Indigo, page 8
“Connections?”
Fitzhugh raised a finger and pushed his nose to one side.
“Wise guys. Back then you couldn’t walk two blocks in any direction without bumping into a silk suit or one of his goons; they had the unions, the agencies, cash investments everywhere in the trade. Ivy used to date one till the spooks from the Breen office put on the pressure to break it off. I forget his name; it’d be Big Vinnie or Joey the Hippo, Little Augie Vermicelli, something anyway out of Dick Tracy. See, it was okay to play a bad girl, but not to be one on your own time. That don’t mean she didn’t stay in touch.”
Valentino was seized with a double-emotion he knew well: the heady sense of having moved closer to his quest than anyone who’d gone before him, and the stark fear of what that would mean to the authorities who’d failed to make that same leap.
And the gangster angle kept coming up. No due process there, just a short trip and a sure place in Hollywood lore.
“Do you know if Ivy Lane is still alive?”
Fitzhugh stared at him, blinked. “Hitch, I didn’t get those new sides. How’m I going to work if I don’t know my lines?”
The actor, he’d remembered, had been cast early in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man before the part had gone to someone else; it was no wonder he’d never received the script changes.
The window had closed; there would be no more new revelations that day. The archivist thanked the old man for his time and left him to his past.
14
AS WAS SO often the case when it came to digging up long-ago events, the interview with Roy Fitzhugh had left Valentino with as many questions as answers.
Was Ivy Lane a murderess, if not directly, then by proxy? A spat over a casting decision seemed a flimsy motive for taking a human life; but then, the motion-picture industry was ruled by ego, and what would seem ludicrous in every other society was a matter of survival in the precarious business of entertaining a fickle public. At the time Bleak Street was in production, barely a generation had passed since the talkie revolution had carved a bloodbath through Hollywood royalty. The image of John Gilbert, the brightest star of his era, scraping along playing bit parts on stages he’d commanded only a few years before, was etched indelibly in memory.
William Goldman, the late great screenwriter, had said it best: “Never underestimate the insecurity of a major star.”
Or:
Could the old man have deliberately misled Valentino with well-timed displays of false senility? He had by his own admission withheld crucial evidence from the police, despite the stone-age methods of interrogation in those pre–Civil Rights days. Since then he’d had decades to perfect his act. A man stuck in the unchanging routine of assisted living might exploit a young visitor’s gullibility for no reason other than his own amusement.
And what of Madeleine Nash? Ignacio Bozal had provided a bucolic sketch of a gifted player who had turned her back on stardom for marriage abroad, while Fitzhugh had said she’d died “too young.” How young was too young? What, precisely, did those two words mean to a man pushing ninety?
In the end, Valentino trusted neither man not to have sent him on a wild-goose chase, just because he could. Eyewitness testimony was reliable only when it was confirmed, and the Grim Reaper had swept his sickle through the population of witnesses who could corroborate or contradict their stories. When it came to cold cases, Van Oliver’s was forty below zero.
He crossed the city limits and turned onto Ventura, which had been transformed into a parking lot. Police barricades blocked the lanes in both directions. Two stuntmen were fighting on the roof of a four-story building in the next block, their fists swishing an inch past each other’s face, with a stack of mattresses and empty cardboard boxes reaching from the sidewalk in front to the second floor. One of the men at least would plunge into that safety net eventually.
It was a familiar disruption in L.A., but that didn’t stop the natives from blowing their horns. This one would go on for a while; the camera crews on the roof and on the street were seated in canvas chairs, drinking bottled water and punching buttons on cell phones while their equipment stood idle. When the rehearsal would end and the actual filming would begin was anybody’s guess, including the director’s. Valentino switched off his ignition. He was nursing his domestic compact along until such time as the revenue from The Oracle laid his worst debts to rest, and the tired motor stalled whenever it idled longer than a minute.
He tapped his own horn for the sake of the brotherhood of the boulevard, then picked up his own phone and hit speed dial. One fought fire with fire, and old men with old men.
* * *
“That’s never a good sign,” Kyle Broadhead said.
The sign read CLOSED BY ORDER OF THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY BOARD OF HEALTH, and it was stuck to the glass entry door to The Brass Gimbal.
Valentino caught the attention of a man in a black polyester suit, white shirt, and black knitted necktie, a bureaucrat straight from central casting. He’d just finished smoothing the adhesive border to the glass.
“Is this temporary?”
“Not up to me; at least until the board sends me back for a compliance visit and I see what’s what. I found a whole colony of cockroaches playing leapfrog in the salad bar.”
“The Green Screen?” Broadhead said. “I told Fanta there’s a reason rabbits don’t live long.”
“Where do we go now?”
Broadhead waved an arm, taking in the Starbucks on their side of the street and its double on the opposite corner. “Take your pick.”
The one they chose was crowded, with a long line, but the barista in charge was efficient. Ten minutes after they entered, the pair took their tall high-dollar waxed-paper cups, a cruller, and a lemon-filled long john to one of the stand-up tables and rested their elbows. Valentino had bought, as he’d suggested the conference. While waiting in line he’d filled in his mentor on what he’d learned.
“Roy Fitzhugh,” Broadhead said. “They built this town on his back. He never starred, went unbilled often as not; just showed up on time every day, sober and on his mark, lines down pat, and made ten pictures to Clark Gable’s one. No Oscars, not even a nomination, but he lent money to some who won.”
Valentino blew steam off his cup. “I didn’t realize you knew so much about him.”
“I don’t; yet I do. He represents an endangered species. Movies are technically better than ever, and their top-notch talent are almost worth their confiscatory salaries, but the industry will never again have the deep bench of supporting players it had in the old days. As soon as one gets more than a just a mention in the trades, the studio builds a feature around him, and lets whatever other project that might have benefited from his contribution collapse under its own weight. And so Adam Sandler winds up carrying the film on his hydrocephalic head.”
“Stirring speech, Kyle, although if you’re planning to address a Guild meeting you’d better be sure Happy Gilmore isn’t in attendance.”
“I don’t give speeches; it’s in my contract. I’m quoting chapter two of the new book.”
“I’ll be sure and pick up a copy. Right now it doesn’t solve my dilemma.”
“It’s not your dilemma. Go back to Henry Anklemire and tell him he’ll have to work with what he’s got. He’ll whine a spell and kick a cat out a window, then put his nose to the stone.” He shook his head. “All this time you’ve spent around old crocks like me and you still haven’t learned you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”
“I do if I want to keep on paying my bills.”
Broadhead dunked his pastry in his coffee and twirled it like a swizzle. “They call me an ornament of the university. You know what an ornament is? A strip of colored paper you throw out after a party. It’s the pillars that stick.”
“I’m a pillar?”
“Shut up. I don’t know why the sky pilots call pride a sin. Modesty’s worse. Every time you snag a rare film and give it to the program, you dig your toe in the dirt and say your reward is in serving the cause of cinema history. You’ve accomplished more than all your predecessors put together.”
“I wouldn’t say—”
“Sinner! Damn it, man, you need to cash in on your reputation! You could strangle the dean’s wife live on TMZ and he’d have Anklemire spin it so it came out you were giving her the Heimlich maneuver. You’re bullet-proof, and you’re afraid a Nerf ball will shatter a rib.”
Valentino watched him rescue the sodden doughnut from ruin. It seemed to require all his concentration. “I guess I could just walk away.”
“You guess? Were you this clueless when I had you in my class, or am I the only one here who’s getting smarter?”
He let Broadhead have that one. It was preferable to the reaction he’d get if he told him he didn’t want to walk away. He had the scent now.
He took a last bite of his cruller and a swig of coffee. It was still hot enough to poach an egg. “Let’s blow.”
Broadhead stared. “How many of those hard-boiled flicks have you been watching?”
They bussed their table and stepped outside. The sun had dipped below the smog, tinting its normally brown underside an eerie shade of copper. Like the green sky that warned the Midwest of a tornado, it promised a major ozone alert by morning, and with it the standard official admonition to avoid going outside, which few locals obeyed. Valentino was parked across the street. He offered Broadhead a lift.
“I’ll walk. It may be my last fresh air for a spell. Also I enjoy the look on the faces of Angelinos when they see a man using his feet for something other than the gas pedal.”
They shook hands and the archivist stepped off the curb.
“Look out!”
A black, slab-sided town car with shuttered headlights sped straight at Valentino. He leapt back onto the sidewalk just as it swept past, close enough to snag the hem of his jacket in the slipstream. Braking, its tires shrilled, slewing the vehicle into the curb.
The window hummed down on the passenger’s side and the driver leaned across the seat, framing his face in the opening. Teak-colored eyes in a nut-brown face caught Valentino’s gaze. “Sorry, buddy. Didn’t see you. I will next time.”
The car slammed into gear and was gone around the corner before Valentino could react.
Broadhead seized him by the shoulders from behind and spun him around. “That maniac! Are you okay?”
“Did you hear what he said?”
“No. What?”
Somehow it sounded even more suggestive when he repeated it.
“Huh.” The professor looked at the little haze of dust still settling in the car’s wake. “I guess this would have been a good time to get a license number.”
15
“DO YOU THINK I should report what happened to the police?”
In the passenger’s seat, Broadhead frowned at the windshield. After the close call with the town car he’d changed his mind about walking back to the office. “I can’t advise you there. You’re the one who almost wound up a hood ornament.”
“It could have been an accident. What did the man say that was really suspicious?”
“You’re right. This old-time mob angle is turning us into nervous Nellies.”
“On the other hand, what does ‘I won’t next time’ mean? What’s the population of L.A., anyway?”
“Three and a half million, give or take a dress extra.”
“So what are the odds there’ll be a next time?”
“Good point. It was a veiled threat.”
“But if it was deliberate, he could have clipped me anyway. All he had to do was bump up over the curb. I’ve done that by accident, turning a sharp corner.”
“Me, too. He was just shook up and said the first thing that came to mind.”
“Still, the way he said it. In a monotone, like a hoodlum in a B movie.”
“Now that you mention it. Better report it.”
“They’d laugh me out of the station, and they’d be right. These things happen a hundred times a day. Nobody in southern California goes anywhere except on wheels, and the speed limit’s a joke.”
“Yup. Just forget it.”
“Thanks, Kyle. Talking with you always clears my head.”
“What I’m here for.”
* * *
Dusk wasn’t just gathering; it was coming in on the gallop. The shadows cast by the Sierras pushed hard toward the Valley under a low ceiling built of coastal fog and auto exhaust. Homeward-bound traffic clogged every major artery and most of the minors, but Valentino swam against the current. He dropped Broadhead off to collect his own car and went back to his office in the old power plant, to return the dubbed M to the secure storage vault next to the lab and to think about his next move.
He hadn’t been fooled by Kyle’s performance in the car. The wily old lecturer had used that Socratic ploy hundreds of times in his class, leading a skeptical student around in tight circles until he came to reject his own pet theory as ludicrous. In this case, the object had been both to prevent Valentino from paralyzing himself with panic and to keep him on his guard. How often had the old pedagogue said it? “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get you.” The trick was to shelve one’s fear until he could confirm the reason for it and act on what he’d learned.
However, Valentino had withheld something from his mentor that might have changed the object of the lesson; had Broadhead seen Bleak Street, he might have noticed what he had.
He’d glimpsed the face in the open car window for less than two seconds, but everything about it—the shape, the coloring, the set of the features—bore so close a resemblance to the young Van Oliver that he might have been his double.
Of course, it was just fantasy, fueled by shock; which was why he hadn’t bothered to share the observation. A crime from the past, a dangerous woman, and now a seeming resurrection from the grave: This whole adventure was veering too close to the plot of a noir film to be anything but illusion.
Ruth, a fixture as always, looked up from the memorandum on her desk; she was crossing out entire passages in red pencil, like a teacher grading a term paper. It might have been written by Broadhead or anyone else in the department who shared her services. Nobody connected had ever summoned up the courage to challenge her right to edit their communications. She pointed the stiletto blade of her pencil toward the door of his office.
“Visitor.”
“And you just let him in?”
“This is a public-funded institution of learning, not Area Fifty-one. Do you think anyone could smuggle so much as a stolen paper clip past me? Also it isn’t a him.” She stuck out a business card.
He took it. An impressionistic pen-and-ink sketch in the corner limned a gaunt vulpine torso and face with baleful eyes, brows that soared like raven’s wings, and neon-red lips: Theda Bara, silent star of Cleopatra and many other man-eating roles during the early silent period (all gone now, an entire career lost to attrition and neglect): the first femme fatale. She was touted as the daughter of a Middle Eastern potentate, her name an anagram of “Arab Death.” In truth she’d been born Theodosia Goodman in Ohio. The Hollywood propaganda machine hit the ground running as early as 1917.
To the right of the drawing and below, engraved in shiny black letters, was a legend, followed by several contact numbers:
TEDDIE GOODMAN
CHIEF CONSULTANT
SUPERNOVA INTERNATIONAL
No, it wasn’t the legendary Theda, although in person it was an easy assumption. Valentino suspected the name was an alias, adopted to catch the eye of her employer, Mark David Turkus, billionaire founder of Supernova, UCLA’s fiercest competitor in the business of locating, restoring, preserving, and marketing lost cinematic treasures. Valentino suspected further that she’d taken the idea from his own name, coincidentally the same as another legendary silent star’s. He could prove his identity from his birth certificate, but not having seen hers, he could only speculate based on her long record of manipulation and underhanded practices. She could give lessons to Theda’s predatory dames in the arts of bribery, subterfuge, and seduction.
“Teddie,” he greeted, pulling his office door shut behind him. “How nice of you to show up without the bother of a satanic rite.”
She was sitting behind his desk, her pencil arms spread and her white hands braced palms down on the top, forming an indestructible triangle. Today she had on a sleeveless dress of some shimmering green metallic material that fit her as tightly as the skin of a snake; it looked as if she’d need a can opener to get out of it. She wore her enameled black hair smoothed straight back from her high pale forehead, and her jet-trail eyebrows drew a V (for vampire) above a long straight nose and scarlet slash of mouth.
“Not funny,” she said.
“Not meant to be.” He hiked a hip onto the corner of the desk and rested a hand on his thigh. It was never bad policy to affect a casual attitude in her presence. The room temperature always seemed to drop ten degrees when she walked in. “It’s been a while. The Augustine murder case, wasn’t it?”
“As you know full well. If it hadn’t been for me, there’d be four fresh plots in Forest Lawn. While the rest of you eggheads were running this way and that, splicing useless clues like it was one of your precious movies, I got the drop on the worst mass-killer in this state since Charles Manson.” Films to her were commodities only.
“No argument; but what have you done lately?”
Twin streaks of crimson appeared on the polished-pearl skin that covered her cheekbones, to fade as quickly as desert blossoms after a rain. Teddie Goodman’s goat could be gotten, but never for long. She pointed a bare shoulder at the file cabinet where he’d stashed M. “Congratulations. Where’s the rest of it?”
“Someplace with a better lock. Seems to me the last time you went snooping among my stuff, a couple of apes threw you down a flight of stairs. Most predators learn from their mistakes.”
“Mark wanted to take you to court for that. You know he’d win; even if the university stood behind you, he’d have buried it under a pile of Tiffany-class lawyers. I told him if he did that, you’d just get fired. It’d take us a week to find out who replaced you and a month to figure out his working method, whereas with you still on the job all I had to do was follow you around until I found out what you were after, then sprint past you to the finish. He’d seen me do it often enough.”
Fitzhugh raised a finger and pushed his nose to one side.
“Wise guys. Back then you couldn’t walk two blocks in any direction without bumping into a silk suit or one of his goons; they had the unions, the agencies, cash investments everywhere in the trade. Ivy used to date one till the spooks from the Breen office put on the pressure to break it off. I forget his name; it’d be Big Vinnie or Joey the Hippo, Little Augie Vermicelli, something anyway out of Dick Tracy. See, it was okay to play a bad girl, but not to be one on your own time. That don’t mean she didn’t stay in touch.”
Valentino was seized with a double-emotion he knew well: the heady sense of having moved closer to his quest than anyone who’d gone before him, and the stark fear of what that would mean to the authorities who’d failed to make that same leap.
And the gangster angle kept coming up. No due process there, just a short trip and a sure place in Hollywood lore.
“Do you know if Ivy Lane is still alive?”
Fitzhugh stared at him, blinked. “Hitch, I didn’t get those new sides. How’m I going to work if I don’t know my lines?”
The actor, he’d remembered, had been cast early in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man before the part had gone to someone else; it was no wonder he’d never received the script changes.
The window had closed; there would be no more new revelations that day. The archivist thanked the old man for his time and left him to his past.
14
AS WAS SO often the case when it came to digging up long-ago events, the interview with Roy Fitzhugh had left Valentino with as many questions as answers.
Was Ivy Lane a murderess, if not directly, then by proxy? A spat over a casting decision seemed a flimsy motive for taking a human life; but then, the motion-picture industry was ruled by ego, and what would seem ludicrous in every other society was a matter of survival in the precarious business of entertaining a fickle public. At the time Bleak Street was in production, barely a generation had passed since the talkie revolution had carved a bloodbath through Hollywood royalty. The image of John Gilbert, the brightest star of his era, scraping along playing bit parts on stages he’d commanded only a few years before, was etched indelibly in memory.
William Goldman, the late great screenwriter, had said it best: “Never underestimate the insecurity of a major star.”
Or:
Could the old man have deliberately misled Valentino with well-timed displays of false senility? He had by his own admission withheld crucial evidence from the police, despite the stone-age methods of interrogation in those pre–Civil Rights days. Since then he’d had decades to perfect his act. A man stuck in the unchanging routine of assisted living might exploit a young visitor’s gullibility for no reason other than his own amusement.
And what of Madeleine Nash? Ignacio Bozal had provided a bucolic sketch of a gifted player who had turned her back on stardom for marriage abroad, while Fitzhugh had said she’d died “too young.” How young was too young? What, precisely, did those two words mean to a man pushing ninety?
In the end, Valentino trusted neither man not to have sent him on a wild-goose chase, just because he could. Eyewitness testimony was reliable only when it was confirmed, and the Grim Reaper had swept his sickle through the population of witnesses who could corroborate or contradict their stories. When it came to cold cases, Van Oliver’s was forty below zero.
He crossed the city limits and turned onto Ventura, which had been transformed into a parking lot. Police barricades blocked the lanes in both directions. Two stuntmen were fighting on the roof of a four-story building in the next block, their fists swishing an inch past each other’s face, with a stack of mattresses and empty cardboard boxes reaching from the sidewalk in front to the second floor. One of the men at least would plunge into that safety net eventually.
It was a familiar disruption in L.A., but that didn’t stop the natives from blowing their horns. This one would go on for a while; the camera crews on the roof and on the street were seated in canvas chairs, drinking bottled water and punching buttons on cell phones while their equipment stood idle. When the rehearsal would end and the actual filming would begin was anybody’s guess, including the director’s. Valentino switched off his ignition. He was nursing his domestic compact along until such time as the revenue from The Oracle laid his worst debts to rest, and the tired motor stalled whenever it idled longer than a minute.
He tapped his own horn for the sake of the brotherhood of the boulevard, then picked up his own phone and hit speed dial. One fought fire with fire, and old men with old men.
* * *
“That’s never a good sign,” Kyle Broadhead said.
The sign read CLOSED BY ORDER OF THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY BOARD OF HEALTH, and it was stuck to the glass entry door to The Brass Gimbal.
Valentino caught the attention of a man in a black polyester suit, white shirt, and black knitted necktie, a bureaucrat straight from central casting. He’d just finished smoothing the adhesive border to the glass.
“Is this temporary?”
“Not up to me; at least until the board sends me back for a compliance visit and I see what’s what. I found a whole colony of cockroaches playing leapfrog in the salad bar.”
“The Green Screen?” Broadhead said. “I told Fanta there’s a reason rabbits don’t live long.”
“Where do we go now?”
Broadhead waved an arm, taking in the Starbucks on their side of the street and its double on the opposite corner. “Take your pick.”
The one they chose was crowded, with a long line, but the barista in charge was efficient. Ten minutes after they entered, the pair took their tall high-dollar waxed-paper cups, a cruller, and a lemon-filled long john to one of the stand-up tables and rested their elbows. Valentino had bought, as he’d suggested the conference. While waiting in line he’d filled in his mentor on what he’d learned.
“Roy Fitzhugh,” Broadhead said. “They built this town on his back. He never starred, went unbilled often as not; just showed up on time every day, sober and on his mark, lines down pat, and made ten pictures to Clark Gable’s one. No Oscars, not even a nomination, but he lent money to some who won.”
Valentino blew steam off his cup. “I didn’t realize you knew so much about him.”
“I don’t; yet I do. He represents an endangered species. Movies are technically better than ever, and their top-notch talent are almost worth their confiscatory salaries, but the industry will never again have the deep bench of supporting players it had in the old days. As soon as one gets more than a just a mention in the trades, the studio builds a feature around him, and lets whatever other project that might have benefited from his contribution collapse under its own weight. And so Adam Sandler winds up carrying the film on his hydrocephalic head.”
“Stirring speech, Kyle, although if you’re planning to address a Guild meeting you’d better be sure Happy Gilmore isn’t in attendance.”
“I don’t give speeches; it’s in my contract. I’m quoting chapter two of the new book.”
“I’ll be sure and pick up a copy. Right now it doesn’t solve my dilemma.”
“It’s not your dilemma. Go back to Henry Anklemire and tell him he’ll have to work with what he’s got. He’ll whine a spell and kick a cat out a window, then put his nose to the stone.” He shook his head. “All this time you’ve spent around old crocks like me and you still haven’t learned you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”
“I do if I want to keep on paying my bills.”
Broadhead dunked his pastry in his coffee and twirled it like a swizzle. “They call me an ornament of the university. You know what an ornament is? A strip of colored paper you throw out after a party. It’s the pillars that stick.”
“I’m a pillar?”
“Shut up. I don’t know why the sky pilots call pride a sin. Modesty’s worse. Every time you snag a rare film and give it to the program, you dig your toe in the dirt and say your reward is in serving the cause of cinema history. You’ve accomplished more than all your predecessors put together.”
“I wouldn’t say—”
“Sinner! Damn it, man, you need to cash in on your reputation! You could strangle the dean’s wife live on TMZ and he’d have Anklemire spin it so it came out you were giving her the Heimlich maneuver. You’re bullet-proof, and you’re afraid a Nerf ball will shatter a rib.”
Valentino watched him rescue the sodden doughnut from ruin. It seemed to require all his concentration. “I guess I could just walk away.”
“You guess? Were you this clueless when I had you in my class, or am I the only one here who’s getting smarter?”
He let Broadhead have that one. It was preferable to the reaction he’d get if he told him he didn’t want to walk away. He had the scent now.
He took a last bite of his cruller and a swig of coffee. It was still hot enough to poach an egg. “Let’s blow.”
Broadhead stared. “How many of those hard-boiled flicks have you been watching?”
They bussed their table and stepped outside. The sun had dipped below the smog, tinting its normally brown underside an eerie shade of copper. Like the green sky that warned the Midwest of a tornado, it promised a major ozone alert by morning, and with it the standard official admonition to avoid going outside, which few locals obeyed. Valentino was parked across the street. He offered Broadhead a lift.
“I’ll walk. It may be my last fresh air for a spell. Also I enjoy the look on the faces of Angelinos when they see a man using his feet for something other than the gas pedal.”
They shook hands and the archivist stepped off the curb.
“Look out!”
A black, slab-sided town car with shuttered headlights sped straight at Valentino. He leapt back onto the sidewalk just as it swept past, close enough to snag the hem of his jacket in the slipstream. Braking, its tires shrilled, slewing the vehicle into the curb.
The window hummed down on the passenger’s side and the driver leaned across the seat, framing his face in the opening. Teak-colored eyes in a nut-brown face caught Valentino’s gaze. “Sorry, buddy. Didn’t see you. I will next time.”
The car slammed into gear and was gone around the corner before Valentino could react.
Broadhead seized him by the shoulders from behind and spun him around. “That maniac! Are you okay?”
“Did you hear what he said?”
“No. What?”
Somehow it sounded even more suggestive when he repeated it.
“Huh.” The professor looked at the little haze of dust still settling in the car’s wake. “I guess this would have been a good time to get a license number.”
15
“DO YOU THINK I should report what happened to the police?”
In the passenger’s seat, Broadhead frowned at the windshield. After the close call with the town car he’d changed his mind about walking back to the office. “I can’t advise you there. You’re the one who almost wound up a hood ornament.”
“It could have been an accident. What did the man say that was really suspicious?”
“You’re right. This old-time mob angle is turning us into nervous Nellies.”
“On the other hand, what does ‘I won’t next time’ mean? What’s the population of L.A., anyway?”
“Three and a half million, give or take a dress extra.”
“So what are the odds there’ll be a next time?”
“Good point. It was a veiled threat.”
“But if it was deliberate, he could have clipped me anyway. All he had to do was bump up over the curb. I’ve done that by accident, turning a sharp corner.”
“Me, too. He was just shook up and said the first thing that came to mind.”
“Still, the way he said it. In a monotone, like a hoodlum in a B movie.”
“Now that you mention it. Better report it.”
“They’d laugh me out of the station, and they’d be right. These things happen a hundred times a day. Nobody in southern California goes anywhere except on wheels, and the speed limit’s a joke.”
“Yup. Just forget it.”
“Thanks, Kyle. Talking with you always clears my head.”
“What I’m here for.”
* * *
Dusk wasn’t just gathering; it was coming in on the gallop. The shadows cast by the Sierras pushed hard toward the Valley under a low ceiling built of coastal fog and auto exhaust. Homeward-bound traffic clogged every major artery and most of the minors, but Valentino swam against the current. He dropped Broadhead off to collect his own car and went back to his office in the old power plant, to return the dubbed M to the secure storage vault next to the lab and to think about his next move.
He hadn’t been fooled by Kyle’s performance in the car. The wily old lecturer had used that Socratic ploy hundreds of times in his class, leading a skeptical student around in tight circles until he came to reject his own pet theory as ludicrous. In this case, the object had been both to prevent Valentino from paralyzing himself with panic and to keep him on his guard. How often had the old pedagogue said it? “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get you.” The trick was to shelve one’s fear until he could confirm the reason for it and act on what he’d learned.
However, Valentino had withheld something from his mentor that might have changed the object of the lesson; had Broadhead seen Bleak Street, he might have noticed what he had.
He’d glimpsed the face in the open car window for less than two seconds, but everything about it—the shape, the coloring, the set of the features—bore so close a resemblance to the young Van Oliver that he might have been his double.
Of course, it was just fantasy, fueled by shock; which was why he hadn’t bothered to share the observation. A crime from the past, a dangerous woman, and now a seeming resurrection from the grave: This whole adventure was veering too close to the plot of a noir film to be anything but illusion.
Ruth, a fixture as always, looked up from the memorandum on her desk; she was crossing out entire passages in red pencil, like a teacher grading a term paper. It might have been written by Broadhead or anyone else in the department who shared her services. Nobody connected had ever summoned up the courage to challenge her right to edit their communications. She pointed the stiletto blade of her pencil toward the door of his office.
“Visitor.”
“And you just let him in?”
“This is a public-funded institution of learning, not Area Fifty-one. Do you think anyone could smuggle so much as a stolen paper clip past me? Also it isn’t a him.” She stuck out a business card.
He took it. An impressionistic pen-and-ink sketch in the corner limned a gaunt vulpine torso and face with baleful eyes, brows that soared like raven’s wings, and neon-red lips: Theda Bara, silent star of Cleopatra and many other man-eating roles during the early silent period (all gone now, an entire career lost to attrition and neglect): the first femme fatale. She was touted as the daughter of a Middle Eastern potentate, her name an anagram of “Arab Death.” In truth she’d been born Theodosia Goodman in Ohio. The Hollywood propaganda machine hit the ground running as early as 1917.
To the right of the drawing and below, engraved in shiny black letters, was a legend, followed by several contact numbers:
TEDDIE GOODMAN
CHIEF CONSULTANT
SUPERNOVA INTERNATIONAL
No, it wasn’t the legendary Theda, although in person it was an easy assumption. Valentino suspected the name was an alias, adopted to catch the eye of her employer, Mark David Turkus, billionaire founder of Supernova, UCLA’s fiercest competitor in the business of locating, restoring, preserving, and marketing lost cinematic treasures. Valentino suspected further that she’d taken the idea from his own name, coincidentally the same as another legendary silent star’s. He could prove his identity from his birth certificate, but not having seen hers, he could only speculate based on her long record of manipulation and underhanded practices. She could give lessons to Theda’s predatory dames in the arts of bribery, subterfuge, and seduction.
“Teddie,” he greeted, pulling his office door shut behind him. “How nice of you to show up without the bother of a satanic rite.”
She was sitting behind his desk, her pencil arms spread and her white hands braced palms down on the top, forming an indestructible triangle. Today she had on a sleeveless dress of some shimmering green metallic material that fit her as tightly as the skin of a snake; it looked as if she’d need a can opener to get out of it. She wore her enameled black hair smoothed straight back from her high pale forehead, and her jet-trail eyebrows drew a V (for vampire) above a long straight nose and scarlet slash of mouth.
“Not funny,” she said.
“Not meant to be.” He hiked a hip onto the corner of the desk and rested a hand on his thigh. It was never bad policy to affect a casual attitude in her presence. The room temperature always seemed to drop ten degrees when she walked in. “It’s been a while. The Augustine murder case, wasn’t it?”
“As you know full well. If it hadn’t been for me, there’d be four fresh plots in Forest Lawn. While the rest of you eggheads were running this way and that, splicing useless clues like it was one of your precious movies, I got the drop on the worst mass-killer in this state since Charles Manson.” Films to her were commodities only.
“No argument; but what have you done lately?”
Twin streaks of crimson appeared on the polished-pearl skin that covered her cheekbones, to fade as quickly as desert blossoms after a rain. Teddie Goodman’s goat could be gotten, but never for long. She pointed a bare shoulder at the file cabinet where he’d stashed M. “Congratulations. Where’s the rest of it?”
“Someplace with a better lock. Seems to me the last time you went snooping among my stuff, a couple of apes threw you down a flight of stairs. Most predators learn from their mistakes.”
“Mark wanted to take you to court for that. You know he’d win; even if the university stood behind you, he’d have buried it under a pile of Tiffany-class lawyers. I told him if he did that, you’d just get fired. It’d take us a week to find out who replaced you and a month to figure out his working method, whereas with you still on the job all I had to do was follow you around until I found out what you were after, then sprint past you to the finish. He’d seen me do it often enough.”
