THE CAR GLIDED through neighborhoods Valentino knew intimately, but he could not have identified any of them. As Mark David Turkus spoke they seemed as foreign as craters on the moon.
The tycoon might have been retelling the plot of a movie he’d seen; but then that was the nature of this entire episode in the film archivist’s life. No other quest had so closely resembled the grail he sought.
“Uncle Connie” had perfected his trade while serving with the U.S. Navy Shore Patrol during the First World War, rounding up AWOL sailors in New York City gin mills that had been declared off-limits by the local base commander and smashing the establishments to pieces. Eventually his superiors had decided that he was taking his job too seriously; he was court-martialed and given a dishonorable discharge.
With that stigma on his record, most legitimate employment was denied him. Just what kind of work he’d found to support himself was something the family preferred not to dwell upon. When he suddenly took the train to California, it seemed logical to assume it was either to avoid arrest or retribution on the part of his associates.
Official disgrace presented no obstacle to the employment he found on the coast. There, during the Great Depression, he founded a freelance security firm that hired itself out to all the major studios.
“The operatives were known as the Blackbirds,” the billionaire said. “Maybe you heard of them.”
“Strikebreakers, weren’t they?”
“Not right away. They were hired originally to protect the stars from blackmail. In those days gangsters threatened to throw acid in their faces if they didn’t pony up. A lot of those goons suddenly took to greener pastures, so it stands to reason the Blackbirds were longer on offense than defense.
“When that crisis ended, the firm branched out. The contract players were forming labor unions. Fair wages and acceptable terms cut into the studios’ bottom line, so the Turk’s men broke up meetings, shanghaied union organizers across the state line, and waded into picket lines with blackjacks and brass knuckles. They wore identical black suits to avoid roughing each other up by mistake; hence the nickname.”
“They failed in the end,” Valentino said. “The Screen Actors Guild is one of the most powerful in the country.”
“Uncle Connie was no quitter. Kicking him out of the navy didn’t stop him from doing the same work on the other side of the law. Having to flee the heat back East didn’t scare him straight. When the mob backed off and the union survived, the Blackbirds went deeper underground, taking jobs the industry didn’t dare do in-house.”
“Such as?”
“Don’t be naïve. What’s it take to go from assault and battery to murder? Just a slight turn of the screw.”
Twenty grim years passed, during which the elder Turkus passed in and out of police headquarters as through a revolving door. The last time during his career was in connection with the questionable “suicide” of George Reeves, TV’s Superman, in 1959.
“There were others that didn’t make the front page, of course,” said Mark Turkus. “Too many, I think, for him to be involved in most of them. The police even called him out of retirement to ask him about Bob Crane’s murder in nineteen seventy-eight.”
The Hogan’s Heroes star. Valentino remembered the sordid details of a crime that was never solved.
Turkus went on. “The Black Dahlia case doesn’t sound like him; but whenever powerful forces were involved, there was Connie’s M.O., as big and fat as he himself got to be. As who wouldn’t, on his commissions?
“I doubt he shared them all the time either,” he added. “A man who worked himself up to the top doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty.”
There was more. In 1950, the Turk was arrested on suspicion of smuggling illegal aliens into the U.S. The theory was he delivered them to the studios to perform as extras, pocketing their wages in return for bringing them across the border. He spent three days in custody, then was released for lack of evidence.
“That was tame for him,” said his nephew. “But he seems never to have passed up the chance to turn a fast buck.”
“Wow.”
“My legacy, I’m afraid. It’s one of the reasons I always conduct business on the up-and-up. Even my fiercest competitors agree that at my most aggressive I’ve never violated any law. That would include you, I suppose.”
Valentino had to give him that much, however much rope the system of free enterprise offered to pitiless entrepreneurs with unlimited funds.
“Was he ever brought to justice?”
The billionaire’s smile was grim. “Only the Old Testament kind. He was diagnosed with terminal cancer in nineteen eighty-six and blew his brains out with his old service pistol. By then he’d been retired for twenty years.”
“How well did you know him?”
“I only saw him once, at a family funeral. By then he was as big as a house. Here.” He slid a flat wallet from an inside pocket, took out a creased Polaroid photograph, and handed it over.
It had been taken from a distance, on a plot of ground dotted with headstones in tidy rows. He was easy to spot in the soberly dressed crowd. The pinstripe suit did nothing to disguise a parade-float of a man whose jowls and multiple chins stood out from the shadow of his felt hat.
“I found it in my mother’s collection of family snapshots,” Turkus said. “I doubt she realized he was in the frame or she’d never have kept it. I carry it around as a reminder not to get too sweet on myself.
“He was my father’s brother. They hadn’t spoken in years, and they didn’t on that occasion. No one was more surprised than I was when Uncle Connie left me twenty thousand dollars in his will.”
“Why you?”
“Good question. I can’t think he was driven by generosity. Maybe he did it to thumb his nose at the rest of his family. That was the seed money I used to start Supernova.”
He raised his hands from his knees and spread them. “Now you know why I can’t let you market Bleak Street.”
“Does Teddie Goodman know?”
“She’s my employee, not my confidante. I wouldn’t have told you if I thought there was any other way of stopping you.”
“What do you know about your uncle and Van Oliver?”
“Only that he was questioned along with a lot of others. I can thank the length of the list of suspects for keeping him off center stage. That won’t be the case if the story gets raked up again. My name alone will put him square in the spotlight and the company with it.” He lowered his hands, linked the fingers, and stared down at them. “It’s not just me that would suffer. A public-relations blow like that would put thousands of people out of work and possibly trigger a national recession.”
“But what was his motive?”
“Who knows? Maybe a mob contract, for whatever purposes. Like I said: anything for a buck.”
“I wish you’d told me all this at the start.”
“Would it have made any difference?”
“We’ll never know now.”
The car ghosted along for blocks, its occupants silent. Then Valentino said, “What if Constantine Turkus is cleared of any implication in the Oliver case? Would you lift the restraining order and allow UCLA to distribute the film?”
Mark David Turkus turned his attention from his hands clasped as in prayer to his fellow passenger. “No one can prove a man didn’t do something. That’s a basic law of nature.”
“Of U.S. law too; that’s why the prosecution has to prove guilt. In order to clear your uncle, I’ll have to identify the real killer.”
“After all this time, when all the experts have failed? And they called me a cock-eyed dreamer.”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“But what if it turns out Connie is the killer?”
“He’s dead. It isn’t as if sitting on the evidence would let a guilty man go free. No one would have to know.”
They’d circled the campus and were approaching the spot where Valentino had been picked up. Turkus tapped on the Plexiglas and signaled the driver to pull over to the curb. He twisted in his seat to face the archivist. The corporate mask was back in place, rendering his face unreadable.
“Just so we’re clear,” he said. “If you manage to name the party behind Van Oliver’s disappearance and it isn’t Constantine Venezelos Turkus, you’ll go public with it, closing the investigation for good. If it is my uncle, you’ll suppress the information.”
“That’s what I’m offering.”
“It’s a gamble. Your silence alone would guarantee that the speculation will continue. It’s bound to come around to him.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t risky. But apart from adopting Blackbird tactics, you won’t stop me from seeing this through to the end. If it comes out in your favor, you’ll never have to worry about Oliver again. And there’s something else to be gained.”
The eyes behind the glasses shone flatly, like plastic discs. So far as the man could be read at all, Valentino suspected he knew what was coming.
He didn’t keep him in suspense. “You’ll have peace of mind. If no capital crimes can definitely be laid to your family’s door, you’ll never have to wonder if your career was built on murder.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“If you find out what happened to Van Oliver and who was responsible, Supernova will withdraw its suit and you’ll be free to do what you want with Bleak Street; sell it, distribute it, burn it. The film is yours.” He held out his hand.
Valentino grasped it. Now if only I had it, he thought.