THE VOICE WAS a deep drum roll. Stepping back, Valentino stared up into a pair of nostrils like ship’s funnels. The line he’d been fed (he thought it a tasteless joke) sounded rehearsed; once again he had that sense of Been There Before. He knew this man from somewhere.
“Neither,” he said. “I have an appointment with Miss Lane. The name is Valentino.”
The man-mountain rumbled. The noise seemed to indicate amusement. “Yeah, sure.”
He suppressed a sigh. Establishing his right to a name so well known in the entertainment world presented an obstacle almost daily. One generation remembered the star of The Sheik and Blood and Sand, avatars of the silent era; another compared him to a fashion designer of international renown. So far as he knew, he was related to neither. Experience had taught him to keep his business cards handy. He gave one to the ogre, who glanced at it and poked it into his handkerchief pocket.
“All her appointments are canceled, sorry.” The door started to close.
A female voice called from the other side of the poplin sportcoat. “Who is it, Vivien?”
Vivien?
“Someone who says his name is Valentino. He has cards.” He sneered the last sentence. “I told him—”
“Yes, I heard that part. Show him in.”
When at last the giant stirred, it was like tectonic plates shifting. He moved to one side, leaving just enough space for Valentino to enter the house sideways. Coming from bright sunlight, he was blinded temporarily by the dim illumination inside. From out of the gloom came a hand, trapping his in a solid grip. As his pupils caught up, he found himself facing a woman nearly as tall as he. She wore large red-framed glasses and a tailored red suit without a blouse. This did wondrous things for a figure that didn’t seem to need to have much for it. Her honey-colored hair was caught loosely behind her neck.
“I’m Georgia Tanner, Miss Lane’s legal representative. She mentioned your conversation.”
“Then I won’t have to explain myself.”
“Something about one of her films.”
“Bleak Street; except it really wasn’t one of her films. She dropped out before the cameras rolled.”
“What business are you in again?”
Vivien retrieved the card from his pocket, looked at it again, and presented it.
“‘Valentino,’” he said, as if she couldn’t read what was on the card. “‘Film Detective.’ A dick. I said it the second I saw him.”
Looking at him again, Valentino felt a shock of recognition. Now that there was some distance between them, he could take in the huge man’s blunt features and heavily muscled build in perspective. He was older than he looked; splinters of silver in his stubble suggested he dyed his hair. In the early eighties, under the name “Bull” Broderick, he’d been interviewed in TV Guide as Lou Ferrigno’s stunt double in The Incredible Hulk. The foyers and pantries of Greater Los Angeles were littered with more half-forgotten faces than a cutting room floor.
Valentino told Georgia Tanner where he worked. “Calling myself a detective gets more attention in the entertainment industry than archivist. My job is to locate and acquire rare motion pictures so they can be preserved for future generations to see and appreciate.”
“Goodness, you are a detective.”
“In a way. Some films seem just as determined to stay lost as any fugitive from justice.” He was suffocating from the lack of a change of subject. “May I see Miss Lane?”
“I don’t see what help she could be, since as you say she wasn’t in—what was it, again?”
He repeated the title. He was pretty sure she hadn’t forgotten it. At this point in her career, she had yet to develop Smith Oldfield’s impervious mien. “So far as I know, she’s one of only two surviving actors who had anything to do with the production. Forgive me, but I didn’t think I’d have to jump through hoops just to ask your client some friendly questions.”
The professional smile left her face. “Miss Lane is dead. She committed suicide late last night or early this morning.”
The news came as a physical blow. He was struck by the thought that he’d never lived in a world that didn’t contain Ivy Lane. She had sounded so lively over the phone, so much more like herself than the dozens of starlets who had attempted to imitate her in roles patterned after her iconic image.
“Have the police definitely established suicide?”
“We’re waiting for them now,” Georgia Tanner said. “She always came down promptly at eleven for lunch. Today, when she was more than a half hour late, Vivien went up to look in on her. He tried to wake her, but her skin was already cool. He called me at my office and I came straight over. I found an empty prescription bottle on her bedside table. It was Seconal.”
“Vivien is the butler?”
“Bodyguard,” said the giant.
Valentino looked from him to the attorney. “Why would an eighty-seven-year-old woman need a bodyguard?”
“She didn’t. She hadn’t since she quit being Hollywood’s Bitch Goddess when Cinemascope came in.” She smiled tightly. “Does my language shock you?”
“I’m familiar with all the euphemisms: femme fatale, bad girl, vamp, harpy, bitch goddess. They predate the rating system.”
“Yes.” She seemed disappointed. “Anyway, she was accustomed to having one around. She played so many spider women, you see, and some moviegoers in those innocent days had trouble separating the image from the reality. That was over long before Vivien came. In his ten years here he’s been more of a companion. He was absolutely devoted to her.”
“Still am.”
Did the big man’s voice break? Valentino looked at him again. His eyes were pink around the edges and slightly swollen. He felt a little more kindly to him then. They were both fans of Ivy Lane.
“Can either of you think of a reason she’d want to end her life?”
A glance passed between attorney and bodyguard. She shook her head. “That’s up to the police, I suppose.”
“May I see her?”
She was startled. “Whatever for?”
“I’ve only known her on-screen. This may be my last chance to see her in—well, person.”
“Creep.” Vivien spoke under his breath.
Georgia Tanner consulted the floor. It was blue and white Mexican tile, the same shining squares William Demarest had dropped his cigar ashes on when he came to investigate the armored-car robbery at the center of Switchback’s convoluted plot.
She looked up. “I don’t suppose it would do any harm, if you don’t touch anything.”
“I go too.” It was a line Vivien never got to use in his non-speaking Hulk role.
They passed through large, sun-splashed rooms and up an open swirl of staircase with a brass banister like the railing of an ocean liner. Original paintings for posters advertising Ivy Lane’s movies lined the staircase wall: Ivy locked in steamy embraces with Wilde, Dick Powell, John Payne, Robert Mitchum, Alan Ladd. Invariably, a shadowy figure lurked in the keylit background, gripping a gun; Peter Lorre, Elisha Cook, Jr., Steve Brodie—a pictorial Who’s Who of heavies from Central Casting’s exhaustive inventory. One of the great Dark Ladies of the uncertain postwar period, Lane was the stereotypical seductress who lured the ambivalent hero to the wrong side of the law, and eventually his doom—and hers as well, as dictated by the code laid down by the censorship offices of Will Hays and Joseph Breen. Her silver-blond mane and hoarse, predatory purr had furnished an insidious antidote to the bright-eyed, perky heroines who had dominated the industry before Pearl Harbor. This, according to the subtext, was what had become of the “gentler sex” while the men were away at the front.
The bedroom, done entirely in cream and black and as big as a warehouse, was scarcely large enough to contain the enormity of death.
Fresh flowers bloomed unaware in a vase on a low dresser forested with unposed family pictures in silver frames. A pair of fuzzy pink slippers on the floor beside a bed shaped like a sleigh, and a pale pink silk dressing gown draped over the footboard, awaited their mistress. Here the only item pertaining to the movies was the honorary Oscar presented to her years before by the Academy as an apology for having passed over her finest performances in favor of ponderous costume dramas and glossy musical extravaganzas; in the world of pompous prestigious showboaters, no “melodramas” need apply. The award looked lonely on its corner of a mirror-topped vanity table. A framed certificate commemorating her efforts on behalf of the World Hunger Foundation occupied a much more prominent position on the wall just inside the door.
Was this a woman who could have arranged Van Oliver’s murder, merely because she suspected him of edging her out of the Bleak Street cast? But a realist like Kyle Broadhead would have reminded him of the good deeds performed by the worst offenders, and the worst transgressions committed by the most celebrated humanitarians. Stereotypical casting existed only on the soundstage; people were invariably more complex and inexplicable than they were represented in screenplays.
The three were not alone with the deceased. As they entered, a man and woman seated next to the bed looked up at them with barren eyes. The man was gray-haired, dressed somewhat flashily in stacked lapels and a yellow silk handkerchief, and might have been considered large in any company that didn’t include the hulking Vivien. The woman was a few years younger and wore plain slacks and a sweater and no makeup. Her brown hair was cut short.
“Dale Grant, Miss Lane’s nephew,” said Ms. Tanner. “His wife, Louise. This is Mr. Valentino.”
“Valentino will do,” said Valentino.
Grant rose and offered a listless hand. “Are you a policeman?”
He shook his head. That made twice in half an hour he’d been mistaken for the law. “Just an admirer. With your permission I’d like to pay my respects.”
“Don’t tell me it’s on the news already,” said Grant. “I wouldn’t have thought Aunt Ivy was such good copy. It’s been so long since she was in the public eye.”
Ms. Tanner said, “Valentino is here by invitation.”
Grant’s brow puckered. “That’s odd. She was scrupulous about keeping commitments. Even despondent as she must have been, she’d have thought it rude. I know that sounds fatuous, but—” He spread his hands, at a loss to complete the sentence.
Valentino finished it for him. “—a person like that would be more likely to put off her plans in order to accommodate an expected visitor; even plans for her own death.”
He was acutely aware that four pairs of eyes were staring at him; but his own were fixed on the small still figure in the bed.