Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 (27 page)

“I’m guessing you didn’t wake up in that vacant lot next to that butchered corpse.”

“No . . . I was in my wife’s house in Brentwood.”

“Was your wife with you?”

“She was in the hospital. Exhaustion and dysentery from our Mexican location shooting. And Shorty had the night off, as did my secretary.”

“So you have no alibi.”

“None, my darling. Nor memory. In a cheap thriller, a blow to the head would have granted me the blessing of amnesia. I, however, earned my loss of memory, every missing moment of it.”

“How?”

“It may come as a shock to you—I know it does to me—but my youth is fading fast, and my energy is no longer boundless. To work for days, without sleep, requires certain pharmaceutical assistance. Similar assistance is necessary to help me maintain my boyish figure, to better perform my leading man duties. And, as you know, I do take the occasional drink.”

“Okay—so we’re talking booze and amphetamines.”

“Did you know that my family tree includes Horace Goldin—the legendary celebrated magician who invented the ‘Divided Woman’ illusion, the trick of sawing a female in half?”

“And that means you bisected Beth Short’s body?”

As if the cigar were a wand, he gestured to the dismembered limbs framing the Crazy House doorway, and to the painting of a woman cut in half, her corpse flung on a flayed cow carcass. “I needed you to see these terrible images, Nathan—these images which were, by the way, created prior to the Short girl’s murder.” He tapped his temple with two fingers; his eyes bugged out. “They were in this mind. Nightmarish visions that I sought to exorcise in this harmless fashion.”

A few terrible moments dragged by, and then he rose, without looking at me, saying, “Let’s continue this in a more reflective setting.”

He almost bolted from the hideous, hellish self-created
surroundings, disappearing into the funhouse. I found him in the hall of mirrors, seated on a folding chair, staring blankly at perhaps eighty images of himself. Another folding chair, next to him, awaited me, and I took it.

“Could I have committed this act, Nathan?”

He was asking my reflections; I answered his.

“Orson, I don’t think so. Just because you’re a megalomaniac doesn’t make you a homicidal maniac.”

He continued to meet my gaze in the mirror; and almost the entire conversation that followed was delivered through the buffer of glass. The cigar had disappeared. As we spoke, it was as if I were speaking not to Welles, but his image, projected on a screen, dozens of screens.

“These Bosch-like grotesqueries,” he said, “could they have been unfulfilled wishes? Worse, images I did fulfill on a black, forgotten night?”

“With
your
bad back?”

That halted the melodrama and made him laugh. “Yes, that did occur to me. I’ve been wearing that damn metal brace about half the time, lately—when I’m under stress, these genetic anomalies of the spine of mine, which my weight hardly helps, make me as helpless . . . and as harmless . . . as a kitten. But what if drugs and alcohol combined to blot out the pain? And to unleash some murderous rage in me, and then blot out the memory?”

I looked at him, not his reflection. “I don’t think you killed her. But you may be able to help me figure out who did, by answering a few questions.”

“By all means.”

“Was Beth Short a hooker, Orson?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“When did you see her last?”

He stole a look at me, then spoke to my image. “At Brittingham’s—I hadn’t seen her since October. I bought her a sandwich and a Coke. It must have been . . . a week prior to the . . . grisly discovery.”

“You just ran into her . . . ?”

“I don’t think it was a coincidence—she was looking for me, hoping to see me—she admitted as much.”

“What did she want?”

“Money. She said she needed an operation.”

“An abortion?”

“That would be a reasonable assumption, considering she mentioned she was going to see a certain Dr. Dailey.”

The back of my neck was prickling. “Why? Who is he?”

“Wallace A. Dailey—a former L.A. County Hospital chief of staff, a retired, respectable physician . . . and, I’m told, Hollywoodland’s current abortionist of choice.”

Sensing I’d struck gold, I scribbled the name down in my notepad, asking, “Would this Dailey happen to hail from New England, originally?”

This line of questioning seemed to make Welles uncomfortable, and a certain irritability, even impatience, colored his tone, as he replied, “I wouldn’t know. Nor do I have an address on the man, though I presume he would be listed in the yellow pages, though probably not under ‘abortionist.’ ”

“She tried to shake you down, didn’t she, Orson?”

“Not precisely. There . . . may have been an implied threat of . . . embarrassment. I gave her what I could—fifty dollars. The child she was carrying was obviously not mine.”

“You weren’t intimate with her at all?”

“Define
intimate
.”

“I would consider having your dick sucked intimate.”

He winced at that, but admitted, “She did have a gift for fellatio. Children are seldom conceived in that fashion, you realize.”

“She have any other gifts? Did you promise her a screen test?”

“I did. Not a false promise, either—she was very attractive, as I’ve said, lovely, really, and I understand she had a pleasant singing voice. How did you link me with her?”

“Florentine Gardens.”

He nodded and dozens of him nodded in the mirrors. “N.T.G.?”

“Yeah, him and that actress, Ann Thomson. I don’t think they’ll mention you to the cops. The cops don’t even know about her working at the Gardens, yet. And there were a lot of celebrities she came into contact with there—you’d be on a long list. I
got a feeling the same is going to prove true of the Hollywood Canteen.”

Now he looked at me—he seemed very young, like a big child with that helpless baby face. “I’d like to engage your services, Nathan.”

“To cover this up?”

Still holding my gaze with his, he said, “I need to know that I was not responsible for this ghastly act. I need to
know
, Nathan.”

“And if you are responsible?”

Now he spoke to me in the mirrors, again. “One calamity at a time. Let me just say, there is schizophrenia in my family, Nathan—if I in fact suffer from these agonizing Welles clan strains, then the next ‘Crazy House’ I inhabit may not be on a soundstage.”

“You didn’t do it, Orson.”

His most charming smile beamed at me from dozens of mirrors. “Nathan, darling, there is in even the most humane of men an irrational drive to do evil.”

I could only think of the opening of his old radio show:
“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?”

Now he swiveled on the chair and looked right at me, placing a hand on my shoulder. “The only cover-up I ask is that you not breathe a word of this to the
Examiner
. If Hearst gets wind of my connection to the Black Dahlia, I’m finished—I might as well have done the crime.”

Welles was right: Hearst would take immense pleasure in finally having his full revenge for
Citizen Kane
.

“I’ll help you, Orson.”

“Nathan, darling, there’s one other small problem.”

“Another problem?”

“I’m broke.”

“Directing and starring in a Rita Hayworth picture, you’re broke?”

“Dead broke. As a magician, my best act seems to be making money disappear. A horde of creditors, including the IRS, are hounding me, daily.” He gestured to his hall of mirrors. “I’m doing this to repay a fifty-grand advance Harry Cohn wired me
when I desperately needed money to pay the costume rental bill for
Around the World
.”

Orson had recently staged a Broadway show of
Around the World in 80 Days
, a lavish production with Cole Porter music that had nonetheless tanked. Rumor was Welles had sunk every cent he had into it, and was in hock for hundreds of thousands.

“You can charge me your standard hourly rate against an interest in my next production,” he suggested, as he walked me out onto the soundstage.

“Which is?”

“I’m talking to Herbert Yates about a project over at Republic.”

“Where they make all those B-westerns? You are running out of studios to alienate.”

He was ushering me through the near-darkness of the vast chamber past the endless dragon slide.

“Don’t be cynical, darling Nathan—I’m going to be doing Shakespeare on the same soundstages where Roy Rogers and Gene Autry bring badmen to justice. There is something delightful about that! I’m mounting it as if it were a horror movie, you know, like Universal used to make with Karloff and Lugosi.”

“Which play?”

“
Macbeth
—murder in the night, followed by nightmares, guilt and rampant paranoia.”

“Well,” I said, stepping out into the light, “at least you got the research out of the way.”

His expression was blank. “I only hope I haven’t been researching
Othello
.”

And he slipped back into the darkness.

Then I turned and bumped into Shorty, waiting to show me the way out of Columbia’s backlot, a maze rivaling Welles’ hall of mirrors.

15

The Bradbury Building, on the southeast corner of Third and Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, was only slightly less bizarre than Welles’ Crazy House. The five-story turn-of-the-century building’s unremarkable brownstone exterior concealed a baroque secret life: ornamental wrought-iron stairwells and balconies, globed fixtures illuminating the open brick-and-tile corridors; caged elevators, their cables and gears and rollers exposed, like contraptions out of Jules Verne; and an enormous greenhouse-style skylight that bounced an eerie gold-white light off the glazed floor of the huge central court that was the Bradbury’s lobby.

Our offices were on the fifth floor, near an elevator, behind a frosted glass door that said
A-1 Detective Agency, Fredrick C. Rubinski, Chief Investigator
(both our names, however, were listed on the building directory—we were the only detective agency in a world of doctors and lawyers). In the outer office sat our receptionist—an attractive gum-chewing, nail-filing blonde—who worked for free, because Fred allowed her to sit at a switchboard, running her own answering-service business. In addition to the inner office, which was Fred’s alone, an adjoining, cubicled-off office accommodated four operatives.

Late in the afternoon, I sat across from Fred and filled him in on my day’s activities.

“Assaulting a police detective,” Fred said archly, leaning back in his swivel chair, the dwindling stub of a once-fine cigar in a corner of his mouth, “that should be good for business. . . . Why so reckless, Nate?”

A hard round ball of a man, Fred looked like a bald, slightly less homely Edward G. Robinson, typically natty in his gray suit and blue-and-gray patterned tie.

“Fat Ass isn’t a cop,” I said, sipping a cup of water from the outer office cooler. “He’s just a thug on the city payroll. Anyway, there won’t be a peep out of him—he won’t tell a soul.”

“Because he was at Lansom’s, playing bag man, you mean?”

“That’s right. I think they’re running hookers out of that nightclub.”

Fred lifted a thick dark eyebrow. “If so, I haven’t heard about it. Ever since that underage-chorus-girl shit hit the fan, Granny’s been keeping the Garden squeaky clean.”

“Yeah? Then why is Granny quitting?”

“The hell you say!”

“Granlund told me as much today. Seems Lansom’s up to something that’s rubbing our esteemed road-company Ziegfeld the wrong way.”

“That’s pretty goddamn interesting . . .” Fred pressed out the stub of his cigar in a brass tray on his tidy desk. “. . . but I still don’t think it’s hookers. Did you break Brown’s nose?”

“Probably. Fat Ass won’t fuck with me—he thinks I’m a Chicago Outfit guy.”

“Aren’t you?”

I wadded up the empty Dixie cup and tossed it in a corner wastebasket. “Not in any major way, but I’m not going to burst his bubble, on that score. Listen, what can you tell me about a . . .” I checked my notepad. “. . . Dr. Wallace A. Dailey?”

Fred rocked in the chair, fingers tented on his belly over his silk tie. “Just that he’s everybody’s favorite rabbit-puller, these days.”

“Abortionist to the stars.”

“Yeah, and the social set.”

“And how does a physician achieve such distinction?”

Fred laughed, shrugged. “We’re not talking about some
back-room abortion mill, Nate—Doc Dailey is, or anyway was, a prominent member of the medical community, out here.”

According to Fred (who confirmed and expanded upon what Welles had told me), Dr. Dailey was a former chief of staff at Los Angeles County Hospital, and—until fairly recently—had been an associate professor of surgery at the University of Southern California.

“There was some kind of scandal that got hushed up,” Fred said, “back in early ’45 . . . a malpractice situation that got paid off and swept under the carpet. But serious enough that the doc had to resign both his positions.”