Show Business Is Murder (13 page)

“You sure, hotshot? Maybe you got that wrong, too.”

Corey heard a rustle of movement followed by a loud slap. The woman shrieked.

“I didn't get nothing wrong, bitch—dammit, we gotta figure our way out of this!” Vince said. His voice held panic, almost strident.

Silence.

Finally, the woman's voice. “Well, they don't belong here, if we just leave and let your wife find them she'll call the police and it'll look like somebody broke in and shot them—let her explain it,” she said, adding, “when is she coming home?”

Vince snorted. “I didn't even know she'd be gone—thought that was her in bed with somebody.”

“Well, why don't we just leave and let her find them—you're supposed to be in Seattle, right?” the woman said.

Corey could hear his own breathing, slow and shallow, hardly audible; like he'd been drugged or something.

Drugged?

—
hell, that was it!
Margo had told him that she knew the woman who lived here, heard she and her husband were not getting along and that he was out of town and the woman would be home at around—well, about now. So that was it; Margo had set it all up. They'd made love and afterward he'd dozed off like always—his ritual post-coital nap—and she'd injected him with something. The drug immobilized him, numbed him all over and temporarily shut down his vision. In fact, it was like a movie he'd refused to do for Garry Howard, the producer whose house they'd broken into—the plot was about a guy shot up with a drug that evoked catatonia. Too implausible, he'd told Howard.

Vince's voice interrupted Corey's musing. “I guess you're right . . . we'll take off and just let my wife find these bodies and call the cops.”

—
empty wire hangers rattling, sound of something being taken from the closet
—
swishing sound.

“What're you doing?” the female asked.

“Wiping for prints.”

“You live here, dummy, your prints belong here.”

Corey smiled inwardly. These people should get an Oscar for their performances. Very convincing. And how 'bout Margo's acting—lying over there so quietly he'd thought she was already dead, doing it all so he'd appreciate life more, being on the edge of death.

From downstairs came the sound of a door opening and closing, someone moving about.

Vince whispered, “Jesus, must be my wife.”

Silence. Then more sounds of movement from downstairs. Humming.

The sound of a gun being cocked. “Vince, what're you doing?” the woman in the bedroom asked.

Dull footsteps on the carpeted stairs could be heard, another woman's voice calling up from below. “Vince, I saw the light—are you home?”

The woman in the room whispered harshly, “Watch that gun, dammit, it's cocked.”

Vince whispering back, “I'm going to do her—make it look like she killed herself after a
ménage à trois
gone bad, killed them and then herself.”

“Vince,”
the wife called again, “why can't you answer?” Sound of someone ascending the stairs.

Corey would have shook his head if possible—this little play was pretty involved. Next thing you know they'll be shooting every—

—
booming roar of a gun!

Corey could hear a gurgling sound coming from the woman in the room, Vince gasping in alarm. “Noooo . . . it went off—the damn gun—”

“My god, Vince—was that a
gunshot
?” the wife shouted from the staircase, her voice tremulous.

Damn good acting, Corey thought—supposed to think Vince just accidentally shot his accomplice. If he could applaud he would. Now . . . how long before the drug wears off?

“SHE'S DUE WHEN?”
Corey had asked as they entered the house.

“About an hour.”

“Well, Margo, if you know her, where's the thrill?—she wouldn't turn you in.”

A wry grin on her face, Margo had replied, “I fired her from a picture once and she hasn't worked in the industry since.”

“Christ, she'll probably shoot both of us,” Corey'd answered.

In the bedroom. “Nice armoire,” Margo'd said, already undressed, just black bikini panties and a smile—a sight of which Corey never tired.

Shrugging out of his clothes, he'd asked, “So, she's divorcing her husband, huh?”

“Yeah, he comes from the hitters.”

Corey'd nodded. “They say it's the violence in movies.”

A HEAVY THUD!

Corey'd heard enough actors fall onto stages . . . that was the unmistakable sound a body makes hitting the floor.

“My God, my god, my god . . .”

And now comes ol' Vince, overacting after doing so well up to now. Corey felt a finger twitch.
Finally, the damn drug is wearing off.

“Vince, please answer me, I'm scared!” The wife screeching now, calling up from a distance, probably the bottom of the stairs—must've gone back down after the shot, pretending fear. “Are you hurt, Vince. . . what happened?” her voice shaky.

From the foot of the bed comes the sound of hollow metal lightly clicking against teeth . . . the gun being cocked again. Low moan . . . .

Christ, more drama, Corey thought. A finger twitched again—felt something like a tickle at his wrist, a thickening in his throat and the sensation of wanting to swallow . . . still couldn't see.

Another booming roar!

Alright with the goddamn gunshots, Corey thought, wishing he could show his disdain for the tiresome little charade he'd been forced to hear. Goddamn day players.

—
sound of yet another body crumpling to the floor
 . . . Corey was really sick of the whole thing by now.

From downstairs came the sound of movement as the wife apparently crossed the tile foyer, high heels clicking, front door being opened, hinges squawking, followed by thechirping sound of a cell phone being powered up. “Police?—I want to report an intruder in my house, there's been gunsho—”

Her words cut off—
sound of the slammed door dully reverberating throughout the house
—the noise caused a full-body involuntary spasm, the movement causing Corey's numbed head to loll to one side, vision partially clearing, but blotched with dark spots, bursting little stars before his eyes. But in that moment he could see . . .

Oh God, that looks like real blood!
—could see in a tight close-up, staring at the gaping gunshot wound in—

It wasn't Margo!
It was his costar, Jennifer Diaz!

“CUT!”

Sounds of people getting to their feet, a lot of sudden noises, the familiar sounds of a movie set. “Okay, people, that's a wrap—let's re-light for the overhead shots. Matt, you and Jenny can take a break but leave the bloody clothes on. And Jenny, try not to screw up the wound, please.”

Corey recognized the director's voice. Young guy with the talent of a Spielberg—real comer. Shaven head, intense eyes. Smiled when he was pissed.

Thank God! This isn't real
—
they're just shooting a scene!

—a movement next to him in the bed caused his body to roll a little to his left from a sudden change in mattress support. Jennifer Diaz getting up.

So those sounds of footsteps on the stairs, the gunshots, door slamming—had all been effects.

—
tsunami of memories flooded Corey's mind, apparently blocked until now by the drug
. . .
wait a minute, what drug? This was a
movie scene
—
but if he wasn't drugged, why had he forgotten about Margo's production?

—remembering now how Margo'd gotten the idea from them getting cheap thrills doing the break-ins and such; she'd put it into development and her staff came up with a movie treatment: about a disillusioned movie star taking small chances in order to feel alive, then everything going wrong—Adam Schaffer had penned a great screenplay, ended up with a high-concept thriller . . . and Corey remembered coming to the sound stage that morning, he and Jennifer doing the death scene on the bed . . .

—he'd noticed Garry Howard, the ruined producer, coming onto the set at about their seventh take, lot-pass hanging from his wrinkled suit coat pocket, smirking as he huddled in the shadows behind the floor lights; dumbass must've thought he was hidden. During a break Corey'd taken a nap in his trailer, woke up with an itching on his arm, thought it was a spider bite.

“Hey, superstar?” Margo said, voice coming out of darkness, the feeling of a hand on his shoulder . . . no, the pressure was just in his mind, still couldn't feel a thing. And it was dark again—his sight had faded.

“Matt?” Margo said, concern in her voice.

The spider bite?
—
had it actually been an injection, Howard creeping into the trailer while he napped, giving him a drug to put him in a coma and ultimately kill him?

“Something's wrong with Matt!” Margo shrieked.

Sounds of people rushing toward the bed. Voices urgent and scared—virtual chorus of screams, angry shouts and finally a few moans.

He could envision Howard standing back behind a set piece—maybe the demented ex-producer had found out about them breaking into his house last summer, thought Corey was mocking him—and the guy had
snapped,
little loose in the brain pan anyway from all reports—and so then the inevitable
plot twist would have to be ol' Garry Howard deciding to kill the actor he blamed for ruining his career.

The set lights had been shut down; he could hear them ticking as they cooled—cast and crew had moved off to wait for the medical services team. He sensed a deep cold spreading through his body and he knew it was the last act. Final Curtain.

With imminent death comes a compensatory indifference, borne not of resignation but of humor
 . . . couldn't remember where he'd read that but it was true; his present circumstance seemed somehow funny. Even whimsical.

—and here's Margo, weeping, probably standing vigil next to him, his body still bloodied with that special goop the young director insists on—looks so real it turns your stomach—Corey imagined her there, head bowed, alone on the darkened set. Sobbing.

As for his killer, would justice prevail? Probably. Howard will more than likely brag about it, tell the story to some producer who'll drop a dime. Or the autopsy will reveal the lethal injection of drugs, cops'll get a list of enemies. Something . . .

Everyone knows you can't get away with murder in Hollywood.

BOB SHAYNE

I'D COME FROM
a land called Brooklyn where everybody was Jewish and poor. Now I was going to a land called Hollywood where everybody was Jewish and rich. Well, that might be a bit of an exaggeration on both ends, but it seemed that way.

It was 1957 and I was twenty-five. I may or may not have been the youngest licensed private detective in the New York phone book, but I was certainly the femalest. My name's Naomi Weinstein. The second syllable rhymes with the first.

We pulled into Los Angeles Union Station at 1:32
P.M.
on a late April afternoon. I'd slept well and long to the rock and sway and the clicking wheels, and I was looking forward to seeing my dear friend David. He'd moved to Hollywood four years earlier, after a slight problem wherein he'd been charged with murder. I had a hand in getting him off, but then I'd had a hand in getting him accused, so it seemed only right.

“Naomi!” he shouted as I stepped off the train in the bowels of Union Station. We ran to each other and embraced. He picked me up and swung me around in a circle. I wriggled out of his arms to avoid throwing up on him, stepped back, and took a look.

He was just as tall and skinny as always, the ever-present gold modernistic mezuzah resting just under his Adam's apple, his long pointy nose angled slightly to the right, hazel eyes, enough of that thick, wavy, dirty-blond hair for two or three guys, and that great crooked smile that always made me smile to see.

He was studying me, too, all five foot three, fuzzy reddish-brown hair, and a few too many pounds of me. I stuck out my breasts and sucked in my tummy as his eyes passed various portions of my anatomy. If I could have added a few inches to my calves I would have done that, too.

“How was your trip?” he asked as he grabbed my bags and we walked toward the Moorish-Aztec style lobby. I doubt that the Moors ever met the Aztecs, but apparently the architect had.

David took me for lunch on a nearby block called Olvera Street. It's supposed to be a 150-year-old section of old Los Angeles, but it looked more like Coney Island to me. A block of souvenir shops and taco stands. (Okay, in Coney they'd be hotdogs stands instead.) I bought three things that were advertised as Mexican jumping beans. Later in my motel room I opened one; it turned out to be a soft capsule, and inside was a ball-bearing, so that when you dropped it the little bearing would roll to one end then the other making the capsule jump. How authentic can you get! I didn't know then it was the perfect metaphor for Hollywood.

We piled my stuff into David's spiffy aqua-and-white Chevy Bel Air convertible and he put the top down at my request. I'd never ridden in a convertible. (When I tried to untangle my Semitic curls that evening, I swore I'd never ride in one again.)

David asked me what my case was about, shouting over the wind as he drove up San Vicente, a wide street with trolley tracks down the middle, on our way to Hollywood. I told him it was to track down somebody named Robert Rich.

He laughed, saying that was the biggest mystery there was. It was all over the papers. The whole town wanted to know who Robert Rich was.

It seems Mr. Rich had won the Oscar a few weeks earlier for Best Original Story for the Screen, for a movie about a little boy and a bull called
The Brave One,
but nobody could find him. Or many people were claiming to be him. Or both. When the award was announced, Jesse Lasky Jr. of the Writers Guild stepped up to the microphone on national television and said, “I'll accept this on behalf of my close friend Robert Rich, who is at this moment at Santa Monica hospital where his wife is giving birth.” But Hedda Hopper checked all the hospitals and no such baby had been born. A few days later when push came to shove Lasky admitted he had never met Robert Rich and hadn't a clue who he was.

You'd think the producers of the movie who bought the story would know who they'd bought it from, but it didn't seem that way. They were brothers named King. When a reporter noticed they had a nephew by the name Robert Rich, the nephew gave a statement saying, yes, he'd written the picture. But then his uncles denied it.

“Did the Kings hire you to find the guy?” David asked.

“No, the
L.A. Times
did,” I shouted back over the hot wind—something David told me the locals call a Santa Ana. “Their reporters haven't been able to find him so they decided to try a private eye.”

“Makes sense. But we have our own private eyes right here in Los Angeles. You know, like Philip Marlowe?”

“Yeah, but he's fictional. They wanted a factual one,” I said. “I don't know why, maybe they're just prejudiced against fiction, being a newspaper and all.”

“But why bring one in all the way from New York?”

I shrugged. “Not sure. I just know I got a call from some guy who said he worked there. Named Chandler.”

David did a double take worthy of Oliver Hardy. “What first name?”

“Uh, Norman. Yeah, Norman.”

“Norman Chandler doesn't work at the
L.A. Times,
” said David with a laugh. “He
owns
it.”

“Oh,” I replied snappily.

“How'd he happen to pick you?”

“You'll never guess.”

David sat quietly for a moment, then said, “You're right. So tell me.”

“A friend of his recommended me.”

“Yes? Yes?”

“J. Edgar Hoover.”

David broke out in laughter and said, “I should have guessed.”

I'd had a sort of weird relationship with Mr. Hoover in the case that involved David. I wouldn't say I was exactly friends with the person who'd been called the most powerful man in America, but we had developed a kind of healthy respect for one another. Well, respect, anyway. Maybe “healthy” isn't the operative word.

I checked into the Hollywood Sands Motel at Sunset and Highland, across the street from Hollywood High. It was new and boxy and full of red and yellow plastic. Two single beds with bedspreads made of some chemical material that sucked the moisture from my fingers, drapes that stopped about an inch short of the bottom of the window, and prints of ducks in a swamp on the off-yellow walls. I liked it. No place ever felt less like the Morris and Sylvia Weinstein home in Canarsie, Brooklyn, New York. Not an antimacassar in sight.

After more sightseeing, David and I hit the Formosa Cafe on Santa Monica Boulevard for dinner, across the street from the Sam Goldwyn Studios. David called it a Hollywood dive.
The walls were full of pictures of movie stars you never heard of. And some you have. David warned me if the chow mein moved of its own accord, I probably shouldn't eat it. As far as I could tell, it was lying there fairly still when I tried to pick it up with chopsticks and get it all the way to my mouth before it fell back onto the plate and I started all over again. I'd never used chopsticks before. And I swore I'd never do so again. Back East we have things called forks. David said eating chow mein by this method was so much work it had minus two calories.

The following morning, I borrowed David's car and drove it to the Sunset Strip, past the Mocambo and Ciro's, those glamorous nightclubs I'd seen in movies all my life, the places where all the sophisticates go. Or used to. It all looked a little seedy now. The Mocambo had been “closed for alterations” for about three years, and Ciro's—where a few years before Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and the Will Mastin Trio starring Sammy Davis Jr. had headlined—had replaced its floor show with an all-you-can-eat buffet.

A few blocks farther west was a small white stucco building with beveled corners, round deco windows, and black wood trim. The words K
ING
B
ROTHERS
P
RODUCTIONS
were embossed on a gold placard on the shiny black door.

It hit me that this could be an important case for me. I'd been thinking of moving to L.A. A lot of my work involved show business companies and they'd been moving west in droves. Getting on the good side of the
L.A. Times
would be a great way to build up a clientele.

I parked on the street and walked up and down the block thinking about how to play this. I knew there were three King brothers: Frank, Hymie, and Maury, and that their nephew—named Robert Rich, but allegedly not
the
Robert Rich—worked there, too. What could I say that would elicit more information than they'd already given out?

As I stood in front of the door, contemplating any options
I could think of, and finding none, the door opened right into my foot. “Ouch!” I said in response.

“Oh, sorry,” said the young man who had pushed it into my big toe. His looks kind of reminded me of Anthony Perkins, who'd been nominated for an Oscar the year before for
Friendly Persuasion,
only this guy seemed a little crazier. He wore an alligator shirt and cotton pegs, and held several stamped letters in his hand. “Were you on your way in?”

“Uh . . .” Well, there was only one answer that made much sense. “Yes.”

“Oh,” he replied. It was a scintillating conversation.

He looked me over. I felt naked. “Are you the girl from the agency?”

Before I could weigh the consequences I said, “Yes.”

“Good, good. Come in,” he bid, holding the door open for me. I had the feeling he smelled my hair as I passed.

“What's your name?” he said, looking directly at my boobs.

I thought of answering, the left one's Zelda and the right Rebecca. Instead, I said, “Naomi. Naomi Weinstein.” I'd learned when I first started out that staying as close to the truth as possible was usually best. That way I didn't have to spend so much time remembering which lie I'd told.

“Oh,” he replied, letting the door close behind him. “They said the girl was named Carey something. McNally, I think.”

My heart stopped while I searched for a reply. “Oh, yeah. Carey couldn't make it. She got called back to another job she was on last week. So they sent me.” I only prayed that the agency in question was a secretarial agency, not a talent agency or an out-call brothel. The good part about being a lady private eye was that everybody always assumed I was a secretary. Or bank teller. Or school teacher. Or nurse. It made it awfully easy to pass. In fact, the one thing no one ever believed I was, when I told them, was a private eye.

“Well, good,” he said. “Here.”

He motioned to the reception desk facing the door. It was beige, like all the other furniture in the room. Everything had rounded edges and moderne designs. They must have picked it up at a going-out-of-style sale.

“Just answer the phones and take messages and I'll be back as soon as I mail these letters,” he said, licking his lips repeatedly. There was something reptilian about him, like William Buckley.

I wished I could get a look at the letters before he deposited them in a mailbox. “Would you like me to mail those for you?” I asked.

“Naw. I'm gonna get a cuppa at Ben Frank's since you're here. Want me to bring you back one?” Well, he might appear dangerously psychotic, but he was certainly polite.

I said, “No thanks.”

“By the way,” he added, “the rest room is right though that door, the one next to my office, if you need to use it at any time. But tell me first so I can cover the phones for you.”

I nodded, and shivered a little. I had a feeling he'd probably drilled a peephole in the wall between his office and the bathroom. Just then the phone rang. I picked up the receiver and pushed down the button that was flashing.

“Just say . . .” he was saying as I did.

“King Brothers Productions,” I said into the phone.

“Good,” he said with a cockeyed nod.

“Hello, this is Robert Rich,” said a voice at the other end of the phone. I want to give you my address to send my Oscar.”

“Hold on just a moment, Mr. Rich,” I said, and put the line on hold.

“Did they say they were Robert Rich?” said the young man. He twisted his mouth into a grimace.

I nodded.

“That's funny, because
I'm
Robert Rich,” he snapped.

I felt like I'd walked into the TV show
To Tell the Truth
. But where was Bud Collyer?

He picked up the phone on the other desk and pressed the blinking button. “Listen, you lying bastard, you just go jump in a lake.” And he hung up.

“What was that all about?” I asked with the greatest of innocence. I may even have fluttered my eyelashes.

He snickered. “You know, our movie,
The Brave One
? It won the Oscar for Best Original Story. But no one knows who or where the writer is. My uncles, they used my name for the credit. They didn't know it was going to win an Oscar,” he shrugged. “I tried to cover and tell the Academy I'd written it, but I sort of lost my nerve when they started questioning me. So my Uncle Frank told them it was actually another Robert Rich who he met in Germany some years ago.”

“Was it?” I asked, even though he'd more or less confessed it wasn't.