Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 03 - Alive! Read online

  “It would be the opposite of help. He’d just blow it on booze and meth. His wife was the most loyal and patient woman I ever knew, but even she gave up on him finally. She divorced him two years ago.”

  “No wonder you never gave him your number.”

  “Actually I did, back when it still seemed like there was hope for him. I’m sure he lost it, along with his career and his wife and his self-respect and every friend he ever had.”

  “Bummer.”

  Valentino smiled wearily. “I didn’t know youngsters were still using that word.”

  “I like old-time things.”

  That put the finish on his brightening mood. “Don’t you have a class to attend?”

  Jason dragged a cell from a pocket, an odd design with an antique brass finish and protrusions that looked like exposed rivets, and checked the time. He belonged to the generation that never wore a wristwatch. “Metallurgy. Thanks, Mr. Vee— alentino,” he corrected himself mid-stride. “I better fly.”

  Metallurgy, the archivist thought after he left. What was the boy majoring in, welding?

  *

  He spent the evening at the work table in the booth, cranking episodes of Peter Gunn back and forth on twin Moviolas, searching for matching frames. A&E had decided not to air the original films because of jarring jump-cuts where scenes had been deleted or damaged, and had donated them to the university for a tax deduction, but a number of previously uncollected Gunns had shown up in the sale of an estate belonging to a retired ABC assistant director. If Valentino could restore the material from the additional reels, a “lost episode” DVD could contribute significantly to the department’s treasury. More funds meant more purchases and better equipment to put them right.

  It was tedious work, and hard on the eyes. After four hours he could barely distinguish Herschel Bernardi from Lola Albright, and his notes swam before his eyes. He’d hoped Harriet would call, but she didn’t, and when he reached for the phone to call her he saw it was after midnight. Instead he cooked a frozen burrito in the little microwave to stop the growling in his stomach, unfolded the sofa bed, and went to sleep in his clothes.

  The telephone had been purring for some time when he woke up enough to answer it. Ever the film editor, he’d managed to splice it into the dream he was having, a crazy thing about paint chips and burritos.

  “Harriet?”

  “Val?” A male voice, deep and thick with phlegm. He grunted something affirmative.

  “It’s Craig. Craig Hunter?”

  He sounded unsure of it himself, a certain indicator he was calling from the bottom of a bottle. In spite of that condition he’d somehow managed to find Valentino’s home number: the perfect end to a perfect day.

  Valentino dragged himself into a sitting position and peered at the luminous dial of his alarm clock. He’d been asleep an hour.

  “Craig, I’m not in the mood. I’m having a bad time of it lately.”

  A gurgling chuckle rang hollowly in his ear. “Brother, you’re an amateur compared to me.”

  “Whose fault is that?” He wanted to end this conversation and get back to his nightmare.

  “Listen—”

  “Save the speech. I don’t have any money. If I did, I’m through subsidizing half the distilleries and drug pushers in the U.S.”

  “Gimme a minute, okay? I’m in a bar in San Diego.” It came out “Shandago.” He had to have been pretty far gone to have forgotten his years of vocal training. He’d gotten as far as he had on his good looks and pleasing tone of voice rather than on his acting. The good looks had vanished, bloated and mottled with gin blossoms, and now he’d lost his only remaining asset.

  “What did you do, drink up all the stock in L.A.?”

  “Val, I need help. I’ll make it worth your while.”

  “It would be worth my while if you’d stop pestering me for something you can only give yourself. Check into rehab.”

  “Hear me out. Don’t—”

  He banged down the receiver. When the purring started again he pulled the cord out of the standard and slid back down and back into unconsciousness.

  *

  His business cards identified Valentino as a “film detective,” a romantic indulgence befitting a life on the outer edge of the motion picture industry. As a full-time consultant with the archives division of the Film Preservation Department, he kept irregular hours in a matchbox office in a building that had once supplied all the heat and electricity to the UCLA campus, a homely pile of architecture whose only point in its favor was the fact that no one in the university administration ever bothered to visit it. There, he, Professor Broadhead, and Ruth, the gargoyle in reception, went about the business of rescuing little pieces of time from erosion without interference on the part of authority—except when the moment came to ask for money to continue. Then the little men with calculators remembered they were there and wondered if the building might be razed to make room for another athletic training facility.

  Fortunately, Valentino was usually absent at these times. Broadhead was a revered scholar in his field, showing his face on TCM and on extra discs issued with remastered DVDs, and knew his way around the wine-and-cheese circuit like the blind man in the labyrinth. He twisted this arm, pumped that hand, and shook loose dollars like jackpots from a slot machine. That freed his colleague to scour toxic landfills and crawlspaces teeming with spiders, tracking lost frames of ancient classics. At these times Valentino was more Sherlock Holmes than Joe Academic. It was this part of the job that had drawn him to it. His name, and the obvious associations it suggested, had made him a fanatic on the subject of old movies since early childhood. It also made him the butt of a million bad jokes, but on the other hand, it left an impression on people who knew celluloid history. They might misplace his card, but they seldom forgot his name.

  Ruth pounced on him the moment he left the elevator. She rarely stirred from her station inside the doughnut-shaped desk where she served sentry, but she was a predatory old bird who swooped down with the power of her eyes. They were kohl-rimmed, as black as her hair, and equally inflexible. Age was her archenemy. She would attack every wrinkle and gray strand as soon as it surfaced, using all the weapons in her arsenal. Broadhead had speculated there were more poisons on her dressing table than in all the Japanese gardeners’ sheds in Beverly Hills. “I’d be as disinclined to visit one as the other.” But for all his shudders he was the only man on campus she couldn’t intimidate.

  “You had a call.”

  Valentino never knew from the burnished-steel tone of her voice if she thought he was at fault for not being there when a call came in or for the call having been made at all. Ruth was efficient and well-nigh indispensable, but she was one of those in favor of demolishing the building and eliminating the film program altogether as a frivolous waste of money and young minds. She tore a pink sheet off her pad and thrust it at him.

  He glanced at it, saw the name Hunter, and stuck it in his pocket. “Thanks. Dr. Broadhead in?”

  “Aren’t you going to return the call?”

  He shrank in on himself, a mouse in a hawk’s line of sight. “Later.” Lifting his brows, he cocked his head toward the door of Broadhead’s office.

  “He’s working on his book. He doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

  “When he wakes up from his nap, please tell him I’d like a moment of his time.”

  “You wouldn’t be so cranky if you started your day with a healthy breakfast.”

  “What do you consider healthy?” He knew he’d regret asking. Prolonging a conversation with Ruth was definitely not the way to start one’s day.

  “Bacon sandwich, three-cheese omelet, and a strawberry milkshake. Whole milk. I wouldn’t wash my feet in that one-percent swill.”

  “Is that what you eat?”

  “Every day for the last forty years, except Sunday. Then I lay out a feast.” She turned her head from side to side, like a spy in a Bob Hope movie, and leaned forward, lowering h
er voice to a foghorn whisper. “She’s in there.”

  She made the pronoun sound like a vile epithet. He had no doubt who she was. Ever since Fanta had breezed into their lives, Ruth had behaved like the old herd leader, determined to resist challenge from a younger rival. The fact that Ruth had no romantic designs on Broadhead didn’t enter into it. In her world, women typed letters and answered telephones and ran things from behind the camouflage of indentured servitude. The presence of any other female in the old power plant was a threat to her authority.

  Valentino was just beginning to wrap his mind around the prospect of a morning romantic interlude—and trying even harder to avoid the image—when Fanta swept out of Broadhead’s office with a chirrupy “’Bye, now, you old grump.” She tugged the door shut behind her and grinned brilliantly when she saw Valentino. “Well, hello. You look like Georgie Jessel the night The Jazz Singer broke all the records. He turned down the lead, you know.”

  “I know. I’m surprised you do. You only audited Kyle’s class for fun when you were studying law.”

  “Being engaged to him is like attending film school twenty-four-seven. Seriously, the bags under your eyes have bags.”

  Fanta had none. She was a fresh twenty-one, with straight hair in bangs and falling to the shoulders of an unstructured autumn-orange blazer. Beneath it she wore a black pants suit and black boots with two-inch heels that shot her up to six-foot-two. It was a far cry from the off-the-shoulder tops and torn jeans of her undergraduate years, which were only months behind her. The Halloween-candy color scheme was in keeping with the season, but the effect was spoiled slightly by the glossy white satin cover of the enormous book she held under one arm. It was the size of a Gutenberg Bible and looked like a photo album belonging to the Baldwin family, exes and all.

  “I didn’t get much sleep last night, but I won’t burden you with the dreary details. How are the wedding plans?”

  “Sleep,” she said, “what’s that? I’m postponing my bar exam until after the honeymoon. I can’t bone up on De Havilland versus Warner Brothers and pick out the centerpieces for the reception at the same time.”

  “So you drafted your fiancé to help decide on invitations?”

  She patted the massive volume. “His own fault. I wanted to hire a calligrapher to do them from scratch, but he said if we started going down that road we’d have to spend the wedding night in Fresno instead of Stockholm.”

  “I can’t see you and Kyle in Niagara Falls, but why Sweden?”

  “There’s an old guy there who says he has Bergman’s production notes for The Seventh Seal, but he won’t let go of them without cash up front and Kyle won’t pay him until he gets a look at them.”

  “He’s really writing his book?”

  “Of course. He made his reputation on Persistence of Vision, but this one will blow it right out of the water.”

  “You’ve read it?”

  “What he’s written. He wants to be sure some aging script girl doesn’t sue him for libel.”

  Valentino was jealous. He’d known Broadhead far longer than she had, and he had never so much as discussed the book with him in any detail. He got away from that subject before he betrayed himself. “So he’s working during your honeymoon.”

  “Hey, I’m just happy we’re getting out of California. You think I just pulled Fresno out of my—?”

  “Take it out to the back fence,” Ruth said. “This is a place of business.”

  Fanta beamed at her. “Good-bye, old dear. You’re getting an invitation, you know.”

  “Something old?” Her eyes were even fiercer than usual.

  “That would be the bridegroom. What are nuptials without a guest who gives the couple six months at the outside?”

  “I never said that.”

  “Really? My mistake. I misread your body language.”

  “Just don’t include me in the wedding party. I’ve had more fun being a pallbearer.”

  Fanta bent down, gave Ruth’s laminated cheek a pat, and whirled on out. The elevator doors opened at her touch. Valentino stared at the secretary, fascinated despite his horror. But Ruth’s expression was as unreadable as a bisque-headed doll’s. He fled to sanctuary, hoping Broadhead wouldn’t ignore his knocking as he sometimes did. Fortune smiled. The professor’s voice beckoned from the other side.

  The office was nearly sterile, the bare polar opposite of Valentino’s, which was cluttered with posters framed and rolled, kitschy knick-knacks, and piles of shooting scripts. The only exception—and it was new—was a slightly out-of-focus photo in a frame of Fanta on some gray, blustery beach, looking over her shoulder at the camera and laughing. She wore a leather windbreaker with the collar turned up.

  Broadhead saw where he was looking. “It’s bewitched. No matter where I stand in the room, it’s me she’s laughing at.”

  “It’s always like that when they look directly into the lens.”

  “See for yourself.”

  Valentino walked to the far rear corner of the room, watching the photo. He crossed to the opposite corner, then to the next. It was true. She was staring at Broadhead and splitting her sides at the ridiculous sight.

  “I’m not sure such a thing is possible, but you’re right.”

  “She’s part gypsy, you know. She cast a spell on me the first day she walked into my classroom.”

  “Try telling that to the review board. Good thing she waited until she was no longer your student before she made her move.”

  “What makes you think the first move wasn’t mine?”

  “You might stick your neck out on a point of film theory, but not in matters of romance.”

  Broadhead unscrewed his pipe and screwed it back together, a habit he’d acquired after the university banned smoking on campus. He claimed to have carved it by hand during the three years he was incarcerated in Yugoslavia on suspicion of espionage. “I’m to choose this sentiment on that paper stock in a third color. I’d suggest elopement, but I’m afraid of ladders.”

  “Isn’t picking out invitations something a bride does with her mother?”

  “She’s in Luxembourg.”

  “Why Luxembourg?”

  “Because she isn’t U.S. ambassador to anywhere else.”

  “Fanta’s mother is an ambassador?”

  “Needless to say, she isn’t available to discuss champagne fountains.”

  “Why do we even have an ambassador there?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest, but she seems to be earning her keep. We haven’t been at war with the place in my memory.” He stopped playing with the pipe and put it in a drawer. “When you didn’t show up here yesterday, I’d hoped you were in Argentina, assembling a blooper reel for Triumph of the Will: Hitler falling on his prat in Nuremberg. But you have the look of an exasperated home remodeler. How normal. I mourn.”

  “It’s worse than that. Craig Hunter’s been calling me.”

  “There’s a name from the past. I thought he’d have mixed up a cemetery cocktail by now.”

  “Not that he hasn’t tried, based on how he sounded late last night. I wasn’t diplomatic. I thought you might talk me out of feeling guilty.”

  “As emotions go, it’s as useful as boxing gloves on a Buddhist. Being polite is no way to get rid of a pest.”

  “He tried again this morning, here at work.”

  Broadhead’s telephone rang. “Let me show you a trick I learned in the Far East. No charge for this wisdom.” He lifted the receiver and let it fall back down. “Needy drunks are like amateur housebreakers. When a lock won’t pick they give up and try next door. You wouldn’t have done him any favors by stringing him along.”

  Ruth opened the door without knocking and leaned in. “I just put through a call. Why’d you hang up?”

  “Why’d you put it through? I said not to disturb me.”

  “It was for Valentino. That woman’s still trying to reach him.”

  Valentino said, “What woman?”

  “I gave
you the message.”

  He fished out the pink crumple. He’d put it away without noting the first name. It was Lorna, Craig Hunter’s ex-wife. She never called on her own behalf. The last time, Craig had been in jail in Mexico, charged with smuggling fighting roosters across the border in return for Colombian cocaine.

  3

  HE RETURNED LORNA’S call from his own office, surrounded by press-agent ephemera and props from movies so obscure their entire casts might have been in witness protection: Broadhead had compared the effect to “a Sunset Strip souvenir shop after the Big One.” Valentino himself considered the Laurel and Hardy salt-and-pepper shakers, mountains of moldering Photoplays and Silver Screens, and the papier-mâché sarcophagus from The Mummy’s Brain his personal totems, among which he found the peace that used to await him at home in the days before he’d sacrificed his private life on the altar of The Oracle.

  “Val, it’s so good to hear your voice.”

  “Yours, too.”

  He wasn’t just being polite. Craig Hunter’s ex-wife—who had put up with him long after everyone else had given him up as a lost cause, maintaining contact even beyond their divorce—spoke in the warm contralto she used all the time now. Its ironic undertone had typecast her as the leading lady’s wisecracking best friend in several romantic comedies until her manager had hired a coach to raise it a full octave. That had led to sitcom stardom at ABC. When after three successful seasons she’d quit, announcing her plans to devote all her time to making one man happy instead of twenty million fans, she’d shaken the network to its foundation. Two years after the marriage broke up, she was still not returning agents’ calls.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t call back right away,” Valentino said, stopping short of adding I thought it was Craig.

  “That’s all right. We sort of lost touch. These things are a little like cancer. Old friends stop coming around.” Candor like hers had kept the couple away from Hollywood parties. “I was wondering if you’d heard from Craig lately.”

  “He called me last night from San Diego.”