Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 03 - Alive! (2 page)

He opened the hidden panel in the wall and climbed the freshly sawn stairs to the projection booth. Eventually it, too, would be gutted and fireproof insulation installed to allow him to screen volatile silver-nitrate stock without violating the fire ordinances, but for the time being it was his sanctum. With the wall torn down that had separated it from the film storage area, it made a comfortable utility apartment.

Harriet Johansen hadn’t called his cell phone. He checked his message machine in case she’d had trouble connecting, but she hadn’t called the theater either. He supposed she was busy attending panels at the CSI convention in Seattle, but he missed her. He made a telephone transfer at his bank to cover the returned check, then left a message on the glazier’s voice mail apologizing for the mistake and assuring him it had been corrected. Sometimes he was grateful for the technology that prevented people from making personal contact.

Harriet answered her cell on the fifth ring. Voices buzzed in the background. “Hi. I’m on my way to lunch and an autopsy. What’s up?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

“That’s sweet. Did I tell you about this fella I want you to meet? He’s ex-FBI, has interest in the antiques business. You know, half detective, half geek. You’d like each other.”

“Still dabbling in law enforcement, eh? Is he living on a pension?”

“I didn’t say he retired. He’s living in the family mansion, making more money buying Louis Quatorze chairs low and selling them high than he ever did chasing terrorists. He’s kind of a hunk.”

“Are you trying to make me jealous?”

“No, but I’m glad to know I still can. Gotta go. Call you later.”

The line clicked. He held the handset a moment longer, then replaced it in the cradle. He
was
jealous. Had she ever called Valentino a hunk in front of others? He doubted it. He wasn’t beefcake material, but evidently this former G-man was.

Someone was rattling up the steps, taking them two at a time. He braced himself for the gale. Jason Stickley, his intern, blew in after barely brushing the door with his knuckles. “Hey, Mr. V.”

“Valentino, Jason. Mr. Valentino if you prefer. ‘Mr. V.’ belongs in a sitcom on Fox.”

“Sorry, sir. It’s just that I’ve seen that other Valentino on TV and you don’t look anything like him.”

He assumed the boy meant the fashion designer and not the silent-film star, whom he’d been told he did resemble slightly. The only reason Kyle Broadhead recommended these young scholars seemed to be to get them out of his class on the history of cinema. They were spoiling the curve.

Whom
Jason
resembled, he couldn’t say. He looked like a toothpick sculpture and his daily uniform of black T-shirt and jeans only drew attention to his painful thinness. He had hollow cheeks, dark hair and dark, soulful eyes, a divot on his chin, and mystifying tattoos inside his arms, extending from under his short sleeves to his wrists, that appeared to represent piston rods joined by pins in the bends of the elbows. He hadn’t explained them, although he must have been aware they were noticed, and Valentino himself was too private a person to ask. The effect was vaguely gothic, but only vaguely, and the lack of macabre makeup and piercings set the youth apart from the Goth crowd on campus.

If there still was such a crowd. The student union really ought to issue a program every semester to bring the uninitiated up to speed on all the cliques.

“Where’s the fire?”

“Fire? Oh, you mean ’cause I was in a hurry.”

And a fossil-to-student dictionary, while they’re at it.
But he merely rolled his eyes.

“This guy’s been trying to reach you all day at the department. I guess he doesn’t have your number here. Ruth sent me to tell you she’s tired of taking the same call from the same guy. It must be important.” He handed him a wad of pink office message slips torn off a pad.

Valentino shuffled through them, recognizing the secretary’s spiky hand. Craig Hunter. He sighed. He’d called every hour on the hour since the office opened. “Did she say how he sounded?”

“‘Stoned and drunk.’ I’m just quoting her.”

“I was afraid of that. There should be a law against operating redial under the influence.” He tore up the messages and dropped the pieces into the fire bucket next to his chair.

“Not a friend, I guess,” Jason said.

“The sad thing about it is he’s just about the best I ever had.”

2

“THE NAME CRAIG
Hunter sounds familiar, kind of,” Jason Stickley said. “Did he come to visit once?”

Valentino shook his head. “Not at the department. Condition he’s usually in, the campus police might’ve picked him up on suspicion. You might have seen one of his movies when you were little, if you were accompanied by an adult or if you sneaked in. Action movies were his thing: plenty of explosions and lines some screenwriter thought were snappy.”

“You mean like Nicolas Cage?”

“I’m old enough to remember when Cage made good art films. But Hunter was never in his league. He’s the guy they went to after Bruce Willis, Steven Seagal, and Vin Diesel turned the part down. After a few of those, his pictures stopped opening, and in the end they went straight to video. It didn’t help that he was arrested a couple of times for DUI and started showing up on the set four hours late. The last time I saw him on screen was in a bit as a nutso neighbor in a Seth Rogen comedy. I doubt he could get even that now, and that’s why he’s calling me, to hit me up for a loan.”

“Bet you’d help him out if you weren’t strapped.” Jason’s grin was meant to be friendly, but it made his face look even more skeletal.

“It would be the opposite of help. He’d just blow it on booze and meth. His wife was the most loyal and patient woman I ever knew, but even she gave up on him finally. She divorced him two years ago.”

“No wonder you never gave him your number.”

“Actually I did, back when it still seemed like there was hope for him. I’m sure he lost it, along with his career and his wife and his self-respect and every friend he ever had.”

“Bummer.”

Valentino smiled wearily. “I didn’t know youngsters were still using that word.”

“I like old-time things.”

That put the finish on his brightening mood. “Don’t you have a class to attend?”

Jason dragged a cell from a pocket, an odd design with an antique brass finish and protrusions that looked like exposed rivets, and checked the time. He belonged to the generation that never wore a wristwatch. “Metallurgy. Thanks, Mr. Vee— alentino,” he corrected himself mid-stride. “I better fly.”

Metallurgy,
the archivist thought after he left. What was the boy majoring in, welding?

*   *   *

He spent the evening at the work table in the booth, cranking episodes of
Peter Gunn
back and forth on twin Moviolas, searching for matching frames. A&E had decided not to air the original films because of jarring jump-cuts where scenes had been deleted or damaged, and had donated them to the university for a tax deduction, but a number of previously uncollected
Gunn
s had shown up in the sale of an estate belonging to a retired ABC assistant director. If Valentino could restore the material from the additional reels, a “lost episode” DVD could contribute significantly to the department’s treasury. More funds meant more purchases and better equipment to put them right.

It was tedious work, and hard on the eyes. After four hours he could barely distinguish Herschel Bernardi from Lola Albright, and his notes swam before his eyes. He’d hoped Harriet would call, but she didn’t, and when he reached for the phone to call her he saw it was after midnight. Instead he cooked a frozen burrito in the little microwave to stop the growling in his stomach, unfolded the sofa bed, and went to sleep in his clothes.

The telephone had been purring for some time when he woke up enough to answer it. Ever the film editor, he’d managed to splice it into the dream he was having, a crazy thing about paint chips and burritos.

“Harriet?”

“Val?” A male voice, deep and thick with phlegm. He grunted something affirmative.

“It’s Craig. Craig Hunter?”

He sounded unsure of it himself, a certain indicator he was calling from the bottom of a bottle. In spite of that condition he’d somehow managed to find Valentino’s home number: the perfect end to a perfect day.

Valentino dragged himself into a sitting position and peered at the luminous dial of his alarm clock. He’d been asleep an hour.

“Craig, I’m not in the mood. I’m having a bad time of it lately.”

A gurgling chuckle rang hollowly in his ear. “Brother, you’re an amateur compared to me.”

“Whose fault is that?” He wanted to end this conversation and get back to his nightmare.

“Listen—”

“Save the speech. I don’t have any money. If I did, I’m through subsidizing half the distilleries and drug pushers in the U.S.”

“Gimme a minute, okay? I’m in a bar in San Diego.” It came out “Shandago.” He had to have been pretty far gone to have forgotten his years of vocal training. He’d gotten as far as he had on his good looks and pleasing tone of voice rather than on his acting. The good looks had vanished, bloated and mottled with gin blossoms, and now he’d lost his only remaining asset.

“What did you do, drink up all the stock in L.A.?”

“Val, I need help. I’ll make it worth your while.”

“It would be worth my while if you’d stop pestering me for something you can only give yourself. Check into rehab.”

“Hear me out. Don’t—”

He banged down the receiver. When the purring started again he pulled the cord out of the standard and slid back down and back into unconsciousness.

*   *   *

His business cards identified Valentino as a “film detective,” a romantic indulgence befitting a life on the outer edge of the motion picture industry. As a full-time consultant with the archives division of the Film Preservation Department, he kept irregular hours in a matchbox office in a building that had once supplied all the heat and electricity to the UCLA campus, a homely pile of architecture whose only point in its favor was the fact that no one in the university administration ever bothered to visit it. There, he, Professor Broadhead, and Ruth, the gargoyle in reception, went about the business of rescuing little pieces of time from erosion without interference on the part of authority—except when the moment came to ask for money to continue. Then the little men with calculators remembered they were there and wondered if the building might be razed to make room for another athletic training facility.

Fortunately, Valentino was usually absent at these times. Broadhead was a revered scholar in his field, showing his face on TCM and on extra discs issued with remastered DVDs, and knew his way around the wine-and-cheese circuit like the blind man in the labyrinth. He twisted this arm, pumped that hand, and shook loose dollars like jackpots from a slot machine. That freed his colleague to scour toxic landfills and crawlspaces teeming with spiders, tracking lost frames of ancient classics. At these times Valentino was more Sherlock Holmes than Joe Academic. It was this part of the job that had drawn him to it. His name, and the obvious associations it suggested, had made him a fanatic on the subject of old movies since early childhood. It also made him the butt of a million bad jokes, but on the other hand, it left an impression on people who knew celluloid history. They might misplace his card, but they seldom forgot his name.

Ruth pounced on him the moment he left the elevator. She rarely stirred from her station inside the doughnut-shaped desk where she served sentry, but she was a predatory old bird who swooped down with the power of her eyes. They were kohl-rimmed, as black as her hair, and equally inflexible. Age was her archenemy. She would attack every wrinkle and gray strand as soon as it surfaced, using all the weapons in her arsenal. Broadhead had speculated there were more poisons on her dressing table than in all the Japanese gardeners’ sheds in Beverly Hills. “I’d be as disinclined to visit one as the other.” But for all his shudders he was the only man on campus she couldn’t intimidate.

“You had a call.”

Valentino never knew from the burnished-steel tone of her voice if she thought he was at fault for not being there when a call came in or for the call having been made at all. Ruth was efficient and well-nigh indispensable, but she was one of those in favor of demolishing the building and eliminating the film program altogether as a frivolous waste of money and young minds. She tore a pink sheet off her pad and thrust it at him.

He glanced at it, saw the name Hunter, and stuck it in his pocket. “Thanks. Dr. Broadhead in?”

“Aren’t you going to return the call?”

He shrank in on himself, a mouse in a hawk’s line of sight. “Later.” Lifting his brows, he cocked his head toward the door of Broadhead’s office.

“He’s working on his book. He doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

“When he wakes up from his nap, please tell him I’d like a moment of his time.”

“You wouldn’t be so cranky if you started your day with a healthy breakfast.”

“What do you consider healthy?” He knew he’d regret asking. Prolonging a conversation with Ruth was definitely not the way to start one’s day.

“Bacon sandwich, three-cheese omelet, and a strawberry milkshake.
Whole
milk. I wouldn’t wash my feet in that one-percent swill.”

“Is that what you eat?”

“Every day for the last forty years, except Sunday. Then I lay out a feast.” She turned her head from side to side, like a spy in a Bob Hope movie, and leaned forward, lowering her voice to a foghorn whisper. “
She’s
in there.”

She made the pronoun sound like a vile epithet. He had no doubt who
she
was. Ever since Fanta had breezed into their lives, Ruth had behaved like the old herd leader, determined to resist challenge from a younger rival. The fact that Ruth had no romantic designs on Broadhead didn’t enter into it. In her world, women typed letters and answered telephones and ran things from behind the camouflage of indentured servitude. The presence of any other female in the old power plant was a threat to her authority.