CHAPTER TWO

 

 

Paddy’s funeral didn’t draw like it would have, once upon a time. He got a few faded stars, though, notably William Powell, over eighty and seldom seen outside of Palm Springs, and Powell’s former costar Joan Crawford, who arrived veiled like a sultan’s favorite wife. Also Bob Hope, who remembered when Paddy had been a gate guard at Paramount in the thirties. So did the director Billy Wilder, another attendee, who claimed it was Paddy who’d first snuck him onto the Paramount lot.

The priest who led the service at All Souls Chapel hadn’t known Paddy that well, which may have been a break for both of them. The gaps in the priest’s knowledge had been alternately filled in and papered over by my wife Ella, a screenwriter and former Hollywood publicist. It was hard for me to say, while listening to the priest sum up Paddy’s life based on Ella’s notes, whether she’d leaned more on her screenwriting or her public relations experience when she’d written them. Paddy came off as a kind of modern-dress Robin Hood, robbing from the rich of greater Hollywood and giving to the poor. That Paddy had died poor himself helped to support the fiction, perhaps. Anyway, no one present demanded equal time.

I referred to Ella just now as my wife. It would have been more honest to say she was my estranged wife. We hadn’t been living together for over a year. Not long after our twentieth wedding anniversary, our son Billy had been reported missing in Vietnam. Ella had never really forgiven me for taking on a job while we’d waited for news of Billy, though we’d continued to live under the same roof for a time. When she’d finally been ready to move on, she done it without me. Our daughter Gabrielle, who was now at UCLA, split her time away from the campus between my little place in Malibu and Ella’s mountain hideaway.

My son was much on my mind during Paddy’s funeral, perhaps because Billy had never gotten a funeral himself. Ella wouldn’t hear of it, not even after the American POWs had returned in Operation Homecoming and Billy hadn’t been among them. Paddy, Billy’s volunteer grandfather, had supported Ella in this. He’d never stopped believing that Billy would show up one day.

Every time I thought of Billy at the funeral, I touched the pocket of my suit coat to make sure I hadn’t lost the MIA bracelet Paddy had worn for him. It had been returned with the rest of Paddy’s effects when his body had been released. I’d considered burying it with Paddy, which would have given Billy a small piece of a funeral. But I didn’t want to make a hard day harder for Ella. For the same reason, I didn’t carry the copper band where she could see it.

That was a precaution I’d hardly needed to take. After a few mumbled words, Ella avoided me during the service, leaning on Gabrielle’s arm instead. At the Maguire gravesite in Calvary Cemetery—just one row down from Lou Costello’s, as Paddy had liked to brag—Ella and Gabby had looked almost like sisters, both slender, Gabby taller and dark, Ella shorter and blond.

After Paddy’s coffin had joined that of his wife Peggy, I found myself at the head of an unofficial receiving line, made up of former Hollywood Security clients and even a few ex-employees. Most had a story about Paddy to tell but few had kept in touch with him.

One who had was a short, balding black man named Casper Wheeler. I knew him as the owner of Wheeler House, a hotel in South LA whose Amber Room had been one of the best spots for live jazz in the 1950s. I’d never associated Wheeler and Paddy. When I admitted that, Wheeler shook his head sadly.

“Oh yes, we went way back. I knew his Miss Peggy, too, a fine woman. She was the brains of the outfit, as Paddy always said. I was shocked when I saw him recently. He looked so wasted away. Losing Miss Peggy did that to him. The spark went out in him, that’s what I believe, the spark of life that holds a person together. When it’s gone, the wind just takes what it wants till there’s nothing left.”

The last person in line was Gabrielle. Before we were done hugging, she told me her mother was waiting for her in their hired limo, establishing a timetable for our meeting. There were tears in her big eyes, but she didn’t offer up any stories about her ersatz grandfather. We’d both had our fill of those for the moment.

“How’s the Mannix business?” she asked instead, naming a currently popular private eye show. The series’ original premise had had an old school PI going to work for a modern, computer-driven detective agency, which reminded Gabrielle of my situation at the reborn Hollywood Security.

“Next time I see Mike Connors,” I said, naming Mannix’s star. “I’ll ask him.”

Gabrielle waited me out. She didn’t believe in unanswered questions. Or in repeating herself. I often felt sorry for her professors.

“It’s fine,” I finally said. “The young guys treat me like the interns treated Dr. Gillespie.”

“Just don’t let them wheel you around in a chair.”

I promised I wouldn’t. Gabrielle had a different promise in mind.

“You’re going to get the guy who murdered him, aren’t you, Dad?”

“Given Paddy’s history, it could’ve been a woman.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do. And I will.”

I didn’t add the word try, didn’t even think it. This was one promise I wouldn’t hedge on.

“It shouldn’t have happened,” Gabrielle said. Then she said what we all were thinking. “It shouldn’t have happened now, when Paddy was no threat to anyone.”

I thought she was getting philosophical, as Captain Grove had in the alley. For Gabrielle, it would have been more in character, since she was a poet. “Not a beat poet,” she’d joked once. “An offbeat one.”

I knew we weren’t discussing philosophy when she fixed me with a look she’d learned at her mother’s knee. The now-hear-this look, I called it.

“That’s a clue, Dad. The murder shouldn’t have happened in the present, so it must have happened in the past. You’ll have to remember that to solve it.”

“So now I have to solve a murder and a riddle?”

“Dad.” Her tone was reproving, but her eyes were now dry. “Take care of yourself. No leading with your right.”

“No leading with my right,” I said.