Double Image (27 page)

“There’s nothing wrong with wanting some time to yourself.”

“But I could have picked a better time to say it. I’m still confused, but . . .”

“You’re not the only one.”

“Maybe I’m ready to talk about it now.”

“We’ll do that when I get back,” Coltrane said.

“Yes. Not on the phone.”

“Not on the phone. Have a good holiday.”

“Same to you. At least as good as you can. Mitch, I haven’t forgotten about the special edition of the magazine. The photographs are still at Packard’s house. When you come back . . .”

“I’ll make sure you get them.”

The snow lanced harder against the front window as Coltrane hung up. He walked to the window and watched dusk thicken. Cars struggled through deepening drifts.

His photographs — they had completely slipped from his mind. It was a measure of how severely things had changed. A week ago, he had been elated about the new direction that his life was taking. He had felt reborn. And now he could barely recall the sense of renewal that had made him excited. Out of habit, he had brought a camera with him, but it remained in one of his suitcases, along with shirts that he hadn’t unpacked.

Going into the front hallway, smelling must, he started up the oak staircase. The banister felt wobbly. Or maybe
I
am, he thought. In his bedroom, he opened his suitcase, took out his camera, set it aside, and removed a large manila envelope that he had reinforced with stiff cardboard to make sure that it didn’t bend.

The envelope contained a dozen photographs from the chamber in Packard’s vault. He spread them out on the bed and stared down at them, directing his gaze from left to right. Dizzily returning to the first, he began again.

And again. The haunting woman looked back at him.

“SHE WAS AN ACTRESS.”

It was four days after Christmas. Coltrane was back in Los Angeles, sitting in the uncluttered office of the private investigator he had hired before going to New Haven.

The man’s name was Roberto Rodriguez. Short and slender, with silver sideburns, wearing spectacles and a conservative suit, he looked more like an attorney than a private detective.

“This is a photocopy of the police file. You can keep it.”

“Police file?” Coltrane worked to steady his right hand as he opened the file. A faint blotched image on a Xerox of a photograph peered up at him, making him tingle. As imprecise as it was, the image left no doubt. That lush dark hair. Those expressive lips and almond-shaped eyes. He was looking at the woman in Packard’s photographs.

He turned the page and frowned at typescript that was hard to read, faded by age and what incomplete portions of characters suggested was an overused typewriter ribbon. “Missing persons department?”

“The complaint was filed by her agent back in 1934,” Rodriguez said. “She had a five-year contract with Universal. Nothing major. She certainly wasn’t a star, although judging from the photo I used to make that Xerox, she could have been. When she didn’t show up for the start of a picture, the studio grumbled to her agent, and the agent realized that he hadn’t heard from her in over three months. Which tells you how close they were.”

“And?”

“There isn’t an ‘and.’ She was never found.”

Coltrane felt a sinking sensation. “But how could Randolph Packard have purchased the house from her if she was never located?”

“Who knows? Maybe after a year she was assumed dead and her parents got permission to put it on the market. Somewhere in that file there’s a summary of a telephone interview with them. The detective in charge of the investigation wanted to know if she had ever shown up where they lived in Texas. They claimed they hadn’t seen her in four years. Which tells you how close the family was.”

Coltrane turned more pages, shaking his head, baffled.

“The detective notes that the family didn’t have a phone. The interview took place at the local police station,” Rodriguez said. “Add the abundance of
ain’ts
and double negatives, and you get the impression of a down-on-his-luck, undereducated farmer. But his last name isn’t Chance. It’s Chavez.
The daughter’s
first name isn’t Rebecca. It’s Juanita.”

“She changed her name to disguise her Hispanic origins?”

“I love old movies. I love to read about them,” Rodriguez said. “Back in the twenties and thirties, you get
male
stars with ethnic names. Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro come to mind. The studios played up their sultry appearance. But I can’t think of more than a few
female
stars — I’m talking major — who didn’t have a white-bread appearance and name. That doesn’t mean they
were
white-bread. Several of them had ethnic backgrounds, but they hid it. Had to. Rita Hayworth’s a good example. She didn’t become famous until the forties, but her career started in the thirties. She was Hispanic. Her real name was Margarita Cansino. She had dark hair and a widow’s peak that made her look very Spanish at a time when there was a growing prejudice against Mexicans. So she dyed her hair auburn and plucked out her widow’s peak to make her hairline look symmetrical. She added some voice lessons to get rid of her accent, changed her name, and managed to assimilate herself. It looks to me like Rebecca Chance did the same.”

“HERE.” The reference librarian, a petite young woman in braids, escorted Coltrane into a Spartan room that had several microfilm machines. “When you’re finished, please bring the film back to my desk.”

“Thanks,” Coltrane said.

It had been years since he had used this kind of machine, but his familiarity with it soon came back. After attaching the roll to a spindle on the right at the bottom, he fed the film through the machine and linked it to a spindle on the left. By twisting a knob, he could forward the film past the light that projected and magnified the small print onto the screen. The roll was for all the issues of the
L.A. Times
that had been published during the last quarter of 1934, which, according to the police report Coltrane had brought with him, was when Rebecca Chance, born Juanita Chavez, had disappeared — specifically, during the second week of October. The missing persons’ report had been filed on October tenth, two days after she failed to show up for work. That meant Coltrane had only nine issues of the newspaper to spin through before he got to the period of time that interested him, but to give himself some context and to avoid missing any seemingly innocent reference to her earlier, he made an effort not to speed ahead but, rather, to take his time and do the job right.

The headline for the October first issue was about Franklin Roosevelt and the President’s efforts to deal with the Depression. A related story described the worsening economic conditions in Los Angeles. International news about fears of a war in Europe were next to a report of a local fire in which five children and two adults had burned to death. If you weren’t in a bad mood when you woke up, Coltrane thought, you would be after reading all this.

As the machine’s fan whirred, preventing the heat of the bulb from burning the microfilm, Coltrane spooled further on. He paid close attention to the entertainment section in each issue but failed to find any mention of Rebecca Chance. Even when he got to October tenth, the day the police had been told that she was missing, he still didn’t find any mention of her. Was the studio keeping her disappearance quiet in order to avoid a scandal? If so, what kind of scandal?

On page eighteen, two days later, October twelfth, he finally found it, “Actress Missing,” a story only six inches long that basically summarized what was in the police report. She had failed to report for work at Universal. The studio had grumbled to her agent. The agent had tried to phone her and then had gone to her home, where no one answered. A neighbor said that he hadn’t seen any sign of activity in the house, including lights, for at least a week. When police searched the house, they found nothing that appeared to have been disturbed or missing. An assistant director at the studio said that she was always on time and knew her lines — it wasn’t like her to fail to be punctual. There weren’t any gaps in her clothes closet to indicate that she had packed and gone on an unannounced trip. Foul play was suspected.

A photograph accompanied the article, and Coltrane had the impression that the article might not have been printed at all if Rebecca Chance hadn’t been so beautiful. Although the photograph, obviously a studio still, didn’t do her the justice that Coltrane knew was possible, he had trouble taking his eyes away from it. The tone of the article wasn’t reverential. It didn’t treat her as a star. That the small piece was buried in the middle of the newspaper reinforced the impression that this was being considered more a crime story than a show-business one.
Up-and-coming
and
promising
were the words used to describe her. At the end of the article, Coltrane wrote down two titles, the films she had most recently appeared in:
Jamaica Wind
and
The Trailblazer
.

Finishing the issue for October twelfth, he continued to the next day, and the day after that. On page twenty of the latter, Rebecca’s photograph, another studio still, immediately caught his attention. It, too, couldn’t compare to Packard’s amazing depictions of her. Nonetheless, her gaze held his own. When he finally broke away and read the article, he learned that the only hint of progress in the investigation was that an actress friend at Universal had told the police about crank phone calls and obsessive fan mail Rebecca had complained about. The calls and the letters all seemed to have come from the same person, and they were all about the same thing: vows of eternal love. “The ‘eternal’ part sounded creepy,” the actress friend said. Rebecca had apparently thrown the letters away — when the police went back to search her house again, they couldn’t find them. The police were speaking to other actresses who might have received similar letters. Other than that, there weren’t any leads.

Coltrane leaned back in his rigid wooden chair and rubbed his forehead. The copy of the police report that Rodriguez had given him made no mention of an overinsistent fan. Did that mean the file was incomplete, or did it mean that the police had put no credence in the story the actress friend had told? Perhaps the actress friend hadn’t been such a close friend after all; perhaps her only motivation had been to get her name in the newspaper. If the police discounted her claims, would they have mentioned them in their report? This wasn’t the only discrepancy Coltrane had noted. The first article had listed Rebecca’s age as twenty-two, while the missing persons’ file had given her age as twenty-five, a figure supplied by her parents. At the same time, it had
not
mentioned Rebecca Chance’s real name. Ohio, and not Texas, was now her home state. All of this suggested to Coltrane that the newspaper hadn’t gotten a look at the police report but had received its information through an intermediary, what seemed to Coltrane like a studio publicist who was protecting the studio’s investment in her, persisting in its white-bread image of her.

The effort had worked. Coltrane scanned the bold print at the start of every article in every issue on the microfilm, continuing through to the end of the year, feeling an odd sense of time overlapping when he reached December twenty-ninth, the same date as when he now examined the microfilm. There were no further references to the disappearance of Rebecca Chance. He rubbed his eyes, which felt as if sand had fallen into them. Stretching his arms, he glanced at his watch and blinked with shock. A few minutes before six o’clock. He had been here seven hours.

“JAMAICA WIND
?”

“Yes.”

“
The Trailblazer
?”

Coltrane nodded.

“Never heard of them.” The purple-haired clerk was about twenty. Videotapes crammed the shelves behind him.

“I’m not surprised. They never heard of them over at Tower Video, either. But they told me that if anybody
would
know how to get a copy of them, it’d be you.”

The clerk, who also had a ring through his left nostril, straightened a little, his pride engaged. He pulled Leonard Maltin’s
Movie and Video Guide
from beneath the counter and started to leaf through it.

“They had a copy of Maltin’s book over at Tower,” Coltrane said.

“These movies aren’t in it?”

Coltrane shook his head.

“Well, if Maltin doesn’t list them, it’s a pretty good sign these things have never been shown on TV.”

“Except maybe since that edition of the book came out,” Coltrane said. “And Maltin himself admits that his book doesn’t include every minor film that ever had only a couple of showings at midnight forty years ago.”

The clerk, who was wearing an
Edward Scissorhands
T-shirt, pulled another reference book from beneath the desk. This one was called
A Worldwide Filmography
. It was oversized, battered, and thick. He looked through the pages. “
Jamaica Wind
. Yep, it exists.”

“I never doubted that.”

“Universal, 1934.”

“Right.”

“Guy Kibbee, William Gargan, Beulah Bondi, Walter Catlett, Rebecca Chance.”

Coltrane felt his pulse increase.

“Sounds like a remake of
Rain
,” the clerk said.

“What?”

“This is almost the same cast as
Rain
, but without Joan Crawford.”

“You really do know your movies.”

The clerk, who wore a Mickey Mouse wristwatch, straightened with greater pride. “I try. But I have to tell you — I never heard of this actress here at the end: Rebecca Chance.”

“She had a short career.”

“What else was she in?”

“That other movie I’m trying to find.”

“
The Trailblazer
? Let’s have a look.” The clerk flipped to near the back of the book. “Yep. Same company. Same year. Bruce Cabot, Hugh Buckler, Heather Angel, Tully Marshall, and . . .” The clerk made a drumroll with his hands. “Rebecca Chance. Now we’re getting somewhere. The picture was directed by George B. Seitz.”