“VALENTINO?” SAID THE woman on the other end of the telephone.
“Valentino,” said Valentino.
“Seriously?”
“Unfortunately.”
She chuckled. The distinctive husky voice had been further roughened by sixty years of cigarettes and aging vocal cords. “I was told you died seven years before I was born.”
“I’m glad I didn’t. I’m a fan.”
“You needn’t flatter me, Mr. Valentino, or whatever your real name is. What can you want of an old relic like me?”
Ivy Lane had proved remarkably easy to locate. Decades after her last appearance on film—one scene in an episode of Ironside—she was still a paid-up member of the Screen Actors Guild, where a contact had passed along her address and phone number, swearing him to strictest confidence.
He’d decided to play it straight. To one of his temperament, laying his cards on the table came more easily than subterfuge, and usually led to better results.
“I’m with the Film and TV Preservation Department at UCLA. I’d like to interview you about your involvement with the filming of Bleak Street.” He held his breath. If his interest made her suspicious enough to refuse, it would at least indicate that Roy Fitzhugh hadn’t made up the story of a confrontation on the set.
Did he hear a slight gasp? It was difficult to tell over the wire. When she spoke, her tone was unchanged.
“Great heavens. I haven’t heard about that one in many, many years. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I had no involvement in the production. I had to leave the cast because of a scheduling conflict.”
He fudged a bit (but then so had she, if what Fitzhugh had said was on the level). “That was my information. It’s what I wanted to ask you about.”
“It’s a filthy day. Would one o’clock tomorrow be convenient?”
He hesitated, then said it would be if it was for her, and they broke the connection.
Her invitation, coming so quickly, had been unexpected; but if this turned out to be another bum steer, he’d at least have the pleasure of adding another personal meeting with a silver-screen icon to his collection.
Valentino had no idea why Teddie and Turkus wanted to suppress Bleak Street; but he was just as determined to crack the Van Oliver case. He could no more stop what he’d started than he could throw a projector into reverse in the middle of a showing, breaking the film beyond repair.
The scenery outside the power plant was depressing. The smog lay now on the rooftops, causing school closures and warnings to the elderly and the very young to remain indoors. There was an advantage to Valentino that the dip in senior-citizen shuttles and school buses made the rush hour less harrowing than usual. He reached Santa Monica in record time. There a retired Foley mixer had promised him a lead to the missing courtship scene from the Judy Garland/James Mason A Star Is Born; for years, restorers had been forced to use production stills to bridge the plot gap under the existing soundtrack. The film’s popularity suffered: Moving pictures were expected to move. But once he got there, the old man tried to hold him up for a bribe in return for information that was patently a bluff.
“Thanks for your time,” he said, turning toward the door; and for wasting mine.
He was disappointed, but not devastated. Most leads led nowhere, through deliberate misdirection or faulty memory or mistaken notions of the worth of the item in play; it was part of the game, and one reason that a true discovery tasted so sweet. On this smutty day, however, the return trip stuck him in the slow-moving sludge of hometown traffic, with nothing to entertain him on his AM-S/M radio but gas-bag talk show hosts, a college basketball contest for dead-last in the standings, ads pitching cures for erectile dysfunction, and rap marathons that left him with a pounding headache and despair for the future of the human race.
“‘The Man that Got Away’ my foot, Judy,” he said aloud. “Make that my career.”
“No one said it’d be all gala premieres and your footprints on the Walk of Fame, Val.”
This voice, the only other one in the car, made him jerk the wheel. The driver of a Land Rover passing him on the right blasted his horn, sending him back over the line.
He wrestled his cell phone from his pants pocket and glanced at the screen. He’d butt-dialed Kyle Broadhead, who’d overheard every word. Valentino hit END without replying.
Overnight the wind shifted to the southwest, blowing the noxious clouds out over the Pacific. A freshly minted sun in a clear sky shone on pink stucco, yellow adobe, red ceramic tile, and swimming pools like bits of sparkling blue glass. It was one of those mornings the Chamber of Commerce chose to roust photographers from bed in order to take the postcard shot for the tourists. With no pressing issues awaiting him at work, Valentino took his toasted bagel and fresh-squeezed orange juice out onto the rear terrace to read the trades and spend the morning admiring Max Fink’s neighborhood: the place as it had looked in 1927, when the box-office baron broke ground on The Oracle.
Afterward, its new owner put on a pale blue shirt and his best summerweight suit. He debated with himself over whether to wear a necktie, then selected one of the handful he kept for excursions east. The old Hollywood and the new had different standards. He wanted to make a good impression.
Driving, he split his attention between the rearview mirror and the road, looking for black town cars with shuttered headlights. When none materialized, he relaxed. A steady diet of crime movies was bad for the imagination.
He drove among convertibles with their tops down, waving at clever-faced youths selling maps to the stars’ homes (the scuttlebutt they sometimes sold him was a good deal more reliable than the maps themselves, dozens of which crammed his glove compartment with their out-of-date information), entered Laurel Canyon, and pulled into a scooped-out parking area at the base of a stupendously long flight of flagstone steps. His watch read 12:45 P.M. He hoped he wouldn’t be late; he hadn’t counted on having to scale the Matterhorn.
The house was one of those stately sprawling old Spanish villas pegged to the side of the canyon, a fortunate survivor of the wildfires that visited the place almost annually. Heavy rain in the spring created lush undergrowth, to be turned into kindling when the Santa Ana winds blew hot and dry from Mexico; all that was required was a spark from a backyard grill or a carelessly flung cigarette butt or just a heated argument to turn the place into an inferno. (Broadhead: “Fires, hurricanes, mudslides, earthquakes. God threw us out of Paradise once. When will we get the message?”)
The steps staggered up and up and up the geological ages, literally a stairway to the stars: When Beverly Hills ran out of room for private palaces, the glitterati had fled this direction. Climbing with the aid of an iron handrail, Valentino felt a niggling sense of déjà vu. He wondered where he’d seen the place before. He was sure this was a part of the canyon he’d never visited.
Then he remembered: It was the house where Ivy Lane had shot Cornel Wilde in Switchback. These were the very steps where Wilde had stumbled and then rolled down, tumbling end over end, bouncing off stone and iron, finally landing on his back in the street. Blank, staring eyes turned toward a heaven too far beyond his mortal reach, captured in extreme close-up as sirens approached, growing louder and louder until THE END came up and the orchestra drowned them out.
Fade to black.
Co-star Ivy Lane had either lent her own home to the production or formed some kind of attachment to it during filming and bought or rented it later; years later, perhaps, in a fit of nostalgia. It looked less forbidding, almost cheerful, in color on a sunny day than it had in black-and-white. Someone had removed the sinister hedges and planted flowers in boxes under the windows.
Had he come there after dark, when the jagged stone steps and the pale-stucco house at the top would be lit only by the streetlamps strung out along the base of the cliff, leaving the rest in indigo shadow, he might have made the connection immediately. As it was, he had the eerie sensation of having stepped directly into a frame from a motion picture.
The house itself was typical of the regional culture, an hommage to the haciendas that had been brutally bulldozed to make room for an earlier generation of bungalows and motor courts. On the expansive front porch, Valentino leaned against a post of piñon pine and waited for his breath to catch up and his heart rate to slow to normal. It had been a long ascent even for a young man, and part of it through Cornel Wilde’s ghost. Finally he pushed away from the post, straightened his tie, and pressed a coral button in a verdigris copper setting.
Instantly the door was opened by a man whose broad bulk filled the opening as thoroughly as a second door. Valentino had the uneasy feeling that he’d been tracked all the way from the floor of the canyon, like an intruder wandering into an ambush. The man wore a tan poplin sportcoat over a white tailored shirt, open at the neck to display his smooth tanned muscular throat. His hair started two inches above the bridge of his flat nose and grew so close to the skull it left the bony structure exposed. Black, tiny eyes under a rocky outcrop of brow and a blue-coal chin suggested a direct line to Cro-Magnon man. In Ivy Lane’s day, he’d have been the man who stood behind the man barking the orders, wearing tight-fitting chalk stripes and a white tie on a black shirt.
The first words out of the man’s mouth were even less encouraging than his monolithic demeanor.
“Are you with the police or the coroner’s office?”