ON HIS WAY out, he opened the door to find Kyle Broadhead standing there. The professor was holding papers.
“As much as I try to maintain a policy of never expressing gratitude—on the theory that sooner or later the party involved will require a quid pro quo—I’ve come to thank you for Days of Wine and Roses. Behold: five pages.”
“I’m glad, but I can’t claim all the credit. You should talk to Blake Edwards.”
“God, no! I already owe him a favor for writing me out of S.O.B.” He saw the bundle under the other’s arm. “Off to the bank? You may now thank me and we’ll call it even. I’m the one who said you were wasting your time on film preservation when you’re sitting on a gold mine in blackmail material.”
“Nothing so felonious. I’m off to Woodland Hills, but first I have to stop by the West Hollywood police precinct and return something I borrowed from Sergeant Clifford.”
“The big red dog? Good Lord, you’re already in her debt for agreeing not to throw you in the hoosegow.”
“I think the statute of limitations has run out on that one. I really must be going; the brain I want to pick at the Country Home has a sell-by date.”
Broadhead’s face went flat. “You’re doing it, aren’t you? Jumping in up to your neck in another police case.” He held up his hands in a defensive gesture. “Include me out. I let my membership in the Junior G-Men expire after the last time.”
“What about that quid pro quo?”
“I knew it! What did I tell you?”
“Relax, Kyle. I’m kidding. I already owe you more than I can ever repay.”
Broadhead lowered his hands. “Who are you going to see?”
“Roy Fitzhugh.”
“Isn’t he dead?”
“Not yet; but that’s no reason to waste time.” Valentino pulled his door shut. On the way to the stairs he heard Broadhead saying: “I could’ve sworn I went to his funeral. If I don’t start making a record of these things I might wind up going to the same one over and over.”
The old character actor had a cheerful room with a fine view of the Santa Monica Mountains and a TV set with a forty-eight-inch screen, where an all-female talk show clucked away in merciful silence. He wore a crisp flannel shirt buttoned to the neck, navy sweats, comfortably worn loafers, and the chirpy air of a man ready to spring out of his wheelchair and dash around the neighborhood.
Valentino did a double-take when he saw him. From Kym Trujillo’s assessment of his precarious mental condition, he’d expected the man to have aged significantly since his last visit; but although he was bald except for a white fringe of hair, he was instantly recognizable from his many screen appearances. A few wrinkles and sags did nothing to detract from his trademark bulldog jaw and bright Irish blue eyes.
“I remember you!” Fitzhugh said. “You grilled me for an hour on Home Sweet Homicide. Last September it was.”
Valentino himself couldn’t have told what month he’d visited. He wondered if Kym had been thinking of someone else when she’d expressed doubts about his mental health. “I tried to talk you into doing the commentary on the DVD. You wouldn’t, so I had to pump you for everything I could get. You’ve brought me a great deal of happiness over the years, Mr. Fitzhugh. I’ve seen all your films.”
“Not all.”
The old man’s lips pleated when he smiled. His dentures did the rest of the work, in a glass by his neatly made bed.
“Every one.” Valentino looked him straight in the eye. “Bleak Street included.”
This drew no reaction. “I got a new one opening next week at Sid’s.”
“Sid’s?”
“Sid Grauman. I’ll have him hold two tickets for you.”
The founder of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre had been dead for many years; and there hadn’t been a new Roy Fitzhugh film since before that.
“Some screwball comedy thing,” he went on. “I forget the title. Jim Stewart’s in it, and that dish Kim Novak.”
He understood then. Memory was a strange creature. It could leave a man shaky about things that had been said or done a few minutes previously, and razor sharp when it came to events a half-century in the past. To confuse it with the present wasn’t unusual in the Home. It was the policy of the establishment to humor the victim rather than try to correct him and cause distress.
That suited Valentino’s purposes down to the ground.
“You’re very generous, sir. I can’t wait to see it. But it’s Bleak Street I wanted to talk about.”
When Fitzhugh frowned, that famous chin bunched up like a pile of rocks. “That swish Fletcher. Said I talked through my schnozz, I should take elocution lessons. I said, ‘Mr. Hughes has been paying me for a year to talk through my schnozz. If it’s Ronnie Colman you want, try MGM.’”
“You were pretty friendly with Van Oliver.”
“Benny’s swell.” For him, the production had just wrapped. “From the beginning he tells me to lay off that ‘Van Oliver’ stuff. He wasn’t any more of a crook than my dear ol da’, smuggling guns to the freedom fighters. Also he fixed it so my two scenes in the picture got scheduled on the first day of shooting and the last; that way I was on the payroll all the way through.” Suddenly his eyes narrowed. “What’s a college egghead want with an old dropout like me? I ain’t worked since they canned me from Barnaby Jones for blowing my lines. That never happened before.”
Valentino adjusted to the time shift. “We found a print of Bleak Street. The university’s planning a big publicity campaign to honor the film and fund our Preservation department. Anything you could tell us about it would be a big help.”
“That swish Fletcher said I talked through my schnozz. Know what I told him?”
He fired his next question before the conversation settled into a continuous loop. “What was Madeleine Nash like?”
Fitzhugh’s face was fascinating to watch. The clouds cleared and the years fell away as if a veil had dropped.
“Maggie was a doll. She wasn’t anything like the bad girl she played; that’s how good an actress she was. And she had a beautiful voice: Sang old Spanish songs on the set. She was Puerto Rican, but you’d never guess it except when she sang or got tired and forgot her voice coaching. She died too young.”
Valentino stiffened.
“I heard she got married and moved out of the country.”
“Who we talking about?”
He’d lost him again. Time for a subject change.
“You were the last person known to have seen Van—Benny—before he vanished. Did you tell the police everything you knew?”
“Mister, they came after me with everything but a rubber hose, and they only didn’t use it on account of all them reporters hanging around. You’d of thought the reason my old da’ and I went down to Mexico was to raise an army to invade San Diego. Did I tell ’em everything I know!” He leaned over in his wheelchair and spat on the rug; this was the Roy Fitzhugh of Corpse and Robbers, Cell Block, The Big Noise: one tough gorilla with a mad-on against the world. “They’d have to beat me to jelly before I’d give ’em the time of day; then, of course, I wouldn’t be able to.”
That old sixth sense kicked in; the flush the film archivist felt in a bazaar in Cairo or a Culver City junk shop just before he turned and found a treasure that had sat collecting dust and no interest for years, waiting for him to come to its rescue.
He spoke carefully, afraid to startle the old man out of lucidity, yet keenly aware that he might tire at any moment and be of no use as a source of information. “Mr. Fitzhugh, do you have any idea who might have been involved in Benny Obrilenski’s disappearance?”
The man in the wheelchair stared. He held this attitude so long his visitor worried that he was experiencing a seizure of some kind. He was thinking of calling for help when Fitzhugh opened his mouth. For a moment nothing came out, although he was working his lips. Then: “Talk to Ivy. If she wasn’t behind it, she sure as hell knows someone who knows who was.”
“Ivy?”
“Ivy Lane.” A toothless grin cracked the simian jaw. “Here’s where you tell me you seen all her pictures.”
A plump, bouncy nurse in a floral smock knocked and entered with a blood-pressure cuff. Valentino tamped down his annoyance, ashamed at himself for resenting the Home’s scrupulous attention to the residents’ health. But he could hear the clock ticking. There was no telling when the window would slam shut on Roy Fitzhugh’s recollections.
“One-thirty over eighty. I wish mine were as good.” She undid the cuff.
“Sister, I wish more’n that.” He winked and smacked her on the bottom.
Unfazed, she left them with a cheerful smile.
“Ivy Lane.” Valentino jogged the actor’s memory.
“Yeah. We had a name for her kind, but we didn’t bandy it around like they do now. The French come up with something more polite later: femme fatale.” He pronounced it “femmy fataly.” “Could she act? Search me. What you got on-screen was what you got off it. Made Dracula’s daughter look like Suzy Sunshine.”
Valentino had seen her menace Cornel Wilde in Switchback; a statuesque ash-blonde with the ruthless beauty of a sorceress from Greek myth and the tongue of a serpent.
“But she wasn’t in Bleak Street.” He suspected Fitzhugh’s mind had begun to wander again.
“Thanks to that swish Fletcher. He said I talked through my schnozz.”
He leapt in before the other could return to Square One. “The director had something to do with why she wasn’t in the film?”
Fitzhugh was back on track. “She was cast opposite Benny, but Fletcher nixed her on account of she was too tall for the leading man. That was bull. It went back to The Big Noise, when she got Fletch fired before he’d even shot one reel. I had a bit in that one, driving a getaway car. She and him never did hit it off, and she was running around with Mr. Hughes at the time, so she got her way.”
That checked. In his days as the owner of RKO, before he became a recluse, Howard Hughes had been infamous for his dalliances with his female players. “In that case, her complaint was with the director, not the star.”
“You’d think. But she didn’t see it that way. She thought Benny’d rigged it so he wouldn’t look like a midget. She threw a hissy right there on the set; said she’d get square with Benny if it was the last thing she did. Fletcher had to threaten to call security to get her to leave.”
“There must have been other witnesses. Why didn’t anyone else come forward?”
“It was just us four. Benny and me was shooting close-ups to insert in post-production. Ivy just showed up, to have it out with Benny.”
“What did he do?”
“Nothing. You don’t know him. He never turned a hair no matter what you said or done to him. That’s one of the reasons I liked him.”
“Why didn’t Melvin Fletcher tell all this to the police?”
Fitzhugh’s face went sly. In the old days that expression had lent extra weight to his heavies. “I told you he was a swish. She called him a queer to his face during The Big Noise. He sure as shootin’ wasn’t going to come clean with the cops. It was a jailable offense, and what was worse, he’d never work in this town again.”
“Still, it’s a long way from there to accusing Ivy Lane of murder.”
“Oh, she’d never get her hands dirty; not with her connections.”
“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.