Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 52, No. 7 & 8, July/August 2007

A Prisoner of Memory by Robert S. Levinson

“Hey, handsome! Need your help.”

She was a presence out of my past, but I knew at once it was Laura Dane. There was no mistaking the growl exploding in my ear with that trained stage actor’s ability to send a whisper up to the back of the second balcony, every precisely enunciated word blasting its way out of a throat sandpapered by years of chain-smoking.

I made sure anyway, verifying the source like the good newspaperman I am: “Laura?”

“I should be insulted that you’d have to ask,” she said. Coughed out a web of phlegm. “I didn’t have to wonder if it was you on the phone, Neil, did I?”

“You called me, Laura.”

“Still smart as a whip, you are, the same way you were so snappy smart in untangling the truth about Elvis and Marilyn in the long ago.” She was talking about a rumored love affair, which led to a series of murders I had a hand in solving. “Got something for you not nearly as glamorous, but dangerous. Down the line it’ll make front page headlines and some damn fine fodder for that Daily column of yours.”

“Dangerous how?”

“Like I could be dead any minute, murdered, before you have a chance to mount your white charger and ride to my rescue, the way Errol Flynn — bless his dear, drunken soul — did in Fort Worth.”

“I remember Flynn in San Antonio and Virginia City,Santa Fe Trail, but Fort Worth? I don’t know that movie. Is it out on DVD?”

“Not a movie. We were in Fort Worth on a war bond tour, Errol and me and a bunch of other Warner Brothers contract players. That crazy galoot saved me from having to go to bed all by my lonesome.” She laid in a lusty groan. “Think he’d also saved all the other dames on the tour before the Superchief got us back to L.A.” Another cough from lungs that sounded in trouble. “So, what do you say, Neil? Come give an old broad a helping hand?”

“As dangerous as you say, aren’t you better off calling the cops?”

“You hear why straight from the filly’s mouth, you’ll understand why not. At Burbank Studios. On the Melancholy Baby set the rest of the day. I’ll leave your name on the pass list at the Barham gate.”

She was off the line faster than I could raise another question.

A couple hours later, I tagged a “-30-” to tomorrow’s column, an emotional screed decrying the destruction of another landmark, the Ambassador Hotel and its fabled Cocoanut Grove, where the stars came out to play when Hollywood was Hollywood and Laura Dane was a name-above-the-title movie star who specialized in playing “the other woman,” much as she had done in real life most of her life, wreaking havoc on Kay Francis, Miriam Hopkins, Claire Cavanaugh, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, and others of her peers.

I e-mailed the piece downtown and took off for a landmark that had withstood the ravages of progress, the Warner Bros. Studio, renamed the Burbank Studios after a shotgun marriage of economic convenience with Columbia Pictures. It was a typical Los Angeles afternoon, the slate blue sky lush with cumulus clouds, the Hollywood Freeway flush with bumper-to-bumper traffic, impatient drivers answering one another with honking horns and expressive middle fingers.

After forty minutes, I pulled up to the Barham Boulevard entrance. A gatekeeper hiding behind reflective shades checked my name against the list on his computer screen and overacted giving me a once-over twice over, logged in my aged Jag’s license number, and directed me to the outdoor set where Melancholy Baby was shooting.

The company had broken for lunch.

Nobody seemed to know who I was talking about when I asked for Laura Dane, except a prune-faced actor in his late seventies or early eighties, costumed in Sunday best, an extravagant handlebar mustache, and a halo of thick white hair, who stepped over at the mention of her name and said, “Check Marnie Nichols’s trailer. Back there, the biggest one of all. Can’t miss it.”

Marnie Nichols.

The name gave me a smile and a jolt of memory as electric as my first dose of morning coffee.

When I met her, she was this fresh-faced kid from Columbus, studying acting with her Great Aunt Laura, driven by the usual wide-eyed dreams of fame and fortune that’s oversold in bulk on television and magazine racks. She’d become one of the few who could cash in her bus ticket back home, as attested to now by the glitter-speckled gold star adhered to the door of her trailer. I rang the bell and when that got me nowhere hammered with my fist and called her name.

After a few more failures, I turned to leave, till I heard the door creak open a crack. A voice full of challenge demanded to know: “That you, Neil Gulliver?”

“In living Technicolor,” I said, swinging around again to confirm it was Laura.

“Get the hell hurry-up inside,” she said, pushing the door wide enough for me to see the Colt .45 caliber automatic she had aimed at my chest, struggling with criminal intensity to keep her two-handed grip steady.

“That’s a prop gun, right?”

She ignored the question. “C’mon, handsome, give it the gas,” she said. “Inside before the son of a bitch spots me.”

There was more luxury to Marnie Nichols’s motor home than to my Westwood condo, all the accoutrements of the stardom earning her twelve million dollars a movie and a modest chunk of the gross, more than your most basic math told me I’d make over my lifetime, however long or abbreviated.

And nobody would ever mistake Marnie for trailer trash, especially not looking the way she looked now, in repose like Ingres’ Grande Odalisque, the risqué Mademoiselle Airière, on a plush chaise lounge covered in crimson velvet about halfway back, twenty-five feet or so, across carpeting a foot deep from an entertainment center out of Mission Control.

Her smile was warm and inviting, her almond-shaped cerulean blue eyes ablaze with the suggestion of more than homespun hospitality — unlike Laura, who alternated looks of dread and fear. Laura’s thread-thin lips ticked recklessly into her hollow cheeks, her gray eyes dulled by time, shifting left and right while she used the .45 to direct me to the driver’s seat. The equipment that had earned Marnie the deserved sobriquet “Body Bountiful” was on full display under a pink silk camisole, and I made a mess of averting my gape, drawing a tinkling giggle of appreciation from her.

Laura said, “You notice anything strange going on?”

“Outside or in here?”

“Not a laughing matter, handsome. Tell him, Marnie, how it’s not a laughing matter.”

Marnie threw an arm across her breasts, putting an end to my peep show. “It’s truly not, Mr. Gulliver. Somebody has been stalking my auntie, threatening to kill her.”

I returned Laura’s anxious stare with one of my own, briefly bagging her head to toe with disbelieving eyes. Long gone was the sex kitten who could get a gent’s pulse skipping beats with a simple wink, replaced by a woman somewhere in her mid eighties, with the sallow complexion and wasted body of someone ill beyond repair.

Laura had turned into half the woman I’d dealt with before, when the astonishing key-ring waist and conical breasts of her stardom had given way to an elephantine body she routinely hid inside tent dresses. The hair she had let go naturally white then and wore like a tight snow bonnet had become a hodgepodge of cotton tufts and random strands.

She coughed into her fist again and asked, “You heard her. More than having to take my word for it.”

I slipped Marnie a glance.

She answered with a wink and a furtive nod that seemed to say, Play along with her.

I said, “When did the stalking begin, Laura?”

Laura closed her eyes and nodded to a silent count that ended with her deciding, “Forty years ago, maybe more.”

At once, I had visions of a stalker using a walker. “A pretty determined fellow. And the threats on your life? Also forty years ago?”

“Starting ten days, maybe two weeks ago. Calling me up again and again, and how he got the unlisted numbers, I don’t know. Every time telling me he’s close as my shadow, and one day soon, he’ll show himself, punch my ticket for good.”

Laura parked the .45 on the copilot’s seat, studied my reaction while scoring a cigarillo from the flip-top box on the dashboard. She slotted it in a corner of her mouth, tossed me the Zippo lighter on the dash, and crooned, “Put your hot one to my cold one and make my cold one hot, baby.” Like I was Cagney in a scene burnt into my memory from the movie where he torched a cigarette for her, then used the smoldering butt to brand her on the neck.

She said, “You’re doubting me, aren’t you, handsome? I see it written on your kisser as clear as a Catalina sunrise.” She shot a jet stream of smoke at me. “Marnie, handsome here doubts me. Tell him what else, go ahead.”

Marnie eased into a sitting position with her legs crossed yoga style, picked up a throw pillow, and hugged it to her chest. “Auntie Laura’s been staying with me since her operation, my place at the Oaks. I’d come home from the studio and find her in a state of panic over the phone calls. Two nights ago, there was a break-in attempt. We both were awakened by sounds coming from downstairs, like someone trying to crack open one of the French windows. Armed security got there inside of ten minutes the silent alarm going off. Also police responding to my 911.”

“And?”

“Whoever it was got away. Security said it was probably this band of gypsies that’s been working Griffith Park, down over at the Estates and across the boulevard in Laughlin Park.”

“We know better, don’t we, sweetheart?”

“We do, Auntie Laura,” Marnie said, heaping on a patronizing smile.

“Did you tell the cops about the calls?”

Marnie said, “Yes. They even checked, but it was a dead end. They said it probably was a disposable cell phone he used.”

Laura added, “All they could do for now, they said, which is how I came to remember you, handsome. What a peach of a guy you were when it mattered.”

“I don’t know that I can be of any more help than the police, Laura.”

“You’re here, so already you’re doing more than them, and—” She drew a puzzle on her face. “—just how did you know where to find me? I’d been on the lookout for you before the lunch break, but nobody at all knew I was even here.”

I told her about the actor who had directed me to Marnie’s trailer.

“And he was decked out in a bib and tucker?”

“Resplendent. And a handlebar mustache begging for a barbershop quartet.”

She swung her face to Marnie. “You hearing what Neil just said, sweetheart? That’s him, finally, the SOB who’s out to get me. My stalker’s here on the lot.”

I searched Marnie’s for confirmation, saw it as her expression slowly dissolved into mild alarm.

She said, “We were originally scheduled to do the ballroom scene today, but construction had a problem with the grand staircase collapsing, so word came down that we’d move instead to the standing outdoor setup. No fancy dress called for. Strictly street wear, me in one of the great Orry-Kelly outfits Bette Davis originally wore in Now, Voyager.”

“And the guy who steered me here—”

“He wouldn’t have known about the change unless he was on the cast list and got the late call from the A.D., same as everybody else—”

“Not if he were working off a shooting schedule he somehow got his hands on. He would finagle his way onto the lot today dressed for the ballroom.”

“Exactly,” Marnie said.

“But that doesn’t explain how he’d know you’d be bringing Laura with you.”

“Stalkers stalk, that’s how,” Laura said, her head unable to settle on a direction. “He saw us leave. It didn’t take a crystal ball to figure out where we were heading in the studio limo.” She looked around for someplace to extinguish what was left of her cigarillo.

The beanbag ashtray on the dash was a mountain of butts. Grumbling, she maneuvered to the door, pushed it open, tossed away the butt, and quickly pulled the door shut. “He’s out there,” Laura said, struggling for breath. “I saw him right now, across the drive, not twenty feet away, and he saw me too. He waved at me. The SOB waved at me.”

It took a few seconds for the news to sink in.

I grabbed the .45 and charged out the door after Laura’s stalker, checking in all directions for a tuxedo among the dozens of extras returning from the meal break, all of them costumed for an afternoon stroll along a section of street dressed like a quaint New England village.

Mustache Man had shown terrific speed for his age.

No sight of him.

Back inside the trailer, Laura was more distraught than ever, clutching Marnie like a life preserver, wailing about her stalker’s ability to sneak onto the lot, get this close to her. Insisting through crocodile tears that she’d be dead sooner rather than later if he had his way. Begging an answer from anywhere to questions that were on my mind as well: Why me, dear Lord? Why now, after forty years? Who is this creature?

Before I could ask them, an A.D. was knocking on the door, calling out that Marnie was needed in wardrobe in ten to double-check a fitting. Laura made a sound like she’d just been pricked with a needle, and her eyes exploded with dread. She pushed away from Marnie and threw herself against the door. Her words a soulful moan, she begged, “You can’t leave me now, not now, sweetheart, not with knowing he’s right outside there somewhere.”

“Auntie Laura, of course not. You’ll come along.”

“No, no, no.” Laura was adamant. “No. Outside, not safe, not safe at all.” She looked to me for confirmation. “Not safe at all.”

“I’ll stick around and wait with you here,” I said. “It’ll be you, me, and—” putting the .45 on display “—our friend Mr. Colt.”

The answer didn’t satisfy her. “Not safe at all, not anywhere here,” she said, wailing the words like they were lyrics out of a Billie Holiday songbook. “Anywhere but here. Anywhere. Here, not safe at all.” The declaration set off a spate of uncontrollable coughing. She looked at her hand despairingly, rubbed it dry on the floral-patterned muumuu that fit her like a practical joke.

Marnie said, “Would you feel safer at the house, Auntie Laura? I’m sure Mr. Gulliver would be happy to take you and would keep you company until I get home.” She gave me a hopeful smile.

Her place took five or six minutes to reach once I turned off Los Feliz and onto Fern Dell Drive, gliding over the creek bridge, past the lush vegetation, the quaint waterfalls, and the cedar, pine, and leafy fern trees bringing modest relief from a summer heat now in the high eighties that had drawn an unusual number of midweek picnickers unconcerned about the shopping cart bums who’d made this part of Griffith Park their home and the gay extroverts sunbathing on the grassy slopes, to Star Bright Lane.

A series of ascending turns led to Star Bright Circle, one of the many hillside cul-de-sacs with flat lots and a magical overview of Los Angeles that extended past the downtown high-rises, long a favorite of celebrities who could afford a fancy pricetag that lately had reached seven and eight figures, going back to the heyday of Ramon Navarro, Cary Grant, and Randolph Scott, and more recently Diane Keaton, Nicolas Cage, Brad Pitt, and briefly my ex, Stevie Marriner, the one-time “Sex Queen of the Soaps.”

Marnie’s two-acre estate was situated behind a shoulder-high wall of natural stone topped by coiled barbed wire. The gate slid open to the numerical code fed me by Laura, and I drove into a rustic courtyard where, were this France, D’Artagnan might have met up with Porthos, Aramis, and Athos. The open-faced garage had space for six cars; adjacent to it was an empty stable.

“Pretty hoity-toity, huh?” Laura said, indicating the house. “When she went shopping for a place, this here reminded her of a house she stayed in the south of France, Provence, when she was there filming Adieu Times Two a couple of years back. Piece of junk, you ask me, but it got my sweet girl an Oscar nomination, so what the hell. That place was in the hills above Luberon National Park and here was Griffith Park, so Marnie didn’t even quibble about the price. Wrote out a check on the spot.”

The house was typically village provincial, unpretentious in design and construction. A comfortably sized living room was furnished simply around a hand-built fireplace of eccentric stone that stretched from the natural wood floor to the wood-beamed ceiling. The kitchen was twice as large and outfitted with top-of-the-line professional appliances, a well-stocked walk-in freezer and larder, and a carved wood dining table large enough to seat a dozen or two without crowding. A wrought-iron staircase took me upstairs to three bedrooms feeding off a mezzanine lounge, whose stucco walls featured framed posters of the movies that had starred either Marnie or Laura, the only signs of star ego anywhere.

I hung out there for a few minutes, enjoying the view of the Griffith Park Observatory before heading back to my Jag to fetch Laura, who’d insisted on locking herself inside until I checked out the house for a stalker in residence.

Halfway down the stairs, I heard noises that suggested her fear might be well placed.

They were coming from Marnie’s master bedroom, a room I’d given cursory inspection, barely a glance, anxious not to invade her privacy.

I pulled Laura’s .45 from inside my belt, got a good two-handed grip on it, and used my foot to ease open the bedroom door. Jumped inside and did a lot of that robotic twisting around the police do for real as well as on Law & Order, ready to squeeze the trigger if it came to that. Instead, it came to a couple of pigeons that had flown in through the patio window that overlooked the courtyard. They were psycho in a major way, banging into walls and knocking over doodads trying to find their way back out.

I windmilled my arms and shouted instructions that finally got them soaring in the right direction, but not before they’d rewarded my good intentions with a series of pigeon bombs that caught me on the head and shoulders.

I stepped onto the patio to curse them farewell.

Looking down, I saw the front passenger door of the Jag was open.

Laura wasn’t in the car or anywhere visible.

After ten or twelve minutes of exploring the grounds, I found her cowering at the rear of a stall in the stable, knees drawn to wattles and anchored by a trembling grip. The place smelled of equestrian history and fresh dung I assigned to squirrels, rats, skunks, coyotes, and other park animals scavenging for food or seeking shelter from bad weather. I kicked aside a stale pile and, settling along side her, said as gently as I could: “Laura, you okay?”

At first, she looked at me like I was a stranger, but recognition set in and she ripped me full of guilt with her icicle stare, challenging, “Where were you when I needed you? The stalker, he came after me, handsome. I saw him first, though, and I got away. Got away. Got away. Where’s the gun? Go after him. Go get him. Okay, handsome? Now. You’ll do that?”

I eased out of my jacket and used it to blanket her. “What did he look like, Laura?”

“What do you think? Like you said. Big handlebar he had, and gussied up for a ball or something. An old fart, moving like the dickens, but I spotted him before he saw me and got in here in the nick of time. Go now. Find him for me and kill the SOB.” She pressed a bony hand against my cheek. “For me, handsome, and I’ll owe you big time,” she said, like she was offering me a free pass to her bedroom.

It was the same tone she’d used on the drive here from the Burbank Studios, a failed try at recreating the insinuatingly passionate voice of her stardom years, while resurrecting one memory after another, like they were a cure for her cough and the cobwebs of time.

Some of Laura’s stories I remembered from our brief history together, others from her uproarious, outlandish visits with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. They flowed out of her like she was reading from a well-rehearsed script, leaving no doubt they were imprisoned in her memory as well as the autobiography that rode the bestseller lists for half a year, Dane, Down & Dirty.

“I was once a hooker, you know that?” she had said early in the drive, anxiously, needing to hold center stage. I played along. “Yeah, top of the batting order in Hollywood’s blue-ribbon pussy palace, a favorite with all the important chippy chasers at all the talent agencies and studios. How I met the gent who engineered the breaks that landed me my contract with Warner Brothers and in bed with every star and costar you care to mention — no names, please — and even a leading lady or two.”

When Laura tired of those anecdotes, she opened a new chapter. “I suppose you know I was roommates with Marilyn? She was always Norma Jean to me and I was always Dubinsky to her. My real name, did you know? Jack Warner, Steve Trilling, they heard that and said, No way, which is how I got to be Laura Dane. From the Fox movie Laura, with Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, because Colonel Warner said I resembled a blond Gene, and Dane rang his bell better’n Dana did. The moguls at Fox decided on Marilyn after she picked Monroe in honor of her granny, but that’s old news already.” Laura rattled off a telephone directory of names rich and famous from the Fifties and into the Sixties, challenging me to guess who of them had been bedded first by her, then by Marilyn. Abruptly changing her mind with a flick of the hand. “Let’s us just call it a tie, okay, baby? Although I hate to admit I never made it into the White House any more than the White House ever made it into me.”

Abruptly, she changed the subject. “You know I was AA?”

“Heard something about it somewhere.”

“The career turns sour, the need turns more and more to sour mash, so to speak. Can’t get a call through or a callback from anybody who could throw me a life preserver. Won’t even try to describe what it looks like below the bottom, but I was there, baby, riding the merry-go-round to nowhere, until I woke up one day knowing I wouldn’t wake up some day if life kept leading me on this way. So, I quit. Cold turkey after one last fling with Wild Turkey, you dig? I dragged myself into AA, said hello to familiar faces, and signed autographs for the others, and stuck with it, still, one day at a time. Anytime I felt like abandoning the wagon, which was often, I helped myself to a smoke. The habit climbed up to two, sometimes three packs a day, but it kept me off the sauce, and I’m still here, so that’s that.”

Now, when Laura paused for a dry mouth cough in the middle of telling me how she’d come to work for Hollywood’s most notorious madam in a mansion above Sunset Plaza Drive available almost exclusively to the elite of show business, I said, “You think it could be a guy from those days who’s finally acting on a grudge he’s been holding for forty years?”

“Baby, when I loved ‘em, they stayed loved. And loving.”

“How about when you and Marilyn were roomies, or maybe somebody at Warner Brothers who—”

“No and no, and...”

It was as if she’d stumbled onto an idea that made sense.

She snapped her face to me and broke out a half smile edged in hope. “There was this gawky-looking kid, a gofer trying to make his mark, sucking up to Hal Wallis, Johnny Huston, Jerry Wald, even Mike Curtiz, who was busy turning the English language into a jigsaw puzzle when he wasn’t taking Bogie or Flynn through their paces. Crawford was playing him for a pet until she wangled that Oscar, and after, that’s when he became my uninvited shadow. Finally, I had to say something to Trilling about the pest not leaving me alone. Before the day was over, the kid was on his way to the unemployment line.” She played with the notion. “Elrod was his name. Elrod Stump. You know what any studio would do with that moniker he ever got signed on as an actor. Stumpy, everyone called him. He bothered me a while longer before the murder put him out of commission.”

“The murder?”

“Stumpy caught on at Monogram, or maybe it was Republic, and got involved in a love triangle with some B actress and the exec who booked the studio’s casting couch. Next anybody knew, the exec was dead and a judge was sending Stumpy to San Quentin to learn how to make license plates.”

“That might account for the forty-year hiatus.”

“What?”

“This Stumpy holds a grudge against you for getting him fired, which led to the murder and the conviction. His need for revenge festers for forty years before he’s finished serving out his sentence or gets paroled. And your stalker is back, only now with your murder on his mind as well. How’s that sound, Laura? Make sense?”

“What?”

“What I was suggesting about Stumpy?”

“Who?”

“Elrod Stump. Your stalker.”

A deep crevice developed between her brows. Then, her eyes brightened with enough wattage to light a premiere at Grauman’s Chinese. “That’s him, the bad apple! You nabbed him, handsome. Bless you.” She pushed herself off the dirt floor and onto her feet with a suddenness that brought on a sonic change in her pulse and caused her to falter. She reached for the wall as dizziness buckled her legs and swooned.

I caught Laura before she hit the ground, cradled her in my arms, and stepped from the stable into the courtyard, anxious to get her into the house. Even in a fading daylight, backlit by the exotic blend of orange, lavender, and scarlet painted across the skyline, I recognized the man moving in on me by his elaborate handlebar mustache.

Marnie skipped out of the limo idling across the courtyard, calling, “It’s okay, he’s with me,” and raced toward me shouting her aunt’s name, asking, “What is it? What’s wrong? What’s happened to her? Is she all right?” She tripped over a moss-covered rock jutting from the ground and vaulted forward, belly-flopping on the dirt.

Mustache Man wheeled around and helped her up, stepping back while she shook the surprise from her face and dusted herself off. Once again he had moved with a speed belying his age. “I’m fine, Mr. Hatcher,” she said. She tugged her sweater and a pair of jeans that fit her like body paint into place, covered the rest of the distance between us, and waited for me to tell her about Laura.

“A fainting spell that doesn’t look to be serious,” I said. She let out enough breath to stir a windmill. I asked, “She do that a lot?”

Marnie’s modest overbite disappeared behind pursed lips while she weaved her head left and right in slow motion. “Not as often as we have to change her sheets,” she said.

“What’s his story?” I said, inclining my head toward the Mustache Man.

“Let’s get Aunt Laura to her room first, okay? Clifton, give Mr. Gulliver a helping hand, won’t you?”

We settled in armchairs across from one another on the mezzanine landing, separated by a glass-topped table decorated with fashion magazines and outdated issues of Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, silently waiting for Marnie to finish with Laura and join us. Mustache Man avoided me by leafing through the trades, while I subtlety examined him over the top of a W Magazine whose cover offered one of those sexily posed someones mostly famous for being famous.

On close inspection, there was something tricky about his face. It didn’t match the body that had traded in the fancy dress for casual wear, tailored slacks, and a camel’s hair jacket, high collar dress shirt open at the neck, showing off a gaudy sterling silver cross nesting on a bed of reddish brown hair.

He looked up from his Reporter, caught me staring. “Clifton,” he said. “Clifton Hatcher.” His voice stronger, far more vibrant than it had sounded at the studio. “Miss Nichols told me all about you on the ride over. I read your column once in a while, Mr. Gulliver. It’s not so bad.”

Once in a while.

Not so bad.

Mustache Man knew how to win friends.

I said, “What don’t I know about you?”

“Enough to fill one of your columns,” he said, suddenly my greatest fan, his overripe smile exposing an abundance of capped teeth. “I’m an actor. You probably figured that out by now.”

“The face isn’t familiar.”

“Not even under this ton of makeup, but someday,” he said. “It’s for a Brynie Foy movie shooting next door to Miss Nichols’s film on a third of the budget. My friend the casting director got me the gig knowing I needed a credit to keep from losing my SAG medical. Only a bit, one line, delivered by an old geezer.” He rose and took a few tottering steps away, touched his brow with the back of a hand like he was measuring a fever, tilted up his chin, and recited in a British accent: Yes, so teddibly hot for this time of year. His makeup was better than his accent.

“And you made a wrong turn on your way over and wound up on the set of Melancholy Baby.”

“Knew from the trades it was Miss Nichols’s flick. I’m a big fan, so when I heard the shoot was so close to ours, I took a chance and headed there instead of for the lunch wagon. Arrived in time to see her entering her trailer. Guessed that might be Laura Dane with her. Her aunt, and an actress my pappy admired in his day. Time ran out and I had to split before I could catch them to say so much as hello.”

Marnie had rejoined us in time to hear his gushing adoration and picked up the thread. “I asked around after you and Auntie Laura left and learned the shoot on Stage Eight was pirating a standing set from the Dennis Morgan and Jack Carson shoot, Two Guys from Surrey. Natty, my flack from the publicity department, went looking for me and located the man with the mustache, Mr. Hatcher here. Since seeing is believing, I invited him to come home with me, so she could meet him and confirm for herself it was no stalker closing in on her today.”

He pressed a palm to his heart. “A beaucoup thrill,” he said, enthusiastically, pronouncing it bow-coop. “And you won’t forget about the autographed photo, will you?”

“I have a better idea,” I told Marnie. “One that can put an end to this stalker business once and for all.”

Marnie motioned us into Laura’s room after about twenty minutes.

Laura was propped up in a reclining position in her canopy-covered bed, under a pair of lace-trimmed pillows.

Her eyes struggled for focus as I pushed Clifton Hatcher forward, hands locked behind his back, urging, “No tricks, nothing stupid, if you know what’s good for you,” loud enough for her to hear. At her bedside, I announced: “Look at the gift I brought you, Laura. This him? This the stalker you spotted at the studio today?” She reared back against the pillows. “Not to worry. He’s cuffed.”

She raised her head and squinted against the dull light, signaled me to bring the Mustache Man nearer. I applied pressure to Hatcher’s shoulder blades, moving his face to within inches of hers. She studied him through eyes that quickly grew wide with alarm. “Him, yes!” she said.

“I also want you to hear him speak, confirm it’s the voice you heard on the phone,” I said, then pulled Hatcher upright and ordered, “Recite the words I told you, mister.”

Hatcher said, “I am as close as your shadow, Laura, and will be coming after you soon,” in what I imagined he imagined was a nifty impression of Pacino as Scarface. How this guy got any acting jobs was beyond me.

Laura made a frightful noise. “Yes! Yes! Him, the SOB! Get the police!” she said and managed to pull the covers over her head.

Marnie eased Hatcher aside and, comforting Laura with her voice while she worked back the covers enough to level a kiss on her aunt’s forehead, said, “The police are here already, dear, waiting outside to take him away once you’ve provided positive identification.”

“Positive, positive, positive!”

A half hour later, the limo was whisking Hatcher and his autographed photo of Marnie back to the studio, and she and I were relaxing against my Jag, alone except for park creatures noisily scavenging in the hillside brush, exploring the truth of what had occurred today.

“The trick with Mr. Hatcher, I can’t thank you enough for that, Mr. Gulliver. I think it’s enough to satisfy Auntie Laura she doesn’t have a stalker to worry about anymore.”

“There is no stalker, is there?” I said.

“Yes, there is — in Auntie Laura’s mind. Back to haunt her forty years later. Before that, she was getting daily calls from her agent, Meyer Mishkin, about a costarring role he said she was perfect for, with Randolph Scott and Lee Marvin in a Budd Boetticher film coming up at Universal.”

“All of them long dead and gone.”

“Not to Auntie Laura... The stalker made his first call soon after Meyer Mishkin called saying Gail Russell had been cast in the role and she sank into a deep depression, spent days in bed, bemoaning that Gail Russell has a bigger drinking problem than she ever had, so what was that all about?”

“It must be tough on you, Marnie.”

“The half of it.”

“The cough, her weight loss — the other half?”

Marnie stared into the darkness. “She’s my auntie, Mr. Gulliver. I’d still be Marnie Who? not Marnie Nichols, if not for Laura Dane.” She twisted around and pressed herself against me in a hug to end all hugs. Plastered my lips with a kiss that set my mouth on fire and was over far too soon. She whispered, “Thank you for recognizing her condition early on and playing along anyway,” then hurried back inside the house.

I heard from Marnie again three days later, shortly before six in the morning.

She called to tell me Laura was dead.

Murdered.

Smothered to death with one of her bed pillows.

Her voice drained of emotion, Marnie described how she was awakened around four A.M. by strange noises coming from Laura’s room and charged over. It was too late to help her auntie, but she saw the killer’s face when he tossed the pillow away, shoved her aside, and fled.

“It was Clifton Hatcher,” she said. “Clifton Hatcher in that stupid makeup, the handlebar mustache and all the rest. Almost like he wanted me to know it was him.”

“Did you report this to the police?”

“They’re here now. Yes. Detectives are on their way over to the studio, the Two Guys from Surrey set, but they figure it’s unlikely he’ll show up, seeing as how I recognized him and all.”

“In makeup again. We never got a look at his real puss.”

“No, but the detectives said they’d know soon enough, if they had to, through the casting director or his agent. That there has to be his photo around somewhere.”

There wasn’t.

By midafternoon, the detectives had determined that everything about Clifton Hatcher was fake, not only the mustache. He wasn’t in the Brynie Foy movie. He’d used it to angle his way onto the lot. The Screen Actors Guild had no member named “Clifton Hatcher.” AFTRA records came up with a member who used that name professionally and gave an address and a phone number in Studio City for a private mailbox service that went out of business four years ago.

His real name was Elrod Stump, Jr.

He’s still out there somewhere, Elrod Stump, Jr., under some name, some face I wouldn’t recognize. Were I to stumble across him, Elrod Stump, Jr., would doubtless be surprised by what I’d have to say to him, words he’d probably least expect to hear out of my mouth: Thank you.

Before he murdered Laura Dane, she was another of those half forgotten stars who retreat into the past, a prisoner of memory until their minds fail them, then their bodies. They get a final, brief review on the obituary page, sometimes accompanied by a photograph of the star that was, not the relic they became.

By killing Laura, Elrod Stump, Jr., restored her to stardom. He gave her the leading role in a murder mystery that remains unsolved to this day. He put her name and her photograph on page one of newspapers throughout the world. He turned her into another of the enduring icons in an exclusive club, the Stars of Scandal, whose members live in perpetuity in books, magazine articles, and films.

He took Laura Dane’s life and gave her legend.

Who could ever ask for more than that?

Certainly not Laura, who lived to be remembered.