Alone (21 page)

“I know. Fanta told me.” She didn’t look up.

“I didn’t know you two hung out.”

“Girlfriends’ network. That’s how I know where you were yesterday morning.”

“Whoops.” It was the best he could come up with after three seconds.

“Well put.”

“I told Kyle that in confidence.”

“He told you about his book in confidence.”

“I should have told you. I’m sorry. I thought if I did you’d try to talk me out of it.”

“You’re a grown man. If you thought it was that good an idea, you shouldn’t have been worried I’d make you change your mind.”

“You’re right. I am sorry.”

“Were you ever going to tell me?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

“The secrets just keep piling up.” She pushed away the tray and looked at him. “I know you, mister. You only lie when you’re ashamed of what you’re doing. I’m the one who suggested you nail Spink, remember?”

“I was ashamed. I still am, even if he did have it coming. I never thought of myself as an extortionist, but that’s what it amounted to. I tried to convince myself I did the right thing by forcing him to quit instead of putting him in my pocket, but you’re right; if there was anything honorable about it I wouldn’t have kept it from you.” He sat back, twisting and untwisting the cap on his bottle of water. “I haven’t been thinking right since this Spink business began. It wasn’t just him; the hotel is the third time I’ve moved since I bought the theater, and then there was that mess with Rankin and the only serious fight I ever had with Kyle. I’m thinking of getting out from under, putting the Oracle up for sale and moving into an apartment with a nice long lease so I won’t be tempted to tear up roots once again. Maybe the legend’s right: The place is haunted.”

“Demonic possession is no excuse for freezing me out of your life.”

“Right again. But you have to admit it’s original.”

“Don’t smile! Don’t you dare. My last relationship ended when he tried one too many times to charm himself back into my good graces.”

He said nothing. He’d run out of options.

“How much do you think you can get for the place?”

His chest felt tight. He’d half expected her to try to talk him out of selling. “I don’t know. I’d be surprised if I got back what I’ve put into it. When I bought it, Kyle said the smart thing to do would be to tear it down. Vacant lots are worth more than rickety old buildings in this town.”

“Sergeant Clifford’s husband is in construction. She might be able to get you a good deal on demolition. You bought some good will when you helped her clear up that old murder at the theater.”

“I’ll talk to her,” he said after a moment.

They locked eyes. A nerve in her cheek twitched. Suddenly she broke up. The room seemed to go from gloomy black-and-white to Technicolor.

“I tried,” she said, wiping her eyes with her napkin. “I couldn’t sustain it. I wish I had a picture of your expression. You looked like a puppy with a bellyache. Val, you couldn’t bring yourself to knock down that old barn if you struck oil in the basement. You can’t sell it either. If you did and whoever bought it tore it down and put up a Seven-Eleven, you’d drive clear around the L.A. basin to avoid looking at it.”

“I’d do it for you.”

“If you did I’d drive the same route for the same reason. You
are
possessed, with a dream, and I’m not going to let you cast me as the Wicked Witch of the West by slapping you awake.” She sat back, stirring the crushed ice in her fountain cup with the straw. “Anyway, that’s where we met. What kind of girlfriend would I be if I demolished a romantic landmark?”

He ventured a smile. “Does that mean I’m forgiven?”

“No, Val, you’re not.”

He studied her face closely. Her cheek didn’t twitch. She looked up. “We need a break,” she said. “You can’t cuddle up to that rat trap and me at the same time, and my work takes patience I can’t afford to spread around.” She held up a hand when he started to speak. “I’m not blaming you entirely. If I’d been thinking like a professional instead of mooning over my beau, I’d never have spilled information on an open police case by telling you what we’d found out from that phony Garbo letter. We both need a vacation, and not from work.”

“How long?” he said at last.

“I don’t know. It’s not like making a reservation at a resort. We’ll play it by ear.”

He opened his mouth, closed it. He didn’t want to say it. “I feel like we’re breaking up.”

“Maybe we are. I hope not. You’re a pretty good guy, Mr. Valentino.”

“You’re not so bad yourself, Ms. Johansen.”

She broke eye contact to lift a shopping bag from the floor beside her chair and put it on the table. It bore the Lord & Taylor logo; he’d assumed she’d spent her day off shopping and had wanted to show him what she’d bought, but she’d behaved as if she’d forgotten it. He asked her what it contained.

“A bunch of old letters. The originals are still in Stockholm and Beverly Hills has copies on file. They’re just taking up space here. I thought you might like to add them to your collection.”

He tilted the bag and looked inside. He recognized the script on the top sheet, as elegant as the hand that had written it, but so much more simple than the personality behind the words. The letter was in somewhat mangled English, an early experiment addressed to Greta Garbo’s close friend Vera Schmiterlöw in Sweden from Hollywood, and characteristically unsigned.

Harriet interrupted before he could thank her. “This, too. They’re issuing a press release, so don’t think I’m falling back into my bad habits.” She took a square fold of paper from a pocket of her smock and snapped it open under his nose.

The fax machine needed a new ink cartridge. The letters were faded, but legible. The message was signed by an inspector with the Swedish Ministry of Police.

**

Ray Padilla’s office was tidier than he was, but then it had been stripped of everything personal and whatever paperwork it had contained had been transferred to someone else with the Beverly Hills Police. The lieutenant slid a bowling trophy into the cardboard carton on the desk and replaced the shredded Kool between his teeth with a fresh one from the pack. His rusty blazer had a fresh hole burned in the left sleeve— apparently he did more than just chew them when he wasn’t under official scrutiny—and he’d gotten rid of the bolo tie.

“What’s so important I had to delay my unpaid vacation?” he demanded.

Valentino held out the fax.

“I’ve seen it. When’s the last time you changed your cartridge?”

“It isn’t mine, it’s LAPD’s.”

“That was my next question. You’ve got a cheap pipeline. All you have to do is buy it flowers and feed it from time to time.”

“I don’t think that’s a road you want to go down, considering the reason you’re cleaning out your desk.”

“I thought tipping the press to what was in the letter might send Rankin over the edge, force him to make a mistake that would reopen the investigation. Maybe I need some time off at that.” Padilla upended a coffee mug full of pencils into the box, started to put down the mug, then shrugged and put it in too.

“It’s possible I owe you an apology. I thought you had it in for everyone who was better off than you, and would frame evidence just to bring him down. Now I’m beginning to think you’re the only cop in Beverly Hills who hasn’t forgotten what justice is all about. Do you know what the fax means?”

“It’s in English, and I can read. The cops in Stockholm arrested the guy that stole Garbo’s letters from the military archives, a replacement janitor. Congrats to them. What’s it got to do with a cold case in California?”

“It’s warming up. All the material reported missing was recovered from the janitor’s flat. It never left Stockholm. What does that do to the theory that Roger Akers stole it and used it to falsify the letter he blackmailed Matthew Rankin with?”

“Maybe he and the janitor were in cahoots. Maybe he borrowed them long enough to make copies and gave them back. The janitor’s end would come out of whatever he got from selling them.”

“You ran the background on Rankin and Akers. How long were they in Stockholm on that visit?”

“They came home after four days.” Padilla chewed on his cigarette. “Not much time to set up a heist. Akers might’ve planned it long distance before they made the trip.”

“How was his Swedish?”

“I didn’t ask him. He’s dead.”

“He’d need more than you can get from a tourist’s phrase book to communicate something as sophisticated as a conspiracy to commit grand theft. If he’d studied the language formally, there’d be a transcript; if he got it from Berlitz, he’d have tapes or CDs at his place or in his car. Even if he got rid of them, there’d have to be a paper trail of some kind.”

“Maybe the janitor speaks English. I’m always hearing how European schools are better than ours when it comes to teaching languages.”

“Something nudged me when I found out that whoever faked the blackmail letter needed at least a working knowledge of Swedish,” Valentino said. “I wasn’t in a frame of mind to know what it was at the time. Whether or not the actual thief speaks English, Akers had to be bilingual in order to fool Rankin, who knew enough to get by. I doubt the schools over there are so good that a janitor could pull it off.”

“Nothing in Akers’ file says he spoke or wrote any other language well enough to order in a Mexican restaurant. Rankin did all the talking when they were abroad. I’ve still got some credit with Records and Information; I can check those other things. But maybe Akers had help over there besides the janitor.”

“He wasn’t extorting enough from Rankin to pay that many accomplices. We’ll know more when the police over there finish interrogating their suspect. Meanwhile we need to let go of the Garbo angle if we’re going to clear this up.”

“We,” Padilla said. “A disgraced cop and a stamp collector. The dream team.”

“Any reinforcements you can suggest are welcome.”

The lieutenant made a face and dropped the cigarette into his wastebasket in two halves. He plucked a shred of tobacco from his lower lip and flicked it away. “There’s a little crack in your theory. If Akers wasn’t squeezing Rankin, there’s no motive for shooting Akers. We can’t blow apart Rankin’s story that Akers attacked him when he refused to go on paying him without discarding the only other reason Rankin had for killing him. It’s like one of those damn number puzzles where you can’t slide one tile where it belongs without pushing another one out of its slot.”

“Those puzzles are designed to be solved,” Valentino said. “And Roger Akers didn’t shoot himself.”

“We know who shot Akers. Rankin admitted it.”

“Let’s ask him why.”

**

He wanted to put his plan into operation immediately, but he remembered he had a meeting scheduled with Henry Anklemire in Information Services. Backing out wasn’t an option; Smith Oldfield was enthusiastic about the deal with MGM, and the way Valentino’s life had been going lately he needed a friend in the legal department.

The little publicist’s office was the only one on campus less commodious than Valentino’s. His abrasive personality had banished him to a monastic cell right next door to the boiler room in the basement of the UCLA administration building. During winter cold snaps—when skateboarders in Malibu wore scarves with their Speedos—the pipes rattled like maracas and the very walls seemed to sweat. Curling photographs in cheap frames showed Anklemire shaking hands with celebrities from both sides of the earthly pale. Some of the poses were putative; the ones with Richard Simmons and Gary Coleman looked genuine, but Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger screamed Photoshop, and most of the autographs appeared to have been written by the same hand.

Anklemire popped up from behind his painted-plywood desk to wring his visitor’s hand, mauling bone and grinning exactly as in his pictures with teeth courtesy of the university’s dental school. He was a youngish man, but wore secondhand hairpieces he obtained from contacts in studio wardrobe departments, and his shiny-slick suit fit his tubby frame like the skin on a bratwurst.

“Garbo!” He spoke in sentence fragments and exclamation points, like the blurbs on an old-time movie poster.

“No, Valentino.”

“You think I forgot your name? I’m still spending the bonus I got on the mileage from that
Greed
deal. Murder! Skeletons! A haunted moompitcher house! Boo! My onliest regret is we couldn’t sit on it till Halloween! Sit down! Not there, that one’s busted. I keep it around in case the director of the department comes to visit. Fat chance!”

Valentino sat in an orange plastic scoop chair that looked as if it had come from a high school, working his hand until circulation returned. The little man couldn’t climb a flight of stairs without wheezing, but a lifetime of glad-handing had put him in shape to arm wrestle Mr. T.

“Cigar?” Back behind his desk, Anklemire shoved a box of White Owls the other’s way. Valentino had visited many offices, but no one had ever offered him a cigar before. The man lived in a time warp.

“No, thanks. Will this take long? I’ve got an important call to make.”

“I never chaired a meeting longer than five minutes. Words are for the rubes. Garbo!” It was the most singular case of Tourette’s Syndrome the archivist had encountered. “I vant to be alone! Ha-ha!”