Hollywood and Levine (16 page)

I waited. The lights were on inside but I heard no movement to the door, heard no splashing out by the pool. I studied my shoes and knocked again. More silence. Another rap of the bull's horns and then I called Carpenter's name. My shout sounded empty. I continued to wait. Maybe he was in the sack, with a starlet or a young ranch hand. It would take time to put on his robe, get into his slippers …

After the fourth knock, I tried the door. It was unlocked and opened into the living room.

The place was an unholy mess.

Everything had been turned on its ear: chairs, sofa cushions, fire irons, wastebaskets, liquor bottles, wine glasses, books, papers, folders, and manila envelopes, scattered with a hurricane's logic across the length and breadth of the wood-paneled room. Only a pair of pearl-handled revolvers, long-barreled beauties circa 1860, stood undisturbed on mountings over the fireplace.

I entered the room and closed the door behind me. It was quiet enough to hear your own pulse. I stepped around a fallen rocker and surveyed the ruins. The work had been done frantically, objects flung wildly across the room, like the fireplace shovel, twenty feet from the fireplace, lying beneath a gouge it had made in the paneling. I picked the shovel up; it was not light. Somebody had been in a great hurry, or very frustrated, or both of the above.

I cleared my throat and called Carpenter's name again, expecting, and receiving, no answer. I placed my right hand on the Colt revolver snoozing peacefully beneath my left armpit and started down the hall leading to the rest of the house.

First door on the left was a bathroom. The shower was still dripping and the cover of the toilet tank was ajar. Next to the bathroom was a guest bedroom. The closet had been emptied of old suits, hangers, and bags full of mothballs. A queen-sized mattress had been lifted and thrown over the foot of the brass bed. Drawers, shirts, and underwear had been hurled across the floor. I backed out of the room and continued on down the hallway. It was like visiting a museum of chaos.

Except that the master bedroom—a large, airy domicile with French doors leading out to a patio—was as perfectly neat and tucked-in as if the maid had just made her dutiful exit. There were two explanations for this: a sudden arrival had scared off the intruders, or said intruders had found what they were looking for.

I backed out of the bedroom and into the hallway. It veered off at a right angle from that spot, rising four steps and leading out to the poolhouse through a glass door, which was open. The poolhouse had showers, marked “Fillies” and “Stallions,” a long bar lined with wicker stools, and a picture window overlooking Beverly Hills. If this was communism, it looked pretty good to me.

Another sliding glass door led out to the pool. I went outside and followed a flagstone path that wound around a group of azalea bushes. It led me to the pool.

It was a handsome pool; the water looked inviting, a mild breeze breaking its blue surface into illuminated ripples. Ribbons of light shimmered across its face and fallen leaves spun slowly about in a whirlpool near the diving board. A pump, housed in a wooden shed, droned mechanically. The sky continued to clear, stars growing sharper and brighter and it would have been a swell night for a party. But the host wasn't feeling very well. Dale Carpenter, sitting in a canvas chair at poolside, was as dead as Louis XIV.

Not
as
dead, exactly. Louie had a big headstart on Carpenter who, by the looks of it, had only checked out a few hours before. But that's mere quibbling; the cowboy was plenty dead, shot through the chest, with no director around to say “cut!” and no wardrobe gal to dust off his pants when he got up off the ground. This was for ugly real, sitting in a chair next to his own pool, dressed in plaid swim trunks and a yellow terrycloth jacket—yellow with blotches of red. His knees were scraped; it seemed a fair assumption that he had been returned to the chair after falling over. Another fair assumption was that he had been killed by a thorough professional: two shots had done the job and one would have been sufficient. They were bull's-eyes through the heart. Carpenter's eyes were open and he was leaning against the side of the chair, as if listening to an amusing story.

I took it all in and tossed it around. A few quick thoughts surfaced: whoever had skulled me had seen Carpenter go into Parker's house with the manila envelope. The actor had most certainly discovered something of importance and had brought it—for reasons I dearly wanted to know—to Parker's attention. He had spoken with Parker and then returned home, watched all the while. Tired and strained from the day's events, Carpenter changed into his trunks and went outside for a refreshing swim. When he climbed out of the pool, a marksman appeared and killed him. The house was searched; after ransacking the living room and guest room, the searcher or searchers found what he or they had come for and departed.

But the unknowns were staggering: what was in the envelop the cowboy star had been carrying? Why had he gone to see Parker? Was the Parker house under surveillance? Was Carpenter being followed? Was I? I'd swear to the fact that no one had tailed me; it's the kind of thing I usually notice. But it didn't really make much difference; Carpenter was dead and Parker remained the key to the whole shebang. And I began to have doubts about Parker's life expectancy as well; he had looked not merely appalled when the actor rang his bell, he looked frightened. I didn't feel so hot myself. It was nearing midnight, time to get back to Helen, time to leave Carpenter and call the cops. Anonymously, of course. Finding one stiff had caused me enough grief; catching the daily double raised the grim prospect of my becoming Homicide's plumpest turkey.

I left the way I came, whipping out a hanky and smearing the doorknobs I had touched. Sure, it might have destroyed evidence, but I was goddamned if I was going to leave my prints all over the place. Besides which, the professional manner of the actor's death led me to believe that he was dispatched by people who did such things wearing gloves. Like Mickey Mouse.

After closing the front door, I descended the stairs, through a green passageway of sculpted shrubs. The bushes were trimmed in exotic parabolas, not a twig was out of place. Only a single stray piece of paper broke the symmetry, a scrap that had nestled in the lower branches near the bottom of the stairs. Being a curious fellow, I reached down and picked up the scrap.

It was a newspaper clipping, an old one. It was brittle and yellow and incomplete, its ragged edges indicating disintegration, rather than tearing or scissoring. I went to the Chrysler and read it while lying down in the front seat.

“Pardee's arrest on the rape charge,” it began, “is his second listed offense, according to Denver authorities. He was charged with disturbing the peace during a New Year's fracas at the Big Sky Club in 1927, an incident which …” And that was it.

I turned it over, saw “POST” but no date. Maybe it was nothing at all, just something blown from a passing garbage truck, but my light turned red. Stop. Think this over. Forget the garbage truck. Let's say this had fallen from a folder held by a man running down these very stairs, say, a couple of hours ago. Let us say, further, that the man had just committed a capital crime and was too preoccupied to notice the little scrap drop from the folder or envelope.

I placed the clipping in my wallet, certain that it was worth a large stack of chips.

I phoned the L.A. cops from a pay booth on Sunset, then drove back to Sherman Oaks, winding around the long dangerous curves of Mulholland Drive. It took longer than I had anticipated and I suddenly got anxious, terribly so, about Helen sitting all alone in that big house on Escadero. I wanted to speed things up, but that was asking for a trip back East in the baggage car, so I took the curves as well as I could, furious at myself for leaving Helen so vulnerable. My state of mind grew increasingly agitated, bordering on the frantic, and I began tearing about like a drunken stunt driver, stomping on the brakes, squealing around bends—virtually two-wheeling an awful curve near Franklin Canyon—in a solo race against my fevered imagination.

And I was dog-tired to boot, at the smoldering end of a long, mean, and frustrating day, in which my own death had nearly been sandwiched between Adrian's funeral and Carpenter's murder. I had been beaten on the head, I had made love to Walter's wife, and now, finally, I had lost my balance.

I pulled into Escadero Drive doing around sixty, and left a foothill of rubber in the Adrian driveway as I floored the brake pedal. The Chrysler shrieked to a stop and I had to hold out a hand to avoid getting creased by the dashboard. I jumped from the car and ran toward the house. Only a dim light shone through a downstairs window, but the top story was bright and full of welcome. I went up the front stairs positively ballooning with dread, legs shaking as I rang the bell. I rang it twice in quick succession.

“Jack?” I heard Helen call from inside.

“Yeah!” My voice was as unsteady as my knees, which rattled from relief and weariness. I had given out.

She opened the door, alive and well.

“How was it?” she asked. I went inside and headed up the stairs, pretending not to hear. It was more than I could handle right now.

I started down the hall to the study, but Helen had moved my things into the master bedroom. When I entered her room, she handed me a towel.

“Check-out time at noon,” she told me.

I washed up quickly, whipped off my clothes, and tumbled into the sack, snuggling beneath the blanket like a child. Helen got in and wrapped herself tightly about me. We lay there like a pair of overgrown embryos.

“Missed you,” she whispered.

I grunted in reply and dug deeper beneath the blanket. My eyelids closed like stone weights and I was asleep before Helen had a chance to turn off the table lamp. Asleep before she had another chance to ask me about Dale Carpenter.

I broke the news to Helen the next morning, before she saw the paper. It seemed to me that she took it well.

“Oh Christ,” she said, then sighed. She stuck a thumbnail into her lovely mouth and chewed on it.

We were sitting in something called a breakfast nook, a sun-washed corner of the Adrian kitchen into which a red banquette had been built. Potted geraniums stood on the window ledges and a group of jays were having a small party in the garden outside. The sky was blue and generous and the sun warmed my back right through the window. It was a thoroughly magnificent morning. Helen in her flowered robe and I in my tan slacks and blue sports shirt, bent over porcelain cups, could have been posing for a feature spread in
Better Homes and Gardens
. Politely chewing our French toast-SNAP, discussing plans for the day-SNAP, turning to observe the musical cavorting of the jays-SNAP. A handsome couple, beneficiaries of America's largesse, having found their literal place in the sun: a radiant California breakfast nook.

“You found him dead?” Helen asked.

“Uh-huh. But that's between you, me, and the geraniums.”

“Did you call the police?”

“From a pay phone on Sunset, anonymously.”

Helen lowered her head and stared into her coffee. The sunlight made her fair skin almost opaque and turned her red hair into a virtual crown. A teardrop formed at the tip of her nose, hung tenuously for a second, then dropped soundlessly into her cup. She spread her hands over her face and wept. “Jack, this is so awful.”

It was that. I put my hand into the crook of her arm and squeezed as gently as I knew how. “It plain stinks, Helen. It's rotten. Were you and Walter close to the guy?”

Helen kept her face covered but shook her head in the negative. I clammed up and let her cry it out. She stopped after another minute or two, removing her hands unapolo-getically and facing me with damp cheeks and glistening eyes. She blew her nose into a paper napkin, so noisily that it made the both of us smile.

“God, Jack,” she said, taking my hand. “What a time you're having out here. It was nice of us to invite you.”

“It's been some fish fry. I was getting bored in New York, but this has been a bit more than I anticipated.”

“Maybe things will calm down now.”

“Maybe. I wouldn't bet on it.” I poured myself some more coffee. “Tell me about your relationship to Carpenter.”

“We weren't very close to him. We'd see him with the others in the group, of course, but never individually. He wasn't terribly bright; very earnest, but obvious, you know? Always discovering things that everybody else had known for years and making a big to-do over them. Like the power company was gypping people or some local politician was a crook. Stuff like that.”

“I know the type.”

“But he was a sweet guy, basically, very sincere. I'm not sure about his sex life. No one was, I think. But that's par for the course out here, you don't even give it a second thought.” She mulled that over. “No chance it was one of those kind of murders, is there, Jack?”

“You mean where a guy brings home a sailor who turns out to be a psycho? I don't think so. The trip Carpenter made to Parker's house, the way the house had been gone through, this thing …” I took out my wallet and removed the clipping about the Denver man named Pardee. “I found this in the hedges outside Carpenter's place and I'm surmising, just for the hell of it, that it flew out of a manila envelope or folder being carried down the steps by the killer.”

Helen took the clipping and examined it carefully, turning it over, reading it twice, moving her lips. After studying it a third time, she looked up, her face registering no sale.

“What do you think it is?” she asked.

“God knows. I'm assuming it's a lead until I find out different.”

“That's how detectives work?”

“That's how I work.” I was showing off and Helen knew it. She smiled.

“My little Sherlock Holmes.”

She took my hand and kissed it. That hadn't happened in a long, long while. I liked it very much.