HARRIET WAS WRONG.
Partially, anyway. While the theater Bozal had installed in the lower level of his home didn’t make The Oracle look like a dump tailor-made for showing barely acceptable features, it outstripped the grandest screening rooms commissioned by major movie stars and most neighborhood picture houses.
He’d taken a larger-than-average basement, extended it under his multi-car garage, and hired a team of contractors to turn it into something Valentino could describe only as an underground mall: what seemed miles of tiled hallway passed a replica of a 1930s automobile showroom, complete with Depression-era models in mint condition on display, brightly gleaming, a mid-century-type service station built of white glazed brick with a black 1955 Porsche pulled up to the pumps—waiting, it seemed, for James Dean to bring the engine to life and speed toward his date with destiny—and a men’s haberdashery stocked with mannequins decked out in vests, double-breasted suits, and snappy fedoras, decorated with patriotic posters advertising war bonds to fight the Axis.
Their way led at last to the theater itself, a plush Art Moderne palace lit by wall sconces, with stadium seating to accommodate two dozen viewers and gold velvet curtains cloaking a screen with a stage for live performances between shows.
“It’s magnificent,” was all the visitor could find to say.
“You should’ve seen it when I bought the place. The previous owner hosted cockfights down here. His neighbors turned him in. He needed quick money to pay his lawyer, so I got it for a song. ’Course, more excavation and the retrofitting ate up the difference. Let’s go see the projection booth.”
A door concealed in the molding led up a short flight of stairs into a square chamber with walls of plain concrete. It contained an ultramodern laser projector mounted to the ceiling and a black steel giant resembling a locomotive. It had reels the size of platters and a threading system as complicated as the Gordian knot.
Valentino goggled at this. “Is that a ’forty-four Bell and Howell?”
“’Forty. I scored it in a junk shop in Tehuantepec, where it’d been busy collecting dust and mouse turds for sixty years. Took me another ten to track down replacement parts from all over the world. I had to buy a shut-down theater in Prague just to get the lens assembly. Outfit in Detroit made the arc lamp from scratch; Bausch and Lomb the reflector mirror. I lucked out on the mechanic. He was retired, living right down there in the Valley. He’d never worked on a projector before, but it’s just a series of simple machines, going back to the Greeks.”
“How big is your silver-nitrate collection?”
“Big enough. But I went to all that bother for just one.”
Bozal turned and took a pizza-size film can off a steel utility rack. “Ever hear of a mug named Van Oliver?”
The abrupt question surprised Valentino. Plainly the old man had little patience for small talk. “Old-time picture actor. He was murdered, supposedly. Another one of Hollywood’s unsolved mysteries.”
His host jerked his chin, approving. Aged and slight as he was—his gold Rolex and cuff links looked too heavy for his fragile wrists—all his movements were steady and his eyes bright as a bird’s. “That’s refreshing. Most people don’t know Van Oliver from Oliver Hardy.”
“We can’t all be buffs. Most people wouldn’t know him. He only made one movie, and it—” He stopped, looking at the can. He felt the old familiar thrill.
Bozal’s smile was wicked. It was the privilege of rich men to carry suspense to the brink of cruelty. “Officially, he just disappeared. My bet is they buried him up in the hills, or rowed him out past Catalina and dumped him overboard in a cement overcoat. In those days, you couldn’t convict anyone of murder in the state of California without a corpse. I guess the law didn’t want to fry someone just because someone else decided to take a powder and forgot to tell anyone, but it sure sold a lot of shovels and quicklime.”
“It was almost a double murder, if you can apply the term to a movie studio,” said Valentino. “He’d been getting the kind of star treatment they reserve for major properties: elocution lessons, tailors, a big flashy car, dates with glamour queens, and an army of press agents, so he could make a splash during interviews and premieres. Only he couldn’t, because he died before the film was released. They shelved it. That was the end of RKO.”
“Helped by that nut Howard Hughes. Sooner or later he drove everything he owned into the ground. You can’t keep hiring and firing and quadrupling budgets and stay in business. Lucy told me the best day in her life was the day she bought the studio, four years after RKO fired her.”
“You knew Lucille Ball?”
“Through Desi. In those days the Spanish colony in Hollywood was thick as thieves.”
Valentino had never met anyone closely connected with I Love Lucy, Desi Arnaz, and the birth of Desilu Studios.
“That was in ’fifty-seven,” Bozal said. “They might have recut and reshot the picture to build up one of the other players and brought it out later, but the noir cycle was on its last legs. Welles’s Touch of Evil came out the next year and tanked.”
He snarled out the side of his mouth. “Universal butchered Evil in post-production; shoved Welles right off the cliff, so of course it under-performed. Nothing’s changed in sixty years except the suits. Anyway, the Oliver vehicle went the same way as its star. Nobody gave a rat’s behind about preservation then. Re-release was strictly for proven properties, the studios had already sold their old libraries to television, and there was no video. Desilu edited down the script to an hour for TV, but none of the networks would touch it, even with a new cast. In this town a bad rep has a half-life of a hundred years. You know the title?”
“Bleak Street,” Valentino said. “Oliver played a racketeer loosely based on Bugsy Siegel. Only he didn’t play him the way pioneer actors played gangsters in the thirties. The few insiders who saw the dailies said he had an entirely new take on the character. If the movie had been allowed to open, it would have revolutionized the crime film the way The Godfather did fifteen years later.”
“Not just crime pictures. Acting; only it didn’t seem like acting. Edward G. Robinson was nasty, Paul Muni a goon, Jimmy Cagney was like a bomb about to go off. Oliver was entirely natural; you wouldn’t know he was reading lines. Also it’s clear no stunt doubles were used for his fight scenes. It wasn’t like watching a movie, more like something happening right in front of you, that you might be sucked into any time: disturbing, which was ideal for the form. There was even a rumor he wrote the screenplay himself under a pseudonym, or at least made changes in the text. The plot had all the usual clichés, but I’d stand the production up beside anything else out there.”
As he warmed to his subject, Bozal’s speech shifted away from street lingo toward more formal language, using jargon familiar to any story conference. Clearly the old man’s passion outstripped his affectations. What was more to the point, he wasn’t parroting something he’d read or heard; he spoke as someone who’d seen the evidence firsthand. The shock of hope Valentino had felt settled into a cozy hum. He had little doubt now what was in the can.
He wondered if he was a latent masochist. He put off asking the question that was foremost on his mind. Instead he drew out the excruciating pleasure of suspense.
“What made everyone so certain he was killed? Sudden success can be terrifying. Maybe he just dropped out of sight because he couldn’t take the pressure. It was easier then to relocate and make up a new identity.”
“His kind thrives on pressure; enduring it as well as applying it. How do you think he did such a good job capturing a gangster’s personality? He came here from New York to work for Mickey Cohen, the local mob boss.”
“Doing what?”
“Bodyguard; not that the little twerp needed one. He already had an army on the job. He thought surrounding himself with muscle made him look like a bigger shot than he was. Some folks said Oliver got bored with sitting around Mickey’s house in Brentwood watching Roy Rogers and started making hits on the side.”
“Sounds like typical Hollywood hokum.”
“Probably. That last part anyway. But he’d been seen around town with Mickey, shooting golf and picking up dames in nightclubs. When the Bleak Street hype started, the attention got to be too much for his employers. They were camera shy after so many big-time operators got themselves deported or shut up for tax evasion. They cut their losses same way they did with Bugsy Siegel back in ’forty-seven, only by then they’d learned not to be so public about it.”
Valentino banked his fires. His profession had taken him close to criminal territory before, and he hadn’t enjoyed the experience. “How much of this is likely and how much gossip?”
Bozal tented his shoulders, let them drop. “In this town, who can say? Is there any other place so visible, yet so frequently out of focus?” He drummed his fingers on the edge of the film can.
His guest couldn’t hold out any longer. “Where’d you find it?”