Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 03 - Alive! (3 page)

Valentino was just beginning to wrap his mind around the prospect of a morning romantic interlude—and trying even harder to avoid the image—when Fanta swept out of Broadhead’s office with a chirrupy “’Bye, now, you old grump.” She tugged the door shut behind her and grinned brilliantly when she saw Valentino. “Well, hello. You look like Georgie Jessel the night
The Jazz Singer
broke all the records. He turned down the lead, you know.”

“I know. I’m surprised
you
do. You only audited Kyle’s class for fun when you were studying law.”

“Being engaged to him is like attending film school twenty-four-seven. Seriously, the bags under your eyes have bags.”

Fanta had none. She was a fresh twenty-one, with straight hair in bangs and falling to the shoulders of an unstructured autumn-orange blazer. Beneath it she wore a black pants suit and black boots with two-inch heels that shot her up to six-foot-two. It was a far cry from the off-the-shoulder tops and torn jeans of her undergraduate years, which were only months behind her. The Halloween-candy color scheme was in keeping with the season, but the effect was spoiled slightly by the glossy white satin cover of the enormous book she held under one arm. It was the size of a Gutenberg Bible and looked like a photo album belonging to the Baldwin family, exes and all.

“I didn’t get much sleep last night, but I won’t burden you with the dreary details. How are the wedding plans?”

“Sleep,” she said, “what’s that? I’m postponing my bar exam until after the honeymoon. I can’t bone up on
De Havilland versus Warner Brothers
and pick out the centerpieces for the reception at the same time.”

“So you drafted your fiancé to help decide on invitations?”

She patted the massive volume. “His own fault.
I
wanted to hire a calligrapher to do them from scratch, but he said if we started going down that road we’d have to spend the wedding night in Fresno instead of Stockholm.”

“I can’t see you and Kyle in Niagara Falls, but why Sweden?”

“There’s an old guy there who says he has Bergman’s production notes for
The Seventh Seal,
but he won’t let go of them without cash up front and Kyle won’t pay him until he gets a look at them.”

“He’s really writing his book?”

“Of course. He made his reputation on
Persistence of Vision,
but this one will blow it right out of the water.”

“You’ve
read
it?”

“What he’s written. He wants to be sure some aging script girl doesn’t sue him for libel.”

Valentino was jealous. He’d known Broadhead far longer than she had, and he had never so much as discussed the book with him in any detail. He got away from that subject before he betrayed himself. “So he’s working during your honeymoon.”

“Hey, I’m just happy we’re getting out of California. You think I just pulled Fresno out of my—?”

“Take it out to the back fence,” Ruth said. “This is a place of business.”

Fanta beamed at her. “Good-bye, old dear. You’re getting an invitation, you know.”

“Something old?” Her eyes were even fiercer than usual.

“That would be the bridegroom. What are nuptials without a guest who gives the couple six months at the outside?”

“I never said that.”

“Really? My mistake. I misread your body language.”

“Just don’t include me in the wedding party. I’ve had more fun being a pallbearer.”

Fanta bent down, gave Ruth’s laminated cheek a pat, and whirled on out. The elevator doors opened at her touch. Valentino stared at the secretary, fascinated despite his horror. But Ruth’s expression was as unreadable as a bisque-headed doll’s. He fled to sanctuary, hoping Broadhead wouldn’t ignore his knocking as he sometimes did. Fortune smiled. The professor’s voice beckoned from the other side.

The office was nearly sterile, the bare polar opposite of Valentino’s, which was cluttered with posters framed and rolled, kitschy knick-knacks, and piles of shooting scripts. The only exception—and it was new—was a slightly out-of-focus photo in a frame of Fanta on some gray, blustery beach, looking over her shoulder at the camera and laughing. She wore a leather windbreaker with the collar turned up.

Broadhead saw where he was looking. “It’s bewitched. No matter where I stand in the room, it’s me she’s laughing at.”

“It’s always like that when they look directly into the lens.”

“See for yourself.”

Valentino walked to the far rear corner of the room, watching the photo. He crossed to the opposite corner, then to the next. It was true. She was staring at Broadhead and splitting her sides at the ridiculous sight.

“I’m not sure such a thing is possible, but you’re right.”

“She’s part gypsy, you know. She cast a spell on me the first day she walked into my classroom.”

“Try telling that to the review board. Good thing she waited until she was no longer your student before she made her move.”

“What makes you think the first move wasn’t mine?”

“You might stick your neck out on a point of film theory, but not in matters of romance.”

Broadhead unscrewed his pipe and screwed it back together, a habit he’d acquired after the university banned smoking on campus. He claimed to have carved it by hand during the three years he was incarcerated in Yugoslavia on suspicion of espionage. “I’m to choose
this
sentiment on
that
paper stock in a third color. I’d suggest elopement, but I’m afraid of ladders.”

“Isn’t picking out invitations something a bride does with her mother?”

“She’s in Luxembourg.”

“Why Luxembourg?”

“Because she isn’t U.S. ambassador to anywhere else.”

“Fanta’s mother is an ambassador?”

“Needless to say, she isn’t available to discuss champagne fountains.”

“Why do we even have an ambassador there?”

“I haven’t the foggiest, but she seems to be earning her keep. We haven’t been at war with the place in my memory.” He stopped playing with the pipe and put it in a drawer. “When you didn’t show up here yesterday, I’d hoped you were in Argentina, assembling a blooper reel for
Triumph of the Will
: Hitler falling on his prat in Nuremberg. But you have the look of an exasperated home remodeler. How normal. I mourn.”

“It’s worse than that. Craig Hunter’s been calling me.”

“
There’s
a name from the past. I thought he’d have mixed up a cemetery cocktail by now.”

“Not that he hasn’t tried, based on how he sounded late last night. I wasn’t diplomatic. I thought you might talk me out of feeling guilty.”

“As emotions go, it’s as useful as boxing gloves on a Buddhist. Being polite is no way to get rid of a pest.”

“He tried again this morning, here at work.”

Broadhead’s telephone rang. “Let me show you a trick I learned in the Far East. No charge for this wisdom.” He lifted the receiver and let it fall back down. “Needy drunks are like amateur housebreakers. When a lock won’t pick they give up and try next door. You wouldn’t have done him any favors by stringing him along.”

Ruth opened the door without knocking and leaned in. “I just put through a call. Why’d you hang up?”

“Why’d you put it through? I said not to disturb me.”

“It was for Valentino. That woman’s still trying to reach him.”

Valentino said, “What woman?”

“I gave you the message.”

He fished out the pink crumple. He’d put it away without noting the first name. It was Lorna, Craig Hunter’s ex-wife. She never called on her own behalf. The last time, Craig had been in jail in Mexico, charged with smuggling fighting roosters across the border in return for Colombian cocaine.

3

HE RETURNED LORNA’S
call from his own office, surrounded by press-agent ephemera and props from movies so obscure their entire casts might have been in witness protection: Broadhead had compared the effect to “a Sunset Strip souvenir shop after the Big One.” Valentino himself considered the Laurel and Hardy salt-and-pepper shakers, mountains of moldering
Photoplay
s and
Silver Screen
s, and the papier-mâché sarcophagus from
The Mummy’s Brain
his personal totems, among which he found the peace that used to await him at home in the days before he’d sacrificed his private life on the altar of The Oracle.

“Val, it’s so good to hear your voice.”

“Yours, too.”

He wasn’t just being polite. Craig Hunter’s ex-wife—who had put up with him long after everyone else had given him up as a lost cause, maintaining contact even beyond their divorce—spoke in the warm contralto she used all the time now. Its ironic undertone had typecast her as the leading lady’s wisecracking best friend in several romantic comedies until her manager had hired a coach to raise it a full octave. That had led to sitcom stardom at ABC. When after three successful seasons she’d quit, announcing her plans to devote all her time to making one man happy instead of twenty million fans, she’d shaken the network to its foundation. Two years after the marriage broke up, she was still not returning agents’ calls.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call back right away,” Valentino said, stopping short of adding
I thought it was Craig
.

“That’s all right. We sort of lost touch. These things are a little like cancer. Old friends stop coming around.” Candor like hers had kept the couple away from Hollywood parties. “I was wondering if you’d heard from Craig lately.”

“He called me last night from San Diego.”

“Did he say where in San Diego?”

He hesitated only briefly. There were no secrets between the divorced. “A bar. He didn’t say which one.”

“He must have used a pay phone. His cell carrier dropped him when he stopped paying his bills. Did the number come up?”

“I didn’t check. He woke me up. If it was a pay phone, it probably came up ‘out of area.’”

“Oh. What did he want?”

“He said he needed my help, but Lorna—”

“I know, Val. You don’t have to say it. I reached the end of my own rope last week. He showed up here late, drunk or high or both, acting like the house was still his—me, too. I had to threaten to call the police to get him to leave.”

“Did he threaten
you
?” Craig had always been sloppy and maudlin under the influence, never violent.

“No, nothing like that. He just wouldn’t leave. But when I mentioned the police, he seemed to sober up right away. He mumbled something about being ungrateful and slunk on out. I offered to call him a cab—he was in no condition to drive—but he acted as if he didn’t hear me. I heard his car start up and leave. I’ve been worried sick ever since. I kept thinking he’d gone off Mulholland or something and was in a ravine somewhere. You don’t know how relieved I am he called you.”

“Why do you think he was so worried about your calling the police? Forgive me, but it wouldn’t be the first night he spent in jail.”

“I have no idea. You don’t suppose he’s mixed up with the Mexicans and Colombians again?”

“I don’t know. It’s a short hop from San Diego to Tijuana.”

“But what kind of help could you have given him?”

“I don’t know. I wish I’d asked, but it was late and—”
he’d been calling me all day
; again he’d stopped short. In the light of this conversation, so persistent an appeal for help made Valentino look as bad as he felt for ignoring it. “You said he acted like the house was still his. What did he say that gave you that impression?”

“Oh, he was just being possessive. Should I call Missing Persons?”

“They’ll probably just tell you to wait forty-eight hours, and I heard from him just last night.” The abrupt change of subject, and the evasiveness of her answer to his question, made him curious. Far from keeping secrets from each other, he wondered if the Hunters were sharing one.

“Will you call me if you hear from him again?” she asked.

“You don’t have to ask, Lorna.”

“I know, Val. Thank you.” The connection broke.

He was compelled to call Harriet. Part of the resentment he felt toward Craig Hunter had had nothing to do with Craig’s wasted life. Some small part of him had always wished he’d met Lorna first, and he felt guilty as well as impatient with himself for clinging to that ghost when he was so contented with what he had.

Harriet didn’t answer. She was probably attending a panel and had her cell turned off. When her voice mail kicked in, he hung up without leaving a message. He’d managed to shift his burden to her for not being available, and wondered if she was sitting with her hunky ex-FBI agent.

The telephone rang while his hand was still on it. It was Harriet.

“Did you just try to call?” she asked.

“Yes. I figured you were busy.”

“Are you angry about something?”

He felt a fresh flush of guilt. She had a better right to be jealous of him. He’d never mentioned Lorna to her. “I’m just a little tired.” He told her about yesterday, leaving out Craig Hunter. That route led to questions, lies, and other evasions, and he was a stranger in such country.

“Oh, Val, you loved that chair.”

“It’s just a piece of furniture,” he said. “It’s been recovered a couple of times since Bogie and Greenstreet sat in it. I was the custodian for a while. It’s time to let someone else take the responsibility.”

“Someone like Teddie Goodman?”

“I’d rather not think about that. If the chair performs up to expectations, I can electrify the marquee and replace the plumbing with PVC pipe.”

“I thought you said copper was best.”

“It is, but the joints have to be soldered, and the State of California in its desire to protect its citizens has outlawed all products containing lead.”

“And you said having a movie star in office would be a good thing.”

“Well, they didn’t let him bring along his special effects. How’s the convention?”

“Dull today. The blowhard from Scotland Yard’s debating the know-it-all from NYPD about whose electron microscope is bigger. Jeff and I are going to play hooky and brunch on top of the Space Needle.”

“Jeff?”