Danny counted lies. “I don’t know, Doc.”
* * *
From his cubicle, Danny called R&I and the DMV and got complete records readouts on victims two and three. George Wiltsie was arrested for soliciting indecent acts at cocktail lounges in ’40 and ’41; the DA dropped charges both times for lack of evidence, and the man possessed a lengthy list of traffic violations. Duane Lindenaur was DMV-clean, and had only the one dropped extortion beef Doc Layman mentioned. Danny had the R&I clerk break down the victims’ arrests by location; Wiltsie’s rousts were in City jurisdiction, Lindenaur’s was in the southeastern part of the County patrolled by Firestone Division. A request for a check of Lindenaur’s package got him the arresting officer’s name—Sergeant Frank Skakel.
Danny called Sheriff’s Personnel and learned that Skakel was still working Firestone swingwatch. He buzzed him there, got the switchboard and was put through to the squadroom.
“Skakel. Speak.”
“Sergeant, this is Deputy Upshaw, West Hollywood.”
“Yeah, Deputy.”
“I’m working a homicide tied in to two City 187’s, and you arrested one of the victims back in ’41. Duane Lindenaur. Do you remember him?”
Skakel said, “Yeah. He was working a queer squeeze on a rich lawyer named Hartshorn. I always remember the money jobs. Lindenaur got bumped, huh?”
“Yes. Do you remember the case?”
“Pretty well. The complainant’s name was Charles Hartshorn. He liked boys, but he was married and he had a daughter he doted on. Lindenaur met Hartshorn through some fruit introduction service, perved with him and threatened to snitch Hartshorn’s queerness to the daughter. Hartshorn called us in, we rousted Lindenaur, then Hartshorn got cold feet about testifying in court and dropped the charges.”
“Sergeant, was Hartshorn tall and gray-haired?”
Skakel laughed. “No. Short and bald as a beagle. What’s with the job? You got leads?”
“Lindenaur’s on the City end, and there’s no real leads yet. What was your take on Hartshorn?”
“He’s no killer, Upshaw. He’s rich, he’s got influence and he won’t give you the time of day. Besides, pansy jobs ain’t worth it, and Lindenaur was a punk. I say c’est la vie, let sleeping queers lie.”
* * *
Back to the City, kid gloves this time, nothing to spawn more lies and trouble. Danny drove to Variety International Pictures, hoping Gene Niles would spend a decent amount of time at the Leafy Glade Motel. With the Goines end stalemated, victims two and three were the hot stuff, and Lindenaur as a studio scribe/extortionist felt hotter than Wiltsie as a male whore.
Rival union factions were picketing by the front gate; Danny parked across the street, put an “Official Police Vehicle” board on the windshield, ducked his head and weaved through a maze of bodies waving banners. The gate guard was reading a scandal tabloid featuring a lurid column on his three killings—gory details leaked by a “reliable source” at the LA morgue. Danny scanned half a page while he got out his badge, the guard engrossed, chewing a cigar. The two cases were now connected in print—if only by the LA Tattler—and that meant the possibility of more ink, radio and television news, phony confessions, phony leads and scads of bullshit.
Danny rapped on the wall; the cigar chewer put down his paper and looked at the badge held up. “Yeah? Who you here for?”
“I want to talk to the people who worked with Duane Lindenaur.”
The guard didn’t flinch at the name; Lindenaur’s monicker hadn’t yet made the tabloid. He checked a sheet on a clipboard, said, “Set 23, the office next to the Tomahawk Massacre interior,” hit a button and pointed. The gate opened; Danny threaded his way down a long stretch of blacktop filled with costumed players. The door to Set 23 was wide open; just inside it, three Mexican men were wiping war paint off their faces. They gave Danny bored looks; he saw a door marked REWRITE, went over and knocked on it.
A voice called, “It’s open”; Danny walked in. A lanky young man in tweeds and horn rims was stuffing pages in a briefcase. He said, “Are you the guy replacing Duane? He hasn’t showed up in three days and the director needs additional dialogue quicks-ville.”
Danny went in fast. “Duane’s dead, his friend George Wiltsie too. Murdered.”
The young man dropped his briefcase; his hands twitched up and adjusted his glasses. “Mm-mm-murdered?”
“That’s right.”
“And y-y-you’re a policeman?”
“Deputy Sheriff. Did you know Lindenaur well?”
The youth picked up his briefcase and slumped into a chair. “N-no, not well. Just here at work, just superficially.”
“Did you see him outside the studio?”
“No.”
“Did you know George Wiltsie?”
“No. I knew he and Duane lived together, because Duane told me.”
Danny swallowed. “Were they lovers?”
“I wouldn’t dream of speculating on their relationship. All I know is that Duane was quiet, that he was a good rewrite man and that he worked cheap, which is a big plus at this slave labor camp.”
A footstep scraped outside the door. Danny turned and saw a shadow retreating. Looking out, he caught a back view of a man fast-walking over to a bank of cameras and lighting fixtures. He followed; the man stood there, hands in his pockets, the classic “I’ve got nothing to hide” routine.
Danny braced him, disappointed that he was young and midsized, no burn scars on his face, at best a conduit for second-hand dope. “What were you doing listening outside that door?”
The man was closer to a boy—skinny, acned, a high voice with a trace of a lisp. “I work here. I’m a set dresser.”
“So that gives you the right to eavesdrop on official police business?”
The kid primped his hair. Danny said, “I asked you a question.”
“No, that doesn’t give me—”
“Then why did you?”
“I heard you say Duaney and George were dead, and I knew them. Do you know—”
“No, I don’t know who killed them, or I wouldn’t be here. How well did you know them?”
The boy played with his pompadour. “I shared lunch with Duaney—Duane—and I knew George to say hi to when he picked Duane up.”
“I guess the three of you had a lot in common, right?”
“Yes.”
“Did you associate with Lindenaur and Wiltsie outside of here?”
“No.”
“But you talked, because the three of you had so goddamn much in common. Is that right?”
The boy eyed the floor, one foot drawing lazy figure eights. “Yes, sir.”
“Then you tell me about what they had going and who else they had going, because if anyone around here would know, you would. Isn’t that right?”
The boy braced himself against a spotlight, his back to Danny. “They’d been together for a long time, but they liked to party with other guys. Georgie was rough trade, and he mostly lived off Duane, but sometimes he turned tricks for this fancy escort service. I don’t know anything else, so can I please go now?”
Danny thought of his call to Firestone Station—Lindenaur meeting the man he blackmailed through a “fruit introduction service.” “No. What was the name of the escort service?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who else did Wiltsie and Lindenaur party with? Give me some names.”
“I don’t know and I don’t have any names!”
“Don’t whine. What about a tall, gray-haired man, middle-aged. Did either Lindenaur or Wiltsie mention a man like that?”
“No.”
“Is there a man working here who fits that description?”
“There’s a million men in LA who fit that description, so will you please—”
Danny clamped the boy’s wrist, saw what he was doing and let go. “Don’t raise your voice to me, just answer. Lindenaur, Wiltsie, a tall, gray-haired man.”
The kid turned and
rubbed his wrist. “I don’t know of any men like that, but Duane liked older guys, and he told me he dug gray hair. Now are you satisfied?”
Danny couldn’t meet his stare. “Did Duane and George like jazz?”
“I don’t know, we never discussed music.”
“Did they ever talk about burglary or a man in his late twenties with burn scars on his face?”
“No.”
“Were either of them hipped on animals?”
“No, just other guys.”
Danny said, “Get out of here,” then moved himself, the kid still staring. The blacktop was deserted now, dusk coming on. He walked to the front gate; a voice from the guard hut stopped him. “Say, Officer. You got a minute?”
Danny halted. A bald man in a polo shirt and golf slacks stepped out and extended his hand. “I’m Herman Gerstein. I run this place.”
City turf. Danny gave Gerstein a shake. “My name’s Upshaw. I’m a Sheriff’s detective.”
Gerstein said, “I heard you were looking for the guys some script hack works with. That true?”
“Duane Lindenaur. He was murdered.”
“That’s too bad. I don’t like it when my people check out without telling me. What’s the matter, Upshaw? You ain’t laughing.”
“It wasn’t funny.”
Gerstein cleared his throat. “To each his own, and I don’t have to beg for laughs, I’ve got comedians for that. Before you go, I want to inform you of something. I’m cooperating with a grand jury investigation into Commie influence in Hollywood, and I don’t like the idea of extraneous cops asking questions around here. You dig? National security outranks a dead script hack.”
Danny threw out a tweak on general principles. “A dead queer script hack.”
Gerstein looked him over. “Now that really ain’t funny, because I would never let a known homo work at my shop under any conditions. Ever. Is that clear?”
“Vividly.”
Gerstein whipped three long cigars out of his slacks and stuck them in Danny’s shirt pocket. “Develop a sense of humor and you might go places. And if you have to come on the lot again, see me first. You understand?”
Danny dropped the cigars on the ground, stepped on them and walked out the gate.
* * *
A check of the local papers and more phone work were next.
Danny drove to Hollywood and Vine, bought all four LA dailies, parked in a no-parking zone and read. The Times and Daily News had nothing on his case; the Mirror and Herald gave it a back page brush-off, “Mangled Bodies Found in Griffith Park,” and “Dead Derelicts Discovered at Dawn” their respective taglines. Sanitized descriptions of the mutilations followed; Gene Niles blasted his horn about the job’s random nature. There was no mention of ID on the victims and nothing pertaining to the death of Marty Goines.
A pay phone stood next to the newsstand. Danny called Karen Hiltscher and got what he expected—her dental lab queries were going very slowly, ten negatives since he gave her the job; her calls to other LASD stations and the Detective Bureau for checks on burglars with dental tech backgrounds got a total zero—no such men existed. Trial calls to two taxidermists yielded the fact that all stuffed animals wore plastic teeth; real animal teeth did not show up in dentures, only in the mouths of creatures still on the hoof. Danny urged Karen to keep plugging, said his goodbyes accompanied by kissy sounds and dialed the Moonglow Lounge.
Janice Modine was not waitressing that night, but John Lembeck was drinking at the bar. Danny made nice with the man he’d spared a beating; the car thief/pimp made nice back. Danny knew he was good for some free information and asked him for scoop on homosexual pimps and escort services. Lembeck said the only queer service he knew of was ritzy, hush-hush and run by a man named Felix Gordean, a legit talent agent with an office on the Strip and a suite at the Chateau Marmont. Gordean wasn’t fruit himself, but provided boys to the Hollywood elite and old money LA.
Danny admonished Lembeck to stay frosty and took his Gordean dope to R&I and the DMV night line. Two calls, two squeaky-clean records and three plush addresses: 9817 Sunset for his office, the Chateau Marmont down the Strip at 7941 for his apartment, a beach house in Malibu: 16822 Pacific Coast Highway.
With one dime and one nickel left in his pocket, Danny played a hunch. He called Firestone Station, got Sergeant Frank Skakel and asked him the name of the “fruit introduction service” where extortionist Duane Lindenaur met extortionee Charles Harts-horn. Skakel grumbled and said he’d ring Danny at his pay phone; ten minutes later he called back and said he’d dug up the original complaint report. Lindenaur met Hartshorn at a party thrown by a man who owned an escort service—Felix Gordean. Skakel ended with his admonition: while he was digging through the files, a buddy on the squad gave him some lowdown: Gordean was paying heavy operation kickbacks to Sheriff’s Central Vice.
Danny drove to the Chateau Marmont, an apartment house-hotel done up like a swank Renaissance fortress. The main building was festooned with turrets and parapets, and there was an inner courtyard of similarly adorned bungalows connected by pathways—high, perfectly trimmed hedges surrounding them. Gaslights at the end of wrought-iron poles illuminated address plates; Danny followed a winding string of numbers to 7941, heard dance music wafting behind the hedge and started for the path to the door. Then a gust of wind scudded clouds across the sky and moonlight caught two men in evening clothes kissing, swaying together in the dark porch enclosure.
Danny watched; the moon was eclipsed by more cloud cover; the door opened and admitted the men—laughter, a jump crescendo and a few seconds’ worth of brightness easing them inside. Danny went pins and needles, squeezed between the hedge and the front wall and scissor-walked over to a large picture window covered by velvet drapes. There was a narrow space where the two furls of purple were drawn apart, with a strip of light giving access to tuxedos swirling across parquet, wall tapestries, the sparkle of glasses hoisted. Danny pressed his face to the window and looked in.
That close, he got distortion blur, Man Camera malfunctions. He pulled back so that his eyes could capture a larger frame, saw tuxedos entwined in movement, cheek-to-cheek tangos, all male. The faces were up against each other so that they couldn’t be distinguished individually; Danny zoomed out, in, out, in, until he was pressed into the window glass with the pins and needles localized between his legs, his eyes honing for mid-shots, closeups, faces.
More blur, blips of arms, legs, a cart being pushed and a man in white carrying a punch bowl. Out, in, out, better focus, no faces, then Tim and Coleman the alto together, swaying to hard jazz. The pins and needles hurting; Tim gone, replaced by a blond ingenu. Then shadows killing his vision, his lens cleared by a step backward—and a perfectly framed view of two fat, ugly wall-flowers tongue-kissing, all oily skin and razor burn and hair pomade glistening.
Danny bolted home, seeing San Berdoo ’39 and Tim giving him the fisheye when he wouldn’t take seconds on Roxie. He found his spare I.W. Harper, knocked down his standard four shots and saw it worse, Tim reproachful, saying, yeah it was just horseplay, but you really liked it. Two more shots, the Chateau Marmont in Technicolor, all pretty ones that he knew had Timmy’s body.
He went straight to the bottle then, quality sourmash burning like rotgut, Man-Cameraing women, women, women. Karen Hiltscher, Janice Modine, strippers he’d questioned about a stickup at the Club Largo, tits and cunt on display in the dressing room, inured to men looking at their stuff. Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, the hat check girl at Dave’s Blue Room, his mother stepping out of the bathtub before she got fat and became a Jehovah’s Witness. All ugly and wrong, just like the two wall-flowers at the Marmont.
Danny drank standing up until his legs went. Going down, he managed to throw the bottle at the wall. It hit a pinup of the blood patterns at 2307 Tamarind.
Chapter Sixteen
Mal got his lies straight on the doorstep and rang the bell. Heels over hardwood echoed inside the house; he pulled his vest down
to cover his slack waistband—too many meals forgotten. The door opened and the Red Queen was standing there, perfectly coiffed, elegantly dressed in silk and tweed—at 9:30 in the morning.
“Yes? Are you a salesman? There’s a Beverly Hills ordinance against soliciting, you know.”
Mal knew she knew otherwise. “I’m with the District Attorney’s Office.”
“Beverly Hills?”
“The City of Los Angeles.”
Claire De Haven smiled—movie star quality. “My accumulation of jaywalking tickets?”
Cop-quality dissembling—Mal knew she had him pegged as the nice guy in the Lopez/Duarte/Benavides questioning. “The City needs your help.”
The woman chuckled—elegantly—and held the door open. “Come in and tell me about it, Mr.…?”
“Considine.”
Claire repeated the name and stood aside; Mal walked into a large living room furnished in a floral motif: gardenia-patterned divans, tufted orchid chairs, little tables and bookstands inlaid with wooden daisies. The walls were solid movie posters—anti-Nazi pictures popular in the late ’30s and early ’40s. Mal strolled up to a garish job ballyhooing Dawn of the Righteous—a noble Russki facing off a drooling blackshirt brandishing a Luger. Sun-shine haloed the good guy; the German was shadowed in darkness. With Claire De Haven watching him, he counterpunched. “Subtle.”
Claire laughed. “Artful. Are you an attorney, Mr. Considine?”
Mal turned around. The Red Queen was holding a glass filled with clear liquid and ice. He couldn’t smell gin and bet vodka—more elegant, no booze breath. “No, I’m an investigator with the Grand Jury Division. May I sit down?”