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“Pegler said you shouldn’t have to sell greed since it isn’t in short supply. Apparently I’ve got my share. Do you really think I can get fifty thousand?”

“You can get double, but don’t tell the department head I said that. He already thinks we’re all going to be selling flowers on the entrances to the San Diego Freeway if the Democrats don’t get back in next time around.”

“I couldn’t ask for a hundred. I feel like a traitor considering any price at all.”

“Next week, some stinking rich alumnus fresh out of white-collar prison will present the president with a giant novelty check, and every third-string player on the football team will have his own personal Jacuzzi. UCLA will survive. So will the Oracle; but only if you stop thinking of
Greed
as if it were the Wailing Wall and treat it as the commodity it was intended to be.”

Valentino watched him puttering with his pipe, the only fetish in his acerbic, ascetic life. “You’re a good friend, Kyle.”

“Your
only
friend. You can’t count Harriet Johansen yet. She’s still your Dulcinea at this early stage.”

“You forgot Kym Trujillo at the Country Home.”

“Have you ever had dinner at her house? Or had her to dinner at yours?”

“Lunch, a couple of times.”

“Lunch is a bribe, to patch up the pipeline to your best source of anecdotal information. Did you tell her about your ghost?”

“Of course not.”

“I rest my case. How is old Erich, by the way? Dead and well, I trust? In good spirits?”

“I missed him last time. He left his smoking paraphernalia in my car, but only for a moment.”

“Urn.” Broadhead sucked on the cold pipe. “I wouldn’t think an apparition had any pressing engagements.”

“When I said you were a good friend, I was referring to your efforts to distract me from the thought that right now a bunch of day laborers with flat feet and a taste for deep-fried pastry are putting their ham fists all over the find of two centuries.”

“Snobbery doesn’t become you. As a matter of fact, many of L.A.’s finest are blessed with admirably high arches. As to the value of the confiscated property, I have my doubts; although dogs are universally popular. You said Pegler still mourns the one he lost to a coal wagon ninety years ago.”

“What do dogs have to do with
Greed?”

“Nothing, in context. Gluttony’s as close as they come to that human sin. But I do expect a proper demonstration of wrath when Sergeant Clifford and her people get past the first three reels and find themselves following the adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin.”

Valentino sat up. “Elucidate.”

“History has largely forgotten that before the brothers Warner greenlighted
The Jazz Singer,
rescuing us all from the poetry of silence, the exploits of a heroic German shepherd were all that stood between them and bankruptcy. They ran that studio on a shoestring and gallons of red ink.”

“Tell me you didn’t put Rin-Tin-Tin in those cans before you let them go.”

“Very well. I did not.”

“Kyle!”

“Assuming you wish to rephrase that as a question, I will respond that I did not do that solely. I’m no piker, and anyway I couldn’t fill all forty-two cans with less than three thousand feet of film. I put in reels one, two, and three of
Greed,
which we’d just barely transferred to safety, threw in the dog, and finished out the bill with
Tarzan of the Apes,
starring the immortal Elmo Lincoln, his leopard skin, and his beer belly. Grand stuff, and we’ve got it all on backup. What more could you ask, short of a travelogue, a newsreel, and Porky the Pig?”

Valentino cursed loud and long. Ruth pounded.

“I considered
The Perils of Pauline,”
Broadhead said, “but it doesn’t date nearly as well. I have standards.”

A fist slammed the desk, starting a paperslide of scripts and playbills that continued long into the speech that followed. “This isn’t a fraternity prank. We started out by withholding evidence, now we’re tampering with it. Clifford’s smart enough to spot the difference between Zasu Pitts and a police dog.”

“Debatable. Pitts was no great beauty. But
Greed’s
safe in our hands, and posterity will judge whether it’s more important to punish a murderer or save a masterpiece.”

“You’re wrong. A judge will judge, and you and I will be watching all our movies in the San Quentin cafeteria. And how did
Greed
manage that tricky U-turn back to masterpiece? A few minutes ago it was a commodity.”

“I was speaking for posterity, not myself. Anyway, it won’t even be a commodity if we let them stick it in the refrigerator with the tuna sandwiches. Your view of penal life is confined to the screen, incidentally. If you don’t actually shiv someone in the shower room, they pipe basic cable into your cell.
Citizen Kane
with feminine hygiene spots is better than no
Kane
at all.” Broadhead scratched the side of his nose with the paper clip, leaving an ashen mark. “But that’s my burden. You’ll be in your own Xanadu, fighting with building inspectors, while I’m busy rattling my cup against the bars, demanding more gruel.” He cocked his head. “No, that’s
Oliver Twist.
It’s high time I retired to the rock pile. I can no longer distinguish between Jackie Coogan and Jimmy Cagney.”

“If you think I’m going to stand by and let you take the rap alone—”

“Spoken like George Raft. It’s not your choice. I’ll exonerate you in my confession. I won’t have you playing Cook to my Peary and smudging my individual achievement.”

“Don’t you mean your martyrdom?”

“The image is inconsistent. Cook and Peary were explorers, not martyrs. Those don’t come in pairs. Which was the whole point of my argument.” He smiled his baggy academic smile. “Don’t weep for me. The cell is bound to be more comfortable than that Eastern European dungeon, and if I can resist the temptation to crash the gate, the warden may let me have paper and pencils to finish my book. A lot of great literature has been created behind bars:
Don Quixote,
the stories of O. Henry,
The Gulag Archipelago.”

“You left out
Mein Kampf.
”

“Hitler’s style meandered too much to qualify. Anyway, that whole Holocaust thing detracts from the text. Mad dictators should hire ghosts to write their memoirs; meaning no offense to Herr von Stroheim.”

“Heroes make a difference. That’s how you know they’re heroes. You’ll just be a drain on the taxpayers while Clifford gets a court order and takes the film anyway.”

“That’s her privilege. We’ll have it on safety by the time my trial date is set. The publicity alone should encourage our president to put the entire technical staff on the job and step up the pace.”

Valentino said, “I know just how he’ll feel.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning you just doubled my determination to solve this case before they drag you away to jail.”

Broadhead tapped a tooth with the mouthpiece of his pipe. “Can I play too?”

**

CHAPTER

19

FANTA JOINED THEM at the microbrewery downtown, where the bunkerlike atmosphere of booths and conversational buzz provided a comfortable environment for plotting strategy. They’d hoped for a spot by the picture of Basil Rathbone with deerstalker and pipe, but that was occupied by some mid-level studio executives scribbling new dialogue on a script with a pen borrowed from their waitress. The trio settled for one near the kitchen under the sardonic supervision of Warren William.

“Didn’t he play Sam Spade once?” Fanta asked.

“Badly,” Broadhead said.

“Perfect,” said Valentino. “He won’t show us up.”

The men ordered beers, the young woman iced tea, and they shared a platter of ethnic samplers, referred to in the menu as the Our Gang Plate. Valentino watched the professor strip all the greenery from a pita sandwich. “Why the change of heart? You’ve been riding me with Junior G-Man jokes all week. Now you’re joining the squad.”

“That was work, this is play. I told you my job is to be the wise Fool to your King Lear.”

“You said you were the Greek chorus.”

“They provide the same stage business. In any case it’s been no fun hovering upstage. I want to share the center spot.”

Fanta said, “Do you two think we can restrict the analogies to the movies? I was just starting to recognize some of them, and now you ring in Aeschylus and Shakespeare.” She colored when the men stared at her. “Okay, I went for a theater major my freshman year. I was going to be the next Barrymore.”

“John or Ethel?” They said it together.

“Drew. I got a shot of good sense up the ying-yang when I auditioned for
Marat/Sade
in the school play.”

“Was that Dr. Zinnerman’s production?” Broadhead asked.

“Yes. Did you see it?”

“I never go to the theater: too much yelling and stomping about. But Zinnerman’s the nastiest piece of work on the faculty. If he taught law instead of drama, he’d have humiliated you out of going for that degree.”

“No way. He was a bear, but he did me a favor. I might have wasted a whole semester finding out I’ve got less talent in my whole body than Lynn Fontanne has in her dead little finger.”

“Is that how he put it?”

“He used adjectives. Mr. Yardley was plenty tough in the class I took from him on contract law, but he couldn’t shake me. I aced the final.”

“That’s impressive,” Broadhead said. “Jack Yardley started out as a criminal attorney, reducing mob killers to tears during cross-examination. And he hands out A’s the way Fort Knox gives free samples.”

Valentino said, “Maybe we should invite him in.”

“Ew,” Fanta said. “I bet he hasn’t trimmed the hair in his nose since his bar exam.”

The professor finished weeding his pita. “A distinct advantage in court. It’s almost impossible to get a jury to pay attention to your summation when they’re watching your opponent marcelling his nostrils at the defense table.”

“Charming.” Valentino pushed away his plate of angel hair pasta.

Fanta drank iced tea. She wore a tank top and cargo pants and her black hair loose to her shoulders, a hooded cellophane raincoat flung over the back of her seat. It was an incongruous mix with the woven-leather shoulder bag beside her on the cushion. The bag was the same one she’d had with her the day she and Valentino had started their investigation. The young studio executives looked up frequently from the script they were mutilating to cast admiring glances her way. She appeared oblivious to their interest. “I like this place,” she said. “It reminds me of the pub in
The Invisible Man.
I’ve been boning up on old videos.”

Valentino said, “They built it on top of a cocktail bar. William Holden drank himself to death at a corner table.”

“I thought he got drunk and fell down in his apartment.”

“He was already half embalmed when he left here.”

“Charming.” Broadhead set down his beer untasted.
“The Invisible Man
isn’t a murder mystery,” he told Fanta.

“I know, but I fell in love with Claude Rains’s voice when I saw
Deception.
You don’t hear pipes like that anymore, and we had some great ones in drama class.”

“Microphones,” said Broadhead. “No reason thundering out to the back row when you’re wearing a lavalier around your neck.”

From there the talk turned to other great stage-trained voices, Rathbone’s and Welles’s and Edward Arnold’s. It was Valentino who steered it back to the business at hand. “Let’s review what we’ve got so far.”

“Not much,” Fanta said. “A newspaper article about a missing projectionist who fits the skeleton’s description and what Warren Pegler told you.” He’d filled her in on the interview while they were waiting for the booth.

“What he didn’t tell me amounts to a lot more,” Valentino said.

Their waitress, older and more ambitious than the woman who’d served them the other day, asked if they wanted anything else, took orders for coffee and a refill of Fanta’s tea, and left, bearing away their dishes.

“Maybe this’ll help.” Fanta dragged the shoulder bag onto her lap and opened the clasp. Valentino half expected her to produce another coffee table book with a picture of The Oracle in its glory, but instead she drew out a thick padded mailer and tipped a pile of folio-size newspapers onto the freshly cleared table. They smelled musty and the brittle old pulp was crumbling at the folds, but the heavy black masthead, identical on all three, still screamed for attention:

THE ANGEL CITY INTELLIGENCER

est. 1925

The edition on top of the slanted stack was dated January of that same year.

“I tracked it down through the Smithsonian Web site,” she said. “An online book finder found it for me in a shop in Las Cruces, New Mexico, of all places, and had them overnight it: the entire run, all three issues.”

Broadhead picked up the top copy and unfolded it to study a grainy photo of a pair of corpses in hats and overcoats sprawled on the bullet-riddled front porch of a miniature Spanish hacienda, MEX SPEAK SERVES UP 2 STIFF ONES, read the caption.

“Offhand, I’d say they overestimated their readership when they named the rag.”