped like a wolf’s head (was it the same weapon Claude Rains had used to kill his son the werewolf in
The Wolf Man
?), and took his visitor’s hand in a firm grip.

“Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Greenwood.”

“Thank
you
. I’ve bored everyone I know with my interests. A fresh victim is always welcome. That will be all, Ronald.”

The tall albino inclined his head and backed through the doorway, pulling the door shut. Greenwood watched Valentino’s gaze follow him out. He smiled, showing a set of teeth younger than anything in the room.

“I found Ronald waiting tables at Olive Garden. They put him on only when they were short-handed. His appearance frightened some customers out of their appetites. Do you think I’m exploiting his unique physical characteristics?”

“That’s not for me to say, sir.”

“Well, I am; but I suspect he’s happier being employed because of them rather than in spite of them, and he doesn’t have to survive on tips.”

Valentino smiled politely but said nothing. His work had taken him to many a wealthy household, but he had very little in common with people who hired other people to answer their doorbells.

“Excuse me one moment.” Greenwood circled behind his chair and raised the ferrule of his cane to press a button set flush to the wall beside one of the display cases. Something made a whirring noise and a heavy pair of drapes, as plain as the walls, closed over the French doors, leaving the room illuminated only by canister lamps in the ceiling. The publisher’s smile narrowed a fraction. “I hope you’re not easily spooked.”

“Not by anything in this room.”

“Well said, and honest. You’d be surprised how many people who claim to be fearless find pressing appointments elsewhere once they’re shut up in here.”

As a matter of fact, the enclosure with its grotesque
objets d’art
took on a far more macabre mien without the reassuring presence of sunlight, but the visitor found it not at all unpleasant. It reminded him of the pictures on the pages of
Horrorwood,
and of happy childhood hours spent lost in them.

“I’m paranoid about discussing the collecting business in front of an exposed window,” Greenwood said. “There are spies everywhere. I’ve lost opportunities because of them.”

Teddie Goodman came to mind. “There’s nothing quite so lost as a lost opportunity.”

“Exactly! It’s odd, really: I sometimes forget just what I have, but I never forget the things I missed. They ache like amputated fingers.”

His guest found himself grinning. This was an area of interest they shared in spades.

Greenwood conducted him on a tour of the room, beginning with his cane, which he said was one of three that Lon Chaney, Jr. carried in
The Wolf Man
. Chaney had broken one, misjudging his weight, and Claude Rains had shattered another in an early take when he missed Chaney’s stunt double at the film’s climax and struck a tree. Valentino touched the shrunken heads from
Jivaro,
relieved to learn that they were cast from rubber, although the hair was real, obtained from a horse’s mane and tail. The weight of a gargoyle from
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
surprised him: It was papier-mâché filled with sand. There was, of course, a story for every piece, and the visitor was loath to interrupt him in order to get to the subject of his visit. He realized that for all his riches and bright spirits, the publisher was a lonely old man, starving for a fresh audience to show all his stuff. The seamed face fell, but only for a moment. Greenwood indicated the end of a sofa set at a right angle to his chair.

When they were seated, his eyes grew even brighter. He flushed deeply and leaned forward to grip Valentino’s knee. “Tell me all you know about those test reels,” he said. “I’d kill for them.”

12

“YOU’RE EXAGGERATING, OF
course,” Valentino said.

“Am I?”

Greenwood’s grasp was cutting off circulation in his leg. He took hold of the publisher’s hand firmly and pried it loose. “If you are, it’s inappropriate. If you’re serious, you should be having this conversation with Sergeant Ernest Gill and Detective John Yellowfern of the San Diego Police. I think Craig Hunter
was
killed for those test reels.”

The collector’s madness faded from the eyes of his host, replaced by the gentility of old age. “Please forgive me. I’d heard about the murder on the news this morning, but I didn’t realize you were close to the victim.”

“Did you know him?”

“He was one of my last interviews for the magazine, on the set of
Bloodbath IV
. I didn’t see him again until somebody brought him to one of my occasional poker parties. He was looking for a game, and he had cash. I should have turned him away.”

“Why?”

“He wasn’t the same pleasant young actor I’d met years ago. He was a bad loser, and griped about all the small talk during what was supposed to be a friendly game. He especially disparaged my collection. ‘Kiddie rot,’ he called horror films.”

“Did you invite him back?”

“I’m uncomfortable with scenes, particularly in my own house. I had hoped he’d lose interest, but he showed up three more times. Also he was into me for a bundle. I consider myself a man of honor, and expect others to live up to their obligations as well. But he kept losing and giving me markers.”

Valentino shifted gears. “What do you know about the
Frankenstein
test?”

“I’ll wager I know more than you. Do you want to go into its history?”

“I’m more interested in where it is now. Mr. Greenwood, were you behind Hunter’s offer to buy it from Elizabeth Grundage?”

“Was that who he was negotiating with? He never mentioned any names, only that he was sure who had the reels. I assume she’s related to Mike Grundage. They said on the news he was being questioned.”

“Craig approached you?”

“Yes. He owed me a lot of money, as I said, and he offered to front for me in return for tearing up his markers. Ever since I bought the
Frankenstein
poster, everyone assumes I’d pay any outlandish price for rare items. If it got out I was interested in this particular property, I’d be out a million, and lucky at that. Naturally, I agreed to his proposition.”