As Groucho, in his slouching way, was climbing on foot up through a quiet residential district at the lower edge of the Hollywood hills, he became aware that out on the afternoon street a dusty green Pontiac was moving along parallel to him.
Slowing, he stopped and squinted in the direction of the automobile. It stopped, too.
The window on the passenger side started to roll down and he prepared to fling himself behind the protective trunk of a palm tree about five feet uphill from him. After his encounter with Sergeant Branner, he was a little concerned about his continued well-being.
“Yoo hoo,” called someone inside the green car, “yoo hoo.”
“You’re in the wrong place,” he said, pointing back toward where he’d parked his Cadillac. “The yodeling auditions are back that way.”
A plump gray-haired woman in a print dress worked her way out of the car, a box camera clutched in both hands. “Mr. Marx,” she asked, approaching him in a very tentative way, “would you mind if I took a picture with you?”
Groucho leaped over the flower beds that trimmed the slanting sidewalk and perched on the curb. “Certainly not. What picture shall we take?” he inquired. “I’ve always been partial to September Morn, but you can pick whatever masterpiece you want. They tell me that the Mona Lisa is much more valuable, even though the dame in that one is fully clothed.” He consulted his gold wristwatch. “Ah, but the Mona Lisa is all the way over in Paris and I simply have too many chores today to allow us to pop over there and swipe it. I’m afraid we’ll have to steal a picture from one of the local—”
“What I meant, Mr. Marx, is would it be all right if my husband snapped a picture of the two of us.”
“Didn’t he get enough good ones when he caught us together in the Roosevelt Hotel the other night?” He jumped from the curb to the street. “Myself, I just adored the one of your doing the fan dance atop the room service table. It was, I must tell you, the very first time I’d ever seen anyone do a fan dance with an electric fan and it really and truly—”
“Get back into the car, Myra,” suggested her husband from the driver’s seat. “These movie stars are all alike.”
Groucho went loping around the perplexed woman to peer into the car. “You’re absolutely correct, sir. You can’t possibly guess how many times a day I’m mistaken for Shirley Temple. The correct answer is twenty-six, but don’t let on I slipped it to you.” He reached in and shook hands with the plump middle-aged man. “You and Tugboat Annie here have brought a little ray of sunshine into a shut-in’s life, but I must be going.”
“But what about the photo, Mr. Marx?” asked the woman as he started to walk away.
Groucho halted, spun around. “Okay, kiddo,” he said. “Get your hubby out here to snap it before the lunacy commission arrives to throw the net over the lot of us.”
“I knew you were a nice man after all, Mr. Marx,” she said.
“Under the circumstances,” he told her, “I’ll overlook that insult.”
* * *
There wasn’t anything in the way of a sea view from the Sea-view Court Apartments. A dozen cream-colored stucco cottages with red tile roofs framed a neatly kept courtyard that had a fountain at its center and a half dozen thriving orange trees dotting its green lawn.
Groucho paused at the fountain to gaze at the imitation marble cherub who topped it and held a spouting dolphin in an uneasy embrace.
“I wonder when Harry Cohn posed for that?” he asked himself before continuing on his way.
As he walked up the redbrick steps to the door of apartment 11, he noticed that the lace curtains masking the living room window swayed and flickered.
He tapped on the glass panel of the curtained door with his knuckles.
Nothing happened.
Groucho knocked once more.
He was certain that he was still being observed from within.
“Miss Wakeman,” he said, leaning close to the door, “I’m trying to help Frances London.”
Very faintly a woman’s voice asked, “Who are you?”
“Groucho Marx.”
“Oh, c’mon, be serious. Besides, Groucho Marx has a big moustache.”
“Greasepaint,” he informed the door. He removed the cigar from his mouth and sang a few lines of “Hail, Freedonia.” “If that doesn’t convince, my dear, I’m prepared to show you my telltale birthmark. That, however, will require a certain amount of public nudity.”
After about twenty seconds the door opened a few inches and Dr. Benninger’s former nurse looked out, carefully, at Groucho. “Okay, I guess you are who you say you are.”
“The last time the government meat inspectors were by the house, they conceded the same thing.” The door opened a little farther and he eased into Alice Wakeman’s living room.
She was a tall young woman, thin, about thirty, wearing jeans, tennis shoes, and a faded UCLA sweatshirt. “Ever since I heard that Dr. Benninger had been killed,” she told him, “I’ve felt very uneasy.”
The room was furnished in department store Swedish modern. “Why?” he asked as he sat in a white armchair.
She seated herself on the blond wood chair opposite him. “Would you like a cup of coffee, Mr. Marx?”
“Not especially. Tell me why you’re scared.”
“Frances didn’t have anything to do with killing him, no matter what the police claim,” she answered. “That means whoever did it might also be interested in hurting me.”
“Who would they be and why harm you?”
She sighed out a slow breath. “I’m not sure anyone will,” she explained. “Because I really don’t know all that much about what the doctor was up to. I just can’t be certain that they know that.”
“You knew enough to quit, though?”
“Between what Frances told me,” she went on, “and what I’d figured out for myself, I decided it was time to get out of his office.”
“What did she tell you, Alice?”
“Don’t you know about that?”
“The matron cut off our conversation before Frances got to the details,” he replied. “She said you’d be able to fill me in.”
“What bothered Frances were the times they went to the Coconut Grove and were joined by Jack Cortez and his girlfriend.”
Groucho straightened in his chair. “Cortez is the Chicago hood who came West to work for that labor racketeer Willie Bioff.”
“That’s him,” she confirmed. “But now he’s high up in Joe Tartaglia’s outfit.”
He rested his cigar in a black ashtray. “Tartaglia is supposed to be the goon who controls the drug trade in Greater LA.”
“I don’t know exactly what was going on, but Dr. Benninger had some kind of dealings with Tartaglia’s people.”
“That means he was involved in the narcotics business.”
“As I say, I quit before I learned too many of the details.”
“You don’t know if the doctor was selling drugs or just using them?”
“What I suspect, Mr. Marx, is that Jack Cortez was providing drugs for Dr. Benninger to sell to some of his rich patients.”
Leaning back in his chair, Groucho frowned. “This opens up all sorts of interesting new motives for killing the fellow.”
“It does,” the nurse agreed, “and a lover’s quarrel sure as hell isn’t one of them.”