Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 769 & 770, September/October 2005

Death Conquers All by Robert S. Levinson

Robert Levinson’s latest novel, Ask a Dead Man (Five Star), drew this praise at the end of a starred review in Publishers Weekly. “This is a dense, dark, beautifully wrought tale of love and betrayal, sin and retribution, offering serious suspense, terrific twists, and full-blooded characters. Levinson may not have an Irish name, but he carries the soul of the Irish poets in his pen and in his heart — only a dead man wouldn’t relish this read.”

“You come back, you’ll be arrested for murder. Trial. Prison. Maybe the death penalty. Everything you’ve avoided all these years.” I told this to Alain De Guerre, but the Frenchman rejected my well-meant reminder the way France turns its back on almost everything American be-sides jazz, beautiful women, and Woody Allen. And Jerry Lewis, still, I suppose.

I told this to Alain De Guerre and he said, “Oui, but I must, Neil. When I have explained everything to you, you will understand. You will help me. You will be so glad you did. We will collaborate and you will have an even better book than the one that became my brilliant film.”

“Brilliant, but it wasn’t my novel, Alain, not when you got through with it, not The Fatty Arbuckle Affair.”

“So brilliant, then why did the jury at Cannes choose instead a putrid piece of overripe dog poop by, by—? I cannot bring myself to say his name even, Neil.” The wonder man of the French cinema sighed and went silent for a moment, then, “If there had been no book by Neil Gulliver, there would be no film for me to realize. Your work, my old friend. I, merely humbled to bring it to the silver screen in all its glory.”

I visualized him with a hand at his heart, bowing his head in false humility.

I said, “Your screenplay, rewriting Fatty as a woman? A woman, Alain?”

“Not any woman. The woman. Deneuve. Deneuve was available. Who dares say no to casting Deneuve? Directing Deneuve? A favorite even of the lamented M. Truffaut. Le Dernier Metro? Le Dernier Metro, Neil.” Truffaut’s name, said like a god. The film title cited like a fresh Commandment down from Heaven.

“Soaking wet, Deneuve weighed less than one of Fatty Arbuckle’s thighs.”

He discredited my comment with an indecipherable noise. “You exaggerate, Neil. We did not show Deneuve’s thighs at all, not even in Deneuve’s scenes with Adjani.”

“The scenes that weren’t anywhere in my novel, those scenes, Alain?”

“Neil, Neil, Neil... What is fiction if not an excuse to present the truth as it should be? Can you come get me at the airport? Or, a limousine? A stretch with the wet bar, maybe? Your bosses at the newspaper, they still give you a fat expense account, is so?”

I sighed and said, “You didn’t hear me a minute ago, Alain? You’re on every airport list of wanted felons—”

“Non, non, non... Accused wanted felon.”

“You’ll be recognized and arrested the second you set foot on U. S. soil.”

“I will be disguised, traveling on falsified papers, but you’re right to be concerned for me. I will instead enter from Canada. Better safety than sorrow.”

There was no dissuading him.

I said, finally, “Give me one good reason now why any of this makes sense.”

“Jean Harlow,” he said without hesitation.

“Jean Harlow?”

“The Platinum Blonde Bombshell. The great icon of the silver screen many years before the great Marilyn.”

“I know who Jean Harlow is, Alain.”

“But The Jean Harlow Affair, yet to be written... You know of her husband, also, who they say committed suicide three days after their marriage?”

“Paul Bern.”

“Oui. Only this Paul Bern, he did not commit suicide, as always believed, mon ami. I have done my work home. This Paul Bern, he was murdered.”

“Rumored and written about for years, Alain. Like the one about him supposedly being shot by his ex-wife, Dorothy Millette, who appeared out of nowhere after several years and—”

“A distraction. A bit player walking through a scene. But I have found out the real truth. This Paul Bern, he was murdered by—” He laid in a long pause. “Paul Bern was murdered by—” Again, a pause. “Jean Harlow herself.” Revealed like the climax of an Agatha Christie novel, as if he expected me to swoon at the revelation.

I said, “Clearly, you don’t need me to write your fiction, Alain.”

“The real truth has been buried for years. Also the evidence of what I’m telling you.”

“I suppose you know where that is?”

“Yes. Why else am I preparing to risk everything and come to America? You will help me to get the evidence. You will expose the truth to the world in your newspaper, then you will write The Jean Harlow Affair and I will realize the film.”

“I see now where this is going, Alain. You’ll get caught. You’ll go on trial. Your lawyers will get you off by pleading insanity.”

“And to play Jean Harlow in our film—”

“Let me guess... Jean-Paul Belmondo.”

“Too old, and also the same, alas, for Alain Delon, for whom I was named after by my sainted mother. Non, mon ami, as Le Blonde Bombshell I see your wonderful and beautiful ex-wife, the gifted Stephanie Marriner, the once-upon-a-time sex queen of the soap operas, which I watched like my religion after they began on our television.”

A week later, shortly before nine o’clock, the evening sky darkly sinister, only a quarter moon to show for the hour, I was waiting for Alain inside the Global Bus terminal in Pasadena, where movie studio press agents once staged their celebrity arrivals. This was before TV, when theater newsreels were a main source of publicity and the station’s hacienda motif made for a far more colorful backdrop than the main terminal twenty minutes away in downtown L.A., on the cusp of Skid Row. The terminal was empty, except for eight or ten people who were also waiting out the bus and a collection of bums sleeping it off on corner benches, their shopping carts piled high with life on the streets, the smell of their cheap whiskey clouding the room and scraping my nostrils raw.

I passed the time reflecting on Jean Harlow and Paul Bern, weeding out fantasies from the facts surrounding the MGM producer’s death on July 5, 1932, three days after he’d wed the Platinum Blonde under the approving eyes of studio genius Irving Thalberg and Thalberg’s own glittering star of a wife, Norma Shearer.

Harlow is away overnight from their Benedict Canyon cottage, visiting with her mother.

In the morning, Bern’s naked body is discovered by the butler, lying facedown in front of a full-length mirror in the bathroom of the white-walled master bedroom, reeking of Harlow’s favorite perfume, Mitsouko. A bullet through his head. A .38-caliber pistol by his side.

The butler, panicked, phones MGM instead of calling the police.

In no time, Thalberg arrives with studio boss Louis B. Mayer and Mayer’s publicity chief and principal henchman, Howard Strickling. Strickling phones for police after Mayer discovers a handwritten suicide note of apology to Harlow:

Case closed, or was it as simple as that?

So open and shut?

What new truth did Alain De Guerre believe he had discovered?

What evidence did he think he’d found that made worthwhile his risking capture by this trip to Hollywood?

The squeal of brakes signaled the arrival of Alain’s bus. I moved outside and drank in the fresh air while searching for him among the dozen or so passengers who stepped onto the arrival platform and did some combination of stretch and yawn, greet and hug, and watchful wait while the driver unloaded luggage from the undercarriage.

Alain wasn’t among them, or so it appeared until I reacted to tapping on my shoulder and turned around to confront a man clutching a fat gym bag, in a rumpled black suit and matching skullcap, barely any face showing past Coke-bottle glasses and a salt-and-pepper bush of a beard stretching down six or eight inches from an off-center bulb of a nose broken once too often.

That nose was the giveaway. It had been broken three times that I was aware of. Tabloid stuff. Once by the husband of some young actress who wound up on his cutting-room floor; once by the young actress, following the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival; once, after it had healed, by Alain’s late wife, within hours of her learning from the tabloids about her husband and the young actress.

I said, “Alain?”

He pressed a finger to his lips. “Lower your voice, mon ami. They may be on to me.” His eyes did a quiet dance, signaling me to check behind, to my right. A couple in their mid to late seventies, suitcases in hand, seemed to be studying us. “They have looked suspicious since they boarded behind me, like they knew better than my disguise.” The couple headed in our direction slowly, each step a seeming adventure in pain. “Quickly. Where is your car?”

“The parking lot. An old Jag.” I rattled off the license plate number.

Alain’s eyebrows rose. “A limousine, how nice it would have been right now for the getaway.” He charged off hugging his gym bag to his chest, leaving me to deal with the elderly couple. They got to me and kept going, heading for a teenage kid with long hair, nose rings, and drooping jeans two sizes too large for his skinny-hipped frame; standing in the entrance with his arms raised apologetically, huffing and puffing an explanation: “Grandma, Gramps, so, like, sorry, really sorry. I got busted for speeding on the freeway...”

“That was a close call,” Alain said. He was crouched below see level in the backseat of the Jag. Until he spoke up, I’d feared he was in the parking lot, aiming for the wrong car or on the lam from Grandma and Gramps. I said so as I slid behind the wheel and sparked the ignition. Alain made a noise that sounded like a severe gas pain and, not entirely convinced, urged me to pay attention to my rearview for headlamps that wouldn’t go away before changing the subject. “I confess, Neil, of having had hopes of you surprising me by bringing your ex-wife to help in welcoming me for our auspicious reunion,” he said.

“Stevie’s in the middle of Texas, on location for another twelve weeks, costarring with Clooney and Depp in a remake of Giant.”

“Merde. Nobody leaves good enough alone in Hollywood. They wanted me to remake Breathless. I smiled in their faces one at a time. I said, ‘What would we call it? Asthma?’ They looked at me like I am joking and laughed to win my favor, except the one vice president who reminded me of the first schoolgirl I ever kissed with my tongue. She thought it was a wonderful suggestion and that it would have special attraction for people suffering from asthma.”

“Alain, you did direct Asthma.”

“The money, mon ami. At a time I had more debts than principles. Besides, I could bring my dear precious wife and live in the laps of luxury in Hollywood, in the Benedict Canyon, while mending our broken relationship.”

“Instead, she was murdered and you were—”

“Neil!” He used my name to put a period to the subject. “The only murder bringing us now together is Paul Bern, by the hand of the legendary Blonde Bombshell, Jean Harlow,” he said. “Do me the favor of paying attention to your driving, will you do that? I booked into the Renaissance Hotel, behind the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.” He stretched out on the rear seat with his gym bag for a pillow and within minutes was asleep.

I snapped on the radio to KJAZ. With the jazz station as the soundtrack to my thoughts, I used the half-hour drive to Hollywood to reflect on rumors that had circulated at the time and in years since had gained strength, but not substantiation. Most began and ended with Mayer’s man, Howard Strickling, loyal and powerful, known privately as “The Fixer” because of his ability to manipulate the government, the newspapers, and anybody and anything else, in the service of his boss.

So, no surprise that almost the first words from Alain when I met him the next morning were: “Howard Strickling, mon ami. You know his name, that villain?”

Alain was waiting for me outside the Renaissance Hotel, situated on the towering backside of the Hollywood & Highland shopping complex that surrounds Grauman’s Chinese, constructed at a cost of six hundred million dollars to resemble — in true motion-picture kitsch — one of the colossal sets that had been built for D.W. Griffith’s epic Intolerance. Alain clucked like a hen on speed and lamented that the closest France had come to so magnificent a creation was the Eiffel Tower and perhaps the Arc de Triomphe. He looked too serious to be joking.

“And the theater inside the Hollywood & Highland is where they now hold the awards ceremonies for the academy and the awards banquet afterwards,” he said. Like I didn’t know. “So many great films of mine and never one nomination, except one in foreign, and the winner something out of a garbage bucket by some director with an unpronounceable name from another of those laughable countries, whose subtitles were more interesting than anything photographed.” Like I was supposed to agree.

I said, “Uh-huh, but going back to Howard Strickling. You called him a villain. Why was that, Alain?”

He adjusted his thick lenses and squinted at me under meshed eyebrows. “You think he’s a savior because he protected Harlow in her moment of greatest need? A villain, more like it, the way he spit in the face of justice. One should not spit in the face of justice. Sins and sinners must be accounted for.” His voice had risen enough to attract attention from tourists leaving the hotel under a load of cameras and backpacks. He stared them to a standoff until they’d all loaded onto a double-decker bus whose painted frame advertised:

When I had his attention, I said, “Strickling protected Harlow how?”

“How else? From the gas chamber, of course. Or was it still the electric chair? You think he was named the Fix-It Man for nothing? For something Howard Strickling was named the Fix-It Man.”

I expected to hear the old legends. How Harlow was there that night and it was she, not the butler, who put in a frantic call to the studio and Mayer. How Bern had returned home late and unexpected to discover his sweet bride, impatient with his inability to perform, in bed and kindling a romance with actor William Powell. How Harlow was visiting her “Mama Jean,” and Bern’s ex-wife, Dorothy Millette, had invaded the mansion, wielding the .38 and threatening to tell the world the Harlow marriage was invalid because, as opposed to an “ex,” she and Bern had never divorced — leading to a demand for blackmail, a struggle, and the fatal shot. How Strickling, in the hours before he summoned police, had restaged the scene and caused a phony suicide note to be written. How he’d directed Jean’s repugnant stepfather Marino Bello to ask Bello’s gangster friend Bugsy Siegel to find and dispose of Dorothy Millette.

How whatever the truth was, the brilliant press agent had orchestrated the kind of follow-up that would not tarnish Harlow’s reputation or career or marginalize her value at the box office to Louis B. Mayer. How it had all played out according to plan with the support of cops whose honesty wasn’t as bankable as Strickling’s payoffs.

Similar legends and contradictions had grown up around Marilyn and her suicide, which through the years had come to be a CIA kill caused by John F. Kennedy or Bobby Kennedy, take your pick; or a murder bought and paid for by their old man, Joe, and arranged by JFK’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford, using underworld contacts he was steered to by Frank Sinatra.

Elvis, of course, was murdered, which didn’t quite explain how he happened to still be alive after his fatal overdose at Graceland, and—

I didn’t expect anything new from Alain, no matter how fiercely his egg-sized eyes shone with the conviction of a man who’s seen the burning bush for himself.

He massaged his beard and sighed to the sky, as if I had flunked another test. “Come, I show you.”

Alain sped off down the avenue toward Hollywood Boulevard, angled forward against a modest breeze, one hand clamped on his skullcap, covering ground like an Olympic sprinter who is not going to pass his test for steroids. He weaved through sidewalk traffic that grew fatter the closer we got to Grauman’s Chinese, winning rude words where he wasn’t quick enough to avoid banging a shoulder or bumping a thigh, few of the words in English.

I chased after him, gaining sweat and losing ground, even though my morning regimen for years has included a trot around Westwood, where I’ve lived in a condo since I was dumped in the name of true love, she said, by Ms. Stephanie Marriner, not long after Stevie was anointed “Sex Queen of the Soaps” by an entertainment media with an unyielding appetite for sex queens.

* * * *

The Grauman’s forecourt was buried under more than a hundred tourists taking pictures and testing against their own the hand- and footprints of favorites among the famous film stars past and present who had been stopping by to memorialize themselves in wet cement since an elf of a showman named Sid Grauman began the custom shortly before his movie palace opened its doors for the first time in 1927 with the world premiere of DeMille’s silent version of The King of Kings.

The area was designed to resemble a King Kong-sized red pagoda. Dragon silhouettes played on the copper roof, while stone lion-dogs guarded the entrance to a lobby supported by red and gold columns, dotted with restored wall murals of life in the Orient under an immense, intricate chandelier of Chinese design.

Grauman, whose partners in the theater were the reigning royalty of Hollywood, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, hadn’t set out to seal stardom in cement. The practice started after actress Constance Talmadge visited the construction site, and accidentally stepped onto a wet slab. In jest, she dedicated the slab to Sid and signed her name and — kazam! — a klieg light erupted over Grauman’s head. Or so the legend goes.

Alain spent a few minutes on the outer sidewalk, hands forming a rectangle, as if he were framing the scene for a camera take, himself framed between Batman and someone dressed like some superhero from an X-Men movie, and not far from Wonder Woman and Superman, they and others paid by the theater to wear costumes, make nice-nice, and pose for photos with the tourists.

“This would not ever happen in France,” Alain said, grunting distemper as he obeyed the command of a lantern-jawed guy in khaki shorts to move out of the picture he was trying to take of Batman with his arms wrapped suggestively around his elephantine wife, in an English spoken with a vaguely Germanic tint. “In France, wherever I go out in public, they are always begging to have their picture taken with me.”

“But not with a rabbi,” I said.

That reminded Alain that he was in disguise. He blew out a small hurricane of relief.

“There,” he said, his index finger pointing to an area by the advertising windows on the west side of the forecourt. “There is where I have to show you.” He hurried over, excusing his way past the clutters of people trying on the prints of Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson. He hovered over a striking blond teenager hanging out of a halter top while matching her elegant, finely-boned fingers against those in the oversized gray-tinted cement block of—

Jean Harlow.

When she cleared away, Alain quickly giant-stepped forward and took possession of the slab like a demonic landlord, shooing away everyone while urging me closer. “You see it now, mon ami?”

Harlow’s memorial to herself read: “To Sid in sincere appreciation.” Under her signature were her hand-prints and high-heeled footprints separated by a vertical row of three penny-sized depressions and under that the date, September 29, 1933.

“The holes were from the black pennies Jean inserted for good luck,” Alain said. “Long missing. Long gone. Stolen by somebody no better than graverobbers.” I gave him a So what? look. He dug out a folded sheet from a pocket and handed it over. It was a glossy photo of the Harlow slab. It won him another questioning look from me. “You think you see, but you do not see,” he said.

I compared the photo to the slab.

There was a difference.

The Harlow slab in the photo had a different inscription: To Sid Grauman, With Sincere Appreciation; here hand and footprints, nothing more.

Alain ripped the photo away from me, refolded it, and jammed it back into his pocket. “Now you begin to see,” he said, looking at me as if he expected an apology.

“What does this have to do with the death of Paul Bern?” I said, the question catching the attention of a few nearby tourists. Alain noticed. He took my sleeve and led me away, over Rex Harrison and Cary Grant, across Jeanne Crain and Natalie Wood, to a back area that gave us a rest bench and a modicum of privacy.

He checked for spies, then whispered, “The fine hand of Howard Strickling at work, Neil, mon ami.”

“I don’t understand, Alain.”

“Of course, but I cracked the puzzle; putting one and two together and getting four.” He adjusted his glasses and nodded in self-accord. A flickered smile gave a momentary animation to his false beard. “The photo is of the block of cement Harlow truly, in fact, did before she murdered Paul Bern.”

“Yes?”

“That terrible night, she summons Howard Strickling to her mansion. This is even before Mayer, anyone. Merde. Strickling recognizes the seriousness of what has happened. He sends Harlow on her way to her mother. He bribes the houseman, who will eventually disappear from the face of our planet, with a large sum of money from a bottomless pot of gold. He does the same with a studio person who writes a suicide note to his specifications. Fearing not all fingerprints will be safely removed, he calls one of his police or gangster connections and soon he has replaced the murder weapon with a .38-caliber pistol that will conveniently have only the prints of Paul Bern. And so on and so on. Now do you begin to understand where I have come from?”

His eyes were beacons of anxiety.

“Tell me, so I’m certain.”

“There is also a confessional note that Harlow has written before Strickling arrives on the scene. As with the true weapon of death, he has confiscated the note. But the Fix-It Man, like so many others, has respect for history and cannot entirely bring himself to destroy this evidence to the truth of what happened. He hides the evidence and, after a safe period of time, he hides it one more time, like a time capsule.” He threw an accusing finger in the direction of the Harlow slab. “Under there. Strickling buried the truth under there.”

He stamped a palm with his fist. His look challenged me to dispute the claim and carried a sense of growing desperation.

“Alain, how could that be?” I said, my mounting uneasiness about his behavior tempered by a newspaperman’s natural curiosity.

“What a Fix-It Man does, Neil. He bribes Grauman. He bribes Jean Klossner, who is the true M. Footprint, a stonemason whose family worked for three generations helping to complete the Notre Dame cathedral, inventors of the wet cement that made—” tossing his arms away — “all this possible. In dark of night at the theater’s forecourt, under a tent of secrecy guarded by police of Strickling’s choosing, in the company of Strickling and Jean Harlow, Monseiur Klossner broke out the old cement, then removed himself, at Strickling’s request, until Strickling could dig down deep enough into the soft earth to place a strongbox in which were the .38 and the confessional note Harlow had written. He smothered the box in the dirt, whereupon Klossner returned and caused the new cement block to be created by Harlow. The hands. The high-heels. But Harlow, she got the inscription wrong and, too quick for Strickling to prevent, she inserted the black pennies.”

Alain grew quiet, his hands folded palms up in his lap, and surveyed the passing parade. A smile lit his lips. “I can smell fresh popped corn soaking in the butter, Neil. I love it, the fresh buttered popped corn. The smell. The taste.” He kissed his fingertips and threw them away. “A cineaste’s true aphrodisiac. My beloved wife, Gilly, and I, we would have it when we attended the cinema. No matter where. I would like some before we leave, the taste on my lips to remind me of our mission when we come back here, oui?”

“Our mission?”

“Yours and mine. They will let us inside for the popcorn? A large-size box. My treat.” He went for his billfold.

I stopped his hand. “Exactly what is our mission, Alain?”

“I have said already, mon ami... To uncover the truth.”

Alain allowed me to pry myself loose from him only after I had promised to return at nightfall with the supplies we’d need. “And two shovels, especially,” he said, repeating himself endlessly about the shovels. “Two shovels, one for you, one for me, so we dig two times as fast, before we are maybe seen by gendarmes and must go on the run.” He remained obsessed with the shovels until we parted at the hotel, when he chased after me in the underground garage to request: “And an axe for use to crack the cement into pieces we can quickly discard in reaching our goal.”

“Already on our list, Alain.”

He decided he needed to see the list again. He studied it intently, like a student preparing for finals. “Ah, bien. Tres bien. Good, good, good. Two axes, one for me and one for you, also to work swiftly, like with the shovels. We will begin after the last screenings, after the workers all depart and the theater goes empty and dark, oui?”

“An excellent plan, Alain.”

I’d have agreed to two hookers driving tanks down the boulevard if he’d asked, anything to help get me away now from behavior increasingly bordering on the bizarre. I was not going to be party to any dig at Grauman’s Chinese, of course. That was not the issue confronting me. The issue was what to do about Alain De Guerre; how to keep him from going through with his crazy scheme.

I was no sooner behind the wheel of the Jag and turning the key than he was rapping on the window, shoving his face into the opening the instant the glass lowered, beard glistening with sweat, to say, “Are we better off using a drill like the drill they use on streets when they are replacing the asphalt?”

I said, “Excellent thought, Alain. I’ll add them to the list.”

“Also, a torch, one for you and one for me? You agree?”

And one for the little boy who lives down the lane?

“Yes. The drills and the torches, both. Better safe than sorry.”

He said, “Perfect, yes. Two to the list. Two, like the axe and the shovel. The shovel, the kind that are like gravedigger shovels, Neil. We are doing that, are we not? Like gravediggers? Raising a corpse, not laying a corpse to rest; exhuming the body of a tragic crime to once and for eternity reveal the truth.”

I gunned the motor.

A second time.

He smiled at that and stepped away from the car, still giving me instructions, his rapid-fire speech a sputter of confusion, barely understandable as more of it came in French. I glided from the parking slot. Easing toward the garage exit, I caught Alain in the rearview, his arms airborne, fingers raised in what was a Churchillian “V for Victory” or a last reminder about the two shovels, the two axes...

Halfway home, I swung off Sunset and trailed down into Beverly Hills, to a shop on Little Santa Monica Boulevard, M. Berman’s Gallery of Greatness, which I often visited when doing research on Hollywood history. The proprietor, Murray, a man in his mid to late sixties, had more minutiae stored in memory than the Internet. He didn’t let me down after I’d described the two Harlow cement squares, the one in the ground at Grauman’s Chinese and the one in the Alain De Guerre photograph.

“Both authentic,” Murray said, before I could ask the question. “Now I suppose you want to know how that can be?” he said, and at once launched into an explanation. “Howard Strickling wanted to make Jean’s ceremony stand out from any of the others when he started to promote the movie Dinner at Eight, so Strickling arranged with Grauman to have it conducted on the theater stage, in front of an audience paying for the privilege of seeing Harlow in the flesh. First time it was ever done that way, and the last.

“The cement maven, Klossner, and his assistants wheel out the framed slab of wet cement on a flatbed dolly and move it onto the floor. She does her thing with the handprints, the shoes, the signature. So far, so good.” There were glasses of freshly brewed tea and a bowl of sugar cubes on the antique table between our armchairs in the conversation area. Murray stuck a cube between his teeth and, after giving his glass several stirs, tilted back his head for a healthy rinse and swallow. He signaled me to try it that way and continued: “Now comes the problem. Klossner’s cement dried faster than usual. While the assistants are lifting the slab back onto the dolly, it splits down the middle. Half falls out of the frame, drops onto the floor, and smashes to bits. Gone. Finished. Destroyed. So, four days later, the ceremony is repeated outside in the forecourt, the way it should’ve been done in the first place, and that’s the one that’s there, except for the pennies Harlow put in for good luck. So much for good luck.” Another swallow. “What else, Neil? You’ve been holding something back from me. I can tell.”

I sprang Alain De Guerre’s theory on him, but made it my own.

Murray gripped his belly in place while his jowls danced to the music of his laughter. He could not get words past an asthmatic wheeze until the lubrication set in from an inhaler he kept nearby.

“I were a betting man, I’d bet there’s nothing under Harlow’s block but the good earth that was there when Grauman built the Chinese to go with his Egyptian Theatre up the boulevard and the Million Dollar in downtown L. A.,” he said. “Makes for a good story, but too risky even for a Howard Strickling.” Another spritz. “The one I always liked? The one about Bern catching her in bed with Bill Powell, and Powell wrestles the gun away from Bern and Kaboom! Then, in comes Strickling to fix things up with the cops, City Hall, the press. Everything that never happened for the French director Alain De Guerre, remember? When Gillian Lance was shot dead a few years ago and De Guerre was indicted for murder and went running back to France, where they’ve always refused to extradite him because of the death penalty here?” He looked at me strangely. “What’s suddenly up with you, Neil? I say, something wrong?”

Murray’s observation had brought me back from the dreamland of Alain De Guerre’s out-of-control imagination. I grew increasingly nervous on the drive home, stung by the truth of the situation I had allowed Alain to lead me into. I was harboring a fugitive from justice; aiding and abetting. A D.A. bent on headlines and videotape at eleven could stretch the charges against me to include accessory to murder.

For his well-being and my own, I had to figure a way to stop Alain from night-crawling at Grauman’s Chinese and get him on a bus, a train, or a plane out of the country.

That was what? Aiding and abetting a flight to avoid prosecution?

How many years would that get me?

Maybe the judge would be compassionate, go easy.

The phone stopped ringing and the answering machine had taken over by the time I got inside my apartment. Alain. Sounding frantic. Saying, “I’ve run out of counting the times I have rung you up, mon ami. Where are you? We have new arrangements to discuss. Call me, call me, call me. Oui? Yes? How you say, Okay? I am waiting, damn you, Neil. Damn you, damn you, damn you.”

I rewound the machine and hit playback. His were a dozen of the fifteen messages, his voice growing increasingly strident, requests turning into demands, whines into tears of anguish at my failure to respond. All of them dealt with either his need for confirmation on the specific time we would be meeting or the idea that we should include a wooden mallet and slender chisel in our arsenal of attack weapons.

“I do not wish to destroy her block, and we can be most diligent with the mallets and the chisels,” went one of them. Two of them. Three of them. “But the shovel, the drill, all that we put on the list, bring them as well,” went another of them. Two of them. Three of them. “We are like Columbus tonight, making a great discovery for the ages,” he decided. “We empty the world of another lie,” he decided.

Once, he wondered if my ex was good in bed, explaining, “I always go to bed with my leading ladies, Neil. It is tradition. You shouldn’t mind. You are no longer man and wife, but I wanted you to know anyway. Only the great Deneuve was beyond me. My Gilly, she went to bed with her leading men, so what to do but to forgive her shameless behavior, oui?” The call ended with out-of-control sobbing.

More abrupt was the message later, in which Alain decided, “If the sex queen of the soap operas denies the role in The Jean Harlow Affair, I have in mind to offer it to Isabelle Huppert. I have never slept with Isabelle Huppert. You, Neil? You ever sleep with Huppert, Neil?”

I was tempted to pick up the phone, call and tell him—

What?

Alain, this is insane, this whole Harlow business. You’re crazy to be here. You have to go back home and—

And what?

Better, maybe, to drop a dime on him with one of my old pals at Parker Center — Steiger, DeSantis — the kind of cop cooperation that would take me off the hook? That made sense, and maybe it would even be doing Alain a favor. I’d always believed in his innocence. What better way to prove friendship than by pushing him to his day in court? Yeah. I’d be doing him a favor, but — at what price to my self-respect?

My dignity?

My honor?

To Alain De Guerre’s freedom, possibly his life, were a jury to find him guilty of killing Gillian Lance?

Alain trusted me.

He had called originally expecting better of me than to turn him over to the police.

I expected better of myself.

I jumped into a shower to wash away my feelings of guilt, then grabbed a Heineken from the fridge and settled at the computer to reaffirm my faith in Alain’s innocence.

My old L. A. Daily pass codes still worked, and got me to the florid prose filed by my one-time nemesis, Clancy McPhillip. I swam through the melodrama he always injected into his copy and reconfirmed that the D.A.’s decision to pin Alain to his wife’s murder stemmed mainly from evidence that at best was circumstantial, most of it derived from conflicting statements made by a husband besotted with grief, his emotions rarely under control from one minute to the next.

The facts that most often came together:

Alain, finished shooting Asthma, is preparing to return to Paris with his American-born wife. He agrees to stay an extra week so she can attend the premiere of her new film, Strangers, at Grauman’s Chinese. The promotion includes a forecourt ceremony for Gilly and her director, Walker Wheeler. Alain becomes increasingly agitated while Gilly is applying her signature to the wet cement. He begins deriding Wheeler when it’s the director’s turn, claiming Wheeler is a hack and has no business being immortalized at all, much less before Alain De Guerre. Heated words are exchanged. Alain accuses Wheeler of having slept with his wife during filming. The director denies it, strings together a series of X-rated curses, and is so distracted he misspells his signature in the cement. He scratches through it and chucks the stylus at Alain, who responds by whipping out a .22 and aiming it at Wheeler while repeating claims of an affair between the director and Gilly. Alain manages to fire a wild shot before the guards subdue him and drag him off kicking, screaming, and vowing revenge. The bullet flies over stunned fans behind the velvet ropes and plunges into one of the stone lion-dogs guarding the theater entrance. Studio publicists step in diplomatically. The .22 is returned and Alain is released without charges being filed after corner huddles with theater management and the LAPD.

The next morning, an hysterical Alain De Guerre phones 911 and summons the police to the Benedict Canyon cottage he and his wife had rented for the duration. Gilly is on the floor of the master bedroom, dead of a .22-caliber bullet in the head that later will be shown to match the one imbedded in the stone at Grauman’s Chinese.

They continued their argument after the forecourt ceremony, he tells detectives. He fled the cottage, spent the night in aimless driving on the freeways, lost his way a few times on his way back, and found her like that. And in other variations on the theme: He drove the freeways after the forecourt ceremony, got back to the cottage the next morning, and saw Wheeler hugging his wife goodbye. He drove off again, the freeways again, lost again, home again; Gilly dead. More variations, each time claiming she threatened to kill herself if he walked out now, Alain angrily tossing the .22 at Gilly and leaving. But, absent the gun anywhere in the cottage, absent a suicide note, the idea of suicide is as suspect as Alain De Guerre.

Wheeler has a verifiable alibi for his whereabouts following the altercation at the theater.

Alain can’t account for his time.

Alain has motive, opportunity, and the means to kill his wife.

Alain is indicted.

Alain flees the country.

No amount of memory-rummaging was telling me why I had been convinced of Alain’s innocence. What struck me now was how much of his story seemed to mirror facts and rumors surrounding Harlow and Paul Bern. Was that what drew Alain to their story and ultimately took us to the forecourt and Harlow’s signed slab? Was that—

What?

What else?

His not mentioning Gillian Lance’s signed cement or thinking to visit it before we left Grauman’s today... Did it say he wasn’t the grieving husband he had always played at being or that he didn’t want brought back ugly memories of events that had led to her death? Or, was it that he didn’t want me raising the wrong questions and learning the right truths?

My phone rang and surrendered to the answering machine midway through the first ring, before I could get to it.

Alain screaming: “I don’t know why I ever bothered with you. I will accomplish this by myself, what I should have done before this, without you, you—” He descended into French at a clip where one word crashed into the next, none making any more sense than his shout of outrage before clicking off.

I looked at the receiver as if it were a time bomb ready to explode.

A time bomb named Alain De Guerre, who was living out the final chapter of a truth he’d buried inside the fantasy of a motion picture he would never make.

It was half-past midnight.

Research had chewed up the evening.

I dialed Alain’s hotel.

The operator connected me to his room.

The phone rang until automatic response kicked in.

“Alain, it’s Neil. Pick up, please. Please. Alain, pick up, damn it...”

I threw my act together and headed for the Renaissance, praying I’d get there before the crazy son of a bitch killed himself.

A little reputation goes a long way in this town.

The night clerk remembered my byline from the Daily column I used to write.

He had the housekeeping manager check Alain’s suite.

Empty.

I tipped a memory-deprived bellman a fiver and he suddenly remembered noticing “that rabbi kind of guy you described.”

Alain had left about a half-hour ago.

I took off for Grauman’s Chinese.

The last screenings had ended. The theater had emptied and the forecourt seemed naked without the tourist hordes. A parade of overhead lights transformed cement plots that during the day screamed with honored stars’ demands for love and remembrance into a somber community of gray and black valleys. Floor spots bathed the militant lion-dogs, guarding them against after-hours trespassers.

I headed toward the Harlow block stage-whispering for Alain.

Got an echo back, then — evidence Alain had been there:

A small triangle of cement that appeared to have been chiseled out of the lower right corner, near the Blonde Bombshell’s heel-prints; nothing I remembered seeing earlier.

A sense he’d discovered what a formidable, impossible task he had set for himself.

I tried Alain’s name again, tracking quickly across the forecourt, over the likes of Bob Hope and the Marx Brothers, almost tripping on Gene Kelly’s shoes, to the northeast section where Gillian Lance and Walker Wheeler shared side-by-side fame in perpetuity. I got only silence in response, marred by a few night-crawling cars humming along the boulevard.

On her cement block, Gilly had written a few words in French, in an elegant, precise hand as petite as her long-fingered hands and shoe size, a Thank you, dear America, for this honor to go with a heart with an erratic arrow drawn through it, aimed toward Wheeler’s block; her signature; the film title, Strangers; and the date.

On his slab, Wheeler had drawn a heart twice as large, its Cupid’s arrow pointed toward Gilly, and printed in irregular block letters that spiraled down like a train heading around a bend, LOVE CONQUERS ALL, followed by his signature and the date.

The hammer and chisel abandoned on top of Wheeler’s block had been used to deface it, Wheeler’s signature and the inscription barely surviving a dozen or more stab and scrape marks, one word changed to make the inscription read: Death CONQUERS ALL.

I eased onto my hands and knees for a closer look, ran my fingers over the damage as if it were some kind of Braille that would tell me things I should know, and unthinkingly glided my hands into Wheeler’s prints. Mine measured larger.

Alain De Guerre said, “You or anybody would also have an easy task of filling his shoes, mon ami.” He was posing against the closest stone lion-dog, one leg propped up on its pedestal. I held up a hand, defending myself against the brilliant moon made by the Maglite he was shining at my face. “One need only look at the arrows to see the truth of their relationship. The arrows aim at one another, publicly and defiantly telling the world I am a cuckold.” Approaching, he abruptly changed the subject. “My only fellow countryman enshrined here is Maurice Chevalier. Since nineteen hundred and thirty-four. The singer Jeanette MacDonald, his costar in Love Me Tonight and The Merry Widow, her signature, her hand and footprints, placed in the cement on the same day.”

He brought up phlegm and spat on Wheeler’s cement.

I managed to get my hand out of the way before the wad landed.

Alain said, “It should be me also here, Neil, next to my precious Gilly, not him. Me. Like Chevalier with MacDonald, the same day, side by side with her. Not only here but for eternity.” He glanced toward the stars, wondering, “Do you think they slept together?”

I said, “Let’s get out of here and talk about it somewhere else, Alain.”

“Oui, somewhere else. Where I want you to see something.”

“You’ll tell me back at the hotel.”

“Non, not there.” He adjusted the Maglite so I could see the .22 aimed at me.

“There is somewhere else you need to see.”

Alain’s precise directions led my Jag to an English-style cottage in Benedict Canyon. It was half-hidden behind a marvel of ageless trees and a chest-high brick wall that could not keep out a determined coyote, about a quarter-mile off the main road. I recognized the address. This was the cottage where Paul Bern was found dead three days after his marriage to Jean Harlow. Years later, it was owned by Jay Sebring, the hairstylist who was among the victims of the Charles Manson Family.

Alain added to the history while inspiring me with the .22 to traverse the wall using the clinging vines and follow the Mag-lit brick path to the front door, saying, “In here is where my darling Gilly and I reposed while I was directing Asthma. A place they now tell is haunted, for me only by memories and by Wheeler, who gave me the arm by acquiring it and moving in after he had defiled Gilly and I was back to Paris, like the sick dog he always was.”

“Alain, you told me Gilly had many men.”

“But none other at the Grauman’s Chinese, mon ami.”

The cottage was all darkness, the door secured by a series of locks. The windows lacked any protection. One on the down-canyon side had missing shutters and glass and stood out like a point of entry that had been used more than once. I climbed inside first.

“That way and turn to the left,” Alain said, the Maglite lighting the route. “To the master bedroom, to see where Harlow and Bern were and where Alain and Gilly were and—” He stopped and took a heavy breath. “Just go,” he said.

Alain flipped a light switch to crack the darkness in the bedroom. “Oh, dear Lord, there at the bathroom,” he said, reciting the words like a bad actor finding punctuation where none exists. Pointing with the .22.

Walker Wheeler lay naked, dead, belly-down in front of the full-length bathroom mirror, his head resting on a pillow of blood caused by the bullet hole from the .38 firmly gripped in his left hand. The area reeked of a sweet scent I could not put a name to, at odds with the smell of a body in the early stages of decay.

As if reading my mind, Alain said, “Mitsouko, Harlow’s favorite parfum. Homage to Paul Bern. I think, appropriate to the moment.”

“Jesus, Alain. You murdered Walker Wheeler.”

Alain shrugged. “He murdered Gilly. An eye for an eye. In the end, death conquers all. Look over on the bed to see what I see.”

A handwritten note rested on the throw pillows:

Alain said, “A suicide note, non? He committed suicide, as anyone with two eyes and a brain can see.”

“A suicide note written how, at the point of your gun? When Gilly was killed, Wheeler had an alibi for the time.”

“And me, also an alibi, Neil. I loved her. That has always been my alibi.”

“For tonight? You have an alibi for tonight? For the dead man on the floor?”

“For why? You read his suicide note. I have hands that are clean hands. As clean as Jean Harlow’s hands were clean. I am here now, not then, not when he put the gun to his head. Soon, I will be gone, and only you the wiser.”

“Only until I tell the police what I know.”

“Oui. Yes. You must tell the police. You should do that after I leave you.”

I said, “Before you go, explain something to me, Alain. Why this elaborate scheme? Why involve me in the first place?”

His laugh carried to the ceiling. “Why else? The drama, mon ami, in what is my last great production, the one I will be most remembered for directing down through the ages. The Alain and Gillian Affair, written by someone I know and trust to tell the story after I’m gone in a way that clouds it in eternal mystery. Questions giving birth to new questions and answers never in agreement. Do that for me, Neil, and it won’t be bad for you either, oui? I promise.”

“You are crazy, aren’t you?”

“Like a fox,” Alain De Guerre said, and turned the .22 on himself.

When I got back home, there was a message from Alain waiting on my answering machine.

The next night, in an hour between midnight and dawn, when the forecourt at Grauman’s Chinese was as still as a graveyard, I traveled across Jean Harlow, up Irene Dunne and the Ritz Brothers, to the stone lion-dog hovering nearby.

I located the out-of-the-way cavity in the lower rear Alain had described and dug in my arm almost to my shoulder, patting around until I found the strongbox he said would be there. It was caked with dust and rust and, once home, I had to jimmy the lock open. Inside the strongbox were a .38 pistol and the note Alain had alluded to, a detailed description of Paul Bern’s murder, handwritten and signed, but not by Paul Bern. Or by Jean Harlow.

Copyright (c); 2005 by Robert S. Levinson.