THE PREMISES OF FEEL-O-REEL INC. lay only a few blocks off and along Pacific Boulevard from Abe Penn’s. But they belonged to a different world.
With its wide lots and dazzling aluminum and steel buildings, the Nueva Vision Business Park looked as if it should house the sort of technologies which Daniel Lamotte had once written about in those pulp “Scientifiction” novels. In a way, it did. If not death rays, rocket fins, instant cures for cancer and meals that came in a tablet, it did at least play host to the manufacturers of the Precious Poochie range of canine clothing, the T C Coolo automatic ice crusher (You’ll Never Choke on Another Cube) and the SeaSlooosh! pool wave-machine. In this elevated company, the activities of the Feel-o-Reel Post Production studio seemed everyday.
Inside the rollback doors, men in white suits were pushing trolleys and tending machines that looked like hi-tech spinning wheels. One of the guys saw Clark and Barbara, and signaled emphatically, without removing his cotton mask, that they should wait right where they where. Another guy then emerged from a glass-walled office.
“Sorry, but we have to be very careful about contamination. Get the slightest bit of grit in the drawing or charging processes, and a whole reels gone to waste. Don’t think I caught your names… ?”
Pete Peters—his parents must have had some imaginations—was wearing an open-neck suit, expensively tailored to look casual in an oh-this-thing-I’ve-just-thrown-on sort of way. He had a relaxed manner and a dry, quick handshake.
“This is Barbara Eshel, and I’m, ah…” They’d agreed on a spiel outside, but Clark still had to think for a stupid moment before coming up with his own name. “… Clark Gable. We’re working for someone called Lamotte. Reason we’re here is, we’re private investigators, and—”
“Of course, of course! My only surprise is it’s taken you so long to get here. Are you working for their insurance company as well, or just for Mr Lamotte in a private capacity?” Peters beckoned them back toward his glass cubical. “Might as well come in…”
His office smelled of clean machine oil like the rest of the place. It was cramped, but expensively furnished in the modern way. Even though there was no outer window, the polished glare off everything made you want to put on sunglasses.
“Know much about what we do here?” Peters asked once he’d got them seated in hard little chairs.
“Well, er…” Barbara began.
“Thing is,” Peters leaned forward across the glasstop desk, “the big feelie companies all have their own stock production facilities, but a lot of the kit they have is at least five years old. And the staff…” He chuckled. “They’re a whole lot older. So what we offer is a faster turnaround and a better, more consistent finished product. A sharper field. A bigger kick for your feelie buck. Then we get used a lot by the independents. I can get our secretary to give you a leaflet. Then, of course, we do one-offs. But you know about that.”
“You mean,” Clark asked, “like the commission from Daniel Lamotte?”
“We do all kinds of stuff. It’s still not that usual for us to do work for a private individual, but a lot of companies are getting more and more interested in feelie technology. All sorts of people you’d never even think.”
“R H Macys? Howard Johnson’s? The Liberty League? The Nazis?”
“Exactly!” Peters nodded as eagerly as Timmy Townsend had.
“Although precisely who we do business for is commercially confidential…” He trailed off, and looked a trifle disappointed when Clark and Barbara didn’t press him. “You really aren’t the police, are you, by the way? I need to be entirely clear on that. Otherwise, my lawyer’ll kill me.”
“No.” Clark said. “We’re not.”
“Absolutely,” Barbara agreed.
“Okay. Because, well, some of the stuff we’re asked to do gets at bit edgy, if you know what I mean…”
This Peters guy was interviewing himself, the way people sometimes did when they were confronted by a private dick. Again, they both nodded. Clark knew all about the sort of bad taste that went into modern stag feelies, and certainly didn’t want to hear about anything that got more “edgy” than that.
“So I guess,” Peters asked, “you want to know the details of the break in?”
Break in? “That sure would be helpful,” Clark agreed, wishing he’d brought along a notepad to help things along, then seeing Barbara fish inside her handbag and produce one.
“Just in your own words, Mr Peterson,” she said brightly, waving a pencil. “Might as well start at the very beginning.”
“Not that much to say really. Your client Mr Lamotte came in, oh… It was in the spring. March, I think…” He reached to flick through a big Rolodex. “Here it is, the 26th. He brought in the recordings he wanted cut and mixed and transcribed with him. Said it was a surprise birthday present for his wife.”
“Got a record of what the recordings were?” Barbara asked.
“We have to. Don’t you know that everything to do with using feelie technology is licensed?”
“Of course. Silly me. So… ?”
“Well here is it.” He unclipped a card from the Rolodex and handed it to her. “Although I guess your client could confirm as well…”
Clark and Barbara studied it. The neatly handwritten list on the card which contained an order number and Daniel Lamotte’s contact details corresponded pretty much with the missing reels Clark remembered in Erewhon’s viewing library. Basically, it was a list of all the feelies for which Daniel Lamotte had written the script. The Magic of the Past was there. So were Sometime Never, Prospector, Sunday Means Tonight, Freedom City and This Point Backwards as well. So, of course, was The Virgin Queen.
“It was quite an interesting challenge. Thing is, Mr Lamotte wanted us to edit and cut these feelies so that we could extract the aura of each of his favorite stars, then re-edit them into one single track.” He shook his head. “Not sure if that sounds weird or not. But who am I to judge? I just do the work.”
“What about this one at the bottom?” Barbara tapped the card with her pencil. “Where you’ve just put a number?”
“Yeah, that was an older reel. Mr Lamotte said it was from his private collection, or his wife’s, or something like that. Rusty old thing. No label or anything. Hasn’t he explained this to you? Jesus, it must have gone wayback, had to clean it up and run it at double speed, although it wasn’t so bad once we’d worked out what it was supposed to represent.”
“And that was?”
“Well, it was just this series of recordings of these different anonymous auras. Must have been some early demo or something, I guess. There were twenty separate sequences in all. It just ended in this glob of fused metal like it had been burnt out. That can happen sometimes—like if filmstock gets trapped in the shutter. Although you need to push the magnetic heads real hard to trigger a melt.”
“Any idea where he got this recording?”
Peters shrugged. “Like I say, it was an ancient thing. Didn’t have any of the usual identifiers. That was why we had to give it a fresh catalogue number. Otherwise, we’d have the Bechmeir Trust on our tail. Doing what we do, we don’t want that. Like I say, everything we produce has to be licensed.”
“How does that work?”
He shrugged. “Simple enough. Pat in our main office has to send off a chit for each recording we make and the Bechmeir Trust log it and send us back a bill.”
“Where do you send it? It doesn’t involve someone called Losovic by any chance, does it?”
Peters thought for a second, then shook his head. “You’ll have to ask Pat. All I know is we send it to some office down in Compton and it gets processed there and it costs us a packet.”
“Compton, not Willowbrook?”
“Isn’t that just where the museum is?”
“You might be right. Now, about the break in… ?”
“Just happened one night. Of course, everything was locked up and secured, although we don’t employ a nightwatchman—didn’t then, anyway. We’d already edited and made Mr Lamotte’s recording. I guess you know it’s been delivered, so there’s no issue there? The weird thing was, that those reels were the only things that got took in this whole facility, where we’ve got machinery worth tens of thousands of dollars, not to mention valuable reels of feelie wirestock.”
“So the reels that Daniel Lamotte had brought to have transcribed were taken, and nothing else?”
“Exactly.”
“Any other signs? Anything left, changed, disturbed?”
“Absolutely nothing at all. Like I keep saying, that was the weird thing.”
“A neat, professional job?”
“You could say. Not that I’m any expert.”
“And how easy would our client’s stuff be to find, once you were in here?”
He shrugged. “Not that hard. I mean we keep things labeled. We’re not Fort Knox. Weren’t anyway…”
“You told the police?”
“Yeah. But…” Peters gave the sort of shrug which most Angelinos who’d dealt in recent years with the LAPD would have recognized.
“And how did Mr Lamotte seem about this when you told him?”
“He was… Well, he just about as puzzled as I was. His wife, though… Jesus…” Peters whistled and shook his head. “She was mad as hell when she rang up a few days later. Asking all sorts of stuff just the way you are even though it was supposed to be her surprise present…I mean, there was nothing bad on that reel. Nothing that any of us noticed, anyway. Are you sure you’re not some kind of police? Or some kind of lawyers?”
Barbara managed to look gravely offended. “Mr Peters, we simply act for our client, but we also have a duty to his insurance company.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry.” Peters’ enthusiasm for an interview with a private dick was fading, the way most people’s did. “I’m just not used to—”
“So that was it? Mr Lamotte’s reels got stolen, and nothing else? And you’ve seen or heard nothing since? Not from the police, not from the Lamottes, not from anyone?”
“Yeah.” Peters began to stand up. “Maybe I could show you where the break-in took place. It’s on the way out, anyway… Are you any closer to finding out who actually did this?”
Barbara smiled reassuringly. “It’s something we’re working on, Mr Peters, believe me.”
They followed him back through the main processing area. Steel threads blurred on spinning tops. Reels unrolled into new reels. White flares thinned between copper stretchers. As well as the smell of machine oil, and despite the absence of air conditioning and the heat of the day, the place had the chilly air of a meatsafe.
“Here we are. It’s the only way in and out. Course, we’ve reviewed security since. We now have a regular nightwatchman, and we’ve gotten ourselves a much stronger padlock. That’s to replace the one that got drilled out.”
Pete Peters slid the door back on a rumble of wheels. The sunlight outside was dizzying.