The Monet Murders: A Mystery Read online

  “What about the cops? The missing persons.”

  “They’d say she ain’t missing. Just gone. And then they’d give me the horselaugh, and it would spread. I can’t afford to get the horselaugh. Not in this town. The horselaugh in this town is like blood in the water.”

  “And if I find her, then what?”

  “Don’t say ‘if.’ Say ‘when.’”

  “All right—when.”

  “I’ll worry about that later. Maybe I’ll have the guy bumped off.” He grinned as if to indicate he was kidding. But it made me wonder. “And maybe they haven’t gone through with it yet. Maybe there’s still time to get her to come to her senses.”

  It occurred to me that, maybe, that’s exactly what had already happened. She’d figured out that being the wife of an insurance salesman in St. Paul, dull as it would ultimately and very quickly become, was better than being schtupped by Manny Stairs. After a very quick while, seeing movie stars in person isn’t all that different from seeing regular people on a downtown bus. The glamour wears off pretty fast. It’s all imagery, after all, with nothing behind it. And that goes double and triple for producers. Stripped of his Savile Row suit, Manny would probably not be a sight to make the female heart beat faster, except maybe in panic. You wouldn’t want to imagine him in his shorts.

  “When did you get this letter?”

  “Last Friday. So you see, they even might not be married yet.”

  “So all you want from me is to find out where she is?”

  “More or less. First things first. There might be something else after that. We’ll have to play that one by ear. But, you understand, there is some sense of urgency about this.”

  Well, so far as I could see, the only urgency was in this guy’s imagination. He wanted her back and he wanted her now. I understood what he was thinking. In the long run, it wouldn’t matter to him whether she was married or not; divorces were easy to come by in Hollywood. Mexico was only a couple of hours away, and divorces there were cheap and, more importantly, quick. No, he was longing for her, plain and simple. It was eating at him, hurting, and he wanted it to stop. Well, as I said, I understood.

  “Can I have this picture?”

  “No, but I have another one.” He pulled open his desk drawer and gave me a snapshot of the two of them standing in front of the Great Wall of China, Hollywood version. He was grinning from ear to ear, and she was staring at the camera like the proverbial deer in the headlights. From her expression, I figured it was a recent photo; she had second thoughts written all over her face. Even so, she did look gorgeous.

  My business card said “Bruno Feldspar, Private Detective to the Stars.” The name wasn’t my idea. Ethel Welkin had dreamed it up when I was out here last year trying half-heartedly to get into the movies. (I’d met her at the Polo Lounge one day, and we’d struck up an acquaintance. Which, after I gave up on the movies, turned into her giving me a hand in getting set up as a detective.) I say “trying half-heartedly” because it didn’t take me long to figure out that the movie business wasn’t meant for me, or I for it. I mean, you don’t have to go to more than one audition and sit around with fifty other guys trying to look like some version of Douglas Fairbanks and waiting to be called into a room with a couple of gnomes who give you thirty seconds to make an impression to understand that this business is not for grown-ups. I did that once and it was enough. I did end up with one bit part, a wagon driver in Cimarron, but that was it for me.

  Of course, I liked California and the good weather and all the beautiful women. There’s nothing not to like about that. But the business itself seemed not worth doing, like being the head chef for Hostess Twinkies. There were too many people pulling you this way and that and no one really knowing what was going on, because the people who controlled the money were a bunch of rag merchants from the east, and most of the people who made the films and considered themselves artistes were just guessing about what they were doing and what would appeal to the masses.

  So there was a lot of screaming and temper tantrums and silliness and posing, and underneath it all was a vast and abiding insecurity. Almost all of those people were worried that someday they would be found out. Someone would shout from the sidewalk that the emperor was buck naked, and it would all be over. That made them chronically nervous, and worse, and consequently not fit to be around. There might be some places in California where not everyone was on the make, but it wasn’t Hollywood. The money was great, of course, if you were a hit, but that was a long shot under the best of circumstances. The few who did make it were pretty much just lucky, and I never liked relying on luck. It came and went without reason. Luck was for gamblers, and most gamblers were losers.

  Then there was that little matter of those capers back East last year, before I came out here, and it seemed to me that putting my rugged features on the silver screen was not the smartest thing to do just then. There wasn’t much chance that anyone in either Detroit or Youngstown would recognize me or connect me to that hijacking in Detroit or the money-laundering scheme in Youngstown. But even so, I figured it would be the better part of valor to lie a little low for a while and keep in touch with my friend from the FBI.

  I explained some of this to Ethel, though not the part about the capers, and she more or less understood. After all, she didn’t care whether I was a big star or a carnival barker. To her, movie stars were so many head of mostly beautiful cattle. She was only interested in one thing; and when I told her I was thinking of becoming a private detective because I had been reading some novels that made it sound at least interesting, she let loose one of her hundred-decibel cackles and said “That’s perfect. A private dick. Yum.”

  Well, she was not what you’d call a lady.

  But she was useful and not even that bad a bed partner, though you wouldn’t think it to look at her, dressed. Nothing you would want as an exclusive arrangement, of course, because she more or less resembled a fire hydrant in both length and shape, and her fondness for garlic bagels, pickles, and pastrami was a definite drawback. But she was a jolly soul and made no demands other than the one, which was something quickly taken care of in a couple of afternoons a week—she was generally pretty efficient. The rest of the time, I was on my own.

  And as an example of her helpful nature, she had introduced me around to some big shots in the business, all of whom at one time or another needed a private detective either to get the goods on a wandering wife or mistress, or to get the wife’s private detective off his, meaning the producer’s, trail as he merrily cut a swath through fields of beautiful hopefuls from Dubuque and such places. These were the girls who hadn’t yet, and probably never would, become a star, or even starlet. But they stayed, still dreaming. Going back home a failure was too sad to think about. They knew they’d get the sly, oh-so-satisfied smiles from the homely girls they’d always behaved condescendingly to. So they hung on in Hollywood and worked the lunch counter at Schwab’s or found jobs as secretaries and spent their free time reluctantly in the sack with some guy named Herman who had come out from the Bronx to work for his uncle Isadore as an assistant producer, which let Herman tell all the girls he could get them a screen test. Then they’d send their folks back home a postcard showing the Santa Monica pier in color and saying that they had a big break coming next week, some time. Hopefulness is as addictive as any other drug and, in this town, almost as toxic.

  I did like the idea of being a private detective—at least until something else came along that was more interesting. I’d found that I had a talent of sorts for the business when I was back in Youngstown and working undercover with the FBI to set up a money-laundering scheme for the local Mafiosi. What the FBI didn’t know was that I was intending to make off with a major chunk of the money, but things didn’t work out as planned, and the end result was that I had actually helped the FBI build a case on the local hoodlums, which in turn made the feds grateful to the point of greasing the skids for me to get a license out in L.A. to operat
e as a private investigator under a fictitious name.

  And when I say things didn’t work out as planned, I mean I didn’t make any money from that deal. But that was all right with me. I only needed a lot of money because my girl Lily was the kind who needed to be kept in the style to which she had become accustomed, as the saying goes. But when she decided she’d better stay with her husband there in her mansion by a lake in Ohio and not run away with me back to California (I had gone back to Ohio to pry her away from him), well, I didn’t need big money anymore. It was something of a relief because, had I gone through with my plan, there was a distinct possibility that the FBI or the local Youngstown mob or maybe even both would have figured out what I was up to. They both have long memories, especially when they’ve been conned. The other thing was, I’d gotten kind of fond of the mobsters I was dealing with. I was even flattered when the local boss offered me a job working with them. I saw it for what it was—a compliment, because he knew I wasn’t Italian, let alone Sicilian—and I appreciated the offer, sincerely. So I felt bad about setting them up.

  I also liked my contact in the FBI. And he was in no hurry to make the pinch, as far as I knew, and nothing had really happened. Not yet, anyway. For all I knew, my friend in the FBI was currently enjoying a payoff from the Youngstown branch of the Sons of Sicily. Just because a guy wears a crew cut doesn’t mean you can’t get to him. Well, that was their business. I suppose my ambivalence says something about me. Well, of course it does. But as it turned out, that was all behind me.

  The truth was, it was much better this way, although I still missed Lily. She would have been worth the risks involved in the money-laundering caper. But she was settled into her new life and couldn’t see how being with me would work. To be honest, she didn’t really trust me as a long-term arrangement. I understood, although I didn’t like it. She came from a wealthy family and had married a wealthy man, and I had to admit to myself that she was fairly conventional—if you put aside her enthusiastic cuckolding of her husband with her old high school flame, meaning me. But conventionality aside, she also had a new baby, which was a complication. I could imagine her leaving her husband, but not her baby. Well, no mother would. Or at least not many.

  I wouldn’t have minded bringing the kid along; it wouldn’t have been right for her to leave the baby—I knew that. I can take babies or leave them, but more or less adopting the kid would have been worth it to have Lily. But in the end she chose the well-trodden path. It’s always the easier route, and I came to California alone.

  So I found myself in California without Lily, and with Ethel’s help and contacts I quickly got into the swing of the detective business and pretty soon was doing confidential work for clients whose talent for getting into trouble far exceeded their talent for making movies. I even had a little office in the Cahuenga Building on Hollywood Boulevard, complete with a secretary named Della who answered the phone and typed proposals and invoices with a perpetual Pall Mall hanging from the side of her mouth and her right eye squinting and watering from the smoke. She was a sharp middle-aged lady with artificially red hair and a smoker’s cough.

  Her husband, Perry, ran a water taxi in Santa Monica, taking sports out to the gambling ships anchored just beyond the three-mile limit. He was a former first-class petty officer in the Navy, so he’d run lots of liberty boats and knew how to handle a boatful of drunks, rough seas or smooth. There were a bunch of these gambling ships out there, so Della’s husband did a pretty good business, although he worked mostly from seven in the evening till three or four in the morning, hauling high-spirited high rollers out and bringing sodden losers back a few hours later. I guess that didn’t leave Della and her husband much domestic time together—and, from what I could interpret, that suited them both. They had reached that stage when it was useful to be married but not so useful as to need time together. Della only came in to the office three days a week, but she added the right kind of hardboiled accent when she was there, and, besides, Perry did a little bootlegging on the side and so was a source of Scotch at a discount. Bourbon, too. Even though Prohibition was over, finally, there were still lots of people who liked to get booze on the cheap. I never asked where he got his supplies.

  Della ran an escort service the rest of the week. At least, that’s what she called it. The fact that she wanted to work for me part-time made me wonder about the quality of her stable. But I didn’t look into that. That was her business.

  My benefactor, Ethel, had put up the cash for this office setup, although the truth was I didn’t need it. I still had the bulk of the money from that hijacking in Detroit a year or so ago, or should I say that undercover operation that we pulled off and thereby relieved the Purple Gang (a mob of bootleggers and hijackers who operated out of Detroit) of one of their illegal shipments of booze. It was a big score (though hardly enough to keep Lily in style)—twenty grand, which is something people in the heartland could live on pretty comfortably for twenty years, though not in Hollywood. I figured twenty grand could last me a good ten years, if I was careful, so I wasn’t worried. I was not extravagant. You grow up in Ohio where most people either farm or work in the steel mills, and you learn the value of money. And the fact was, that Detroit caper led to some gangland executions among the Purples, which in turn led to some arrests and the virtual breakup of the gang. So part of me felt that I had done a good deed for society, while the rest of me was satisfied to keep the cash we’d gotten from selling the booze to Capone in Chicago.

  I was staying at the Garden of Allah Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, just across the street from Schwab’s Drug Store, lunch counter to the stars, the maybe’s, the hopefuls, and the never-will-be’s. The hotel had formerly been the home of an aging silent film star, Alla Nazinova, who’d fallen on hard times when the talkies came in because her voice sounded like a dump truck unloading gravel, and so she’d transformed her palatial home into a hotel and augmented the main building with twenty-five bungalows surrounding a swimming pool. There were flower gardens and winding, uneven brick paths among the bungalows and the usual birds tweeting and hibiscus smelling, and it was really a very pleasant place.

  But Alla must not have been any better at hotel management than she’d been at acting in talkies, because she soon went broke and had to sell the place, whereupon she moved into one of the bungalows and no doubt began brooding and muttering “sic transit gloria” or its equivalent in Russian. The original name of the place had been the Garden of Alla, after its first owner, but the new management added an H to the Alla in order to give it an exotic touch.

  Ethel had suggested the place, because she said it was the favorite of writers from back east who were living there in semi-permanent exile from all things they cherished most, meaning the bars and restaurants of New York and London. The hotel was also a favorite of movie stars who were just passing through for a few weeks, so the atmosphere was in general something along the lines of a fraternity house.

  Ethel had some notion that I was a kind of minor gangster trying to reform, more or less, and so thought I would appreciate the free spirits that roamed around the grounds or sat beside the swimming pool. Granted, during the day some of these free spirits were steeped in gloom because of a Homeric hangover or because of the inherent absurdity of being a writer in Hollywood—an absurdity that they all complained about or whined about or damned. They wrote words, but movies were pictures, and therein lay their dilemma. That plus the fact that they had bosses who thought nothing of firing them from a project or bringing in another team of writers to work on the same project. But every evening like clockwork, the gloom and the hangovers would fade away like the San Pedro fog and the bottles would come out and the parties would begin, and after a while some astonishing-looking starlet would take off her clothes and go swimming in the pool, while a half dozen swaying writers, all at some stage of physical collapse, looked on and leered happily, until inevitably one of them fell into the pool too. And in the background, someone’s victrola wo
uld be playing “Bolero” or “Tea for Two” or “What’ll I Do When You Are Far Away,” a tune that always made me feel a little depressed because it reminded me of Lily.

  And even farther in the background, you could hear the sounds of bouncing bedsprings and the usual groaning or unconvincing screaming from a starlet who was essentially auditioning, for the walls were not thick in these bungalows. Even though they looked like stucco, they weren’t. Like much of Hollywood, they were something less than they appeared. There was a story going around about some writer who was asleep and heard a female asking for a glass of water, and so, still half-stewed and thinking it was his bedmate, he got up to get it, only to discover that he was alone and the thirsty woman was next door.

  There were women writers living there, too, and they weren’t about to be left behind in the dissipation sweepstakes. One time I overheard some guy asking a dumpy-looking brunette with bangs why she looked so tired, and she replied “I’m too fucking busy. And vice versa.” It made me wonder how drunk someone would have to be to take her on. But there was more than enough booze available at The Garden to turn even a sagging, past-her-prime Eastern writer into an object of desire. I guess. She had a big contract to write for the movies and, like all the exiles from New York, she hated herself for staying, and said so. But, you see, the money was just too good. Integrity comes high, but it comes.

  Ethel thought I would like this place. I don’t know whether that was a compliment or not. But I have to be honest, I did. Like it, I mean. It made me think that once I got tired of being a private detective, I might try my hand at writing for the movies. If these people could do it, I figured anyone could. I could drink as well as any of them, and there didn’t seem to be much more involved in the business. Besides, what better way of picking up story ideas than digging around in the Hollywood dirt as a private dick? It was not a noble idea, but noble ideas were thin on the ground just then. At least on my ground.