The Twenty-Year Death (41 page)

“Something you left in my office. I’m returning it.”

He puffed out his upper lip and looked up at me. “You know, sending Rose to the nut house was a fine idea you had there. Now
everyone
thinks she killed Mandy.”

“No they don’t,” I said.

“All right, no they don’t.” He held up the envelope. “You really should keep this. It would make me feel more comfortable.”

“Who asked you to hire me?”

“I hired you, what do you mean? Look, I don’t have time—”

“Then don’t waste it repeating yourself. Who asked you to
hire me? It wasn’t your idea. I’ve seen Sturgeon in action, it wasn’t his. All I want to know is, who wanted me—or some other sap like me—following Chloë Rose around?”

“Dennis...”

“I don’t get paid off. I get paid to do a job. And I definitely don’t get paid off when I don’t even know who’s paying me off and what they’re paying me off for. I got hired to do a job. I didn’t do it. So I don’t get paid.”

Knox’s face sagged. “I was doing you a favor, goddamn it,” he said. “I was throwing a bone your way. Why the hell couldn’t you just take it and chew on it?”

“Because I’m not a lapdog, Knox. I don’t fetch, I don’t heel, and I don’t roll over.”

We stared at each other then. Taxidermied deer couldn’t have done it better. Knox tapped the unopened envelope on his desk. Someone in another part of the office yelled, but I couldn’t make out what it was about. Outside, the whole engine of Merton Stein Productions chugged away. Take an actress, an actor, and one of those scripts they were forever carrying back and forth out there. Slap some film in the camera. Plug in some lights, pay a violinist or two to add background melodies, and presto, you’ve got yourself a product you can show at theaters around the country, or drive-ins if it isn’t good enough for the indoor crowd. Then do it again. Fifty times a year. A hundred. No slowdowns along the line. One part in the machinery is broken? Get another. Mr. and Mrs. America need their Sunday double feature, otherwise it would be nothing but newsreels, and we need morale to be high. Leave your dime at the door.

Knox set the envelope down. “Mr. Merton gave me the order personally. He said I should hire someone who could do a simple job, and I picked you. Okey, you bastard?”

I nodded. “Okey.”

“You’re not surprised.”

“I can’t say that I am.”

He watched me. The voice down the hall yelled again, a happy sound. “I’m working with children here,” Knox said.

“I’ll leave you to it.” I started for the door. Behind me came the sound of his chair creaking and then an exhalation as he pulled himself out of his seat.

“Now wait just a minute, Foster. Do you have something on this you want to tell me?”

“No, like I said. I got the message from you yesterday. I did a bad job. I’m fired. I even worked another case since then. Fastest P.I. in the west.”

“Don’t be like that, Foster. We’re all acting stupid around this. Damn it, I went into this security detail so I wouldn’t have to deal with this kind of thing anymore. I’m tired of blood.”

I softened and leaned in toward him. “The police put me off of this thing too. Nobody wants me in it. I don’t want me in it.”

He waited for more. When I didn’t say anything, he said, “Well, why are you here?”

“To see Mr. Merton,” I said, and headed for the door.

He caught me by the shoulder. “You can’t just go see Mr. Merton. You need an appointment.”

“I don’t think he’ll make one for me, do you?”

He didn’t stop me when I turned to go that time.

Merton wanted someone to follow Chloë Rose, he wanted Chloë Rose’s horse, which used to be his horse, and he wanted a Jane Doe story to go away. Probably this Mandy Ehrhardt story, too. And Mr. Merton was a man who got what he wanted. So what else did Mr. Merton want? I figured I’d ask him.

The exterior walkway on the second floor cast the ground
floor walk in shadow. The main entrance was a pair of double glass doors that entered into a wind block, and then another set of doors. The Merton Stein crest hung on the wood-paneled wall behind the front desk, and there were two secretaries at the desk who looked more severe than any of the security officers I’d seen so far. But I walked as though I belonged, waving and nodding to both of them, and went straight for the stairs. They might have called out after me, but I didn’t wait to find out.

Upstairs, I was in another reception room almost identical to the lobby below. There was no avoiding the secretary here, a middle-aged woman with the lined face of a gorilla, her hair pulled back into a tight bun.

“May I help you?” she said. Her voice had the sandpaper rasp of a lifelong smoker.

“I’m here to see Mr. Merton,” I said. I had my wallet out, already reaching for one of my cards. I held it out to her, and she looked at it without making any move to take it. Her expression did not change.

“To see Mr. Merton, you must have an appointment.”

“I think if you check with him, I have an appointment.”

“I make Mr. Merton’s appointments,” she said. She was annoyed with me, but not so annoyed that it was worth exercising a facial muscle over.

“Mr. Merton had me hired the day before yesterday. Last night—”

“I know who you are,” the secretary said.

“So do I,” said another voice, much friendlier, though no less stern.

I looked up. She stood in the entryway of the massive double doors just to the left of the secretary’s desk. She wore a blue
blouse with a red ascot tied around her neck and a tailored pair of khaki pants that ended mid-calf. Her open-toed brown heels showed that her toenails were the same color as her lips, rose red. The last time I had seen her, she had offered me those lips, and the time before that she’d been stuffing a drunk into the back seat of a car. Yeah, she was a girl that could make life very pleasant or very difficult, sometimes both at the same time.

The secretary’s annoyance deepened then. “Miss Merton, I have already asked you to return home and wait for your father there.” Including me she said, “Mr. Merton isn’t here right now. As you know all too well, Mr. Foster, he is quite busy today handling the situation.”

“That’s grand, Mr. Foster, isn’t it?” Miss Merton said, still from the doorway. “The ‘situation,’” she mimicked.

The secretary turned white.

Miss Merton nodded her head into the mysterious dark between the doors, and said, “Come on in, Mr. Foster. We can wait for Daddy together.” She passed through the doors without waiting to see if I would follow. I guess they always followed. I smiled my charming smile at the secretary and it got about the same response it had with the kid at the front gate. I walked around her desk, and let myself into Daniel Merton’s office.

The lights were off and the curtains drawn, giving the room the oppressive tone of sick days in bed. Mr. Merton’s desk stood by the windows, its footprint smaller than Al Knox’s office downstairs, but not by much. Beside the desk there was a small school chair with attached writing surface where the stenographer would sit when Mr. Merton wanted to write something down. There was a long boardroom table off to one side with high-backed leather chairs all around it. A clutch of cozy couches in burgundy upholstery with buttons on the cushions surrounded a glass coffee table on a zebra-skin rug.

Vera Merton had chosen the couch with its back to me so that I had to walk around to the other side if we were going to talk. When I did, the shadows cut her features sharper. It didn’t hurt her any. Her legs were crossed at the ankles and extended under the coffee table where I could see them through the glass. She was a lifetime of getting what she wanted when she wanted it and no realization that that wasn’t true for everybody. Chloë Rose made you want to protect her. This one made you hope someone would protect you.

“There’s a bar hidden away in the wall over there, if you’d like a drink.” She didn’t have one. In fact, it was unclear what she had been doing all alone in the dark. “I knew you were hired by my father,” she said as I sat on the edge of the opposite couch.

“Only I didn’t,” I said, leaning forward on my thighs, my hat in my hands. “Daddy can’t pay the electric bills?”

“Sometimes I like sitting in the dark. It helps me think,” she said.

“And what do you think about?”

She cocked her head. “If I’m not mistaken, that was a personal question. Did you just ask me a personal question?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes in my business I get personal when I’m not supposed to. Do you ask all the men that happen by to palaver in your father’s office?”

“Only ones that work for my father,” she said.

“So I guess around you that’s all of them,” I said.

“If you decide to be fresh with me, I might decide I don’t like you.”

“You liked me all right yesterday.”

“That was yesterday.”

“Well, take your time. I don’t need an answer today.”

She laughed at that, though it sounded as sincere as an acting class exercise. “Are you auditioning for a part? You’re like a man out of my father’s movies.”

I smiled along with her, but said nothing.

She turned the laughter off but left the smile on. It was a perfect smile, barely a crease showing around it on her face. And it was a perfect face, a young girl’s face, nineteen, maybe twenty.

“You have a knack for finding bodies, it seems,” she said.

“You were there when Stark asked me to find Mr. Taylor. I didn’t promise I’d find him alive.”

The smile went away.

“Do you remember the question I asked you, and you told me to go ask Daddy? That’s why I’m here. But Daddy’s not here and you are.”

“A coincidence. What was your question?”

“You’re getting personal again.”

“Sorry. I’ll try to cut it out. What was your question?”

“What did my father hire you for?”

“Maybe that’s personal,” I said.

“Maybe, but you’re going to tell me anyway.”

“I will?”

“You wouldn’t yesterday, but you will today. He hired you because of my brother, didn’t he?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said.

“Oh, I’m sure he told you to be cautious, he probably even had a cover story prepared for you. Was it that some crank was claiming that he had the exact same story idea as our most recent picture and that he sent it in two years ago, and now he was threatening Tommy over it?”

It was fascinating watching her guess as we sat there together in the dark. Even if she was young, she wasn’t stupid; even if she was wrong, I had the feeling she might be groping in the right direction. “No,” I said, “that wasn’t it.”

“It’s got to be my brother. That’s the only reason Daddy would handle something as menial as hiring a detective himself. It’s the only reason he would have hired somebody instead of using someone that already worked for him.”

“Sure, you’re too smart for me,” I said. “You knew all this days ago. You knew it before I was hired even.” I nodded my chin at her. “What’s with your brother that he needs a detective?”

Her confidence slipped as she realized that she might have spoken out of turn. She looked away from me, her eyes darting down and then across the distance to the blacked-out windows. “Nothing,” she said. “Gambling.” She looked back at me, proving
that she could meet my look. “Gambling, women, too much room for blackmail.” She said this last as if she didn’t expect me to believe it.

I felt sorry, so I said, “I was hired on studio business. It was Al Knox, head of security who actually did the hiring. The word just came down from your father.”

She didn’t look relieved or placated.

“That’s all I can tell you,” I added.

“No, of course,” she said, lifting her head up and with it her shoulders. “I try not to know anything about my father’s business. When your father’s a magic maker it takes all the magic out of life, because you’ve seen all the tricks.”

“Unless he learns a new one.”

She smiled, and it was her award-winning smile again. “Old dogs, Mr. Foster. Or I forget, did you say to call you Dennis?”

“I didn’t say either.”

She waved that away, and let her arm fall limp beside her.

“You know why I was hired. All of that business about your brother, that’s just your protective side coming out.”

“Let’s forget about that,” she said quietly. “It’s in the past now.”

“That doesn’t always mean it goes away,” I said.

Our eyes met, and I held hers. We measured our stares. One of us had to be the first to look away, and in the end I did it. I didn’t want to stay any longer. “Enjoy the dark,” I said, standing.

“My father’s probably at the track.” She didn’t look up at me, but spoke straight ahead. “He’s been nearly every day since the law went through. He put up the initial money to build the place before it was even legal.”

“Santa Theresa or Hollywood Park?”

“Hollywood Park, of course.”

“Then who runs things around here?” I said.

“Younger men,” she said. Her eyes were gone.

I put on my hat and left before she had fully convinced herself that she had the right to feel sorry for herself.

In the outer office, the secretary didn’t pause in her typing, even when I stood right up against her desk. “Is there a public phone around here?”

“Are you sure you don’t want to just use mine?” she said in exaggerated indignation.

“No, I’m afraid the call’s private.”

“There’s one downstairs to the right of the door.”

“Thanks,” I said, and tipped my hat. She never looked up.

I went downstairs and crossed the lobby to the payphone. It wasn’t in a booth, just bolted to the wall. I had the operator put me through to the
Chronicle
and asked for Pauly Fisher. There was a long pause during which I watched the flags dangle listlessly on their poles, and then Fisher came on. “I’ve got news for you,” he said.

“Give.”

“I talked to a friend in the Harbor City police department, a real veteran. You talk to them down there?”

“I don’t think we’re friends right now.”

Fisher snorted. “Well, there’s at least one other case, a few years back. Same thing. Cut neck, cut thighs.”