Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 127, No. 5. Whole No. 777, May 2006

Brief Nudity by Ron Goulart

Ron Goulart is well known for his work in several fiction genres, and he is also an expert on pulp-fiction magazines and comic strips. His history of adventure comic strips from the 1930s, The Adventurous Decade, was recently reprinted in a large trade paperback edition. His latest novel is Groucho Marx, King of the Jungle (St. Martin’s).

The official verdict was that he’d been doing a bit of late-night jogging along the beach and suffered a fatal heart attack. Not surprising in a man his age. Actually, though, Bud Hebberd had been running for his life and if he hadn’t fallen dead, they’d have shot him down.

I’d encountered Bud for the first time in several years just three weeks earlier. I was standing there in the Wee Chapel of Eternal Rest in Santa Monica looking down at the closed coffin and reflecting on the fact that I had, unfortunately, reached the age where attending the wakes and funerals of my contemporaries was beginning to take up an increasing amount of my time.

Then, rather tentatively, someone slapped me on the back and spoke my name.

“You’ve held up better than I expected,” he said as I turned to face him. “Not that many wrinkles and the hair looks to be all your own, buddy, in spite of that cornbread color you’ve got it dyed.”

I frowned. The nasal voice sounded somewhat familiar, but I didn’t immediately recognize the man. “Bud Hebberd?” I guessed after a few seconds.

Spreading his arms wide, he admitted, “The same.”

Bud was at least forty pounds heavier than when he ran an animation studio that now and then turned out TV spots for the advertising agency where I was an account man. He didn’t have hair anymore and he was obviously wearing contact lenses that weren’t comfortable and caused him to blink quite a lot.

“Too bad about Gil,” I said as we moved to the side of the little chapel and stood near a brand-new stained-glass window.

He made a noise that was part wheeze and part chuckle. “Once an adman, always an adman, right there with the appropriate cliché,” he said. “Gil Jacobs was a second-rate photographer and a third-rate human being.” He produced another wheezy chuckle. “If it hadn’t been for his sideline, the guy would’ve starved to death years since.”

“And how have you been, Bud?”

“Lousy,” he replied. “My life, as you should remember, took a serious downturn over twenty-five years ago.” He sighed. “That was when Marina Bowen tossed me out on my ear.”

“Hey, you should have recovered from that at least twenty-four years ago.”

Scowling, Bud said, “You never were very imaginative. So you don’t know, being such a stodgy upper-middle-class sort of fellow, what it feels like to have the love of your life turn against you for no apparent reason.” Bud shook his bald head forlornly. “The trauma of that fateful parting, buddy, ruined my career as a serious artist and—”

“As I recall, it was actually a long series of saloon brawls that—”

“Admittedly,” he admitted, “I drank for a brief period.”

“Eleven or twelve years isn’t exactly brief, Bud, even for old coots like us.”

“Let’s walk down to the beach,” he suggested, taking hold of my arm. “The smell of all these damn wilting flowers is starting to—”

“I told somebody I’d meet him here.”

“There’s something important I want to discuss.”

“Even so.”

He lowered his voice. “Listen, I finally found out why Marina dumped me all those long years ago. And if it hadn’t been for that son of a bitch lying in that casket yonder I never would’ve known.”

My curiosity was, albeit only slightly, aroused and I allowed Bud to lead me out of the funeral home and into the misty early evening.

A thin grey fog was drifting in across the darkening Pacific. Bud, breathing heavily, said, “I better sit down for a minute.” He settled, with a wheezy sigh, onto one of the benches along the seafront.

“We can head back inside if—”

“I’m okay. Just not up to long hikes.”

“A block and a half isn’t exactly—”

“I just want to catch my breath,” he said. “Now, about Marina.”

“Gil Jacobs told you something?”

“Not Gil directly, no,” he answered. “I imagine what that jerk did was have a sort of deathbed conversion and became a nice guy for a short while before he kicked off. He instructed his attorney to turn this over to me.” Fishing a small silver key from his coat pocket, he held it up. “Along with a — for him — apologetic letter.”

“Safe-deposit box?” My legs were starting to ache slightly, so I sat down next to him.

Another raspy chuckle. “A commodious safe-deposit box in a California Trust Bank branch in Altadena.” Dropping the key away, he gazed up into the foggy night. “Very illuminating, the contents. Only one of the folders applied to me, but Gil, as he was shuffling off to oblivion, wasn’t thinking too clearly and he turned over all the files that have added so immeasurably to his livelihood over the years.”

I asked, “You’re implying that he was a blackmailer?”

“That he was. In addition to being a jealous and duplicitous rat and a mediocre commercial photographer.”

“He did some good work for my ad agency back—”

“Proving my point.”

The fog was growing thicker and colder. “What did Gil say in the letter?”

After taking a few short breaths, Bud replied, “It was an apology. Yeah, he told me to look in the file he’d kept on me and I’d find out why Marina had given me the heave-ho. I don’t know if you remember that Gil was also interested in her. Not that he had a chance.”

“He showed her,” I guessed, “some photographs.”

Bud nodded. “Sent them to her, actually. You know how on cable at the beginning of every movie they put a warning? ‘Adult content, adult language, mild violence, brief nudity.’ That was my problem.”

“Which? Adult content?”

“No, wise-ass. Brief nudity.” He held up a forefinger. “Once, just only once while I was with Marina, I strayed and spent the night with another woman. A couple of hours at the All-Star Motel that used to be on Wilshire twenty-five years ago.”

“Gil got pictures of that?”

“What I didn’t know was that he was trailing me, trying to get something, anything, that’d make Marina break up with me,” Bud said, wheezing some. “I didn’t even know he was outside the side window using that film that doesn’t need a flash. Inez Federman.”

“Who?”

“Inez Federman, did commercials. She was the young housewife in the Farmer Fred’s Smoked Sausage spots where her husband and repulsive offsprings all start howling for—”

“Nope, don’t recall her. We never used her at our agency.”

“I thought she had a terrific crush on me and one night when Marina went to a screening at the Writers Guild for some Italian tearjerker I didn’t want to see, I ran into Inez at a joint on the Strip. Gil confessed in his letter that he’d hired her to lure me to that motel.”

“And you allowed yourself to be lured, Bud.”

“Inez was awfully cute.” He shook his head, then sat up straighter. A smile touched his plump face. “Now here’s what I intend to do.”

“About what?”

“Marina and me. Haven’t you been paying attention, buddy?” He frowned at me. “I’m going to tell Marina that Gil faked this whole thing. She’s certain to—”

“You actually know where Marina Bowen is?” I asked. “She dropped out of movies a good fifteen years ago. And after doing thirteen episodes of that dreadful sitcom about a widow who inherited a circus, she disappeared from Hollywood.”

“Well, no,” he admitted, “I don’t yet know where she’s living now. I only got Gil’s stuff today. But once I check with SAG and some of her old friends, I know I’ll be able to track her down. Once I find her, I’ll convince her that I was sabotaged by that louse over yonder.” He pointed at the fog-enshrouded funeral home across the street where the neon sign was flashing a blurry Eternal Rest into the night.

Almost three weeks passed before I encountered Bud Hebberd again. Now and then I still do a consulting job for the advertising agency where I worked for over thirty years. They were co-producing a TV reality show tentatively titled Elective Surgery. It was felt that Dr. Vernon Noodleman, bestselling author of Surgery Can Be Fun, would make an ideal host. Noodleman felt otherwise, but since I’d worked with him back in the 1980s when he appeared in a series of TV spots for our Butch Masculine Deodorant account, it was thought that I might be able to persuade him where others had failed.

So I flew to Tucson two days after Gil Jacobs’s wake and spent a week and a half cajoling Dr. Noodleman. I’d just about got him to agree to host Elective Surgery when the Creative Director at the agency faxed me at my hotel to inform me that the show was being retitled So You Want a New Face and they were actively pursuing a noted Chicago plastic surgeon for the hosting position.

Preoccupied as I was with pitching Dr. Noodleman, I pretty much forgot about Bud and his attempts to find his long-lost love.

On a smoggy Tuesday afternoon, over a week after I got back to L.A., as I was leaving the Sunset Strip office of my latest urologist, I noticed Bud, wearing a faded Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts that didn’t much flatter his flabby legs, standing at the corner up ahead.

“How’ve you been?” I inquired, catching up with him.

“Wretched, miserable,” he answered without looking at me, “frustrated, forlorn, downcast, depressed, morose—”

“Okay, enough,” I cut in. “So what did Marina say when you found her?”

“I haven’t found her.” He pointed across the street at Moonbaum’s Delicatessen. “Let me treat you to a plate of blueberry blintzes and I’ll explain.”

“I’m on a low-carb diet,” I told him. “But I’ve got time for a decaf.”

The signal changed and the roar of Jaguars, Mercedes, hybrids, SUVs, and a few lesser vehicles ceased. We crossed Sunset.

“Not a trace,” said Bud. “Once a major actress, a noted Hollywoodite... vanished.”

Inside the chill, highly air-conditioned deli, we found a booth and settled in. “I hear,” I said, “that Groucho Marx used to eat here all the time.”

“Sure, and George Washington slept in this very booth.”

“Has it occurred to you that Marina Bowen might be deceased?”

“Am I a nitwit? Of course it occurred to me,” he said. “I’ve gone on the ‘Net’ and checked obits, hospital records, prison records, mental institutions. I’ve combed Yahoo, Google, Hoohaw, and sundry other search engines for mentions of Marina Bowen — also for Jane Borowitz, her real name. I found forty-three sites devoted to her old movies, ninety-two giving bio info, thirteen, if you can believe it, devoted to that abysmal Running Away With the Circus TV disaster. Two separate outfits are selling DVDs with ‘all thirteen hilarious, gut-busting episodes.’ Proving that there’s no accounting for taste.”

“So I’ve heard.”

A waitress with the looks of a supermodel appeared beside our booth. “Any luck, Mr. Hebberd?”

“Still haven’t found her, Mindy. I’ll have the blueberry blintzes with sour cream and applesauce. Plus a Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray.”

“And your distinguished friend?”

“Decaf.”

“Would you like a side order of kosher dills?”

“Not at all.”

Smiling abundantly, she departed.

Bud rested both elbows on the table. “There’s not one bio site that takes her beyond 1990,” he said forlornly. “There are speculations that she’s living in New England with an ailing relative, that she entered a nunnery as a protest against the Gulf War, that she married me and we’re living in an artists’ colony in Taos, New Mexico.”

“How about the Guild?”

“No address for Marina since 1990. And the agency that represented her — well, there’s only one guy still there from back then and he has no idea where she is. The handful of her surviving friends haven’t heard from her since she vanished from Los Angeles.”

My coffee came and I stirred one packet of Splenda into it. “Were I you, Bud,” I advised, “I’d take this as a sign from the Almighty. You’re not meant to find her. Or to put it in nonmystical terms, if Marina is still in this world somewhere, she simply doesn’t want to be found. By you or anybody else. Knowing when to quit is important.”

“I’ll find her.” His blintzes arrived.

“How?”

Setting aside his blueberry-stained fork, Bud held up his left hand and commenced ticking off fingers. “One, I have just hired a topnotch, crackerjack investigative agency,” he told me. “These lads are top seeded in the P.I. field. Three of them are former FBI agents, two are rumored to be ex-CIA, and the guy who’s in charge of finding Marina for me has been fired from the LAPD for excessive zeal.”

“An outfit on the Strip?”

“Yeah, I was just up—”

“Going to be expensive.”

“It is, sure. No problem.”

After sipping my coffee, I asked, “And what’s two on your list?”

He retrieved his fork. “This’ll appeal to the adman in you. Advertising. I’m going to be placing ads — full-page and half-page — in all the trades — Hollywood Reporter, Daily Variety, and such.”

“Also expensive.”

“No problem,” he repeated. “Each ad has a big headline — Whatever Happened to Marina Bowen? Then a few lines of concise copy saying that anyone knowing her whereabouts should contact Hubris Productions. That she’s wanted for an important role in a new film budgeted at sixty million bucks.”

“Might work,” I conceded. “But I’m not clear on how you’re going to pay for the private eyes and the trade paper ads.”

“You forget, buddy, that I have Gil Jacobs’s complete files,” he reminded me in a lowered voice. “And some of his photos and documents, especially the most recent ones, are still quite useful.”

I said, “Wait now, Bud. You aren’t planning to take over his blackmail business?”

“For a while, sure,” he said. “It’s only fair. Gil was responsible for my losing Marina in the first place. Why shouldn’t he help me pay for finding her again?”

“Here are some valid reasons,” I offered. “It’s damned dangerous. It’s also illegal.”

“His clients all did a variety of illegal stuff,” Bud countered. “So basically I’m just punishing evildoers.”

“Still a mistake, a big one.”

He produced one of his wheezy chuckles. “I’ll invite you to the wedding when Marina and I get married,” he promised.

He didn’t get around to that.

I never saw Bud alive again. For that matter, I never saw him dead, since there was a closed coffin at his wake. He did phone me a couple of times, so I have a fair idea of what actually happened to him. Of course, quite a bit of what I think went on is based on conjecture.

Bud’s ads in the Hollywood trades began appearing the day after I ran into him on the Strip. Since he was an artist, they were nicely laid out and the typography was excellent. But a week later, they’d produced no positive results at all. Three different actresses of about the same age as Marina contacted him at his Hubris Productions e-mail address to suggest they could handle any role as well as she could and they had the advantage of being immediately available.

The prestigious private-investigation agency had made no progress toward locating her, though they assured Bud that they expected results in a very short time.

My wife and I make it a rule to play tennis at least twice a week at the country club in the beach town where we now reside. So when Bud called me the first time, I wasn’t at home. After listening to the voice mail, I meant to call him back but we were expecting some people for dinner and I never got around to it.

Bud sounded dejected. “This is costing a stewpot of money. And I’m not any closer to finding her. But I know Marina and I are going to get together, so I sure as hell am not going to give up hope.”

In my view, something that hadn’t happened in twenty-five years wasn’t likely to happen at all. That’s what I would’ve told him if I hadn’t been distracted by helping my wife get the house ready for guests that night.

Bud’s final call came about a week later, in the late afternoon. That one I was home for. “Success at last,” he announced, wheezing slightly with excitement.

“Great. You found Marina?”

“Almost.”

“Meaning?”

“It turns out Marina has a very good reason for lying low all these years.”

“And it is?”

“That I don’t know as yet, buddy, but it’s something pretty big,” he told me. “But she — and this really cheered me up — wants very much to see me again. Truth is, as might have been expected, she misses me, too, and is sorry we ever broke up.”

“Who told you this?”

“A very close friend of hers,” he said. “I’m going to meet this woman tonight and, if I can prove I really am Bud Hebberd, then she’s going to take me to Marina’s hideaway. I’m really excited about—”

“Where are you meeting this woman?”

“A secluded spot.”

“Specifically where?”

“Well, don’t mention this to anybody, especially the press,” he requested. “It’s that deserted amusement park down in San Amaro, place called Beachside Funland. In the parking lot in back of the place, you know, right along the water.”

I sighed. “Bud, have you been carrying on Gil’s blackmail sideline?”

After a few silent seconds, he said, “Yeah, I’ve had to, buddy. You know, to finance my quest.”

“Seems to me if one of your disgruntled clients wanted to get you alone at an out-of-the-way—”

“C’mon, don’t be paranoid,” he told me. “This is completely legit.”

“All right, let’s hope so,” I said. “And good luck.”

“Good luck I’m already having,” he assured me, and hung up.

They found him early the next morning, just as the day was starting, dressed in tennis shoes, a pair of chinos, and a blue pullover. Bud was sprawled facedown on the running path that stretched alongside the ocean. He was less than a quarter mile from the beachfront amusement park’s parking lot.

There were some unexplained bruises on his face. But there was no doubt that he’d suffered a massive heart attack.

Bud had never done anything resembling exercise in his entire life. He sure as hell hadn’t decided to start that night.

One of the people he’d been blackmailing, knowing about his obsession with Marina, had lured him to that quiet spot and tried to persuade him to tell where he’d stashed Gil Jacobs’s blackmail files.

Bud had managed to break loose and start running along the beach. Before they caught up with him, he suffered his heart attack.

They left him there alongside the ocean. They took his keys — none were found on the body — and went to his place in Pasadena to hunt for the blackmail material. They must have found it, since nothing like that was among his effects.

That’s what I think actually happened.

Bud’s ads in the Hollywood trade papers had some posthumous success. For one thing, they got assorted media people thinking about Marina Bowen again. Three different studios contacted her agent to inquire if she’d be interested in an assortment of maternal roles, two outfits that staged nostalgia conventions wanted to sign her up, and both Entertainment Tonight and 60 Minutes wanted to do segments about her and where she’d been all these years.

As it turned out, her surviving agent did know where she was. But Marina had long ago instructed him not to divulge her whereabouts to anyone. No exceptions. Even the detective agency Bud hired couldn’t get it out of him.

Back in 1991 Marina had had what was most likely a serious breakdown. She managed to get herself to an out-of-the-way corner of Wyoming. When she recovered she decided she didn’t want anything to do with show business ever again. She changed her name and devoted her life to watercolor painting and a modest bit of community service. Nobody in that particular remote corner recognized her. She had a considerable amount of money to finance her anonymity. However, when her agent contacted her to tell her about the renewed interest in her, Marina decided it was possibly time for a comeback. After a decade or more of dabbling in watercolors of Wyoming scenes, she felt it was maybe time to try Hollywood again.

I encountered her, by chance, at our country club on an overcast afternoon a month and a half after Bud had been laid to rest at a cemetery out in Glendale. She was about ten pounds heavier and had a few wrinkles. Her hair she’d been able to keep the same shade of auburn and, all things considered, she still looked pretty good.

I noticed her sitting at an outdoor table with two young and successful screenwriters, one of each sex, and a plump young woman who was an agent. Years ago I’d met her when she did some endorsement print ads for the agency. I crossed to the table and introduced myself. Then I said, “I was a friend of Bud Hebberd.”

Marina touched at her hair with slender fingers. She frowned thoughtfully. “Bud Hebberd?”

“As I understand it, you and he shared a home together about twenty-five years ago.”

The frown gradually faded. “Yes, that’s right,” she said finally. “I’d quite forgotten.”

Copyright © 2006 Ron Goulart