TWO SECURITY guards stood sentry at the entrance to Hollywood Forever Cemetery when I pulled into the drive, the wrought-iron gates securely closed behind them. The older of the two ambled over to greet me, gun belt clinging precariously to the southern slope of his pear-shaped torso. “We’re closed for the morning,” he said, bending to peer into the car.
“What’s going on?” I asked, curious what he’d say.
“Just a little unscheduled maintenance. We hope to have everything cleared away by noon, if you want to come back then.” He glanced up, his eye drawn by something across the canvas top of the Cadillac. The passenger door clicked open and Frank Adams settled his considerable girth into the passenger seat, next to my camera bag. “Thanks for your help, Don,” he said, leaning across my shoulder. “Don’t forget to look for yourself in next week’s issue.”
The security guard touched his thumb and forefinger to his cap, said, “Anytime, Mr. Adams.”
Like Frank was some kind of big shot.
“How much you pay him?” I asked.
“Twenty bucks and a couple of compliments.” Frank pointed to the right, told me to go down one block and turn right again. “He gave me a name from one of the apartments overlooking the cemetery, said the guy saw the whole thing.”
Frank had buzzed my cell phone after I’d walked out of the police station, telling me to meet him at the front gates of Hollywood Forever Cemetery. He didn’t know I’d been picked up that morning. “What whole thing?” I asked.
“Somebody staged a raid on the cemetery last night, broke into Rudolph Valentino’s crypt. Looks like one of them was killed too, a woman. We’re still waiting for the police to contact next of kin, release a name.”
“The victim’s name was Sharon Bogle,” I said.
Frank half turned in the seat, asked, “How do you know?”
“I was the next of kin they notified.”
“No shit?”
“None at all,” I said, and told him about it.
The eyewitness lived in a third-floor apartment on the avenue bordering the cemetery to the east. Frank buzzed the name on the building directory with the eraser end of his pencil and dipped the leaded tip back to his notebook, intent on taking down my story without missing a single relevant detail. As the elevator doors opened to the third-floor landing he said, “Duplicity, theft, murder, and scandal—I only write about this stuff but you live it.”
“Not by choice.”
He lifted a ham-sized arm and knocked on the door. “I wish my family would do something interesting, like rob banks and get murdered. All they do is sell used cars and sit around the porch, getting fat and drunk.”
The door snapped open to a sixty-something man with a wild spray of gray hair curving around a polished, bald pate and glasses so thick an average-sighted person could have used them for bird-watching. Frank flashed a business card, said, “Frank Adams, Scandal Times,” and pointed a thumb toward me. “This is our staff photographer.”
The man held the card above the top rim of his glasses and ran it past his eyes a letter at a time, then slipped the card into the ink-stained pocket of his off-gray pocket T-shirt. “The whole thing happened beneath my balcony window. C’mon, I’ll show you.” He led us from the hallway into a studio with broad windows and a sliding glass door overlooking the cemetery. Movie posters and macabre, cartoonish drawings hung haphazardly on the walls and leaned against a drafting table. Frank stopped at the first drawing we passed, depicting a ghoul standing over the body of a woman, an ax in one hand and her head in the other. The drawing looked pulled from the pages of a comic book.
“Tales from the Crypt,” Frank said.
The witness tapped a long, yellowed fingernail against the frame and peered at Frank above the rim of his glasses. “You know it?”
“Are you kidding? I’ve read ’em all. When’s this one from, 1950?”
“Fifty-four.”
“Don’t tell me you’re the artist?”
“Tales from the Crypt was my first major gig.”
Frank slapped his forehead, lurched forward, and shook the man’s hand. “Of course! You’re Joe Harvest! You drew for EC and Marvel. I should have known right away by the drawing.” Frank generally yawned in the face of celebrity, so I first suspected he was being obsequious, hoping to wheedle information from the witness, but genuine excitement surged through his voice as the two discussed the fine points of comic-book illustration. For the first time since I’d met him, he seemed starstruck.
I jiggled the latch at the sliding glass door and stepped onto a balcony not much larger than a door laid flat, the lushly tended grounds of the cemetery laid out before me like paradise. The cityscape between downtown Los Angeles and the ocean was a little short on parkland—not counting the six country clubs restricted to private members—and so by default Hollywood Forever Cemetery was the largest tract of green on the West Side open to the public, even if its chief public was a dead one. The grass rolled to a small lake rimmed by headstones, monuments, and palm trees, and from the center of the lake rose an emerald-green island topped by a columned white temple that could have housed the remains of ancient Greeks—but didn’t. Across the lane from the lake an imposing mausoleum done in a more stodgy Greek Revival stood amid the palms, and beyond that, weeping willows, lush Bermuda, and granite markers stretched to the warehouse-like soundstages of Paramount Studios looming over the southern wall.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, focusing on the island.
“A great place to live if you’re dead,” Frank said, stepping behind me to the balcony’s threshold. “You see that building there?” He pointed to the mausoleum near the lake, its massive, black iron doors festooned with yellow police tape. Two beige sedans blocked the steps to the gates and a black van emblazoned with the LAPD logo straddled the grass to the side of the lane. “Valentino was buried behind those doors.”
I framed the scene and took a shot just as a crime-scene investigator stepped under the tape, a white surgical mask strapped across his mouth. “That whole building was his?”
The illustrator snorted and peered around Frank’s shoulder. “Just a crypt no bigger than the size of his coffin. They stack them away like boxes in that building, five or six crypts high. Valentino doesn’t even have the top bunk. He’s hidden away in the corner, about chest-high.”
“But he was a major star.”
“The most popular leading man of his time, the Sheik of Araby and all that,” Frank said. “You’d think he rated more than a shoe-box.”
“Valentino died in a hurry, kinda like he lived.” The illustrator stepped onto the balcony and gripped the railing for balance, as though afraid of pitching over the edge. “It was probably a good thing he died when he did.”
“Why’s that?”
“You hate to see the great ones fade away, don’t you? You hate to see all that youthful beauty corrupted. Valentino died in his thirties but still, he bloated up like a corpse his last few years and died so broke a friend of his had to donate the crypt. James Dean had the right idea. Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse.”
That, I thought, was an easy thing for an ugly old man to say.
“You were home last night?” Frank asked.
“Sure was.” The illustrator’s glasses slipped down his nose when he nodded and he returned them to their rightful place with a deft, one-fingered push. “I like to work late so I was more or less awake when it all happened.”
“What time was that?”
“About two in the morning. I’d just settled into bed when I heard the first noises, big bangs, like somebody whacking something with a sledgehammer, so I jumped up and looked outside.” He pantomimed his movements as he spoke, craning his neck left and right. “This part of town, we get a lot of street crime, not all that unusual to hear gunshots, people screaming at each other, sirens, tire screeches, a whole city nightscape of sound.” He pointed toward the cemetery. “But the neighbors on this side, at least they’re quiet.”
Frank and the illustrator flashed ghoulish smiles.
“Who’s down there?” I asked. “Other than Valentino?”
“Mostly the early pioneers of cinema, the silent and early talkie stars, like Peter Lorre, Marion Davies, Douglas Fairbanks. Directors like Cecil B. DeMille and John Huston. The stars of the post-silent-film period are mostly in Forest Lawn, near Glendale. That’s the real mother lode of celebrity graves.”
“So when you looked outside, what did you see?” Frank asked.
“Hardly anything.” The illustrator’s eyes blinked behind their thick glass shields, as though he couldn’t understand it. “Too dark, I guess.”
Frank glanced at me. Some eyewitness.
“Okay, then, what else did you hear?”
“Two screams. Terrified, female screams.” He opened his mouth to imitate the expression of a woman screaming, then whirled as though reacting to the sound. “So I ran to the balcony again, because the screams sounded like they came from the cemetery.” He gripped the railing and leaned his head over the edge, listening in memory to the sounds from the night before. “But that was it, just two screams, and then all kinds of noise, people running, whispers loud as shouts—hurry, come on, that sort of thing—clangs and bangs like tools being thrown into a van.”
“Van?” Frank asked. “Any idea about color or make?”
The illustrator shook his head. He didn’t know.
“How do you know it was a van?”
“It wasn’t completely dark. I could make out the shape. But mostly it sounded like a van, you know the ratcheting sound the side doors make when they open and close.”
“Hear anything after that?”
“The sirens, of course,” he said. “Took the cops a half hour to respond.”
“Screams in a cemetery probably didn’t worry them all that much,” Frank said. “I mean, everybody in there’s dead already.”