Most nights the big tent pitched at the center of the King Neptune Playland at the Beach was the home of a girlie show called Honolulu Honeys. Tonight, since Colonel Mullens had hired the entire amusement park for his birthday party, the tent was going to be used for the entertainment that included Groucho and Polly.
The wind that had come up at sundown was worrying the canvas sides of the tent, causing them to shake and produce occasional popping sounds. About two hundred folding chairs were arranged in rows on the sawdust-covered plank floor. The whole place smelled of stale beer, perspiration, and something that was either cheap perfume or insect spray.
There was a small elevated stage up at the front of the tent with five chairs and a piano on the floor right below it.
No one was in the tent. I stood just inside the entrance for a few minutes, taking it all in. Then I made my way down the center sawdust aisle. The spangled curtain, which had a fading painting of hula dancers on a tropical beach decorating it, was partially open.
Walking up the six wooden steps at the side of the platform, I reached the stage. Now I could see a plywood partition at the back. It had an unpainted door at its center and lettered in whitewash, in an arbitrary mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, were the words dRessiNg rOomS.
“Not quite the Palace,” I said.
“When do the elephants arrive?”
Groucho, carrying his guitar case, his makeup kit and a large paper-wrapped bundle, was loping along the aisle toward the stage.
Outside in the windy dusk the merry-go-round started up, playing a pipe organ version of “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
Dropping everything, Groucho straightened up and saluted. After a few seconds he said, “Ah, forgive me. I thought they were playing the national anthem.” Taking out a cigar, he glanced around the tent. “Where’s my amazingly cute little costar?”
“Not here yet,” I answered. “Nobody is.”
“I assume they’ve shooed the chimpanzees out of my dressing room and I can unload my wandering minstrel equipment someplace hereabouts?”
Returning down to the sawdust, I reached for his bundle. “Dressing rooms are behind that partition yonder.”
“Take it up tenderly,” he cautioned me, gathering up his guitar and the makeup box. “I’ve got Nelson Eddy’s hat in there and I intend to wear it for my duet with Pollyanna.”
“Which hat?” I went climbing up the steps again.
“The one he sported in Rosemarie. My brother Chico knows a girl—well, no, actually, Chico knows, at last count, two thousand and three girls. This particular one, however, has access to the MGM wardrobe facilities and she was able to extract the actual skimmer Eddy wore while yodeling to Jeanette MacDonald and pretending to be a Royal Canadian Mountie. Of course, if he were half a man, he’d have doffed the hat and mounted the lady, but—”
“That would’ve capsized the canoe.” I lugged the bundle to the partition. The door made a rusty sound when I yanked it open.
“Speaking of Chico, also known as the Oversexed Rover Boy, he passed along an interesting fact about Polly’s pop.”
We found seven cubbyholes behind the partition, each one with an old army blanket on a wire serving as a door. Pinned on the second blanket from the left was a sheet of tablet paper with Marx scrawled on it in purple ink.
Groucho wandered along inspecting the labels on the other blankets. “Aha,” he said at the fourth blanket. “Rita Hayworth. A very impressive young lady and a spiffy dancer. Can’t act at all, but it little matters. I first encountered her back when she was calling herself Margarita Cansino but her father discouraged me from paying attention to her. And, when a fellow uses a knife about this long to discourage me, I tend to get discouraged and—”
“What about Pilgrim?”
Drawing aside the blanket that guarded the entry to his cubbyhole, Groucho peered in. There was a rickety makeup table with a streaked mirror attached, a folding metal chair, and a hat rack with a brass eagle atop it. The light was provided by a dangling 60-watt bulb.
“Damme, sirrah,” he remarked, “I had better quarters at MGM and Louis B. Mayer loathes me.” Entering, he placed the guitar case on the plank floor and rested the makeup kit on the table. “In fact, I had a better dressing room when we played the Black Hole of Calcutta. And it smelled a great deal more fragrant.”
“Something about Polly’s father?” I reminded.
“Like my dear scatterbrained brother, it seems Old Man Pilgrim has a fondness for games of chance and betting on sporting contests.” Groucho gazed up at the shadowy canvas top of the tent far above. “Are those bats I see dangling up there?”
“And?”
“The gent is deeply in hock, so rumor has it.”
“C’mon, Groucho, he comes from a family that’s been wealthy for generations here in California.” When I set the bundle on the chair, the chair teetered and started to topple to the left. I caught it, got it righted and balanced. “His public relations outfit takes in all kinds of dough promoting right-wing politicians and their causes. And he must skim a goodly chunk off Polly’s money.”
“Nevertheless.” Groucho was staring at himself in the mirror. “Have I developed freckles or is this thing flyspecked?”
“You’re suggesting that Pilgrim owes money to people like Vince Salermo and similar hoodlums and gamblers?”
“According to the ever reliable Chico, he owes a pretty penny.”
“Then he must be especially anxious to make sure Polly signs that contract with Paragon.”
“Exactly, Rollo,” he said, licking the tip of his forefinger and rubbing at the surface of the glass. “By the bye, my beloved sibling also informed me, when I mentioned the site of tonight’s little fiasco, that there’s something called the Filmland Wax Museum on the premises.”
“Yeah, over beyond the Fun House. I noticed it coming in.”
“There is supposedly a tableau of myself and three of my cherubic brothers on display there for all the world to see.”
“And you want to see it?”
“So few artists have ever been able to capture my true innate beauty,” he explained, “that I live in the constant hope that someone will finally succeed. Do you want to go take a gander before I have to start rehearsing?”
“Sure, okay,” I agreed. “What did you find out about the girl who slipped you the death threat?”
“Her name is Maggie Barnes.”
“An actress?”
Taking my arm, Groucho led me out of his cubicle. “This may break your heart, Merton, but I fear the lady has fallen on hard times,” he told me. “When she’s not working as a gun moll, she apparently puts in time at a local bawdy house.”
“Have you talked to her yet?”
Slouching along the sawdust aisle, he answered, “No, since she hasn’t been home all the livelong day. In a mood to sacrifice, I intend to call on her at her place of business after tonight’s festivities.”
“Hey, that isn’t safe.”
“I don’t intend to avail myself of her carnal services, Rollo, only talk with dear Maggie.”
“Every whore house in LA is owned and operated by gangsters,” I reminded him. “Suppose they find out that you’re there?”
“You’re unlikely to find them underfoot. They’re usually lolling around their mansions in Bel Air or Malibu, my lad,” he assured me. “I shall simply pop in, convince the lass she should tell all, and then take my leave. I won’t even hug her, I’ll eschew a farewell address.”
“Even so, Groucho, you—”
“Of course, if the eschew is on the other foot, there’s no telling what could transpire.”
“I think you ought to wait and see her at home.”
“Should I have said something about taking a plug of eschewing tobacco along?”
“No.”
We were outside now and the amusement park was starting to come to life. Few guests had arrived, but more and more colored lights were blossoming across the darkening sky, neon signs were starting to blink and flash, several kinds of loud music were pouring out of speakers.
“While we’re en route to this temple of the arts,” suggested Groucho, “we can compare notes. I was intending to entitle my report on my activities My Day, but it turns out Eleanor Roosevelt beat me to the title.”
“I think you’ve mentioned that to me before.”
“Brilliant remarks, let me remind you, can certainly bear repeating,” he pointed out. “Take that ‘To be or not to be’ routine. You’ve heard that more than once, I’ll wager.”
Rising up in front of the brightly painted Fun House was a huge automated clown inside a glass cage. He was wearing a silky crimson costume, had a white goggle-eyed face dominated by a red bulb of a nose. “Ho ho ho,” he said. “Ho ho ho.”
“Let’s make sure that chap gets a front-row seat for the show,” said Groucho.
There was no ticket taker on duty at the Filmland Wax Museum. Tacked to the front of the ticket booth was a hand-lettered sign announcing, FREE TONIGHT!
Gingerbread trim painted blue, red, and gold framed the entrance and a cloth banner strung above the doorway promised LIFELIKE, LIFE-SIZE REPLICAS OF THE GREATS OF FILMLAND!
Groucho and I entered. The place apparently consisted of a linked series of small display rooms and we had the initial one to ourselves. It was chill, musty. Set up around the room on low wooden pedestals were wax effigies of Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, W. C. Fields, Bob Hope, and a skinny fellow I didn’t recognize. Most of the likenesses weren’t bad, although the comedians all had the complexions of painted dolls.
“Explain to me why I’m not in this room.” He gestured at the array of figures. “It’s obviously devoted chiefly to great comedians.”
“Maybe the great comedians who are members of family groups have a separate room.”
Hands behind his back, Groucho went shuffling over to study the statue of Bob Hope. “Upstart,” he muttered. “Judging by what you learned from the valet, Rollo, and what I persuaded Tad Ballard of Paragon Pictures to confide, we can pretty much conclude that Brian Montaine was murdered and that Dr. Benninger played a part in the killing.”
“We can’t prove Montaine was murdered,” I said. “And after the funeral, as Jane told us, they cremated the guy.”
“Sifting that hambone’s ashes won’t establish he was bopped on the coco before being giving a lethal shot in the tochis.” He sighed, turning his back on Hope. “Imagine spending all eternity with no backside.” He drifted toward the doorway to the next chamber. “What do you think of Janey’s theory?”
“That Dianne and the valet teamed up to bump Montaine off?” I followed him. “I suppose it’s possible, but I don’t believe he was killed so somebody could inherit his money.”
“Silencing him seems the more likely motive. Ah, here’s Joan Crawford.”
A dozen wax figures of movie actresses circled this room. Joan Crawford, in her Sadie Thompson costume, was sitting in a chair on the platform to the right of the entrance.
“Did I ever tell you about what transpired between Joan and myself in that phone booth in Tijuana?”
“You did, yes sir.”
“Would you like me to retell it?”
“Nope.”
“Perhaps I’ll write it up and sell it to the Reader’s Digest.” He moved further into the room. “The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Shared a Phone Booth With.”
“Snappy title.”
“I’ll be jiggered. They’ve got Louise Brooks on display.” He was gazing up at the wax figure of the dark-haired actress. “Takes me back to my youth—and that’s starting to be an all-day trip. I had an enormous yen for her in the early twenties.”
“What happened?”
Eyebrows climbing, he looked at me briefly over his shoulder. “You refuse to hear a recounting of my tender telephonic interlude with Miss Crawford, you young reprobate, but the possibility that I diddled a madcap Follies girl excites your lewd libido?”
“That must be it, yes.”
“I was going to digress and make a few well-chosen remarks about Ida Libido, but I shall refrain,” he decided. “As a matter of fact, Dr. Adler, I believe I am the one and only Broadway playboy who didn’t carry on with Louise. It has all the ingredients of a romantic tragedy, though I’ll be the first to admit that Groucho and Louise doesn’t have quite the zing of Romeo and Juliet.”
Shaking his head sadly, Groucho loped into the next room.
“Eureka,” I heard him exclaim.
The Marx Brothers figures were there, standing side by side with arms linked. Except for Harpo, who had his knee being held up by Groucho. Chico was there along with Zeppo.
As he shuffled around the platform, Groucho observed, “Gad, Zeppo hasn’t looked this good in years. He really should come here and have his puss waxed by these people.” When he halted before his own image, a scowl appeared on his face. “I, on the other hand, look like Rasputin on a bad day.”
He rose up on tiptoe, stretching to flick a speck of lint off the frock coat of the wax Groucho.
Behind us I heard a leather shoe sole rasp on wood and a metallic click.
“Look out.” I dived forward and tackled Groucho.
We both went slamming into the floor and up above us the head of the Groucho figure exploded when the bullet hit it.