Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 01 - Frames Read online

  “YOU MUST FOCUS!”

  Erich von Stroheim greeted him, a ghastly figure separated in shreds and tatters from what remained of The Oracle’s linen screen, hanging like silk stockings from the rail at the top of the stage. He wore a cutaway coat with tails, a stiff shirtboard, and a black-rimmed monocle attached by a ribbon to his lapel: the butler in Sunset Boulevard, reduced by devotion and circumstances from Norma Desmond’s first director (and first husband).

  “You are a handy fellow with the ladies, Herr Valentino,” he said. “But how are you at saving mein Kindling? I see no progress.”

  Valentino blinked. He was wide awake now, he knew it; yet he was facing a ghost. He’d made the mad leap from harmless obsessive to full-blown psychotic with no stops along the way. Best to humor the vision; and by reflection himself.

  “You allow yourself to be distracted. Die Frauen—Ja, they provide comfort in times of trouble and help propagate the species—but also they distract us from the business at hand. You must focus. This is a metaphor, ja? And yet it was so important to art—mein art—that the world embraced it as a model to emulate. Emulate, this the right word, ja?”

  “Ja,” Valentino said. “I mean yes. But you’re overlooking an important issue. You’re dead. You’ve been dead for forty-eight years. I have a hard time accepting advice from a corpse.”

  “And yet who else has such wisdom of experience?” No humor showed on that stern face, separated as it was into disconnected pieces, an eye here, half a nose there, the mouth twitching out of line with the other features, like a reflection in a shattered mirror. “Seek the dead for your counsel, Herr Valentino. They have all the answers.”

  And he was alone.

  Praise for Frames

  “While the lighthearted tone is far removed from the gritty realism of the author’s Amos Walker series (American Detective, etc.), the versatile Estleman has crafted yet another intelligent page-turner.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Veteran mystery writer Loren Estleman has laid claim to a fresh new franchise and the turf is all his. It’s a pleasure to see the care and cunning he’s invested in this book. My hat’s off to him.”

  —Sue Grafton, New York Times #1 bestselling author

  “Loren Estleman marvelously mixes movies and mayhem in a way sure to please film buffs and mystery fans alike. Frames is another winner from a master.”

  —John Jakes, New York Times #1 bestselling author

  “Wherever it is, he goes. Whenever it’s buried, he digs. Whatever it takes, he does. Estleman introduces an amiable new sleuth in an offbeat new series…. An entertaining journey.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Estleman is a national treasure.”

  —John Lescroart, New York Times bestselling author

  “Electric with witty suspense and fascinating Hollywood lore, Frames proves master noir author Loren Estleman is not only one of today’s most versatile but finest novelists. From screening rooms to boardrooms, exploding celluloid to fire-eating cops, this marvelous tale delivers the ride of a lifetime.”

  —Gayle Lynds, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Spymaster

  “Loren Estleman’s new series is a winner, a treat for film and mystery buffs alike. Add Valentino to the gallery of memorable characters Mr. Estleman has given us throughout his distinguished career.”

  —George Pelecanos, New York Times bestselling author

  “Film has never been so noir—nor so much fun—as it is in Frames. Mystery, movies, and a sleuth named Valentino—crime doesn’t get much better than this. Estleman’s one of the best in the business—and this series nails his name on the marquee in bright lights.”

  —Linda Fairstein, New York Times bestselling author

  “The usually dark, cynical, and masterful Loren Estleman has turned his talents to the bright, breezy, and totally hilarious. This is both a very funny tale and a wacky riveting mystery. Loren knows mysteries. Loren knows movies. Loren knows how to create characters you want to meet again and again. May Valentino and his entourage of quirky helpers appear again very soon, with or without the ghost of Erich von Stroheim.”

  —Stuart M. Kaminsky, New York Times bestselling author

  “Break out the popcorn! Mystery fans and old-movie fanatics will love Frames, the kickoff of Loren Estleman’s new softer-boiled series about a UCLA film archivist named Valentino. Frames is a delightful double feature of vintage Hollywood murder and hilarious present-day shenanigans, and the snappy dialogue alone is worth the price of admission.”

  —Deborah Donnelly, author of the Wedding Planner Mysteries

  Books by Loren D. Estleman

  Kill Zone

  Roses are Dead

  Any Man’s Death

  Motor City Blue

  Angel Eyes

  The Midnight Man

  The Glass Highway

  Sugartown

  Every Brilliant Eye

  Lady Yesterday

  Downriver

  Silent Thunder

  Sweet Women Lie

  Never Street

  The Witchfinder

  The Hours of the Virgin

  A Smile on the Face of the Tiger

  City of Widows*

  The High Rocks*

  Billy Gashade*

  Stamping Ground*

  Aces & Eights*

  Journey of the Dead*

  Jitterbug*

  Thunder City*

  The Rocky Mountain Moving

  Picture Association*

  The Master Executioner*

  Black Powder, White Smoke*

  White Desert*

  Sinister Heights

  Something Borrowed,

  Something Black*

  Port Hazard*

  Poison Blonde*

  Retro*

  Little Black Dress*

  Nicotine Kiss*

  The Undertaker’s Wife*

  The Adventures of Johnny

  Vermillion*

  American Detective*

  Frames*

  Gas City*

  The Branch and the Scaffold*

  Alone*

  The Book of Murdock*

  Roy & Lillie: A Love Story*

  The LeftHanded Dollar*

  *A Forge Book

  LOREN D. ESTLEMAN

  FRAMES

  A VALENTINO MYSTERY

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Louise A. Estleman, who taught me to love movies; and of my father, Leauvett C. Estleman, who taught me to read the credits.

  That’s part of your problem. You haven’t seen enough movies. All of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.

  —Steve Martin to Kevin Kline, Grand Canyon (1991, Lawrence Kasdan and Meg Kasdan)

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  …in which the author owns up to using broad license in his description of the UCLA Film Preservation Program. The laboratory and its equipment here are state of the current art, and may in fact be either less or more advanced depending on the funds available when the book appears; and the building itself is an architect
ural fantasy. Certainly the size of the archival staff exceeds two, and its own offices are more modern and ergonomic. Who among us is inclined to be more sympathetic toward characters who haven’t squalid conditions to rise above?

  CONTENTS

  I: POPCORN PALACE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  II: DOUBLE FEATURE

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  III: DISH NIGHT

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  IV: RED CARPET

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CLOSING CREDITS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  I

  POPCORN PALACE

  CHAPTER

  1

  YOU COULDN’T LIVE a linear life in Hollywood. Everything was a special effect.

  One moment there you were on your fleet of telephones, bellowing at brokers and bank managers, a gravel-voiced captain of industry in a screwball comedy, and then your vision swam and someone made broad circling motions on a harp, and the next moment you were lying on a stingy mattress in a rancid hotel room with a revolver in your hand.

  “Tragic case,” the realtor said. “Are you familiar with the details?”

  Valentino nodded and took a hit from his five-dollar cup of coffee. He and the woman were standing in front of a bas-relief in bronze of Max Fink’s bald sad face on a plaque in the crumbling lobby of The Oracle, a ruin left over from the lost ancient civilization of Hollywood. The floor was littered with horsehair plaster and shattered chestnut shells, the plunder of some squirrel cineaste.

  “Tragic, and not uncommon. He wasn’t the only entrepreneur of his time to get caught in the pinch between the Wall Street crash and the talking-pictures revolution.” He smiled apologetically at the realtor, Anita Somebody. “I’m a bore on this subect. Ask me how to spell DeMille and I’ll recite his complete filmography.”

  She hesitated just long enough to convince him she didn’t know DeMille from Deliverance. She was a carefully preserved blonde in her forties, and Valentino knew her story without asking: She’d come out from Omaha or someplace like that twenty years ago, hoping for a role on L.A. Law, and when that missed the mark and she couldn’t get work in commercials, it was either realty or prostitution. Prostitution didn’t come with a dental plan. She looked obscenely well pressed in her agency blazer and tailored skirt among the rat droppings. “It’s what you call a fixer-upper,” she said.

  “It’s what I call Ground Zero.”

  The grand foyer was a jungle of exposed wires and broken fretwork. An ambitious spider had erected a web of Babylonian proportions across the marble staircase and pigeons fluttered to and fro among the copper coffers in the ceiling. How the building had managed to escape demolition in a city of soaring property values and cheap Mexican labor was one for Charlie Chan.

  Valentino, who knew less about construction and repair than Anita knew about Cecil B. DeMille, said, “Explain to me again why you brought me here. I’m looking for a place to live, not a lifelong hobby.”

  “The budget you gave us presented challenges. This neighborhood’s zoned commercial and residential. No one seems to know just where the break is. Developers are reluctant to make an offer until the county board straightens it out, and the owners are anxious to sell. I’m afraid it’s either this or Oxnard.”

  “I can’t afford it.”

  “You haven’t heard the asking price.”

  “I don’t mean that. I love these wonderful old barns; they’re in greater danger of extinction than the spotted owl. If I bought it, I’d feel obligated to restore it to its original splendor. Did I mention I’m on salary at UCLA?”

  Her lipstick smile was firmer than the foundation. “Why don’t you postpone your decision until you’ve seen all there is to see?”

  “Well, I guess I can afford a tour.” Saying it, he felt an intoxicating mix of anticipation and surrender. History was his weakness and his calling.

  Max Fink’s very public dream of 1927 turned into a hangover two years later, but by then everyone else was too busy taking aspirins to notice.

  Fink had stumbled into millions in 1912, when he rented out his candy store in Brooklyn evenings and weekends for the exhibition of silent motion-picture shorts. When he came by one night after closing and saw how many people had lined up to pay to see painted Indians chasing covered wagons across the New Jersey countryside, he evicted his tenants, bought a projector, struck a deal with a local photo-play distributor, and went into show business.

  When Thomas Edison sued his moviemaking competitors for infringing on his patent, Max Fink fled with them to Southern California and invented Hollywood. Along the way he stopped at choice locations to purchase vaudeville theaters in financial trouble and converted them into movie houses. Fifteen years after he sold his last Jolly Roger, he invested his profits in the stock market and used his credit to build a glittering chain of motion-picture palaces from coast to coast, saving the biggest and best for Los Angeles.

  The Oracle as sketched by the architect was a Balinese-Turkish-Grecian temple, with a mild Polynesian influence and bits cribbed from Moorish Spain, Renaissance Italy, and the Gaiety Music Hall in Flatbush. Seating was designed for five thousand, with space in the pit for a hundred-piece orchestra. Fink commissioned a four-manual Wurlitzer pipe organ to accompany the action onscreen, a half-ton chandelier, and plaster Pegasuses to flank the grand staircase rising to the mezzanine. When word reached H. L. Mencken, the curmudgeonly magazine mogul quipped, “It just shows you what God could accomplish if He had bad taste.”

  Then The Jazz Singer, the Warner brothers’ last-ditch attempt to rescue their studio from bankruptcy by introducing songs and spoken dialogue to the silent screen, opened to delirious throngs at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Overnight, Hollywood was forced to shut down its pantomime productions. Soundstages were erected, theaters were wired for speakers, and audiences were permitted to hear their favorite matinee idols speaking lines instead of having to read them on title cards. All this expensive retrofitting led to a recession in California. Reluctantly—agonizingly—Fink told his contractor to reduce the size of the orchestra pit and reconfigure the auditorium to seat a paltry eighteen hundred customers. Construction in six cities was postponed until the industry could catch its second wind.

  “It was like when the dot-com bubble burst in the nineties,” Anita explained, in the singsong tone of a museum tour guide. “Millionaires found themselves lining up for free soup at Salvation Army missions. There was a song—” She broke off, stuck for the title.

  “‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?’” Valentino finished. “It was about a busted railroad baron; but it applied to the Hollywood elite two years before the Depression hit New York.”

  “Maybe I should keep my mouth shut and leave you in charge.” Anita’s relentlessly chipper tone fell short of covering her impatience.

  “Sorry. I did warn you.” He reached out to stroke a crushed-velvet seat—and put his thumb through the rotted fabric. They were in the auditorium, a vast ruined chamber where the ornate brass sconces had been scavenged for scrap, leaving gaping holes in the exquisitely molded plaster.

  In spite of the cutbacks, the completed Oracle was a marvel. Fink had reduced its scope, but steadfastly refused to skimp on material or workmanship. Its marquee towered forty feet into the sky, lit by sixteen thousand electric bulbs, with colored searchlights swiveling and crossing swordlike beams far above the red-tile rooftops of Golden Age Holly
wood. Attendance at the premiere of The Hollywood Review of 1929 shattered every record set since Ben-Hur three years before.

  Six months later, Max Fink was broke.

  After the stock market collapsed in ’29, he was forced to sell his theater chain to mollify his creditors. It was a temporary reprieve. In 1933, sick, penniless, and stripped of all his delusions, one of the industry’s great visionaries put a pawnshop Colt to his head and blew out his brains in a dollar-a-week flophouse, two blocks down from a line of customers waiting to get in to see Mae West in a personal appearance at The Oracle. A friend who had lent him money to complete construction paid for his burial in Forest Lawn. Charlie Chaplin was among the pallbearers, who outnumbered the other mourners two to one.

  “There’s a quaint legend connected to the place,” Anita said. “On certain nights you can see Max Fink’s ghost roaming the aisles, counting the house. Bless you!”

  Valentino excused himself and blew his nose into his Starbucks napkin. “I guess dust and mold spores don’t affect spooks the way they do us mortals.”

  It was just an old building after all. Neither its backstory nor the glamorous phantasms that had glided across its screen, fly-specked now and hanging in tatters, countered the tragic truth that it should have been put out of its misery decades ago.

  But Valentino was a film archivist, trained to see past such flaws as broken sprocket holes, scratched frames, and the insidious orange creep of decomposition and appreciate the glory of America’s first true native art form. He found the moth-eaten carpet and water-stained gilt no less exotic than Egyptian treasures half buried in Sahara sand. There in the elephants’ graveyard of spoiled dreams he experienced the same electric thrill he’d felt the day his mother took his hand and led him into a movie theater for the first time. But that had been only a whitewashed cinderblock box in Fox Forage, Indiana. This was Max Fink’s fabled Oracle, home of Hell’s Angels, 42nd Street, Stagecoach, and Anna Christie. He could almost hear Garbo’s smoky voice, saying—