Eats to Die For! (22 page)

Clearly shocked, they dropped their chokeholds on us and staggered backwards. Hannah leapt back as the two tried to charge her, but they got only halfway across the room before faltering, weaving, swearing, and ultimately falling down on the floor, making futile attempts to rise like the cows in those “give-now-to-stop-this-barbaric-practice” PSAs.

Finally, the two stopped moving.

“Good god, you didn't poison them, did you?” Louie asked.

“No, but I made the shot super strong,” Hannah said. “They'll be out for a long time. Now let's go.”

We followed her through the door and into the hallway. “There are cameras all over this place,” I said. “They're probably watching us right now. How far can we get?”

“There's one place where there are no cameras of any kind,” Hannah replied. “We'll go there for the time being.”

“Where's that?”

She didn't answer but forced us to hurry along the corridor, and then stopped in front of the enormous door of the Master Suite. Pulling out a key card and putting it into a very well disguised slot on the door, she pushed it open and hustled us in, closing the door behind us.

A cynical whistle (if whistles can be so characterized) coursed through my head, followed by Bogie's voice saying:
Get a load of
this!

Even in the dimness of the suite it was possible to make out its ornate luxury, like a room in a European palace, not that I'd been in many. Or any. The ceilings were high, at least a storey-and-a-half high, and made of paneled wood, from which hung a crystal chandelier.

The walls were covered with a deep-red wallpaper that reminded me of the décor of an old Southern California restaurant chain called Joanne's Chili Bordello, which had a place in Long Beach for a while.

The enormous stone hearth and fireplace that was cut into one wall was large enough to stage a Shakespearean production in, though if we were really as far below ground level as had been indicated, I had to wonder how they managed the chimney.

“That's just for show,” Hannah said, seeming to read my mind. “This place has central heat and air.”

Over the fireplace was a oil painting, lit on all sides by track lights. It was no surprise that the subject of the painting was Palmer Hanley as he must have looked in the mid-1960s, his head tilted up slightly and his eyes gazing into the distance, revealing a masterfully-rendered expression of optimism and wisdom. It was more expression than I had ever seen on the man's face from any of his film appearances.

“What is this place used for?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” Hannah said.

“Well, is this the VIP suite or something? The honeymoon suite? What?”

The woman looked and me like I was an idiot. “It's the Master's suite,” she said.

“I get that, but how does one earn a night in the baroque presence of the worst actor in the history of Hollywood?”

From behind me a somewhat squeaky voice said, “By being a rude jerk, that's how.”

Turning, I saw a man behind me.

It was clear he had once been fairly tall, though now he was stooped and remained upright only through the aid of a silver-headed cane, which he grasped in his gnarled right hand. His hair was white and thin, but still there, for the most part, and his face had more lines than the Thomas Guide page showing downtown.

Even though his eyes showed a liveliness and intelligence that was never revealed on film, he remained recognizable.

“Who are you anyway?” demanded Palmer Hanley.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“What is all this, Hannah?” the old man asked.

“I'm sorry, sir. I thought you'd be sleeping,” she replied.

“Um, Mr. Hanley,” I began, “I think I owe you an apology.”

“Everybody does, why should you be any different? Who did you say you were?”

“My name is Dave Beauchamp. This is my friend Luisa Sandoval, and obviously you know Hannah.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Well…we've been kidnapped.”

“Okay, but what happened to your nose?”

“My nose? Oh, right.”

I had managed to get so used to the throbbing ache in my face from Louie's punch that I'd forgotten I looked like W.C. Fields at five in the morning.

“Yeah, I got hurt in the struggle.”

“You should be more careful,” Hanley said. “You say you owe me an apology?”

“Yes sir. I'm sorry I cast aspersions on your acting. I'm sure you were doing your best.”

“You said your name was Dave?”

“Yes sir, Dave Beauchamp.”

“Well, Dave Beauchamp, you and everyone else in Los Angeles cast aspersions on my acting. I did fine on the stage, you know. I played Happy in
Salesman
in New York and nobody got sick. But I never had that magical quality that you need in Hollywood, the one that makes the camera love you. Truth is, the camera hated me. It somehow sapped my energy, like a vampire. My face turned into a mask and my voice became a dial tone. Why that was, I've no idea.

He appeared lost in thought for a moment, then continued:

“Now you take Marilyn…I knew Marilyn, you know, poor little mouse…on stage she would have been an ice box, a piece of furniture. But on camera, well, the camera loved her.
Loved
her, more than Romeo loved Juliet. Me, on the other hand? The camera hated me just as much as it loved her. Ah, that's old history now.”

He made his way to the expensive sofa and fell back on it, almost in slow motion, like a feather falling from a height.

“But as for you, Dave Beauchamp,” he went on, “you're about the only person I ever met who had the good manners and class to stand up and look me in the eye and apologize for taking dumping garbage on my head, so your apology is accepted. You're all right.”

He thrust a birch twig arm out at me and I walked over to the sofa to take his hand, which was surprisingly strong, and shake it enthusiastically. At that moment I decided I liked Palmer Hanley, no matter what he had done in the past, and would do whatever I could to help him.

“I'm ninety-four years old, Dave Beauchamp, did you know that?”

“No sir, I didn't.”

“Well, now you do. Now that that's settled, what are two you doing in my rooms?”

“At the moment, we're hiding,” I said.

The old man gave a wheezy laugh. “Well, you've sure as hell come to the right place, then. I've been hidden away here for thirty years.”

“This is incredible,” Louie said.

“I'm sorry, dear, what was your name again?”

“Louie.”

“Louie…like Louie Calhern? You sure don't look like Louie Calhern. Well, call it incredible if you want, but I've been tucked away here because they
don't want me shooting my mouth off about how they turned my dumb little money-making idea into a criminal's paradise.”

“Who, exactly, are
they
, Mr. Hanley?” Louie asked.

“I'm getting tired. I don't get visitors often, not since…Christ, I don't even remember.”

He turned and hobbled to an overstuffed sofa and plopped down in the middle of it.

“Honey, could you bring me something to drink?”

“Of course,” Hannah said, leaving the room.

“Now, what were you asking? Oh, right,
them
. You sure you want to hear all this, Louie?”

She slid onto the sofa next to him. “Positive.”

“Suit yourself.”

Hannah hustled back in with a glass of ice tea, which Hanley took from her.

“You two want any?”

“We're fine, thanks,” Louie said.

“Bottoms up.”

He took a healthy chug that half-emptied the glass, and then said: “Do either of you know what a Mason is?”

After ridding my head of the voice of Raymond Burr, I said, “You mean the secret society?”

“Well, it's about as secret as an earthquake, particularly in Hollywood, but yeah, the society. Back in the day all the studio heads were Masons, and so were most of the big guns in town. Hope, Autry, the Duke, DeMille, even old Roy Rogers, all Masons. And Harold Lloyd was Mason in chief. But you're probably too young to know who Harold Lloyd was.”

“He was right up there with Chaplin and Keaton,” I said.

Hanley's face registered surprise.

“A young kid who knows Harold Lloyd. Maybe there's hope for the world yet.”

“What about the Masons?” Louie prompted, ever the reporter.

“Well, as you probably know my career in Hollywood was totally in the jakes by the late fifties. I already told you why. By then I wasn't even successful enough to get in trouble with HUAC! I could've marched up and down Hollywood Boulevard wearing a union suit with hammers and sickles all over it and nobody would've cared. You had to be famous to be blacklisted. At least working.”

He finished his tea and handed the glass back to Hanna before continuing.

“Anyway, the point came where I was so broke I was living in a friend's guest room. He was a Mason, and was working on me to try and get me to join, or apprentice, or however it was you became a member, saying it might lead to something. I guess the idea was that if you put on a robe and skipped around a Pentagram with Walt Disney, he'd put you in one of his movies.”

While I doubted that was what really went on in the Hollywood Masonic Temple, I didn't call him on it.

“But laying there in that borrowed bed, in that borrowed room, I thought I had a better idea,” Hanley continued. “I'd start my own club and charge people to be in it. But then I got the brainstorm to not just settle for a club, an organization, or even a secret society. You still have to pay taxes on those. So I decided to start a church. I got a guy I'd done a television show with to write up a half-assed bible for it, based on some baloney we concocted, and put out the word that I was holding spiritual cleansing sessions, and the suckers took the bait.”

“So you never actually believed any of what you created?” Louie asked.

“Miss Calhern—”

“Just call me Louie, okay?”

The old man shrugged. “All right, Louie. Have you ever seen a picture called
House of Wax
?”

“Yes. A long time ago. Why do you ask?”

“I had a scene in the movie that got cut out. But if you look at the wax figure of John Wilkes Booth real closely, though, he might look a little familiar.”

“You modeled for Booth?” I asked.

“I had a short scene where I got killed by the monster because I looked like Booth, but they cut it out.”

“Guys, this is fascinating,” Louie said, “but why are we talking about an old movie?”

“I'm getting to that as a way of answering your question, young lady,” Hanley said. “Do you believe Vincent Price really killed those people and then coated them in wax?”

“Of course not. It's a movie.”

“Right. Ol' Vinnie, God bless him, was just an actor working for a paycheck. He didn't believe any of the rubbish the studios hired him to do, but he managed to make the audience believe that he was an insane murderer, and believe it so completely that they got scared.”

With some effort, Palmer Hanley leaned forward.

“That's what it's all about, young lady. It doesn't matter what
I
believe. It only matters what I can make others believe. And a lot of them believed that I somehow had discovered the secrets of life and could pass those secrets on to them. They believed it so completely they paid money just for the chance that they might learn what they believed I knew.”

“What was that?” I asked.

“Well, what I came to know is that most people just want to be relieved of the onus of having to make their own decisions. They'll pay good money not to be in charge of their own lives. That was the idea behind the Temple of Theotologics. My idea, anyway. Then the boys
got involved.”

“The boys?”

“Organized crime. They were already out here because of the film and music business, and once they smelled the kind of money I was starting to make, they moved in.

“I didn't realize what I was getting into at first. I just saw a bunch of golf shirts and dark glasses offering to capitalize my venture. Before I knew what was happening the mob was in charge of the whole shebang and using the Temple to launder money from their other pursuits. Theotologics was a godsend for them because there are only two kinds of schemes where you don't have to worry about taxes. They already had one, the black market, and I had the other, religion.”

“That sounds rather cynical, Mr. Hanley,” Louie said.

“Honey, I'm ninety-four years old, and anything good that ever happened to me over that long, long time has been taken away again in one fashion or other. I think I've earned the right to sound cynical.”

“That's the lead!” Louie cried, jumping up off the sofa.

“Lead for what?” I asked.

“My article! Maybe even a book! Don't look at me that way, Dave. You don't seriously think I'm going to walk away from the story of the decade, do you?”

“But we have to get out of here before you can write it.”

“Then let's get out of here,” she said, just like that. “Hannah will help us, won't you, Hannah?”

The nurse nodded tentatively.

“That's it then.”

“Louie, I'm for getting away from this prison as much as anyone,” I began. “But think about it for a minute. Let's say we actually are able to escape from this building. We're still stuck somewhere in the middle of Canada. How do we get back to L.A.? I don't have any cash. They took my wallet, so I'm assuming they took my ID as well.”

“Did you say Canada?” Hanley asked.

“We're all in a bunker somewhere in Alberta, aren't we?”

“Where did you get that idea?”

Louie and I exchanged looks.

“I heard about this complex from the members of the Temple I spoke with for my article,” she said.