The Twenty-Year Death (25 page)
Read The Twenty-Year Death Online
Authors: Ariel S. Winter
in memoriam
R.C.
with apologies
ONE
Merton Stein Productions was twelve square blocks enclosed by a ten-foot brick wall with pointed granite capstones every three yards. There was a lineup of cars at the main gate that backed out into the westbound passing lane of Cabarello Boulevard. Every five minutes or so the line advanced one car length. If you had urgent business you were no doubt instructed to take one of the other entrances. Since I had been directed to this one, I figured my business wasn’t urgent.
It was just about noon on a clear day in the middle of July that wasn’t too hot if you didn’t mind the roof of your mouth feeling like an emery board. I smoked a cigarette and considered taking down the ragtop on my Packard to let in the mid-day sun. It was a question of whether it would be hotter with it closed or with it open. When it was my turn at the guard stand, I still hadn’t decided.
A skinny young man in a blue security uniform stepped up to my open window without taking his eyes off of the clipboard in his hands. His face had the narrow lean look of a boy who hadn’t yet grown into his manhood. His authority came from playing dress-up, but the costume wasn’t fooling anyone, including himself. “Name,” he said.
“Dennis Foster,” I said. “You need to see proof?”
He looked at me for the first time. “You’re not on the list.”
“I’m here to see Al Knox.”
He looked behind him, then out to the street, and finally settled back on his clipboard. “You’re not on the list,” he said again.
Before he could decide what to make of me, a voice said, “Get out of there.” The kid was pushed aside and suddenly Al Knox was leaning on my door, wearing the same blue uniform, only many sizes larger. There was a metal star pinned to his chest and a patch below it that stated his name and the title Chief of Security. He stuck his hand in my face and I took it as he said, “Dennis. How the hell are you?”
“Covering the rent. How’s the private security business?”
“Better than the public one. Give me a second, I’ll ride in with you.” He backed out of the window, told the skinny kid, “Open the gate, Jerry, this charmer’s with me,” and then crossed in front of my car in the awkward lope his weight forced on him. He opened the passenger door, grunted as he settled himself, and pulled the door shut. The sour smell of perspiration filled the car. He nodded his head and pointed at the windshield. “Just drive up Main Street here.”
Jerry lifted the gate arm and I drove forward onto a two-way drive lined with two-story pink buildings that had open walkways on the second floors. There was a lot of activity on either side of the street, people in suits and people in painters’ smocks and people in cavalry uniforms and women in tight, shiny skirts with lipstick that matched their eyes. Three men in coveralls with perfectly sculpted hair worked bucket-brigade-style unloading costumes from a truck. Workers walked in both directions across a circular drive to the commissary. Knox directed me to the third intersection, which had a street sign that said Madison Avenue. Messrs. Young and Rubicam wouldn’t have recognized the place. We turned left, drove one block over, past a building the size of an airplane hangar, and made another left onto a
boulevard with palm trees in planters down the middle of the street. Here there was a four-story building large enough to be a regional high school. It had an oval drive and two flagpoles out front, one flying Old Glory and the other flying a banner with the Merton Stein crest on it. We drove past the oval and pulled into a spot at the corner of the building beside a row of black-and-white golf carts.
In front of us was a door with wired glass in the top half that had the word “Security” painted on it in fancy black-and-gold letters. I suppose the men who lettered all those title cards in the old days needed something to keep them busy now. To make doubly sure we knew where we were, a sign on a metal arm above the door read “Security Office.” Knox started around the car to lead the way when a woman’s voice said something that wasn’t strictly ladylike. We looked, and three cars over a blonde head bobbed into sight and then vanished again.
Knox pulled up his pants at the waistband as though they might finally decide to go over his belly, and went around to where we had seen the woman’s head. I followed. Bent over, arms outstretched, the blonde made a perfect question mark, an effect accentuated by the black sundress she wore, which covered her from a spot just above her breasts to one just above her knees in a single fluid curve. She had on black high-heeled shoes with rhinestone decorative buckles, simple diamond stud earrings and a necklace with five diamonds set in gold across her white chest. In light of the earrings and the necklace, I allowed that the decorative buckles on the shoes might be real diamonds too. What she was bending over was the back seat of a new ’41 Cadillac sedan. A pair of legs in wrinkled trousers was hanging out of the car, the man’s heels
touching the asphalt. She said the surprising word again, followed by, “Tommy.”
Knox said, “Do you need any help, Miss Merton?”
She straightened up. There was no sign of embarrassment on the sharp face that came into view, just annoyance and frustration. She brushed her hair back out of her face with one hand, and it stayed exactly where she wanted it, in an alluring sheet that just touched her shoulders. “Oh, Al. Can you help me get Tommy into the car again? He’s passed out and he’s too heavy for me.”
Knox started forward and Miss Merton stepped back out of his way. She looked at me, and a smile formed on her face that suggested we shared a private secret. “Hello,” she said. I didn’t say anything. Her smile deepened. I didn’t like that.
Knox wrestled Tommy’s legs into the back seat, a process that involved some heavy breathing and maybe a few choice words under his breath too. At last he had the feet stowed in the well behind the driver’s seat, and he slammed the door with satisfaction. “There you go, Miss Merton.”
She turned to him, and said in a hard voice, “Tommy can’t expect that I’ll always go around cleaning up after him.”
“No, ma’am,” Knox said.
Miss Merton looked at me, gifted me with another smile, and then pulled open the door and poured herself into the driver’s seat. Knox faced me, shaking his head but not saying anything as the Cadillac’s engine caught and started. Only once the car was out of view did he say, under his breath, “Vera Merton. Daniel Merton’s daughter. She’s always around here getting into some trouble or other. The son doesn’t usually even make it this far. He must have found himself caught out
last night.” He rolled his eyes and shook his head again. “The bosses, yeah?”
“The bosses,” I said.
He gave a hearty laugh and slapped me on the back. “I’m telling you. This place is filled with crazies. Come on into my office, I’ll fill you in.”
The front room of the security office was a small, air-conditioned, wood-paneled room with a metal office desk on which there were two telephones, a green-shaded lamp, a desk clock, a pen-and-ink set, a calendar blotter, and a message pad. There was a wooden rolling chair behind it, and three orange armchairs along the wall in front of it that had probably served time on one of the movie sets before their upholstery wore thin and they were reassigned here. A middle-aged dark-haired man with a well-managed mustache looked up as we came in and then away as he saw it was Knox, who continued on through a door behind the desk marked “Private.” This led to a narrow hallway off of which there were three more rooms. The first was an empty squad room with four desks, two couches, and a blackboard across one whole wall. The second was a kitchenette with a large table in the center and no less than three automatic coffee machines. Knox went into the third room, which was much like the first, only it had Knox’s photographs on the wall. There were pictures taken with various movie stars, and pictures taken when he and I had been police, with Knox looking trim in his city uniform, and pictures taken when he was with the DA’s office, looking less trim, but much thinner than he was now. “Close the door,” he said, sitting down behind the desk.
I did and took the chair across from him.
“Sorry about the kid at the gate. We have a high turnover and it’s either old retired cops like me or kids the academy turned away. The old guys can’t take the heat in the box, so it goes to the kids. More than half of this job is managing my own staff.”
I said I hadn’t been bothered.
He nodded and puffed out his upper lip by forcing air into it. Then he moved his lips as though tasting something, and said, “This is a crap job I have for you, I just want to say that up front. It’s a crap job, but the money’s good and easy and I need someone I can trust.”
“I’ll just take my regular fee.”
He shook his head. “No. I put in for fifty a day. And expenses, of course. This is the picture business, you take as much money as they’ll give you.”
“Let’s leave that,” I said. “What’s the job?”
He puffed his lips again and rocked in his seat while rubbing one hand back and forth on his blotter as though checking for splinters. He didn’t want to tell. Telling me would make it real. At last he slapped his desk and said, “Oh, hell, you’ve already seen the kind of thing I have to deal with. These movie people live in a different world than guys like you and me.”
“That’s not what
Life
magazine says. Haven’t you seen? Bogie built his own porch and Garbo sews all her clothes.” Knox snorted at that. “Well, they love and hate and die like anyone else, don’t they?”
“Sure, but they do it to the sound of violins, with their faces ten feet tall.” He slapped his desk again. “If you have any sense of propriety left after being on the force, they sure knock it right out of you here. What do you know about Chloë Rose?”
“I’ve seen her pictures,” I said.
“Well she manages that tortured beauty act from her pictures all the time in real life, too. And now we think maybe she’s going crazy.”
“What’s she done?”
“Nothing much. Nothing besides the usual crying jags and mad demands and refusal to work that we get from any number of these women stars, including some who make the studio a lot less money than Chloë Rose. But now she thinks she’s being followed. She’s nervous all the time about it, and it’s making it hard for Sturgeon to shoot the picture she’s making. The studio has her on a five-year contract and there are three years to go, so there are people who are worried.”
“Worried that she’s actually being followed or worried that she thinks she’s being followed?”
“Thinks.” He drummed his fingers on the desk. “Maybe she is being followed, I don’t know. But I tend to doubt it. These people are all paranoid. It’s their sense of self-importance. Either way, I’ve managed to convince her well enough that I’ve got things under control here, that the only people on the lot are people who belong there. In truth, there’s any number of ways to get onto the lot without us knowing. We have to throw people off the lot all the time, people who think they belong in pictures and are ready to prove it.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
“Just follow her around when she’s not on the set. Stakeout in front of her house at night.”
“You want a bodyguard. I’m not a bodyguard.”
“It’s not a bodyguard job. I told you, she only thinks she’s being followed. You just need to make her feel safe. For show.”
“So I’m supposed to follow her around to make her feel better about somebody following her around?”
Knox held his hands wide and leaned back. “That’s show business.”
“Go back to Miss Rose’s mystery man. It is a man, isn’t it?”
“That’s what she says.”
“You said that you convinced her that the only people on the lot are people who belong on the lot. Why couldn’t her tail be someone who belongs on the lot?”
“He could be. But don’t point that out to her. She must not have thought of it.”
“What’s he supposed to look like?”
“Like every other man you’ve ever met, if you go by her description. Medium height, dark hair, medium build. You’ll talk to her about it. She’ll fill you in.”
“And she’s seen him on the lot?”
“On the lot and off.” He leaned forward. “That’s if you believe her. I told you already. There’s nobody following her. She’s going dotty. There’ve been a batch of tantrums on the set. And her private life is worse than a paperback novel.”
I raised an eyebrow.
He took a breath and let it out slowly. I waited.
“Her husband’s Shem Rosenkrantz,” he said. “He had a few books they liked in New York ten, fifteen years ago, but the last few years he’s been hanging around here doing treatments that never get made. They never get made because he’s too busy fooling around with the starlets and he doesn’t keep it a secret from his wife. This picture they’re filming now is one he wrote and it’s getting made because she’s in it. And he’s
still
having an affair with her co-star, this new girl called Mandy Ehrhardt. Meanwhile, Sturgeon, the director, has a thing for Rose, Missus Rosenkrantz if you’re keeping score. Which might be fine if she wanted it too, but...”