Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 03 - Alive! (16 page)

Grundage was still smiling. “Kid’s got a head on his shoulders. You never can tell, can you? You might as well tell ’em, Horace. They don’t have it.”

The archivist’s heart sank. “You mean
you
don’t?”

The lawyer answered for him. “Three nights ago, someone broke into the storage unit. Those two reels were the only things missing.”

15

JASON WAS A
good driver, careful and in control. He kept steady speed with most of the other cars on the freeway and didn’t lose his temper with southbound drivers who refused to dim their lights.

“You think Craig Hunter stole the film?” He kept his eyes on the road.

Valentino glared at the darkness outside his window on the passenger’s side. “A few years ago I’d have said no. But by the end he was capable of anything. If Elizabeth Grundage wouldn’t do business with him on Lysander’s advice, he might just have done it out of desperation. Maybe he made up his mind that night he called Lysander to chew him out. It would explain why he was so excited. He’d found a way to cut out the middleman and keep all the profit for himself.”

“Mike Grundage must have suspected he was the thief. Does that put him back on the list?”

“He was never really off. But if he did kill Craig, we know he didn’t get the film back. This trip was a fishing expedition on his part to find out if Craig had slipped it to me.”

“What do you think he did with it?”

“I’ve been racking my brain over that. If he had it in his apartment in Long Beach, the police would have found it when they searched the place for clues after he was killed. I hope he picked a stable hiding spot.”

“Stable?”

“That old silver-nitrate stock doesn’t hold up well to adverse conditions. If there was anything left of it after all those years in the Grundages’ possession—Lord knows how
they
treated it; winding up in an ordinary storage unit isn’t an encouraging sign—it might be turning to vinegar in a damp crawlspace somewhere.”

“Maybe he put it in a bank safety deposit box.”

“Not much better, but if he did, it will turn up when it’s examined by the authorities. That’s standard procedure after someone’s death.”

“Then you can start negotiating with Elizabeth Grundage.”

“Provided the police find and convict Craig’s murderer before nature takes its course in a muggy evidence room in San Diego. I’ve been down this road before.”

“Can I help?”

“Help me with what?”

“Solving the murder.”

But it was late, and the sleep he’d been missing caught up with him before he could answer. His last thought as he slipped under was that everyone he spent time with, no matter how casually, seemed to know him so well.

*   *   *

“Sound! Roll ’em! Action!”

The villagers, who have doused their cigarettes and put the occasional flask back on the occasional hip, respond with aching muscles to the commands issuing from the megaphone. They collect their torches, take the bloodhounds by their leashes from the trainers, and resume babbling nonsensical strings of vowels and consonants, tumbling over the brambles and uneven earth of the backlot and hoping this is the last take: It’s getting on toward midnight, and there is no Screen Actors Guild to demand decent hours and extra pay for overtime. The hounds’ baying echoes their own miseries.

But none of the extras is suffering as much as the man in the heavy boots, steel braces, dense padding, and two sets of union suits still clammy with perspiration from yesterday’s shooting in a blazing Southern California summer. The man at his side has been drinking heavily between takes and gives him no help as he sags into his arms—all six feet and one hundred eighty pounds of him—and forces him to carry him on his shoulder up the steep hill to the gaunt windmill at the top for the seventeenth time since sundown. For some reason, the director has taken a dislike to the actor in the ponderous and painful makeup, and seems to draw sadistic delight from torturing him physically, wasting film in the process: But film costs only two cents a foot, and the actor himself is being paid less than the amount budgeted for that part of the production.

So once again he hauls his heavy and inebriated colleague a quarter-mile up a sixty-degree slope, his breath heaving and sawing in his throat, sweat making gullies in the greenish greasepaint on his face and dissolving the mortician’s wax used to fashion his drooping eyelids into particles that burn his eyes like acid.

“And … cut!”

He lowers the other actor onto his unsteady feet and stands panting with hands braced on his thighs, the backs of those hands built up with thick artificial veins, waiting for his heartbeat to slow. If the windmill’s blades rotated at that same rate the entire building would take to the air.

“You were a little slow on that one, Boris,” drawls the man with the megaphone in his meticulous (and entirely fabricated) West End accent. “Remember, you’re a superhuman creation. You’re not driving a truck. Let’s go again, shall we? Places!”

He won’t even be invited to the premiere.

*   *   *

“Mr. Valentino?”

Stirred from yet another dream in which he didn’t appear, he changed positions, wondering why his bed had so many hard surfaces suddenly. When Jason shook him by the shoulder, he jumped, bumped his head against the window, and remembered he wasn’t in The Oracle. A blinding light was shining in his face. He shielded his eyes against the powerful flashlight, saw the pale oval of a face beneath the visor of a uniform cap looking through the window on Jason’s side, and beyond it the blue-and-red strobes of a police car bouncing off the front of the theater.

Taking Jason’s and Valentino’s driver’s licenses, the officer examined them with his flash, then returned them. “Come with me, please, sir. Not you. You can leave.”

The boy had reached for the door handle. He looked at Valentino.

“It’s all right. You can drive the car to campus in the morning. I’ll take the bus.”

Jason opened his mouth to say something, but the officer tapped his flashlight on the window frame and he started the engine. Valentino got out and accompanied the man in uniform inside as the car drove off.

All the lights in the foyer (those that had been replaced so far) were burning. He found the boyish sergeant with the eyes that were not boyish and the detective whose profile belonged on an Indian-head penny waiting there. Others in uniforms and plainclothes bustled about in the shadows.

Gill spoke first. “We’re cooperating with LAPD on this one, since it involves our case. Would you mind telling us where you were this evening?”

“San Diego.”

“Wish
I
was in San Diego,” Yellowfern said. “Paying your respects to Mike Grundage?”

“As a matter of fact, I was.”

Detectives were very difficult to surprise, even more so to get a reaction from when one succeeded. The pair exchanged a glance. Gill said, “I got the impression you weren’t in each other’s social circle.”

“He invited me to the Grotto for dinner. I was going to tell you about it later.”

“How
much
later?” Yellowfern snapped.

“Time enough for that,” said his partner. “One of your neighbors called in a possible B-and-E. Someone was prowling around inside with a flashlight. They saw it through the windows.”

“What’s a breaking-and-entering in West Hollywood have to do with San Diego Homicide?” The reason for the crime was clear to him now. Grundage, suspecting Craig had given him the test reels for safekeeping, had lured him far enough out of town to give his people in L.A. time to search the theater. Gill and Yellowfern would have heard the report on their radio and investigated it on a hunch, based on the location.

The sergeant said, “I said that’s how it was called in. It’s a little more than that now.” He made a beckoning gesture with his finger.

Valentino followed the pair into the auditorium, where the recently rewired crystal chandelier made a pond of light reaching the base of the staircase to the projection booth. The door to it was open and something lay at the foot.

The woman was sprawled in an impossible position. She was dressed exotically even by entertainment-capital standards, in brilliant red and midnight black, the waist cut narrow and the shoulders square. Her face was in the shadow of the stairwell, but Valentino could spot Teddie Goodman, his arch-rival, under any circumstances.

16

AS HE WAS
staring, a foot twitched at the end of a shattered leg and a low, heartbreaking moan issued from the shadow of the stairwell. Valentino looked at the detectives, horror-stricken.

“Yeah,” Yellowfern said. “We lucked out. In six months she’ll be able to tell us who helped her down the stairs, if she doesn’t croak first.”

Gill was more human. “The ambulance is on its way. We can’t move her till then.” Just as he finished speaking, a siren gulped into the block.

“Can’t you cover her with a blanket or something? I heard you do that for shock.”

“Not till the EMS crew says. You never know with internal injuries. It’s tough, but that’s how it is. You know her?” Gill touched the arm of an LAPD officer, stopping him on his way past. “Let’s have a light.”

Valentino looked at the face in the glow of the officer’s flash, just to be sure. It was turned to one side. A virulent purple bruise had blossomed up from her cheek, swelling and closing the eye. He clutched his stomach, sorry he’d eaten such a big meal.

“Her name is Theodosia Burr Goodman. She works for Mark David Turkus.”

“The skillionaire?” Yellowfern said. “What’s she do for him?”

“The same thing I do for UCLA, only for a lot more money. Where’s that ambulance crew?”

Gill said, “Calm down, we haven’t been here long. If she’s making such big bucks, what’s she doing breaking in places?”

A man and a woman wearing Emergency Medical Services uniforms came in carrying equipment and a stretcher. Valentino and the detectives moved out of their way. “Could we talk about this someplace else?”

Yellowfern said, “When the coast is clear, we can go up to your nice comfortable apartment, only there’s no place to sit. Your girlfriend or somebody else trashed it good. Either that, or you’re one rotten housekeeper.”

His first fear was for the Bell & Howell projector. Then he felt shame for worrying about an inanimate thing while the attendants were examining Teddie’s vital signs. By silent consent the three moved down the aisle until they found adjoining seats whose cotton batting generations of nest-building mice had not yet thoroughly plundered. Valentino, of course, sat in the center.

Gill had his notebook out. “The way it looks right now, someone came in on her while she was tossing the place and gave her a shove. That made you a suspect, but I can’t remember the last time anyone named a gangster as his alibi.”

“You can ask my intern, Jason Stickley. He was with me. One of your men sent him home.”

“Not one of ours,” snarled Yellowfern.

“We screw up, too. The order was to bring in Valentino.” Gill pointed his pen at the archivist. “You can give us contact info on the intern later. Maybe Grundage’ll back you up, although based on experience he wouldn’t tell the pizza guy his address when he was ordering. We’ll get to what you were doing with him. What was your girlfriend looking for?”

“She’s not my girlfriend. She works for the competition. She thought I was on the trail of something Turkus would want. Maybe she thought I had it, or that she could find out what it was and where to look for it if she went through my things.”

Yellowfern chuckled nastily and propped his feet on the back of the seat in front of him. “Sounds like true love to me.”

“Shut up, John. What’d she think you had?”

He sighed and told them about the
Frankenstein
test; about everything connected with it, starting with June 1931 through Craig Hunter all the way to that evening. He’d already made up his mind to come clean. One person had died, another might yet. It wasn’t worth it for thirty or forty minutes of film.

For once, Yellowfern was speechless. While Valentino was talking he placed his feet back on the floor and leaned forward and twisted in his seat to stare at him, knuckles whitening on the arm. It was Gill who spoke, with cold fury in his voice.

“I hope you get the same job in San Quentin. Those cons can use a break from
Horton Hears a Who!
. You’re still a suspect in my book. You threw this Goodman woman down those stairs just the same as if you were here.”

“It was all guesswork until tonight,” Valentino said. “It didn’t even count as evidence. I didn’t really believe the film existed until Lysander told me it was stolen. I only had an old man’s word he’d held that sample strip in his hand, and the word of a half-crazed collector at that.”

Gill shook his head. “You’ve been running around grilling our witnesses, and one we didn’t even know about.
Anyone
who had contact with Hunter just before he died is material. We’ll start with interfering and work our way up to obstruction.”

“Don’t forget accessory after the fact.” Yellowfern had found his tongue.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

Valentino looked to Gill, the reasonable one, for mercy. But the sergeant had turned his head to summon an officer. When the man in uniform came, he said, “This man is under arrest. Truss him up and read him his rights.”

Which was how Valentino found himself in jail for the first time in his life.

*   *   *

In holding, anyway. His cell in the West Hollywood station of the Los Angeles Police Department was small but clean, and the cot looked tempting, but he used his one call on Kyle Broadhead.

“Have you been arraigned?” Broadhead was always calm, always practical.

“No. I’m not even sure what the charge is. It seems there’s a menu to choose from.”

“I can’t bail you out until bail is set. I’m afraid you’re in for the night. Do you want me to call Harriet?”

“God, no.”