Frames (10 page)

From there, Valentino went to the downtown branch of the library, where most of the staff knew him by name and greeted him with smiles and nods and here and there a tightening of nostrils, bracing for a request that would send them to the remote dusty stacks for an item no one had checked out in decades. He thought he heard a collective release of breath as he passed the desk and went straight to the microfilm reading room.

There among his most devoted friends—spools of film in boxes arranged by date and the Moviola-like readers in their carrells—he began scrolling through ancient numbers of the
L.A. Times
and the late great
Mirror.
After a while he stopped mooning over the advertised premieres of motion pictures that no longer existed and directed his attention to the local news. The readers were time machines, and there were occasions when he wished he could crawl inside one, reverse the crank, and travel backward with the pages preserved on film, wonderful film. Rumors that the library was preparing to transfer its newspaper files onto digital discs, for viewing on computer monitors, depressed him as nothing had since colorization.

Four hours later, woozy and shielding his eyes from the glare of the twenty-first century, he found Fanta in the place they’d arranged to meet, a microbrewery off the old Plaza where he and Kyle liked to hang out. The walls were plastered with four-sheets of W. C. Fields playing poker, Douglas Fairbanks in tights, and Marilyn fluttering too close to the flame. Reese Witherspoon and Johnny Depp had been added to attract a younger crowd, but the clientele so far had remained relentlessly middle-aged. Fanta and the wait-staff were the youngest people present.

At the moment, however, she looked older. She had unaccustomed circles under her eyes and smelled faintly of old plat books. She ordered a glass of stout.

“Can I see ID?” The waitress wore a ring in her nose and a James Dean T-shirt.

“Diet Pepsi.” Fanta shrugged at Valentino. “Can’t blame a girl for trying.”

“Nothing to eat?” he asked.

“Now that you mention it, I’ve had a humongous craving for White Castle all day. I’ll have the Scarface,” she told the waitress. “Extra heavy on the blood ‘n’ gore.”

Valentino discovered that she’d ordered a half-pound burger with double everything. The menu had changed since his last visit. “I’ll have the clam chowder.”

“One Buster Keaton.” The waitress wrote on her pad. “Anything to drink?”

“Regular Pepsi.”

“Have a beer,” Fanta said. “At least I can smell it.”

He ordered the stout, in her honor. Ordinarily he preferred something domestic and lighter in body. When they were alone, Fanta leaned her forearms on the table. “The Oracle changed hands three times between nineteen twenty-nine, when Max Fink sold it, and nineteen thirty-seven. The last time was to a guy named—”

“Warren Pegler,” he finished. “He sold it in fifty-six to a film society. They showed Bergman and Fellini to college students, and broadened the program a few years later to include more popular fare. That was the generation that made stars all over again out of Humphrey Bogart and the Marx Brothers.”

“Then mine came along and plunged them back into obscurity.”

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

“It’s true, though. Maybe my kids will reverse the cycle.”

He smiled. “You have a fine vocabulary. You should use it more often.”

“Totally. Only for right now I’d rather be a closet nerd. You know, we wasted a bundle of time if all we did was dupe each other’s efforts.”

“Your sources were more official. Newspapers were no more reliable then than they are now, especially the feature items. According to the
Times
—it was the
Times Mirror
then, before the takeover was complete—the society struggled ahead for several years trying to make ends meet, then gave it up as an expensive hobby and sold it to my realty firm, which rented it to a hippie commune until it could find a buyer. That turned out to be me, long after the hippies packed up their lava lamps and left.”

“I got as far as the realtor,” she said. “County records aren’t long on colorful details, and they don’t have you on the books yet.”

“The world is waiting to see if my check bounces. The
Mirror
did a human-interest piece on Pegler when he took over. He was a double amputee, lost both legs in an accident in the developing lab at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he worked a dozen years earlier.”

The food and drinks arrived. Fanta waited impatiently while the waitress set everything out, asked if they needed anything else, and left without waiting for an answer. Then Fanta pounced. “MGM did
Greed,
right?”

He nodded. “It’s a coincidence worth looking into, but it’s not remarkable when you know L.A.’s history. It’s still a factory town, the factories being the studios, but it was even more so from the twenties through the forties. They were the biggest employers around, and MGM was bigger than all the rest of them put together. It’s like trying to connect a Chevrolet assembly worker to something that happened at General Motors world headquarters.”

“An assembly worker who bought himself a dealership,” she said. “Where’d he get the bucks?”

“Metro’s lawyers gave him a fat settlement to avoid a lawsuit. After he paid his hospital expenses he had enough left over to buy a block of shares in Warner Brothers just before
The Jazz Singer.”
He paused. “You know the story behind
The Jazz Singer?”

“Al Jolson talks and sings, the box office lights up like Grand Theft Auto.” She rolled her eyes. “Four-point-oh, film studies, Kyle Broadhead, Ph.D., hello.”

“Sorry. Habit.” He stirred his soup. “Long story short, he pulled out of the stock market two months ahead of the crash in nineteen twenty-nine. Eight years into a major depression, he still had the price of a lucrative theater franchise in his pocket.”

“Your reading was way better than mine.” She sneezed.

“Bless you.”

“Thanks. They should dust that place every hundred years.” She picked up her burger. “That reminds me. Did you call that Harriet person yet?”

He swallowed some chowder. He couldn’t recall mentioning Ms. Johansen’s impending visit to UCLA. “Call?”

“You thirtysomethings are worse than we are in the slacking department. There were so many sparks flying around that basement I was glad we got the film out of it.”

“We exchanged polite words.”

“Any more polite and you’d’ve finished up in the sack.”

“At your age, maybe. I’m too young for ‘Do your own thing’ and too old for ‘Whatever.’ She sneezed and I said, ‘Bless you.’ I just blessed you when you sneezed. I didn’t see any sparks.”

“You didn’t bless me the way you blessed her.”

“Let’s change the subject.”

“Whatever. This Scarface burger is awesome. Al Pacino should work at White Castle.”

“Maybe Paul Muni made it.”

“Who?”

“The original
Scar
—oh, forget it. I am a geek.” He pushed away his Buster Keaton, an experience less memorable than its namesake. “You did all right today. Not many athletes would skip practice to spend the afternoon in the cellar of the county building.”

“Dibs on the newspaper files next time.”

“Do you mean that?”

She met his gaze, then put down her sandwich and wiped her mouth and her hands. “Give me your best shot. What do you need?”

“A more specific time line, to start. Architecture and dental science puts that corpse in the basement room long after Fink, and common sense says it was before the realty firm took possession. It had to have been bricked in by then or someone would have found it. That’s still a fifteen-year chunk. I need to narrow it down.”

“It might be longer than that. Your realtor overlooked twenty-four reels of
Greed
upstairs.”

“The saleswoman said there used to be a wall in front of it. They tore it down only recently. My guess is some flunky saw a lot of film cans, nothing unusual to show up next to a projection booth, opened a few, found them empty, and didn’t bother to look any farther. Ignoring the human skeleton in the basement is something else altogether.”

“I wonder why the reels were split up.”

“Not important to the central issue. Whose skeleton was it, and who bricked it up?”

“The murderer. Or an accomplice.”

“If it was murder. Sergeant Clifford says the skeleton might have been a stunt to spice up a B horror movie.” He told her about William Castle. “If her hunch pays off, the case is no longer official business, and we get to keep the film.”

“Yes!”

“Except playing the hunch means eliminating every missing-persons complaint filed over fifteen years, until a trick skeleton is the only explanation left. Meanwhile
Greed
rots away in a stuffy room at the Hall of Justice.”

“Oh.”

“Hold on, there may be a shortcut. Someone disappeared late in the Pegler era or when the film society owned the theater. I’m assuming someone missed him and reported it to the police.”

“That’d be in their files. Clifford must be all over it.”

“Let’s hope she hits the jackpot. I found some promising candidates in the old papers, but most of them turned up alive or dead in the later editions. I’m leaving the rest to the sergeant to run down.”

“What’s left?”

“I told you all I could find in four hours. You can skip past that, take my place in the reading room, and expand the search beyond L.A. Maybe someone with a connection to the Oracle went missing out of town and it wasn’t reported locally. Check the suburban papers and the AP wire. I’d do it myself, but I have fences to mend.” He avoided bringing up the Johansen tour for fear of reviving that conversation. He felt a flash of guilt. “It means missing classes. It isn’t as if you could look up the subject in an index and go right to it.”

“Yes, it is. It’s called Google. I’ll fire up the Mac and do a mouse hunt.”

He laughed and sat back. “From the mouth of Generation Y. It never occurred to me to tweak the Net.”

“While I’m at it, I can try to find what became of Warren Pegler.”

“Burial or cremation would be my guess. He was thirty-one in nineteen thirty-seven.”

“Maybe there’s a daughter or a grandson. No legs doesn’t mean no—”

“Romance. Knock yourself out. And Fanta? Thanks.”

“Anything for the program. I might learn something I can use in my practice. Oh! I almost forgot.”

They were seated in a booth, with Marlene Dietrich looking at them down the length of her elegant nose. Fanta opened her shoulder bag on the seat beside her and took out something large and flat in a slick plastic bag. “I was early, so I killed a few minutes in Barnes and Noble on the way here. I hope you don’t have it.”

He took it and slid out a coffee table book in a varnished jacket. Grauman’s Chinese Theater blazed in barbaric splendor on the cover in full color. The title was
Pleasure Domes: The Golden Age of the Picture Show.

“I don’t,” he said, “but I can’t accept it. I don’t want to get in the way of paying off your student loans.”

“It was remaindered. And I’m here on an athletic scholarship. I’m a very good archer. Turn to page ninety-four.”

It was a two-page spread, of The Oracle’s auditorium, taken at the peak of its grandeur. He ran his fingertips over the glossy surface. He could almost feel the contours in the gilded baroque ornaments and the deep plush on the seats. The photographer must have chosen a premiere night, and stationed himself in an upper balcony to capture the entire scene: Iconic stars and pioneer producers in dinner jackets and ball gowns shared the orchestra, chatting and holding programs. Every seat was filled. Valentino’s throat tightened. It was like looking at a snapshot of his mother in the full beauty of her youth. He made a mental note to call her.

“It’s wonderful. Thank you.” The words seemed inadequate.

“I just wish it were in color,” she said. “What was it with black-and-white, anyway?”

“Everything’s better in black-and-white. I think even Sergeant Clifford would bear me out on that.”

**

CHAPTER

10

AFTER HE LET Fanta out in front of her house, he used his cell to ask Ruth if Harriet Johansen had called.

“No, but everyone else has.” She mentioned KBLA, the
Times,
the
Post,
and added the Associated Press to the list; it appeared the story of the corpse at The Oracle contained all the elements necessary to capture the attention of the national media. “That
Prong
creature called again,” she said. “He’s an insistent little punk. I bet he walks around with a boom box and a pistol.”

“I’m sorry for the bother. It doesn’t have anything to do with the office.” Which wasn’t really a lie, since none of the reporters knew what else the basement had contained.

“Don’t apologize. This is the first time this department has justified the cost of installing telephone equipment. I haven’t answered this many calls since the old days at Columbia.”

“Did Harry Cohn chase you around his casting couch?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

He’d caught her in a playful mood, which was an event rare enough to encourage him to pursue the conversation.