The Twenty-Year Death (31 page)

“Resident alien. They met when he and his first wife were living in France. You ever hear how old she was?”

“How old?”

“The official story is eighteen. Unofficially, I’ve heard everything from seventeen to fifteen.”

“So what? She’s over eighteen now.”

“So everything. It’s all going to come out, how old she was or wasn’t, and that story about what happened to her with some prison guard...”

“What prison guard?”

Knox waved a hand angrily. “I don’t know, it’s all rumors, but they’re pretty nasty rumors. Mix that in with a murder trial here and see what you get. I’m telling you, there’s plenty to feed the headlines for weeks. Months, maybe.”

I shook my head, trying to reconcile the small, vulnerable, beautiful woman I’d seen the day before with the brutal mutilation and killing I had come across that morning. “It’s all circumstantial.”

“That’s all they need. She’s not supposed to hang for it. They make a big splash of her arrest, and if it never gets to a conviction, who cares? Only, we do care. We care plenty.”

I just shook my head again.

“You really screwed up,” Knox said.

“You came over just to tell me that in person?”

“That, and this: You’re fired.” He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, and pulled out an envelope. He tossed it on the desk. I left it there untouched.

He shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry, Dennis, I know we go way back, but—”

“You can skip the old friends bit. I heard it yesterday. I didn’t like it then, and I like it even less now.”

“Fine. Then just take the money and be glad you’re not in deeper than you are.” He mashed out his cigarette in my ashtray and stood up. He pointed at the door. “And if Sturgeon tries to get you to—”

“Oh, don’t worry. I’m off the case.”

At the door, Knox turned back with his hand on the knob. “We’re not public servants anymore, Foster. We’re not supposed to deal with this stuff anymore.”

“We all serve someone,” I said.

“I wish like hell I knew who you thought you were serving last night,” he said. And he left the office, leaving the door open to the reception room, and slamming the outside door to the hall.

I would have liked a moment to collect my thoughts before dealing with Sturgeon, but he was already in the open doorway. His hat was in one hand down at his side now. He had his chest out with his chin raised in a caricature of defiance. He was directing himself and he had lost the ability to realize he was hamming it up. When he started, his tone was stern. “Mr. Foster, I have a job for you.”

I indicated the chairs across my desk. He sat on the one Knox hadn’t.

“I assume Mr. Knox told you that they suspect Chloë of...” He took a deep breath. “Of what happened to Mandy.”

I still had half a cigarette left, and I drew on it. “He did. What’s that done to the picture?” I asked. “You’re not filming today?”

He watched me smoke, but it was unclear if his expression was distaste or desire. I didn’t offer him one. “With Mandy’s death, and this business with the police and Chloë...I was forced to suspend filming for the morning. I’m shooting B-reel this afternoon.”

“So the movie’ll go on?”

“Mandy’s parts were mostly finished. We’ll just get Shem to rewrite the few remaining scenes, and it should be fine.”

“You mean Mr. Rosenkrantz, whose lover was killed last night, and whose wife is suspected of the killing. I’m sure he’ll be eager to get to a typewriter.”

His face showed his distaste. “Yes, I mean Shem Rosenkrantz.
Now, what’s with all the questions? I came to hire you. Don’t you want me to let you know what the job is?”

I went on. “It must be a relief to you, that the picture will still get finished. You need this movie, don’t you? Your career depends on it. Or was I misinformed?”

“What are you suggesting?”

“I’m not suggesting anything. Only that you have a pretty good reason not to want Chloë Rose to be on the hook for Miss Ehrhardt’s murder. Especially if you were finished with Miss Ehrhardt anyway.”

He stood. “I’m repulsed by your implication.”

“What was my implication?” I said. “I must have missed it.” Then I gave him the five-dollar smile.

Grudgingly he sat back down. “Don’t you want to at least hear about the job?”

“You want me to prove that Chloë Rose did not kill Mandy Ehrhardt.”

He tilted his head and gave a single downward nod. “That is correct.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t,” I said.

“You can’t? Mr. Foster, you’re part of the reason she’s in this mess, don’t you want to get her out of it?”

“I just promised your chief of security that I was off this case. I don’t want it anyway.”

“Knox made you promise not to take my case?”

“Knox didn’t make me do anything,” I said, standing. “This whole thing was wrong from the start. All of you Hollywood people may be used to using each other like props, but I’m not a prop. I’m an honest guy trying to make a living. This story doesn’t need me. My part was written out.”

“You can’t allow Chloë to have her career ruined, her life—”

“Skip it. Your picture’ll get finished, and it’ll even make a few extra dollars because it’s got a dead ingénue in it. So don’t start crying crocodile tears. My answer is no. Now if you don’t mind.”

He tried to push his chest out again, but it didn’t work with me standing over him. He got up himself, to even things out. “I do mind,” he said. “I’m willing to pay you quite a bit of money.” He started fumbling at his pocket, at last coming up with a tan goatskin billfold. He took out a handful of bills.

I waved them away. “If you don’t put that away, I might have to do something we’ll both regret.”

He stood there with the money in his outstretched hand just long enough to feel foolish. He put it away with one quick motion.

I picked up the envelope Knox had left on my desk and went over to the safe with it. “Had Miss Ehrhardt been in many other pictures?” I asked, just to be saying something.

“No, this would have been her first one, other than a few jobs as an extra.”

I nodded as though that meant something to me, deposited the envelope in the safe, and locked it. Then I went over to the door and gestured for him to vacate my office. “You’re welcome to use the reception room, but I’ve got work here.”

He regarded me for a moment, deflated, and then stepped by me as though I were wet paint he had to worry about getting on his clothes. I pushed the door shut and locked it.

I listened, waiting for his exit. After a minute, I heard the outer door open and his footsteps grow faint in the hall. I could just make out the chime of the elevator when it arrived.

I looked around my office. I didn’t have a damn thing to do. If I sat around long enough, maybe a client would come in, a fat heiress with a kidnapped dog, or a kid sister looking for her missing brother.

I hadn’t decided about the check in the safe yet. It felt dirty to me. Studios didn’t usually hire private investigators to follow their stars. The stars might themselves, but not the studio. And with the murder added in, the whole thing seemed like a setup to me. But who was getting set up? The obvious answer fell too close to home, but I couldn’t figure it. There would have been no way to predict that I would have ended up in Harbor City last night at all. Something was wrong with this thing, and I wasn’t going to figure out what standing around here.

I paced over to the safe and then back.

It’s none of your business, Foster. You got paid off to let it drop.

Yeah, but the patsy costume doesn’t quite fit right. It’s too tight in the neck. And I’m not actually paid until I cash their check.

You’re a damn fool, Foster.

That one I had no answer to. The only kinds of people in this business were fools who could admit it and fools who couldn’t. I could admit it, but it didn’t change what I was.

I started to unlock the door, but before the knob turned, the phone on my desk rang. I hesitated a moment, not eager to add whatever headache was on the phone to the ones I had been handed in the last five hours. But it rang again, insistent and impossible to ignore. I went back to my desk, and watched it ring a third time. I picked up from the client’s side of the desk.

“Foster.”

“Mr. Foster, we met yesterday.” The voice was deep and charming and expertly controlled. “Do you know who I am?”

“I met a lot of people yesterday,” I said. “So many that some aren’t even alive today.”

“This thing with Mandy is horrible,” the voice said and I thought it sounded almost sincere. But who was I to judge? Maybe he was really shaken. Maybe he’d cried all morning.

“It’s also keeping me busy. What do you want, Mr. Stark?’

“You do remember me! I suppose remembering people is important in your line of work.” He paused to give me a chance to reply, but I didn’t say anything. How many people forgot meeting John Stark? He went on, “I’m calling because Greg Taylor is missing. My...kitchen help. He answered the door for you yesterday.”

“Yeah, I remember him too.”

“I’m calling to see if you think you could find him. But you say you’re busy...”

“How long has he been missing? He was there yesterday afternoon.”

“Since shortly after you left. We had a fight, you see. He didn’t like how you’d treated him and he thought I should have defended him better. Or that was the excuse for the fight. It had been almost two months since our last quarrel. It was bound to happen sooner rather than later. Anyway, he left, stayed away all night. He’ll do that, but he always comes back in the morning. And with this thing with Mandy...I’m worried.”

Now he sounded it.

“Why don’t you go to the police? I’m sure for you they won’t notice that it hasn’t been twenty-four hours. They have a whole operation for this kind of thing.”

“When Greg goes off like this, a lot of the things he does are not strictly legal. If he were in a compromising situation, I wouldn’t want the police to be the ones who find him...”

Knox wanted me off the Rose/Ehrhardt case, and anything I had had in mind to do there was going to be strictly on my own time. Things weren’t so good that I could turn away business.

Stark spoke into the silence, “I’d rather not go into more details over the phone.”

“Of course you wouldn’t,” I said. “I take it you can’t come to my office?”

“I was hoping you would come here.”

“Right.”

“They’ll expect you at the door,” he said, and he hung up.

Everyone wanted to keep me in this movie business. Everyone but the person who got me into it in the first place. I went through the routine with the lock and took the stairs so I wouldn’t have to wait for the automatic elevator.

A proper butler opened the door at Stark’s this time. He was bald with a horseshoe of hair around the back of his head, a pencil mustache, and a tuxedo with white gloves. He led the way across the marble entry hall, back through the same set of rooms I had seen the day before, and out onto the same verandah where Stark was in the same position. He was reading a different script, though, because only a few pages of this one had been turned back. Or maybe he was rereading his lines.

“He hasn’t come back,” he said, and tried his million-dollar smile, but his face looked pinched, and his eyes were afraid. He set the script down. “You will find him, won’t you?”

“I charge twenty-five dollars a day plus expenses and I get one hundred dollars up front as a retainer.”

His face lost any pretense now. He was very troubled. “That won’t be a problem. That doesn’t matter. He doesn’t even need to come back. I just want to know that he’s all right.”

“You said he’s done this before when you’ve fought. Where did he go?”

“He never gave me specifics. That was part of our unspoken arrangement. He could go on an occasional bender but we would act as though it hadn’t happened. I know that he would get high, shoot up.”

“H?”

“Morphine, I think. Maybe it was heroin. His eyes were always
glassy. Sometimes he’d end up with bruises on the insides of his arms. He’s very delicate.”

“Any friends, family he might have gone to?”

“I don’t think so. Definitely no family. Greg isn’t from San Angelo. Maybe friends, but I never met any. I know he would go to the Blacklight, Choices, all those Market clubs. If he was feeling lucky, maybe the Tip. He knew people who went there.”

“Who?”

“Well, me, for one.”

The Tip was Gilplaine’s club. Of course it had to be the Tip. I didn’t know the other places, but I wasn’t the type who would know them. “Clubs close. He would have had to sleep somewhere.”

“I told you. We never spoke about details.”

“Do you have a photo of him?”

“No.”

There was a sound at the door and I turned to find Vera Merton standing there in a bright red blouse with an oriental pattern and a muted red skirt that stopped just before the tops of her brown calfskin high-heeled boots.

“I step out for a moment, and I miss everything.”

She touched my shoulder as she went past me and I caught the scent of cinnamon and cloves. She went around Stark’s chair and settled herself in the one beside him, putting her boots up on the wicker ottoman.

“This is Mr. Foster,” Stark said. “He’s here about Greg.”

She smiled, and her smile had no concern dampening it at all. “I think maybe we saw one another yesterday. Is that right?”

“Yes,” I said.

She bit her lower lip and then said, “This has been a horrible
horrible day.” It sounded like the sort of thing she might say on a day when it rained too much.

Stark said, “I know that I’m not giving you very much information, but it’s all I’ve got. I met Greg when he was nearly just off the bus and since then he’s been living here. He didn’t have much of a life outside of the house.”

“And you never went out in public with him,” I said.

He stiffened and said, “Not never. But rarely. I’m sure you’ll understand, and you’ll understand why this matter has to be kept private. If the studio hired you, I know you can be trusted.”

“The studio doesn’t feel that way this morning. I was the one who found Mandy Ehrhardt.”