Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 03 - Alive! (14 page)

“I think you know what this is about,” Grundage said.

“I only know someone I once knew is dead.”

“There’s a lot of that going around. When can you be in San Diego?”

“That’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive.”

“I didn’t ask for travelers’ information.”

It was barely mid-morning, but he had to consult with someone. “I can be there tonight, but I need to know if it’s worth the trip.” He heard his own voice shaking. He hoped it sounded like a bad connection on the other end.

“You’re with some college, right?”

“UCLA. Film Preservation Department.”

“Colleges are always looking for money. I can swing some your way, strictly legit. No greasy bills tied with rubber bands.” His voice didn’t warm up when it chuckled. “It doesn’t all have to go on the books, though, if you get my drift.”

“I’m not interested in personal profit, Mr. Grundage. I want to know about Craig Hunter, and what happened to something he had in his possession.”

“I want to know about Hunter myself. I shouldn’t have to tell you the reason for that. About the other, well, you can clear up a lot just talking.”

“Where do you want to meet?”

“Little place called the Grotto. It’s on E Street. Miss it, you’re in the bay. Eight o’clock.”

Valentino’s temperature dropped. “That’s the bar where Hunter was killed.”

“Tavern. They serve food too. His body wound up there, sure enough. Another pain in the hip pockets. Business is down, but it’ll pick up.”

“So you do own the Grotto.”

“Come hungry. The Chicken Cordon Bleu’s from an old family recipe. You’ll be glad you had it.”

13

BROADHEAD SAID, “I’M
going with you.”

Fanta said, “No, you’re not. You won’t fly, and you get carsick after twenty minutes.”

Valentino had caught the pair together in Broadhead’s office, rare event. Something that looked like a large-scale map of the Salisbury Plain, complete with Stonehenge, turned out to be a seating chart for the wedding reception, spread out on the desk and spilling off the edges. The professor sat back making gurgling noises in the stem of his pipe while Fanta stood with a finger still planted on some sketched feature, like a general studying a battle plan.

“My dear young lady,” Broadhead said, “I hiked across Manchuria, assembling documentary footage of Mao’s Long March. I don’t even like chow mein.”

“You were my age. And you said you liked my chow mein.”

“I wasn’t under oath.
Now
who’s kvetching about the age difference?”

“
I
don’t care, but you’d slow Val down having to stop and puke every few miles. Who knows how a gangster will react if he’s late for dinner?”

Valentino always enjoyed watching them bicker. “He might resent having to nuke the Chicken Cordon Bleu.”

“That’s another thing. Eighty years of mob movies says all they eat is linguini and lasagna. What’s he say when he puts someone on the spot,
Au revoir
?”

Fanta ignored him. “What did Harriet say?”

“I can’t reach her. She must be in a seminar.”

“Text her.”

“I doubt I can get it all on that tiny screen.”

She took her finger from the seating chart and stabbed it at him. “Take dictation: WE NEED 2 TALK.”

Broadhead said, “Only girls leave that message.”

She moved so swiftly Valentino missed it. He heard a crack and she was pointing at him again, Broadhead rubbing at the pink print of her palm on the side of his face. “Send it. When she takes delivery on a fish wrapped in your sweatshirt, she’ll want to know what part I had in it.”

“You know, you could give an old man a stroke, hitting him like that.”

“Shut up, Kyle.” She glared at Valentino until he finished sending the text. “What about the police?”

“I almost called them. But if they get to those test reels first, you know what will happen to them.”

“Déjà vu.
Greed
. It’s how we met.” She blew a gust of air and started folding up the chart. “Someone should go with you, but it isn’t Kyle, and it isn’t me. I’ve canceled two appointments already with the director of the chapel. If I miss tonight, there’s just the Strikes ‘n’ Spares. It’s a combination bowling alley and rib joint. The rate at which all the movie stars divorce, shuffle, and remarry, you can’t find a venue this side of Encino.”

“What’s wrong with Encino?” Broadhead asked.

“Hell-o.” She opened her mouth and jabbed her finger down her throat. “Every twenty minutes.”

Valentino said, “I’d call Henry Anklemire in Information Services, but before I got halfway down the coast I’d aim the car at a telephone pole just to shut him up.”

“Even if you got there, Grundage would whack you both the minute the little flack tried to sell him the Golden Gate Bridge. But none of these suggestions would intimidate a thug. He’d do you both in a heartbeat.”

Fanta shook her head. “You’re not thinking like a lawyer. This isn’t Chicago 1929. One body’s bad enough: Grundage wouldn’t be so anxious to meet if Hunter weren’t a serious inconvenience. A second body—or a mysterious disappearance—would turn up the heat, although maybe not enough to stop him from acting the way thugs act from instinct. A third might give him pause. It tips the odds more in Val’s favor.”

Broadhead unscrewed and reassembled his pipe, often a sign he’d found need to attempt a puzzle he couldn’t handle comfortably. “But who? We’re two academics and a lawyer. Not exactly Friend material on Facebook.”

Someone tapped on the door. The professor barked an invitation.

Jason Stickley opened the door and poked his head inside. He wore his mysterious costume, complete with chain and padlock dangling outside his Victorian morning coat and top hat, with an assortment of gears and cogs attached to the crown and his eyes obscured behind a pair of black rubber goggles. The young intern peered from face to face, as if the scratched and discolored eyepieces made it difficult to distinguish one from another. At last he focused on Valentino.

“Ruth said you were in here,” he said. “I’ve got another party, but there’s time, if you need me for anything.”

Fanta and Broadhead glanced at Valentino with significance.

He said, “How important is this party?”

*   *   *

“Awesome.”

Valentino smiled to himself. He’d wondered if youngsters still used that word.

“I hope it’s anything but. I’m counting on racketeers being more civilized these days. But Professor Broadhead and his fiancée insisted I don’t go down there alone.” He was driving, the young man seated beside him with his tricked-out top hat in his lap. The compact’s low roof allowed no room for it on his head.

“That’s an interesting couple, those two.”

“Not as interesting as how they became a couple.”

“I really want to hear it, but can you drop me off at the party for just a minute? I was supposed to bring— something, and they’ll have to send someone else.”

“Keg, or twenty-four pack?” Valentino grinned at the windshield.

“Um.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t bust you. I’m grateful you agreed to come along. Where’s the party?”

Jason directed him into a neighborhood he hadn’t known was there, made up of rows of industrial-looking brick buildings sharing common walls, with panes missing from gridded windows set too high up to provide a view from inside. “People
live
here?”

“No. We all chipped in and rented a place for tonight. They made buzz-saw blades there in the olden days.”

“I’ll reimburse you for your part.”

“You don’t need to do that, Mr. Valentino. This is going to be way more interesting.”

“Again, I hope not.”

At length they drew up before a building that looked like all the rest. The year 1909 was chiseled in the yellowed cornerstone. With all the constant razing and rebuilding, it was astonishing to be in a part of L.A. that predated Hollywood.

“Be just a sec.” Jason got out and put on his hat. Climbing the concrete steps to the door, frock coat draping his scarecrow figure, he looked like an undertaker in a Poe film.

The door opened, letting out light and loud, discordant music that Valentino decided had been composed by a Russian modern master to celebrate tractors. He wondered, with amusement that would scandalize his ultraconservative department head, if Jason Stickley and his friends were communists. Another young man dressed similarly, in a formal cutaway over a starched white shirtboard and a bowler hat crusted over with machine parts, threw his arms around the newcomer and they retreated inside. The door closed, shutting off the music.

Valentino’s cell rang. It was Harriet.

“So what do we need to talk about?” she said sprightly.

“How’s the conference?”

“Swell. Jeff’s on a panel tonight, about the history of crime-scene equipment. He’s brought some stuff from his own collection. I can’t wait.”

“They have panels at night?”

“All day, and practically all night. It’s a big do. They have to run concurrently to fit everything in. We’re lucky when we get to eat before midnight.”

That would explain her being up until almost dawn that morning, but he wasn’t sure if she was telling him the truth. Cautiously he said, “I hope the LAPD is paying you overtime.”

“You said you wanted to talk?”

“I’m at a party,” he found himself saying. “I think it’s going to get noisy. If you can’t reach me later, it’s because I won’t hear the phone.”

He hated lying, and he wasn’t doing it because he didn’t believe what she’d said about the convention program. If he told her what he was up to, he knew she’d try to talk him out of it, and probably succeed. It didn’t make him feel any less guilty.

“Since when do you go to noisy parties?”

“You know how much I love Halloween. Anyway, it gives me something to do besides miss you.”

“That’s sweet. Trying a little too hard, but sweet. What are you going as?”

At that moment, a young woman (he assumed it was a woman) came along the sidewalk wearing a Victorian wedding gown and a deep-sea diver’s brass helmet. She hoisted a long train of ivory-colored lace over one arm and went up the steps to the party. “Madonna.”

He’d always liked Harriet’s laugh. It was a flat-out guffaw, lusty as a man’s. “Which one,
Truth or Dare
or the mystic Jew?”

“Virgin.”

“That’s getting to be a long time ago. Do you think anyone will recognize it?”

“Well, if they don’t, I’ll be in disguise, so I won’t embarrass myself.” The door opened again and Jason came out. “My host is coming over. I’ll call you later. Enjoy your thing.”

“You, too. Just don’t get carried away and start singing.” They exchanged endearments and the conversation was over. Jason slid into his seat as Valentino was clapping shut the phone. “Miss Johansen?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say about our adventure?”

“She told me to enjoy myself.”

“Awesome. If I had a girl I bet she’d bust my chops over it.”

“Bust your chops?”

The boy blushed and smiled. “I like saying old stuff like that. Old stuff’s da bomb.”

Valentino didn’t know where he stood now in the matter of understanding Jason’s generation. Was he talking to him in the language of his contemporaries, or parroting something that was utterly passé? The archivist pulled away from the obsolete factory, passing a group of young men and women in outrageous costumes, but all part of a theme he’d begun to recognize, if not identify. He knew where they were headed.

“It’s none of my business, but my curiosity is burning a hole through me.”

“The clothes?”

“You don’t have to answer if I’m prying.”

“No problem, sir. Sometimes it’s just hard for people who aren’t into it to understand.” He rumpled his black hair. The hat was on his lap again, his black rubber goggles loose around his neck. “It’s steampunk.”

“Steampunk?”

“Yeah. I guess you’d call it kind of a backlash to the whole ‘information superhighway’ deal. What it is, it’s Queen Victoria and steam engines.”

“Uh-huh.” Although he wasn’t following, not at all.

“See, at the same time people were wearing high stiff collars and bustles, the Industrial Age was chugging along, eating coal and pouring out big clouds of steam and smoke and making a racket. What gives us steampunks a charge, I guess, is that— that—”

“Juxtaposition?”

“Yes!” He flashed Valentino a look of gratitude mixed with astonishment. “The contrast. So what we do, we dress and act like people did back then—society people—but we mix it up with cogs and chains and old-time factory stuff. These parties, they’re not really costume things, not just. When the budget will stand it, we eat things like roast suckling pig with an apple in its mouth, using all the right forks and like that, but the centerpiece is a bouquet of pistons.”

“But what do you get out of it?”

“Well, I can only answer for me, but I don’t know how a computer works, do you?”

“I don’t suppose anyone does outside technicians.”

“I’m not so sure they do, either. Oh, they know how to operate them and fix them, and some even know how to build one from scratch, but I’m not sure they know how it actually
works,
how it does what it does. But you can look at a steam engine, see the flywheels spin and the belts turn and the drive rods move up and down and figure it out. That’s, well, it’s—”

“Reassuring?”

“Reassuring, that’s it. The rest is just kid stuff, I guess.” His voice trailed off on a slightly sullen note.

“I must be a kid, then. It makes perfect sense to me.”

Jason turned to him, and his grin was so broad it threatened to split his narrow face straight across. “I sort of thought— I hoped you’d say something like that. I’ve got a hunch you’re one of us.”

“I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t think I’d be comfortable lugging all that on top of my head.”

The boy examined his hat. The interlocking gears attached to the crown created the illusion, when he wore it, that they were the machinery that raised and lowered his pipecleaner limbs. “I lucked out at the junkyard. I paid them just over scrap price for the guts of a grandfather clock. You can go broke if you don’t know how to shop. What I meant was, this
Frankenstein
deal, for instance. Everybody in that movie had an English accent and drank tea, all veddy veddy proper, and here’s this guy stirring them all up with his flat head and bolts in his neck. And that laboratory, which is seriously cool, all those things spinning and spitting sparks and the operating table going up and down on pulleys.”