Come Back Dead

Come Back Dead

A Scott Elliott Mystery

Terence Faherty

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

For Dr. and Mrs. Norman T. Gates

1

A con was in progress. A young man was trying to convince a young woman that he needed dancing lessons. I knew he didn't. Anyone would have known, except this particular teacher. She didn't exactly trust him, but it wasn't over his dancing ability. She figured he was on the make.

She probably figured that often and with good reason. She had the body of a dancer, but not the bony, ethereal kind. A dancer who had grown up on a farm in Kansas was more like it. A dancer who didn't miss meals. And she had big luminous eyes–not innocent, but kind–and lips that had been painted by an artist, maybe the one who specialized in dew drops for Walt Disney. Her hair had been referred to as red, but it looked like a brassy blond, a not entirely unstudied blond. But the hair didn't contradict the impression made by the knowing eyes and the figure, the impression that the woman was as down-to-earth as the guy who delivers your mail.

The young man was another matter entirely. He seemed less substantial than the spiral of smoke rising from my cigarette. Part of the problem was his outfit: morning attire complete with cutaway coat and striped trousers. The feet he was describing as left and left were in shoes that glowed like Dorothy's ruby slippers, their shine protected by spats. But the problem was more than clothes, more even than the fine, slicked-down hair whose high, short part said “toupee” in a refined voice. The guy just wasn't plausible. His ears were too big and his chin and nose too pointy. These elfin features were matched by his thin frame. Though she was no truck driver, the woman he was trying to seduce could have blown him away without drawing a deep breath.

I ground out my cigarette and lit another while I watched the con man's first attempt at dancing. His extreme clumsiness should have tipped her off, but she was too busy protecting her feet to think about it. He ended up sitting on the floor, something you seldom see outside of a roller rink. While still seated, he did something even more unusual. He began to sing.

Now his very implausibility worked for him. It seemed perfectly natural for this wraith in vest and wing collar–seated on the floor, no less–to be singing. Or blowing bubbles out his ears, for that matter. His voice was as thin as the rest of him, reedy in the highest register, but pleasant. Her voice–there was no reason for her not to sing if he was going to–was also light and a touch nasal, but like everything about her except her hair color, it was also believable, a voice you might hear around any parlor piano in America.

After some more playacting on his part, they began to dance in earnest. The con man was transformed, seemingly by the touch of her hand. In the space of a few bars of music, he became graceful, sure. And the confident grace was the missing piece that pulled all his unlikely parts together. He suddenly seemed more real than the studio in which they danced, as real as she was. Or had been. Because she was also transformed, her movements so light and effortless now that the girl-next-door quality fell away like a carnival mask.

Suddenly they were partners in a new con, the illusion that two total strangers could work together like Horowitz's hands, each reading the other's mind, anticipating every novel move. They tapped out a routine that was both complicated and inevitable, the only possible way any two people would dance to this particular music. They carried the con off by making each practiced step seem as natural and spontaneous as the bouncing of her hair.

The studio's centerpiece was a dance floor surrounded by a low railing. At first this railing contained their dancing, though gravity itself barely seemed up to the job. The pair bounced so high with each effortless step that my calves ached in sympathy. But then the railing's inadequacy was revealed. He hoisted her over it and followed, and then did it again just to show how easy it was. At the end of the dance, the pair leapt the railing together, landing with no more force than you'd feel stepping off a curb. They disappeared arm in arm through swinging doors, the transformed man looking back over his shoulder to smile at me lightheartedly.

The whole number had lightened my heart, but the feeling didn't last. After a brief pause, the pair's place in my view was taken by another smiling man, a stout man with wavy hair and a moustache that was barely visible above his fat lips. Behind him was a shiny new automobile fronted by a hand-painted sign that read low, low prices. Before the man could tell me just how low, the picture collapsed into a single bright point of light that lingered in the center of the tube like the last star of a gray morning.

I didn't notice how long the star lingered. My attention was drawn to the woman who had switched off the television set. Ella stood facing me with her hand on the knob. She was wearing a silk nightgown with a lacy bodice. It was similar to the number Rita Hayworth had worn in her famous wartime pinup. Ella could have given Miss Hayworth a run for her money if it hadn't been for a single, prominent imperfection. Her body was in the Hayworth class, but its proportions looked even more dramatic because she was slightly shorter than the actress. In most parts of the country, Ella's hair would have been brown, but here in sunny Southern California, it had just enough golden highlights to pass for blond. Neither her thin lips nor her pale blue eyes were currently set off with makeup, but the eyes at least didn't miss it. They were striking against her tanned face. Her imperfection was nestled between and below those striking eyes: a nose that had once been broken and had ever afterward pointed slightly to her left.

That nose was now pointed at me, and she sighted down it. “Can you do without Fred and Ginger's company for a while, Scotty?”

“In a pinch,” I said.

She crossed to the ottoman in front of my chair and sat down, keeping her bare shoulders self-consciously square. “The kids are asleep,” she said.

“I hope so,” I said, “with you dressed like that.”

“Glad you noticed.” Ella then did some noticing of her own. She took the burning cigarette from my hand. “I thought you were cutting down.”

“You know how we detectives are between cases. It was these or cocaine.”

She smiled at one or the other of my little jokes. For me, the funnier one was the idea that I was a detective. I was actually the employee of a security company that ran errands for the Hollywood studios. There had been moments, though.

“I thought you had a new assignment,” Ella said. “Didn't you say Paddy had called?”

“Starts tomorrow. I was doing a little research when you came in.” I nodded toward the darkened television.

“Uh-huh,” Ella said. She thought I did way too much of that kind of research already. She called it living in the past. “Was your subject Astaire or Rogers?”

“RKO.”

The initials stood for Radio Keith Orpheum, reflecting the movie studio's complicated parentage: a marriage between a then-new medium, radio, represented by the Radio Corporation of America, and a dying art form, vaudeville. The Keith Orpheum circuit had been the biggest chain of vaudeville theaters in the country, once upon a time. Neither parent had controlled RKO for very long, but the initials had stuck, as had the studio's trademark, a giant radio tower on a slowly turning globe.

Now, in 1955, RKO itself was all but gone. Ella decided I needed to be reminded of that. “There is no such studio,” she said. “Not really. If someone's hiring you to find out who killed it, I can give you a clue. His initials are HH.”

They belonged to Howard Hughes, RKO's last owner during its days as a going concern. He'd run the studio as his private hobby shop and dating service, making fewer and fewer films each year, and those films increasingly bizarre. When he'd finally sold out, there'd been little left except for some choice real estate and a library of amazing movies like the one I'd just been watching,
Swing Time
, directed by George Stevens in 1936.

Ella reached up, unnecessarily, to smooth her hair. “Did Paddy say what it was about?”

“Not Paddy. You know his style. He'll only tell me what I need to know.”

“Just after you need to know it,” Ella added, proving that she did in fact know my boss.

To fill Paddy's deliberate void, I'd tuned in
Swing Time
when I'd seen it listed. My motive had really been research, despite Ella's suspicion that I'd been wallowing in nostalgia for the prewar days when I'd been an actor myself. To be specific, I'd been doing background research. Any of RKO's classics would have suited my purpose:
Bringing Up Baby, Stage Door, Top Hat, First Citizen, Gunga Din. King Kong
, even. It was my theory that each studio had its own style, a style that reflected a unique mind-set. Warners, for example, had a brash, East Coast take on the world, the urban immigrant's odd combination of cynicism and sentimentality. MGM had a more typically American outlook that said big was good and bigger was better. RKO's mind-set was modest in comparison. Deliberately modest. Watching Astaire and Rogers, I'd gotten a sense of it again, the idea that the really worthwhile things were simple and stylish and effortlessly competent.

If I'd been the kind of detective who snaps his fingers when he sees a sign for liver pills and announces that the murderer is the local butcher, the kind who makes connections, I could have regained my sense of RKO by gazing at my wife of seven years. Ella was stylish, as the nightgown she was almost wearing attested. And she was competent, a mother of two who had made the transition from studio publicist to freelance screenwriter under her maiden name, Ella Englehart. She wasn't simple, the third item in RKO's formula, but she liked to pretend that she was. She liked to pretend that our whole complicated life together was simple.

“Care to dance?” she asked, lightly stroking my knee. Her touch transformed me as thoroughly as Ginger Rogers had transformed Fred Astaire, but not in the same direction, not toward an almost spiritual gracefulness.

“Who's the code for?” I asked, taking her playful hand and pulling her onto my lap. “Dancing” was the euphemism for “sex” that we used in front of the children.

“I'm not speaking in code,” Ella said. “I thought after watching your old pals dance you might prefer it to sex. They seemed to.”

“They had the Hays office to worry about.”

We kissed, and I thought of the first time we had. I felt our first kiss again, I mean.

“Too bad for them,” Ella said.

2

The next morning I drove to RKO's main studio on Gower Street. At least the stretch of Gower between the Columbia and Paramount lots used to be RKO, as Ella would have reminded me if she'd been along for the ride. It was now the corpse of the studio, laid out in the California sun for the vultures' benefit. RKO's globe and radio tower symbol, which was already a landmark when I'd rolled into Hollywood from Indiana in the late thirties, still perched on the northwest corner of the property, but the globe's plaster oceans were overdue for a repainting. My guess was, they'd never get it.

Like many of the studios, RKO was a fortress built to keep out its own fans, the perimeter of the lot being a series of windowless buildings and blank, high walls. The fans could have captured the fortress on this particular day if they hadn't all been home glued to their television sets. No one challenged me at the gate when I turned off Gower. Beyond it was a little postage-stamp lawn surrounded by offices, a town square done in miniature. Once, the little plot of grass had been the best-kept lawn in town. Now it was brown and dead and needed only a tumbleweed or two to pass for the set of a western.

The absence of foot traffic made it easy to spot my boss, Patrick J. Maguire, who was inspecting the administration building as though he, and not some Midwestern rubber company, now owned it. Not that it was ever hard to spot Paddy. He was a big man, not unusually tall but broad, and he always dressed like a plumber who had just won the Irish sweepstakes. In deference to the July temperatures, Paddy's suit was pearl gray, the same color as his familiar homburg, but he'd jazzed things up with a tie whose red-and-white checks and breadth reminded me of a farmhouse tablecloth.

Paddy waved me into an empty parking space, using his cigar as a baton. The corona was still big enough for the job, being unlit. Before I switched off the engine, I pushed in the dashboard lighter. Paddy leaned in the passenger side window expectantly.

“Good man,” he said. “Came out this morning without a match to my name.” I noted that he had a rosebud pinned to his lapel, the flower looking as indifferent to the heat as the man himself. As the checks in his tie were red, the rose was naturally pink.

“I figured this spaceship of yours would have a lighter,” Paddy said. “God knows it has everything except a sense of restraint. The Pope's Sunday duds are plainer.”

My car, a DeSoto Fireflite, was still new, and Paddy hadn't gotten his fill of kidding me about it. He was a man who could spot a weakness, and cars were a definite weakness of mine. The whole country had shaken off the gray moderation of the war and its aftermath. I'd followed along to the extent of buying the DeSoto. It had a two-hundred-horsepower V8, leather upholstery in a diamond pattern, and a silly “gullwing” dash, whose beautifully curved metal wouldn't hold a single cup of coffee safely, even when the car was parked. The exterior was equally utilitarian. The front grille looked like a vampire's lower teeth done up in chrome braces. The paint was white and turquoise, the white relegated to the roof and a “sweep-spear” on each side, chrome-trimmed arrows of white running from the rear whitewalls to just behind the protruding headlights.

“How many times,” Paddy began in a put-upon, rhetorical tone, “have I told you that the best vehicle for security work is something no one would look at twice?”

“I've lost count,” I said, handing him the lighter. My unstated answer was that we did our security work in Hollywood, where chrome battleships cruised every street. A brown Chevy on black-walls would have stuck out here like an old maid in a chorus line. The answer was unstated because I didn't enjoy arguing with Paddy. Neither of us liked it when he lost.

He got the corona going, filling the car with blue smoke in the process. I traded the smog for the already hot air of the lot, trying to appear more relaxed than I felt as I looked the place over. I understood my jumpiness without really thinking it out, remembering a similar feeling from my time overseas during the fighting. It was the sensation of being on the enemy's ground. RKO was no longer a movie studio in any real sense. It belonged to the television subsidiary of a tire company. They'd never make tires here, but they'd surely get around to making television shows, once all the old movies in the RKO vaults had been shown to death. I didn't want to play any part in that transformation. I'd rather have seen the old studio bulldozed for parking lots.

My beacon in this darkness was Paddy Maguire. I knew he felt the same way I did about television, which was the way Brooklynites felt about the Yankees. Paddy had yet to forgive radio for killing his first profession, vaudeville. Now radio with pictures attached was threatening to do the same thing to his current meal ticket, Hollywood. Paddy had sworn that he'd never do business with the enemy.

It was a blind spot in Paddy's remarkable eye for the main chance. He'd come to Hollywood shortly before the talkies had given the town its first big shake-up. He'd been in the right place at the right time, in other words, but things hadn't clicked for him. He'd ended up manning the front gate at Paramount, my old studio, where we'd met. But he hadn't stayed in the gatehouse. When he'd heard through his network of old friends that the studios were planning to sever their financial relationship with the local police–a relationship that had saved many a big star's career–Paddy had seen an opportunity for personal advancement. He'd founded the Hollywood Security Agency to provide discreet and often legitimate security services for the studios, major and minor.

After that, Paddy's financial fortunes had paralleled those of Hollywood: up during the war years, when the country had gratefully swallowed whatever the studios had doled out, and gently downward after V-J Day, when the kingdom had begun to unravel. First a government antitrust suit had forced the studios to sell off their theater chains. Then television had reared its ugly head. Through it all, Paddy had remained stubbornly loyal, a fact I was counting on now.

I relaxed completely when my boss turned his attention from his cigar to business and asked, “What can you tell me about Carson Drury?”

“You mean there's someone in this town you don't know?” I asked.

“Geniuses intimidate me,” Paddy said. “I used to cross the street whenever I saw Charlie Chaplin coming. I especially don't like boy geniuses. They make me feel dumb and ancient at the same time.”

“Drury's no boy anymore,” I said. “And his track record says he isn't a genius, either.”

“The rise before the fall, please,” Paddy said. “I don't like stories that begin at the end.”

Paddy didn't need any coaching from me. I guessed that he was testing me, seeing how much background on Drury I needed myself. I went along with the gag. “Drury came to Hollywood the year before I was drafted.”

“That would make it '40,” Paddy said.

“Right. He'd set New York on its ear with some innovative theatrical productions, including a modern dress
Hamlet
and a revival of
Showboat
that had colored actors in the white roles and vice versa.”

“I remember that brouhaha. Drury sang ‘Old Man River' himself, as I recall. He was on radio, too, wasn't he?”

“Yes, with a lot of the same actors he used on Broadway. Repertory One, he called the group. He brought them out here when RKO signed him for a two-picture deal. Drury's debut film,
First Citizen
, which he wrote and starred in and directed, was a big success.”

“Not with me it wasn't,” Paddy said. His broad face, about the same width at the jawline as Pat O'Brien's, took on a sincere reddish cast. “
First Citizen
was D. W. Griffith's life story with the names changed to keep Mr. Drury out of court. Griffith's drunkenness, his affairs, his failure to keep pace with changes in Hollywood–a town he practically founded–were all paraded on the screen. Worse, Drury made Griffith seem like the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan just because he used the Klan in
Birth of a Nation
.”

“Some people would say Griffith celebrated the Klan in
Birth of a Nation
.”

Paddy darkened half a shade. “Some people would say Drury kicked Griffith when the old man was down. He was still alive in '41, you know. Still trying to get work from his old assistants who'd risen to run the studios.
First Citizen
didn't help the effort. It didn't make any friends for Drury around this town, either.”

“Who's telling this story?” I asked to calm him down.

“You are. And may I say you're killing the morning doing it.” He patted the pocket of his vest where his watch used to reside and then extended his left arm to display his new wrist model, a present from Ella. “We're late. You'll have to finish while we walk.”

He started off toward the administration building. “What was Drury's second picture?”

“
The Imperial Albertsons
,” I said as I fell into step beside him. “It flopped.”

The news cheered Paddy considerably. “Any idea why?”

“No. I was in an army camp when the picture was released. Maybe D. W. Griffith's old friends sabotaged it.”

“Funny you should use that word,” Paddy said. “What happened next?”

“A series of disappointments and failures and pictures that were announced but never made. Lately, I haven't even heard any announcements.”

Paddy held the building's plate glass door open for me, bowing slightly at the waist as he waved me through. “You're about to hear a pip,” he said.