Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, No. 1. Whole No. 785, January 2007

Terence Faherty recently received a nomination for the Shamus Award for his 128-page novella In a Teapot, from his Scott Elliott series published in hardcover by The Mystery Company. The other four nominees for the award, for best hardcover of 2005, are all full-length novels. Hats off to Mr. Faherty for proving that short fiction can compete with popular novels! Scott Elliott also features in this new story.

1.

I reached the offices of the Hollywood Security Agency a little before nine, as I usually did. A guy with two kids and a working wife hardly ever oversleeps. As I pulled up in front of the agency’s little building on Roe, I got a surprise. It turned out to be the first of a full day’s worth.

My boss, Patrick J. Maguire, no early riser, was up and waiting for me. He was pacing the front walk, to be exact, and using all of it, as he was also no scarecrow. At the sight of me, he tossed the cigar he’d been smoking at the nearest palm tree.

“Keep the motor running, Scotty,” Paddy called to me. “We’re late for an appointment.”

By then he was climbing into the gray and red Edsel Corsair I was driving that year.

“Where?” I asked.

“Grauman’s. Not the Chinese Theatre. Grauman’s warehouse. On Seward. That headstone you’ve been fussing over’s been stolen.”

“Gabrielle’s?”

“I thought that would get your attention. It got mine, too. I see a nice payday ahead for us. And maybe a chance to do a good turn for your old friend.”

That old friend was Gabrielle Nouveau, real name Annie Kovacs, a silent-movie star who’d befriended me when I’d landed in Hollywood in the thirties. Now, in 1959, she was long dead and nearly forgotten. Worse, her grave had been desecrated.

Not her real grave, which was safe and sound in Forest Lawn. The one that had been disturbed was the grave of her stardom. As everyone knows, Grauman’s Chinese has a unique collection of stars’ autographs. They reside in the cement of the theater’s forecourt, right up against Hollywood Boulevard. The practice started in 1927 when Norma Talmadge, an old rival of Gabrielle’s, accidentally stepped in wet cement while touring the new theater. She’d added her name, and a tradition had been born. Not every star did footprints. Some left handprints, some both, some were more creative. Groucho Marx, for example, had imprinted his cigar, and Sonja Henie her skates.

Gabrielle Nouveau had left the standard signature and footprints way back in 1929, when the future had looked rosy for her and just about everyone else. Her little slab had stayed put until 1956, when it and a second one had been “temporarily” removed as part of a renovation to the theater’s box office. The two slabs had never been replaced, despite letter-writing and petition campaigns organized by Gabrielle’s old friends, including my wife Ella and me. That hunk of concrete was the “headstone” Paddy had mentioned.

“Was the other slab taken too?” I asked.

“Yes, I think it was,” Paddy said, playing coy. He was silver-haired, now that he was pushing sixty. But he was still a flashy dresser. Today’s tie was a collection of red, green, and blue triangles. They were fluttering in the breeze from the Corsair’s open window like a string of pennants. A small-craft warning, I decided.

“How did anyone know the slabs were there to steal?” I asked. Then the answer came to me. “That television spot.”

A local station had recently done a piece on the Grauman’s warehouse that had included shots of the two displaced squares. I’d missed the story, but Ella hadn’t. It had inspired her to start another petition drive.

“If it was that TV piece,” Paddy said, “Grauman’s brought this on themselves, by going after a little free publicity. Now they want it hushed up. Hence their call to us.”

Hollywood Security had gotten more than its share of that kind of call. They were usually placed by vaguely titled studio executives who wanted us to put in a fix or twist an arm or closely examine a keyhole.

“Hushed up? Why?”

Paddy chuckled. “Ever played the tourist, Scotty? Ever gone to Grauman’s and compared your shoe size with William Powell’s? Sure you have. You probably did it within twenty-four hours of stepping off your train back in the ‘thirties, all star struck, with the hay still sticking out of your ears. Then when you signed with Paramount, I’ll bet you went back there and picked out the very square of concrete where your footprints were going to be someday.”

As Paddy knew all too well, I was an ex-actor, emphasis on the ex. And, as it happened, I had staked out a stretch of Grauman’s forecourt for my very own, once upon a time. That claim had since been jumped by Van Johnson, not that I held a grudge.

Paddy was breezing on. “And when you got out of the service after the war, I’ll bet the Chinese Theater was one of the first places you went. Hell, it was probably one of the things you’d been fighting for.”

“So what if it was?” I asked politely.

“So, in all those visits you made, real and imaginary, did you ever happen to see a slab belonging to the great Greta Garbo?”

“No,” I said. “There isn’t one. That kind of stunt was beneath Garbo’s dignity.”

Paddy beamed at me. “The guy who said a person’s education never really ends must have had your picture on his desk.”

2.

Grauman’s Chinese Theatre looked like the MGM set department’s idea of a chop suey house, with its jade green pagoda roof, red pillars, and its dragons, large and small. Grauman’s warehouse, on the other hand, was strictly out of Omaha, Nebraska, its facade lacking any decorations whatsoever, unless you counted the oversize garage doors. The walls were poured concrete, naturally. Grauman’s used so much of the stuff, they probably got a discount. I wondered if the workmen who’d built the place had signed their names before it dried.

The pedestrian entrance had a doorbell, but Paddy tried the knob first. It turned in his hand, and we waltzed on in. The first thing we came to was a giant gorilla’s foot, cut off at the ankle and big enough inside for Paddy to use it as a bathtub.

“Forgot they did the King Kong premiere,” he said as we circled the prop. “That was a night.”

Beyond the foot were racks holding scenery flats and enough spotlights for a chain of theaters. Four very special lights came next, the giant, wheeled searchlights Grauman’s used to light up the night sky during big events.

Paddy kicked the nearest searchlight’s tire and said, “If the Japanese bombers had made it over here, old Sid Grauman would have been ready for them.”

We heard voices and saw a trio of men standing in a sunny square beneath a skylight. One of them saw us back and hurried to meet us, a very thin man with sunken cheeks, big sad eyes, and wavy hair that looked like it had been pulled at recently.

“Thank you for coming so quickly,” he said, sounding as sincere as the greeter at a funeral parlor. “I’m Frank Findley, vice president of public relations. The police are still here—” he gestured toward the men he’d just left “—so maybe you’d like to wait outside.”

“The police are old friends of ours,” Paddy assured him. “We’ve helped them out any number of times. Before we join them, why don’t you tell my associate, Mr. Elliott, about what happened last night.”

Findley blinked. “You haven’t briefed him? I must say I’m surprised.”

Welcome to the club, I thought, though it had actually been years since I’d been surprised by Paddy’s managerial style.

“I wanted him to hear it from you,” the great man said. “I was afraid he’d start theorizing before he had all the data. That’s a big mistake in our business.”

“He keeps his cigars in a coal scuttle, too,” I told Findley, but the allusion sailed over his head.

He blinked again, focused on me, and began. “Last night someone broke in here and stole three concrete slabs we had in storage.”

“Three? I thought only two had been yanked when the box office was renovated.”

Findley was impressed. “Two of the slabs were ones we’d removed for those box-office repairs. They belonged to actresses of no consequence. The third was quite different.”

Paddy didn’t nudge me in the ribs, but I felt it anyway.

The theater representative cleared his throat. “Please understand that what I’m about to tell you is in the strictest confidence, Mr. Elliott. The third slab belonged to Miss Greta Garbo. It contained imprints of her hands and her signature. She made them in 1929, at the premiere of the film A Woman of Affairs. Shortly afterward, the slab was removed and put into storage here. It remained here until last night.”

“Removed why?” I asked.

“Miss Garbo requested it. She wasn’t pleased with the slab. I’ve heard several explanations. One was that she’d accidentally knelt in the cement while signing her name, leaving an imprint of her knees.”

“Years before Al Jolson thought of doing it,” Paddy observed.

“Er, yes. There certainly were impressions of her knees in our slab. I’ve seen them. So maybe she’d expected them to be smoothed over and was unhappy that they hadn’t been. Another story was that Miss Garbo was upset over comments made about the slab.” Findley checked for eavesdroppers. “She was known for having somewhat large feet. The wags supposedly said that she’d imprinted her knees because her feet wouldn’t fit. Things like that.

“Mr. Grauman,” Findley continued, reverently referring to Sid Grauman, the late theater owner Paddy had mentioned earlier, “made a deal with her. He agreed to remove and destroy the slab if she would come and do another one, without knees. She said she would. But she was already becoming shy and reclusive. She never fulfilled her part of the bargain.”

“Neither did Mr. Grauman,” I pointed out. “He didn’t destroy the slab.”

“No,” Findley admitted.

“Why didn’t he threaten to stick it back in?” Paddy asked, describing what might be called the Maguire approach. “That would have gotten her attention.”

“Mr. Grauman would never have threatened anyone. He held on to the slab for sentimental reasons.”

“How long does sentiment last around here?” I asked. “He’s been dead quite awhile.”

“Nine years,” Findley said for the record. “Obviously we retained the slab after Mr. Grauman’s death. There was always a chance that it could be restored without offending Miss Garbo. If she...”

“Stepped in front of a bus?” Paddy suggested.

Findley nodded guiltily. “After Miss Garbo passes on,” he said, sounding like a funeral director again, “the slab could be... rediscovered. That is, it could have been before last night. Now it may be gone forever. And all because of that television crew.”

“Television,” Paddy said, all but spitting for emphasis. “What good has ever come of that?”

3.

We were interrupted at that point by a police detective named Hughes, one of the pair who’d been hogging the square of sunlight. I’d recognized him as soon as we’d entered, and he’d recognized us. Even in a dimly lit warehouse, there was no mistaking Paddy. Hughes, a shorter than standard guy with a bony brow, may have been waiting for us to come over and pay our respects. We hadn’t, and he seemed a little hurt about it.

“Should have known you vultures would be circling the water hole,” he said pleasantly. Like a lot of us just then, he was watching too many Westerns.

“Nice to see you too, Detective,” Paddy said and offered him a cigar. He held it well down, underscoring Hughes’s lack of height.

Hughes ignored the cigar but not the slight. “This may actually be your kind of job, Maguire, though I would have expected your outfit to be on the other side of it, the taking side. Or on both, the taking side and the miraculously recovering side. Anyone ask you for an estimate in the last week or so for a lift-and-carry job?”

“I’ll check our phone log,” Paddy said. “In the meantime, Mr. Findley was about to tell us how word of the Garbo slab leaked out.”

Hughes’s kind remarks about Hollywood Security had made the public relations man even more nervous. He collected himself a little and said, “It was the television crew. It had to be. They came by here last week to do a story on the memorabilia stored here. The person from my office who set it up wasn’t familiar with the Garbo situation. The warehouse manager thought the visit had been cleared by upper management, which it hadn’t been. He showed the film crew back here.” Findley pointed to a stretch of floor currently occupied by nothing at all. “They saw and photographed the Garbo artifact.”

“It didn’t make the evening news,” I said. Ella would certainly have mentioned that.

“No,” Findley said. “Luckily, the owner of the station belongs to several of the same civic organizations as our current president. He agreed to respect our privacy. The story as broadcast did not mention Greta Garbo. But word got out somehow. Someone at the station must have leaked it.”

Paddy said, “I assume we’re discounting the possibility of a tip-off from one of your people because they’ve all been with you for donkey’s years. And because of the timing, the theft coming right on the heels of the newspeople’s visit. Fine. How did our thieves go about it?”

Hughes actually jumped in to answer that, maybe because Findley and Paddy weren’t leaving him any lines. “Door over there was broken open. There are footprints outside, enough for four men, it looks like. It would have taken at least four linebackers to heft one of those things. And there are tire marks from a flatbed in the alley.”

“The alarm didn’t go off?” I asked.

Findley looked sheepish. “We’ve never had one.”

Paddy asked at him. “Surprised King Kong’s foot’s still here. What’s your thinking on why all three were taken?”

He asked this of Detective Hughes, who said, “They took all three to hide their interest in the one they really wanted, the only valuable one, the Garbo slab.”

“It didn’t work worth a damn,” I said.

“What?” Hughes growled.

“He’s congratulating you on seeing through it so quickly,” Paddy said.

Just then, the ringing of a phone in some distant corner took Findley away from us. Hughes saw an opportunity for a heart-to-heart.

“Listen, Maguire. For once you’re welcome to stick your nose in. We don’t have much interest in this. That Garbo thing is on its way to some nutball collector who’ll either sleep with it or have it set in the floor of his bathtub. The other two are already on the bottom of Santa Monica Bay. We’re only making this much effort because Grauman’s is still a big noise at the chamber of commerce. So if you can keep them out of our hair, fine. Just don’t soak them for too much, or we’ll come by to see you.”

“You’re always welcome,” Paddy said.

Hughes stalked off, followed by his bashful partner, a guy who looked like he’d be billed as “second policeman” for the rest of his life.

Findley was disappointed to find them gone when he trotted back.

“They knew you were in good hands,” Paddy assured him. “Any news?”

“The phone call? No. It was the theater management, hoping for news from me. Why?”

“One possibility we have to face is that your mementos are being held for ransom. If that’s the case, we should be hearing from the, ah, kidnappers shortly.”

“What will we do then?”

“You’ll leave everything to us, of course. In fact, maybe you and I should go over to your offices right now and put your superiors’ collective mind at rest. Meanwhile, Mr. Elliott here will initiate inquiries. Any thoughts on that, Scotty?”

I had one, which took the form of a question. “One of the other slabs belonged to Gabrielle Nouveau,” I said, impressing Findley a second time. “Who autographed the third one?”

“Another silent-movie actress, Nola Nielsen.”

It seemed to me that Findley sniffed a little before pronouncing the name. I felt I should know why he would, too, but I couldn’t quite remember.

While I puzzled over it, Findley told Paddy that his car was in the alley.

“Fine. Pick me up out front. I want to give my operative here some final instructions.”

4.

“I take it that you’re less than impressed with Detective Hughes’s analysis of the case,” Paddy said as he walked me out the way we’d come in.

“I like it fine,” I said. “He’s just wearing it inside out. Gabrielle’s slab and the other one weren’t taken as camouflage for the Garbo heist. It was the other way around. One of the unknown slabs was the real target. You can’t disguise your interest in a diamond by adding a couple of aquamarines to your haul. But grab a diamond and nobody will remember what small change you took.”

Paddy wasn’t buying, but that only made me sell harder. “Look how much simpler it is my way. You don’t need a leak at the television station or anywhere else. Someone saw the news story as broadcast and decided he had to have one of those two slabs. Some nutball fan, in Hughes’s words, or someone with a connection to one of those forgotten actresses.”

“ ‘Actresses of no consequence’ was how our friend Findley described them,” Paddy said. “I’m tempted to see it your way just for the chance to make Findley eat that slight. But things aren’t as simple as you make them sound. If you don’t have a leak, the thieves don’t know about the Garbo doohickey. If they don’t know about it, how can they plan to steal it to cover up their real crime?”

“They didn’t plan that part,” I said. “They planned to grab both slabs from the television story so the police wouldn’t focus on the one they really wanted. When they got here, they found a third one. Naturally, they took that, too.”

Paddy was scratching at his forelock or what was left of it. I was responsible for a considerable thinning of that patch of hair over the years.

“Isn’t it far likelier,” he asked, “that the thieves just got confused? The Moe, Larry, Curly, and Shemp types who go in for this kind of work confuse pretty easily. They may have come for the Garbo slab and taken all three just to be sure they got the right one.”

We’d reached the front door by then. Paddy put a hand on its knob but made no move to open it. “I’m guessing you don’t see Miss Nouveau’s autograph as the real target,” he said.

“It’s hard to imagine, given the trouble we’ve had getting signatures for her petitions.” That left the woman whose name resonated faintly for me. “Why did saying Nola Nielsen give Findley the sniffles?”

Paddy looked mildly surprised. “It was before you hit town, come to think of it. Still, I’d have thought you’d have heard. She died badly. Back around nineteen-thirty. Killed herself, maybe.”

I remembered then. “She died in a closed garage, sitting in her car with the engine running. Why the maybe?”

Paddy shrugged. “On account of the kind of life she’d led, the wild, Roaring Twenties kind of life. Booze certainly, drugs probably, men excessively. One of her beaus was a gangster she threw over. The rumors about her suicide not being entirely her idea mainly involved him. Morrie Bender.”

There was nothing vague about my memories of Morrie Bender. He’d still been someone to tiptoe around back when I’d started with Hollywood Security after the war.

A horn sounded outside. Findley, anxious to relieve those corporate minds. Paddy didn’t stir.

“The accepted version of Nielsen’s death was that she’d killed herself over talking pictures,” he said. “She made exactly one — Sunshine, I think it was called — but it hadn’t been released at the time of her death. Supposedly, she was worried about it flopping. Then when it finally came out, it was a big hit. Some of the good reviews Sunshine got may have been flowers for Nielsen’s grave, but the general thinking was that she’d gotten herself worked up over nothing. She would have done fine in the talkies if she’d given herself the chance.”

“Or if someone else had,” I said. “Bender has a place in Brentwood Heights, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, and you’ve got a wife and kids. Bender may be eighty-something, but he hasn’t mellowed much, not from what I hear. And he’s still well connected. I’m officially denying you permission to bother him.”

“How about unofficially?”

Findley tooted his horn again, a little forlornly, it seemed to me.

Paddy said, “My money’s on this kidnapping idea. I’m thinking we’ll hear something on the subject in an hour or so at the latest. Check in with me then, care of Grauman’s.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

Paddy sighed. “No, I didn’t. If you should bump into Morrie Bender by accident, give him my love.”

5.

It took a little driving around, but by and by I accidentally found myself at the Morrie Bender estate. It was overlandscaped on the street side and gated, the gate manned by a well-dressed mob trainee. A slightly older one greeted me when I pulled up at the house. I’d gotten that far on the strength of Hollywood Security’s name. The greeter, a solidly built guy with a Marlon Brando hairline, wanted more.

“This is regarding?” was how he put it.

“Nola Nielsen,” I said.

He repeated it to get the pronunciation down while he checked me for a gun. Then he looked over the Corsair and said, “Jack Paar told a pretty funny joke about Edsels the other night. I can’t remember how it went.”

“It was something about how the guys who drive them don’t like to be kept standing out in the sun, I bet.” I was a little sensitive about Edsel jokes.

Brando lost his grin, found it again, and said, “How do they feel about getting tossed out on their ears? Wait a minute,” he added, holding up a beefy hand. “Tell me when I get back.”

He came back quickly, but it wasn’t to toss me out. He showed me inside, acting puzzled about it, if not disappointed.

During my wait, I’d examined the house, a heavily timbered ranch, and imagined the interior to be something on the order of a hunting lodge. Instead, it was like a Park Avenue apartment writ large. Not that I got much of a tour. The man I’d come to see was out back, sitting next to a swimming pool with a mountain view.

Morrie Bender was thin and frail, gray-skinned and nearly hairless, but walking out to brace him, I felt a little like I had the day my outfit boarded ship for occupied France. It was his gaze that conveyed the threat. Though his eyes were yellow and rheumy, the look they were giving me was as fragile as a bayonet. It was a look I’d seen once or twice before in the eyes of dying hard-cases, a willingness — even a desire — to take someone with them.

He smiled when I drew close, but it didn’t soften things. “Hollywood Security, huh?” he said. “You one of Paddy Maguire’s boys?”

“Yes,” I said, trying not to glance at the chair he hadn’t invited me to use.

“How is the big mick?” he asked. He seemed to do about half his talking on the inhale.

“Fine.”

“Getting older?”

“Yes.”

That pleased him. “I tried to get him drunk one night. At Ciro’s, maybe. In ‘forty-three, I think it was. I was sixty-five then. I thought Maguire knew something I wanted to know, so I kept the drinks coming. That was a waste of my money. I changed the combination on my safe the very next day. I was that sure I’d told him more than he’d told me. Nothing about Nola Nielsen, though. I’m damn sure of that.”

“Paddy didn’t send me. He didn’t want me to bother you.”

“What bother?”

“But he did ask me to give you his regards.”

Those were the magic words. “Have a seat,” Bender said. “Tell me why you’re here.”

I started to tell him about Nielsen’s slab. He stopped me with a smile that really was a smile.

“I was there the night she made that thing,” he said. “It was nineteen twenty-eight. I was fifty. Thought I was still twenty-five. I wasn’t at Grauman’s officially. That wouldn’t have looked so good. But I was in the crowd. They had a regular little ceremony. We went dancing afterwards, I remember. Nola had her motor wound up that night, I can tell you.”

That brought us to the awkward part of my pitch. Experience had taught me that there was no smooth way to accuse someone of a crime, so I dove right in, describing the theft of the slab from the warehouse. Luckily, Bender had even more experience as an accusee than I had as an accuser. And he’d been accused of a lot worse than stealing concrete. His smile barely dimmed.

“You think I saw that story on the TV and decided I had to have her footprints as a keepsake? Not a bad thought, except that I hated that little blonde’s guts. If I’d lifted that slab, it’d been so I could use it for a urinal.

“So now you’re wondering what happened after that night at Grauman’s in ‘twenty-eight to get me feeling that way. So I’ll tell you. She walked out on me. Me. She thought she had to choose between her movies and me and she chose her movies.

“I would have talked her out of it, except that she ran away to New York, a town where I wasn’t welcome. Spent most of nineteen twenty-nine there. Working with Broadway dramatic coaches so she’d be able to talk on the screen, that was the story. But it was really to give me time to cool off, which I did.”

“You don’t sound that cool right now,” I said.

“That’s over what she did when she came back. She almost got me a seat in the gas chamber. After she killed herself, I had the cops in my hip pocket for weeks. They’d never been able to get me for something I’d actually done. But I was sure they’d get me for that, something I had no part in. Then it blew over.”

End of story and, I was afraid, the interview. I threw out another question. “Do you know anyone else who might have wanted a keepsake of Nola? Did she have any family?”

“Back East somewhere. I can’t remember their name. Nola Nielsen wasn’t her real name, but so what? Everybody changes his name out here. Even me. My real name’s Benderwitz. That’s how I signed myself in at Ellis Island in nineteen oh-one. I was twenty-three.”

“How about Nola’s friends?”

“I remember one pal of hers. Sort of a paid companion, a girl from her hometown. Her name was Rita something. She was a looker herself, was Rita. And a wildcat too, like Nola. They were a pair, those two.”

The memory of that pair wore him out, or maybe it was all the talking. He waved me out of my chair. “Thanks for coming. Tell that big mick boss of yours to keep his nose clean.”

6.

It was time to report in and get an update on the kidnappers, but I still thought they were figments of Paddy’s imagination. So I drove downtown to the courthouse and followed a trail in its worn linoleum that led me to the office of the county recorder. There I asked to see a copy of Nola Nielsen’s last will and testament. I was hoping the will would point me toward Nielsen’s family and friends, that some of them would be in the greater Los Angeles area, and that at least one of those would still be breathing.

The clerk, who was old enough to have delivered Nielsen’s newspapers, said it would take awhile. He pointed to a row of gunmetal chairs and told me to make myself comfortable. I made myself uncomfortable instead worrying over whether Nielsen had bothered to change her name legally. Not every star got around to doing that. If Nielsen hadn’t, her will would be filed under Gladys Knockwurst or whatever her parents had christened her. And I’d be scrambling around trying to track that name down.

It was a nice little worry, more than enough to keep my pipe going at a steady clip. About the time I’d reduced all its tobacco to ash, the clerk returned with an extra-long folder and good news. Nola Nielsen had died under her screen name, like a good star should.

Though typed on a long sheet of paper, the will was fairly short. There was a token bequest to Dr. and Mrs. Herbert Axlerod of Columbus, Georgia, Nielsen’s parents, almost certainly. Another small gift went to “my pal” Rita Koenig. She had to be the Rita that Bender remembered so fondly, the paid companion. The bulk of Nielsen’s estate went into a trust to be managed by the Golden State Bank and Trust. The documents defining the trust weren’t included in the folder.

I asked my friend the clerk for that missing piece, and he referred me to Golden State’s trust department. “And good luck with that,” he said.

On my way out, I stopped in the lobby at one of a bank of pay phones. My phone’s directory contained no listing for a Rita Koenig. I then used the phone itself to call Grauman’s front office. The receptionist knew exactly who Patrick J. Maguire was. Everybody in the building did by then.

“Talk them out of a drink yet?” I asked when the man himself came on the line.

“No. It’s drier here than a Baptist funeral. No calls from any slabnappers either. I’m running out of stories.”

“That’ll be the day. Do we know anybody at Golden State Bank and Trust?” I described my visit with Bender and my interest in Nielsen’s will.

“Seems to me I played canasta with a guy from that bank once,” Paddy said. “You want the details of the trust, I take it. Call me back in an hour.”

It was lunchtime by then, for the dawn patrol at least. I visited a little eatery near the courthouse that had a lot of associations for me, good and bad. I spent awhile wandering down memory lane. Then I called my wife to see how the latest screenplay was going. Then I called Paddy.

“I may have let you down,” he said. “My old canasta partner wasn’t as forthcoming as I’d hoped he’d be. According to him, Nielsen’s trust was dissolved in nineteen fifty-five. It’d been set up for the benefit of a single male child. Once the kid turned twenty-five, the thing just folded.”

“Whose child?”

“My friend wouldn’t say, wouldn’t even give me the kid’s name. That makes me think it had to be Nielsen’s. I never heard she had one, but she might have gone out of her way to keep it quiet. That would fit with all this trust secrecy.”

I wasn’t as fast on ages as Morrie Bender, but I’d spotted a problem. “If this kid was twenty-five in nineteen fifty-five, he was born in nineteen thirty, after Nielsen got back from her year in New York.”

“So she got knocked up out East in ‘twenty-nine. Maybe by some stockbroker she’d talked off a ledge when the market crashed. You do funny things when you think the world’s ending.”

“But she made a movie in nineteen thirty, her talkie, Sunshine. Somebody would have noticed if she’d been pregnant.”

My boss wasn’t concerned. “It only took a few weeks to shoot a movie back then, even with microphones bollixing up the works. She must not have been showing yet.”

It occurred to me that I should have spent my lunch hour down at the Times, boning up on little things like the actual date of Nielsen’s death. Paddy’s thoughts were tending a different way.

“I wonder if Morrie Bender knew that she’d taken up with someone back East. Could have given him a little more reason to have shut her up in that garage. Assuming he was the jealous type. You’ll have to ask Miss Koenig about that.”

“Rita Koenig? How am I supposed to find her?”

“Did I forget to mention that? She was the mystery kid’s guardian. My banker friend let that slip. She drew a monthly check from the trust right through nineteen fifty-five. The address where those checks were sent is up in Vesta. Got a pencil?”

7.

Vesta was a sunny little spot on the coast about halfway to Santa Barbara. It was so sunny on this particular afternoon that the dark glasses I’d used to fight the Pacific’s glare on the drive north were still in place when I knocked at the door of the seaside cottage where Rita Koenig’s trust fund checks had landed. The shades might have accounted for the reception I got from the lady of the house, which was cool. The woman, who was wearing a bathing suit under an unbuttoned housedress, might have taken me for a cop or even an IRS agent. She told me that Rita Koenig didn’t live there anymore. Hadn’t for years. And who the hell cared where she was now?

I still did. I went in search of a phone book, as I had in L.A., and found Koenig right off. The listing had her on a street called Chester, which turned out to be more than a few blocks from the ocean. And on the wrong side of the tracks, if Vesta had been big enough to have tracks. The actual address belonged to a boardinghouse, an old brick one. Koenig wasn’t home, but her landlady was, a Marjorie Main look-alike who was weeding an overrun flower bed. She was more than happy to tell me where Koenig worked. I’d remembered to reveal my steely-blue eyes this time and even to bat their lashes occasionally.

Koenig’s place of business was a diner that made the hole-in-the-wall where I’d had my lunch look like the Brown Derby. Koenig turned out to be the first person I came to when I entered, a little fiftyish woman perched on a stool behind the diner’s cash register. Bender had called Koenig a wildcat, but somehow she’d changed into a wild bird over the years. She reminded me of a sparrow, though the coloring of her dyed hair and penciled brows was much darker. She had sharp features and quick eyes, the eyes made extra prominent by her glasses. I thought for a second that she might be in charge, but when I asked for five minutes of her time, she glanced at a big guy who was scraping down the grill.

“I get a break in ten minutes,” she said. “There’s a bench out front.” She pushed a pack of Old Golds my way and held out a hand, palm up.

“I don’t use them,” I said.

“I do,” she said back.

I paid her, found the bench, and started in to field-strip and clean my pipe. I was twisting the stem back into place when Koenig came out. The first thing she did was to hold her face up to the sun for a few seconds. From the look of her skin, the action was more a ritual than an impulse.

She’d specified the bench, but she didn’t use it. “All I do is sit,” she said and held out her hand for the Old Golds.

I towered over her when I stood to light her cigarette, so I sat down again so I could look into those magnified eyes.

At first she only smoked, going at it so hard it got me longing for a Lucky Strike. Then she asked, “What’s this about Nola Nielsen?”

I’d mentioned the actress back at the cash register. The name had gotten Koenig’s full attention then. Now she was acting as if it barely rang a bell.

“I’m trying to trace her next of kin,” I said, “regarding some property of hers in Los Angeles.” A four-by-four chunk of property, suitable for driveway repair.

“What makes you think I even knew her?”

I decided to jump us ahead a few moves. “She trusted you to raise her son. And you drew a monthly check from her estate for twenty-five years.”

“Never trust a banker,” Koenig said. It was a sentiment popular with people old enough to remember 1929. The cashier went further. “Never trust anybody. That’s what I always told Nola. Nobody in Hollywood was what he seemed. But she trusted everybody, even me.”

“When did that start?”

“Way before Hollywood. She and I grew up together back in Georgia. Even then I was just tagging along. Her people had money. Mine didn’t.”

“Is that where the trust fund came from?”

“Some of it. From a rich aunt. But a lot of it was Nola’s own dough. She was making a thousand a week once she hit it big in pictures. That was serious money back then.”

It still was, for people like Koenig and me. I said, “Then The Jazz Singer came out and the world changed. What happened next?”

“Nola ran off to New York to learn how to talk without a Southern accent. Took her the better part of a year.”

Koenig had worked the same trick, but then she’d had thirty years in little Vesta. She was on her second Old Gold by then, lighting it from the first.

“She came back pregnant. Some Broadway director, she said. Might have been some Broadway cabdriver. She wasn’t far along. She had time to make one last picture.”

“Sunshine,” I said.

It was more information than a flunky trying to trace a next of kin should have had, but I didn’t expect Koenig to call me on it. I’d already asked her questions I shouldn’t have asked and revealed more interest in her past than I should have had. She seemed more than willing to chat, at least about the dead and buried.

“After the movie, we went upstate and hid out until Nola had the kid. That was the start of the bad times.”

“What happened?”

“Nola got the blues. They can hit a woman bad after her kid is born.”

“I know,” I said. “My wife had two.”

“And then Sunshine’s release was delayed. Because it stunk, Nola decided. She got real worked up about it. On top of her depression, it was too much. Next thing I knew, she was dead and I was stuck with the kid.”

Not a very sentimental summing up, but I let that pass. “He’s the one I’m looking for,” I said.

“Well, you can just keep looking.” She ground her cigarette under a dainty heel. “I don’t like your story, the little I’ve heard of it. Nola didn’t leave any property lying around. I knew where every nickel was stashed. Who really sent you?”

Not what business but what person. There was only one who’d be interested, as far as I knew. “It wasn’t Morrie Bender,” I said.

She’d been bracing herself to hear that name, and it still made her jump. She was halfway to the lunch wagon before I could get off the bench.

“I’ll never tell you anything,” she said as she backpedaled. “You or Bender, either. I’ll die first.”

8.

I knew Paddy would be critical of my approach to Rita Koenig. For one thing, I hadn’t once mentioned Grauman’s loss. And I hadn’t tried to bribe her, if you didn’t count the pack of cigarettes. Paddy would have lit her first one with a five-dollar bill just to catch her eye.

But I thought my boss would approve of what I did next, which was to stop at a corner store on the same street as Koenig’s boardinghouse and buy two very cold bottles of Coca-Cola. Armed with those, I ambled to the boardinghouse itself, where Marjorie Main’s understudy was still fighting her losing battle against the weeds.

She turned down the offer of the little bottle opener from my pocketknife and dispatched her bottle’s cap by rapping it expertly against the stone sill of one of her windows. But she did accept my story that I’d gotten turned around and hadn’t been able to find Koenig’s diner. She patiently repeated her instructions and had me parrot them back.

That left us with most of our Cokes to finish. We’d just about killed them when her curiosity finally got the better of her.

“This isn’t some trouble for Rita, is it?” she asked.

“Could be,” I said.

“With the kid? She’s had all the trouble she needs from that skunk. I told Rita him moving down to L.A. was a big mistake.”

“It might be about him.” I took an envelope from my pocket — my phone bill — and pretended to study it. “What’s his name?”

“Peter Thorpe.”

“Nope,” I said. “Different trouble.”

I walked back to the mom-and-pop where I’d left the Corsair and used the store’s phone to call Hollywood Security. The woman who answered, Peggy Maguire, Paddy’s wife and the firm’s secret brain trust, promised she’d have a line on Peter Thorpe by the time I got back.

I called her again from a roadside booth on the coast highway around Castellammare. Her directions took me into the hills above West Hollywood, to a house built out over the edge of a canyon.

A late-model Continental convertible was baking in the driveway, though the house had an attached two-car garage. The Mark III could have belonged to a visitor, of course. Or there could have been two even more valuable cars in the garage. But I was hoping the space was otherwise occupied. I tried the overhead door. It was locked.

I moved from there to the front door. The man who answered it was dressed for cocktails at the yacht club in white flannels and a dark blue blazer. He was blond and slight and nervous.

“Peter Thorpe?” I asked.

He stammered his yes. I showed him my card and asked if he’d be willing to help with an investigation I was conducting. He said yes again, making a real project of it this time. By then I was sure I’d come to the right place. As I backed him into the low-ceilinged living room, I decided to skip the foreplay.

“Those slabs you had lifted from Grauman’s warehouse, got ‘em handy?”

If my question surprised Thorpe, his reply really shocked me. He reached into a side pocket of his blazer and pulled out a gun. Or almost pulled it out. It was a snub-nosed revolver, and its hammer got caught on the corner of the pocket, as hammers will. I had time to grab his wrist and tag him on the chin, more or less simultaneously.

In my haste, I hit him harder than I had to. He would have collapsed into his white buck shoes if I hadn’t had a firm grip on his gun hand. I steered him to an armless sofa and disentangled the revolver, which I put in my own pocket.

Then I hunted around until I found the connecting door to the attached garage. The space beyond the door was empty except for something that looked like a card table draped in canvas. I pulled off the tarp, and there was Nola Nielsen’s concrete autograph, resting on a pair of sawhorses. She’d had tiny feet and the handwriting of a ten-year-old, if you could judge a person’s writing by how they did with a stick in wet cement. I looked everywhere but down in the canyon for the other two slabs. There was no sign of them.

By then, Thorpe was sitting up. “It’s mine,” he said. “I have a right to it.”

His speech was a little thick, but I’d evidently cured his stammer. “Are we talking about the gun or that little souvenir in the garage?”

“She was my mother. I don’t have anything of hers.” He contradicted himself by looking toward a low-slung fireplace. Above it hung an old photograph of a striking young woman with bobbed platinum hair and a smile that curled wickedly at the ends. Nola Nielsen.

“You have her money,” I said, looking around the rest of the room. The bric-a-brac alone was worth as much as my car. “Rita Koenig could use some of your spare change, by the way. Things are a little tight for her just now.”

“She’s gotten all of my mother’s money she’s going to get. She sponged off Nola when she was alive, then she lived in style off my trust fund. Living right on the beach, like she was the movie star.”

“She’s moved inland since,” I said.

“I don’t care where she is. She got a year more on the gravy train than she was entitled to. That’s more charity than she deserves.”

“How did she manage that?”

“By lying to me and everyone else about my age. Her and that shyster trustee. I should have prosecuted them. They controlled the trust fund until I turned twenty-five. That’s how my mother set it up. Rita always told me I was born in 1930. That kept me under her thumb until 1955. But when I finally got to see my mother’s papers, I found my birth certificate. I was really born in 1929. Rita’d cut herself in for an extra year of easy living.”

That revelation nearly did to me what my right cross had done to Thorpe. But I came out of it faster.

“Your birth certificate say where you were born?” I asked, almost conversationally.

“Of course,” he said. “New York City.” He added proudly, “My father was a Broadway director. Richard Thorpe.”

“His name appear on the birth certificate?”

Thorpe’s stammer made a comeback. “No. He and my mother weren’t...”

“How did you find out about him?”

“Aunt Rita told me. My name was always Thorpe. She told me how I’d come by it. It was about the only time she was ever honest with me.

“She had Nola cremated, Aunt Rita did. And then scattered her ashes in the ocean. So I don’t even have a grave to visit. When I saw the TV story about mother’s slab being in Grauman’s warehouse, I knew I had to have it. I even picked out a spot down in the canyon where I was going to have it set. A place where I could plant flowers.”

“What happened to the other two slabs?”

“I told them to dump them out in the desert somewhere.”

“Told who?”

“My gardener set it up for me. He said he knew a guy who knew a guy who’d do it, but I think he just hired his relatives. I told him to take both slabs — they talked about two on the television. That way the theft wouldn’t point to me. Then, when he delivered my mother’s slab, he said there’d been three. Tried to get me to pay extra. I sent him packing.”

A fancy blue phone occupied an end table near Thorpe’s sofa. I pointed to it with the snub-nose, which I’d produced without snagging my pocket.

“Time to call him and apologize,” I said.

9.

Thorpe was able to reach his gardener friend. With my encouragement, he worked out a price for recovering the two discarded slabs and returning them to Grauman’s warehouse bright and early the next morning.

“Tell them to ring the bell this time,” I said.

I then used the blue phone to report my success to Paddy. My partial success. “It’s a no-questions-asked deal,” I said. “They’ll be getting back two of the items. Gabrielle’s and the one with the knee prints.”

“Why only two?”

“The third was damaged beyond repair.”

“I see,” Paddy said. “Well, I don’t think they’ll kick about that. I’ll be anxious to hear your full report. Anything else you want to tell me now?”

“Hold the line.” I gestured with the gun toward the front door and said to Thorpe, “You mind?”

He didn’t. He’d been a new man ever since I’d told the lie about his mother’s slab.

When he was gone, I said, “How much leverage do we have with Grauman’s?”

“Plenty,” Paddy said, “since they still want Garbo’s name kept out of this. It’s going to take two postmen to deliver our bill. Why?”

I broke open the revolver and shook the shells out onto the carpet. “This morning you mentioned doing Gabrielle a good turn.”

“Having her reinstated, you mean? Or is the word I want ‘reinstalled’? Leave it to me.”

Outside, Thorpe was staring at his Continental as if he didn’t recognize it. “Why did you say that?” he asked. “About Nola’s slab?”

“I thought she’d like you to keep it,” I said.

I was feeling altogether too soft by then. As a pick-me-up, I tossed the gun at him and told him that I’d be back if the other two slabs weren’t delivered by noon the next day.

10.

I could have gone home to mow the grass with a clear conscience. Instead, I drove north along the coast to the little town of Vesta. It was early evening when I arrived, a beautiful, still evening, the sky cloudless, the ocean a big blue pond that happened to reach all the way to Japan.

Koenig had finished her shift at the diner. She wasn’t at her boardinghouse either. No one was. I played a hunch and stopped at the little corner store to ask after the nearest public beach. On its edge, I found her. She was sitting with bowed head on a bench that was the twin of the one I’d used earlier in the day. I sat down beside her and took out my pipe.

“Who invited you?” she said, sniffing a little. She’d been crying.

“That’s a long story, Nola.”

“What did you call me?”

“Nola. As in Nola Nielsen.” I finished filling my pipe and brushed the stray bits of cavendish off my pants.

That gave my companion plenty of time to come up with a reply. The best she could do was, “I’m Rita Koenig.”

“I don’t think so. I think Koenig died in a sealed garage almost thirty years ago. I’m afraid you helped her with that.”

I got my pipe going and dropped the spent match in the sand at our feet. “Here’s how I figure it. Way back around nineteen twenty-eight, you found yourself in a bad spot. You were pregnant, and the father of the child you were carrying was a gangster named Morrie Bender. You’d already had enough of Bender, but he wasn’t ready to let you go. You knew if he found out about the kid, he might never be ready. Worse, the kid would grow up with a gangster father.

“So you ran away to New York, a town that was off-limits to Bender. You gave out the story that you were being coached for the talkies, and maybe you were. But you were really there to have the kid on the sly. You came back after a year and brought the kid with you. Set him up someplace quiet with a nurse or a nanny or both and got back to making movies. Bender had gotten over you, so everything had worked out fine.

“Then Rita Koenig, your paid-companion pal, spoiled the whole deal. She knew the truth, of course, and she threatened to go to Bender. She started bleeding you. She cut herself in for a slice of everything you’d tucked away.

“Meanwhile, Sunshine’s release was delayed. All around you, silent stars were dropping like matinée Indians. You decided that you were through anyway and that you might as well throw over the whole setup.

“So Koenig took your place in the garage. Did you dope her or get her drunk or just whack her on the head?”

Nielsen opened her purse and pulled out a twist of paper and cellophane, all that was left of the cigarettes I’d bought her. I produced a purchase I’d made when I’d stopped to ask for directions to the beach: a fresh pack of Old Golds.

She looked at the peace offering and said, “I told you this afternoon I wouldn’t talk.”

“That’s when you thought I worked for Morrie Bender.” I told her then why I’d really come to Vesta, the mystery of the missing slabs, complete in ten installments. Somewhere around episode six, she took the cigarettes and lit one gratefully.

When I’d finished, she sniffed again, collected herself, and said, “I got Rita drunk. It wasn’t very hard.”

“What about her hair? I’m guessing Koenig was a brunette, since you are now.”

“I got her to dye hers that last afternoon. That wasn’t very hard either. She’d always wanted blond hair. She’d always wanted anything I had, including Morrie Bender. I couldn’t trust her not to tell him about Peter, even with me paying her. I was afraid she’d do it just to get back in with him.”

“Did you and Koenig look that much alike?”

“Enough. And I saw to it that the body wasn’t found right away.”

“And that it was cremated. And you changed your son’s age to make it impossible for Bender to work out that he was Peter’s father. You had to get the guy who ran your trust to go along with that.”

“The trustee was a pal of mine, a real pal, a lawyer who worked for my studio. When Peter found out his real age, he thought we’d done it to cheat him. That was fine with me.”

“How is it he never recognized you? He’s got your picture hanging up in his house.”

“Does he? By the time he was old enough to ask about his mother, I’d already changed. I’d dyed my hair and started to wear the glasses I’d needed for years. And I was careful to tell him that I looked a lot like his mother. He threw that in my face later. Said I was giving myself airs. Like the cottage by the sea I didn’t deserve. I’ve always loved the ocean. Just being able to sit near it every night means a lot to me.”

It was about all she had left. “Why don’t you tell Peter the truth? He’d give you your cottage back.”

“Would he? Would you do a favor for somebody who told you your father was a thug and your mother was a murderess? Anyway, I deserve to be punished.”

She looked into my face for the first time, maybe to see if I had any thoughts of my own on the subject of her punishment.

I had, as it happened. My thoughts were of Nola’s last picture, Sunshine, and its unexpected success. How had she reacted to that? Well enough at first, maybe. But how about years later, when the son she’d done so much to protect had walked out on her? And how about now, during the long shifts at a greasy spoon? Did she ever think of Sunshine and wonder?

I stood up. “Sorry to have bothered you, Miss Koenig.”

As I turned to go, she asked, “How did you recognize me?”

I hadn’t. My tip-offs had been the birth certificate she’d lied about and her declaration to me that afternoon that she’d die before she told anyone the truth. She hadn’t sounded like a clapped-out guardian then. She’d sounded like a mother.

But I played along. “I’ve seen your footprints in cement, remember? I’d know those size sixes anywhere.”

She smiled for the first time in our acquaintance. The smile curled at the ends, just like it had when the world was young.

Copyright ©2006 by Terence Faherty