She was the first movie star I ever worked for, but I wasn’t much impressed. If I were that easily impressed, I’d have been impressed by Hollywood itself. And having seen the way Hollywood portrayed my profession on the so-called silver screen, I wasn’t much impressed with Hollywood.
On the other hand, Thelma Todd was the most beautiful woman who ever wanted to hire my services, and that did impress me. Enough so that when she called me, that October, and asked me to drive out to her “sidewalk cafe” nestled under the Palisades in Montemar Vista, I went, wondering if she would be as pretty in the flesh as she was on celluloid.
I’d driven out Pacific Coast Highway that same morning, a clear cool morning with a blue sky lording it over a vast sparkling sea. Pelicans were playing tag with the breaking surf, flying just under the curl of the white-lipped waves. Yachts, like a child’s toy boats, floated out there just between me and the horizon. I felt like I could reach out for one, pluck and examine it, sniff it maybe, like King Kong checking out Fay Wray’s lingerie.
“Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Cafe,” as a billboard on the hillside behind it so labeled the place, was a sprawling two-story hacienda affair, as big as a beached luxury liner. Over its central, largest-of-many archways, a third-story tower rose like a stubby lighthouse. There weren’t many cars here-it was approaching ten a.m., too early for the luncheon crowd and even I didn’t drink cocktails this early in the day. Not and tell, anyway.
She was waiting in the otherwise unpopulated cocktail lounge, where massive wooden beams in a traditional Spanish mode fought the chromium-and-leather furnishings and the chrome-and-glass-brick bar and came out a draw. She was a big blonde woman with more curves than the highway out front and just the right number of hills and valleys. Wearing a clingy summery white dress, she was seated on one of the bar stools, with her bare legs crossed; they weren’t the best-looking legs on the planet, necessarily. I just couldn’t prove otherwise. That good a detective I’m not.
“Nathan Heller?” she asked, and her smile dimpled her cheeks in a manner that made her whole heart-shaped face smile, and the world smile as well, including me. She didn’t move off the stool, just extended her hand in a manner that was at once casual and regal.
I took the hand, not knowing whether to kiss it, shake it, or press it into a book like a corsage I wanted to keep. I looked at her feeling vaguely embarrassed; she was so pretty you didn’t know where to look next, and felt like there was maybe something wrong with looking anywhere. But I couldn’t help myself.
She had pale, creamy skin and her hair was almost white blonde. They called her the ice-cream blonde, in the press. I could see why.
Then I got around to her eyes. They were blue of course, cornflower blue; and big and sporting long lashes, the real McCoy, not your dimestore variety. But they were also the saddest eyes I’d ever looked into. The smile froze on my face like I was looking at Medusa, not a twenty-nine year-old former six-grade teacher from Massachusetts who won a talent search.
“Is something wrong?” she asked. Then she patted the stool next to her.
I sat and said, “Nothing’s wrong. I never had a movie star for a client before.”
“I see. Thanks for considering this job-for extending your stay, I mean.”
I was visiting L.A. from Chicago because a friend-a fellow former pickpocket detail dick-had recently opened an office out here in sunny Southern Cal. Fred Rubinski needed an out-of-towner to pose as a visiting banker, to expose an embezzler; the firm had wanted to keep the affair in-house.
“Mr. Rubinski recommended you highly.” Her voice had a low, throaty quality that wasn’t forced or affected; she was what Mae West would’ve been if Mae West wasn’t a parody.
“That’s just because Fred hasn’t been in town long enough to make any connections. But if Thelma Todd wants me to consider extending my stay, I’m willing to listen.”
She smiled at that, very broadly, showing off teeth whiter than cameras can record. “Might I get you a drink, Mr. Heller?”
“It’s a little early.”
“I know it is. Might I get you a drink?”
“Sure.”
“Anything special?”
“Anything that doesn’t have a little paper umbrella in it is fine by me…. Make it rum and Coke.”
“Rum and Coke.” She fixed me up with that, and had the same herself. Either we had similar tastes or she just wasn’t fussy about what she drank.
“Have you heard of Lucky Luciano?” she asked, returning to her bar stool.
“Heard of him,” I said. “Haven’t met him.”
“What do you know about him?”
I shrugged. “Big-time gangster from back east. Runs casinos all over southern California. More every day.”
She flicked the air with a long red fingernail, like she was shooing away a bug. “Well, perhaps you’ve noticed the tower above my restaurant.”
“Sure.”
“I live on the second floor, but the tower above is fairly spacious.”
“Big enough for a casino, you mean.”
“That’s right,” she said, nodding. “I was approached by Luciano, more than once. I turned him away, more than once. After all, with my location, and my clientele, a casino could make a killing.”
“You’re doing well enough legally. Why bother with ill?”
“I agree. And if I were to get into any legal problems, that would mean a scandal, and Hollywood doesn’t need another scandal. Busby Berkley’s trial is coming up soon, you know.”
The noted director and choreographer, creator of so many frothy fantasies, was up on the drunk-driving homicide of three pedestrians, not far from this cafe.
“But now,” she said, her bee-lips drawn nervously tight, “I’ve begun to receive threatening notes.”
“From Luciano, specifically?”
“No. They’re extortion notes, actually. Asking me to pay off Artie Lewis. You know, the bandleader?”
“Why him?”
“He’s in Luciano’s pocket. Gambling markers. And I used to go with Artie. He lives in San Francisco, now.”
“I see. Well, have you talked to the cops?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to get Artie in trouble.”
“Have you talked to Artie?”
“Yes-he claims he knows nothing about this. He doesn’t want my money. He doesn’t even want me back-he’s got a new girl.”
I’d like to see the girl that could make you forget Thelma Todd.
“So,” I said, “you want me to investigate. Can I see the extortion notes?”
“No,” she said, shaking her white blonde curls like the mop of the gods, “that’s not it. I burned those notes. For Artie’s sake.”
“Well, for Nate’s sake,” I said, “where do I come in?”
“I think I’m being followed. I’d like a bodyguard.”
I resisted looking her over wolfishly and making a wise-crack. She was a nice woman, and the fact that hers was the sort of a body a private eye would pay to guard didn’t seem worth mentioning. My fee did.
“Twenty-five a day and expenses,” I said.
“Fine,” she said. “And you can have any meals you like right here at the Cafe. Drinks, too. Run a tab and I’ll pick it up.”
“Swell,” I grinned. “I was wondering if I’d ever run into a fringe benefit in this racket.”
“You can be my chauffeur.”
“Well…”
“You have a problem with that, Mr. Heller?”
“I have a private investigator’s license, and a license to carry a gun…in Illinois, anyway. But I don’t have a chauffeur’s license.”
“I think a driver’s license will suffice.” Her bee-stung lips were poised in a kiss of amusement. “What’s the real problem, Heller?”
“I’m not wearing a uniform. I’m strictly plainclothes.”
She smiled tightly, wryly amused, saying, “All right, hang onto your dignity…but you have to let me pay the freight on a couple of new suits for you. I’ll throw ’em in on the deal.”
“Swell,” I said. I liked it when women bought me clothes.
So for the next two months, I stayed on in southern Cal, and Thelma Todd was my only client. I worked six days a week for her-Monday through Saturday. Sundays God, Heller and Todd rested. I drove her in her candy-apple red Packard convertible, a car designed for blondes with wind-blown hair and pearls. She sat in back, of course. Most days I took her to the Hal Roach Studio where she was making a musical with Laurel and Hardy. I’d wait in some dark pocket of the sound studio and watch her every move out in the brightness. In a black wig, lacy bodice, and clinging, gypsy skirt, Thelma was the kind of girl you took home to Mother, and if Mother didn’t like her, to hell with Mother.
Evenings she hit the club circuit, the Trocadero and the El Mocambo chiefly. I’d sit in the cocktail lounges and quietly drink and wait for her and her various dates to head home. Some of these guys were swishy types that she was doing the studio a favor appearing in public with; a couple others spent the night.
I don’t mean to tell tales out of school, but this tale can’t be told at all unless I’m frank about that one thing: Thelma slept around. Later, when the gossip rags were spreading rumors about alcohol and drugs, that was all the bunk. But Thelma was a friendly girl. She had generous charms and enerous with them.
“Heller,” she said, one night in early December when I was dropping her off, walking her up to the front door of the Cafe like always, “I think I have a crush on you.”
She was alone tonight, having played girl friend to one of those Hollywood funny boys for the benefit of Louella Parsons and company. Alone but for me.
She slipped an arm around my waist. She had booze on her breath, but then so did I, and neither one of us was drunk. She was bathed gently in moonlight and Chanel Number Five.
She kissed me with those bee-stung lips, stinging so softly, so deeply.
I moved away. “No. I’m sorry.”
She winced. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m the hired help. You’re just lonely tonight.”
Her eyes, which I seldom looked into because of the depth of the sadness there, hardened. “Don’t you ever get lonely, you bastard?”
“Never,” I said.
She drew her hand back to slap me, but then she just touched my face, instead. Gentle as the ocean breeze, and it was gentle tonight, the breeze, so gentle.
“Goodnight, Heller,” she said.
And she slipped inside, but left the door slightly ajar.
“What the hell,” I said, and I slipped inside, too.
An hour later, I drove her Packard to the garage that was attached to the bungalow above the restaurant complex; to do that I had to take Montemar Vista Road to Seretto Way, turning right. The Mediterranean-style stucco bungalow, on Cabrillo, like so many houses in Montemar Vista, climbed the side of the hill like a clinging vine. It was owned by Thelma Todd’s partner in the Cafe, movie director/producer Warren Eastman. Eastman had an apartment next to Thelma’s above the restaurant, as well as the bungalow, and seemed to live back and forth between the two.
I wondered what the deal was, with Eastman and my client, but I never asked, not directly. Eastman was a thin, dapper man in his late forties, with a pointed chin and a small mustache and a window’s peak that his slick black hair was receding around, making his face look diamond shaped. He often sat in the cocktail lounge with a bloody Mary in one hand and a cigarette in a holder in the other. He was always talking deals with movie people.
“Heller,” he said, one night, motioning me over to the bar. He was seated on the very stool that Thelma had been, that first morning. “This is Nick DeCiro, the talent agent. Nick, this is the gumshoe Thelma hired to protect her from the big bad gambling syndicate.”
DeCiro was another darkly handsome man, a bit older than Eastman, though he lacked both the mustache and receding hairline of the director. DeCiro wore a white suit with a dark sportshirt, open at the neck to reveal a wealth of black chest hair.
I shook DeCiro’s hand. His grip was firm, moist, like a fistful of topsoil.
“Nicky here is your client’s ex-husband,” Eastman said, with a wag of his cigarette-in-holder, trying for an air of that effortless deence that Hollywood works so hard at.
“Thelma and me are still pals,” DeCiro said, lighting up a foreign cig with a shiny silver lighter that he then clicked shut with a meaningless flourish. “We broke up amicably.”
“I heard it was over extreme cruelty,” I said.
DeCiro frowned, and Eastman cut in glibly, “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers, Heller. Besides, you have to get a divorce over something.”
“But then you’d know that in your line of work,” DeCiro said, an edge in his thin voice.
“Don’t knock it,” I said with my own edge. “Where would your crowd be without divorce dicks? Now, if you gents will excuse me…”
“Heller, Heller,” Eastman said, touching my arm, “don’t be so touchy.”
I waited for him to remove his hand from my arm, then said, “Did you want something, Mr. Eastman? I’m not much for this Hollywood shit-chat.”
“I don’t like your manner,” DeCiro said.
“Nobody does,” I said. “But I don’t get paid well enough for it to matter.”
“Heller,” Eastman said, “I was just trying to convince Nicky here that my new film is perfect for a certain client of his. I’m doing a mystery. About the perfect crime. The perfect murder.”
“No such animal,” I said.
“Oh, really?” DeCiro said, lifting an eyebrow.
“Murder and crime are inexact sciences. All the planning in the world doesn’t account for the human element.”
“Then how do you explain,” Eastman said archly, “the hundreds of murders that go unsolved in this country?”
“Policework is a more exact science than crime or murder,” I admitted, “but we have a lot of bent cops in this world-and a lot of dumb ones.”
“Then there are perfect crimes.”
“No. Just unsolved ones. And imperfect detectives. Good evening, gentlemen.”
That was the most extensive conversation I had with either Eastman or DeCiro during the time I was employed by Miss Todd, though I said hello and they did the same, now and then, at the Cafe.
But Eastman was married to an actress named Miranda Diamond, a fiery Latin whose parents were from Mexico City, even if she’d been raised in the Bronx. She fancied herself as the next Lupe Velez, and she was a similarly voluptuous dame, though her handsome features were as hard as a gravestone.
She cornered me at the Cafe one night, in the cocktail lounge, where I was drinking on the job.
“You’re a dick,” she said.
We’d never spoken before.
“I hope you mean that in the nicest way,” I said.
“You’re bodyguarding that bitch,” she said, sitting next to me on a leather and chrome couch. Her nostrils flared; if I’d been holding a red cape, I’d have dropped it and run for the stands.
“Miss Todd is my client, yes, Miss Diamond.”
She smiled. “You recognize me.”
“Oh yes. And I also know enough to call you Mrs. Eastman, in certain company.”
“My husband and I are separated.”
“Ah.”
“But I could use a little help in the divorce court.”
“What kind of help?”
“Photographs of him and that bitch in the sack.” She said “the” like “thee.”
“That would help you.”
“Yes. You see…my husband has similar pictures of me, with a gentleman, in a compromising position.”
“Even missionaries get caught in that position, I understand.” I offered her a cigarette, she took it, and I lit hers and mine. “And if you had similar photos, you could negotiate yourself a better settlement.”
“Exactly. Interested?”
“I do divorce work-that’s no problem. But I try not to sell clients out. Bad for business.”
She smiled; she put her hand on my leg. “I could make it worth your while. Financially and…otherwise.”
It wasn’t even Christmas and already here was a second screen goddess who wanted to hop in the sack with me. I must have really been something.
“Listen, if you like me, just say so. But we’re not making a business arrangement-I got a client, already.”
Then she suggested I do to myself what she’d just offered to do for me. She was full of ideas.
So was I. I was pretty sure Thelma and Eastman were indeed having an affair, but it was of the on-again-off-again variety. One night they’d be affectionate, in that sickening Hollywood sweetie-baby way; the next night he would be cool to her; the next she would be cool to him. It was love, I recognized it, but the kind that sooner or later blows up like an overheated engine.
Ten days before Christmas, Thelma was honored by Lupino Lane-the famous British comedian, so famous I’d never the hell heard of him-with a dinner at the Troc. At a table for twelve upstairs, in the swanky cream-and-gold dining room, Thelma was being feted by her show-biz friends, while I sat downstairs in the oak-paneled Cellar Lounge with other people not famous enough to sit upstairs, nursing a rum and Coke at the polished copper bar. I didn’t feel like a polished copper, that was for sure. I was just a chauffeur with a gun, and a beautiful client who didn’t need me.
That much was clear to me: in the two months I’d worked for Thelma, I hadn’t spotted anybody following her except a few fans, and I couldn’t blame them. I think I was just a little bit in love with the ice-cream blonde myself. We’d only had that one slightly inebriated night togeth#8212;and neither of us had mentioned it since, or even referred to it. Maybe we were both embarrassed; I didn’t figure either of us were exactly the type to be ashamed.
Anyway, she was a client, and she slept around, and neither of those things appealed to me in a girl-though everything else about her, including her money, did.
About half an hour into the evening, I heard a scream upstairs. A woman’s scream, a scream that might have belonged to Thelma.
I took the stairs four at a time and had my gun in my hand when I entered the fancy dining room. Normally when I enter fancy dining rooms with a gun in my hand, all eyes are on me. Not this time.
Thelma was clawing at her ex-husband, who was laughing at her. She was being held back by Patsy Kelly, the dark-haired rubber-faced comedienne who was Thelma’s partner in the two-reelers. DeCiro, in a white tux, had a starlet on his arm, a blonde about twenty with a neckline down to her shoes. The starlet looked frightened, but DeCiro was having a big laugh.
I put my gun away and took over for Patsy Kelly.
“Miss Todd,” I said, gently, whispering into her ear, holding onto her two arms from behind, “don’t do this.”
She went limp for a moment, then straightened and said, with stiff dignity, “I’m all right, Nathan.”
It was the only time she ever called me that.
I let go of her.
“What’s the problem?” I asked. I was asking both Thelma Todd and her ex-husband.
“He embarrassed me,” she said, without any further explanation.
And without any further anything, I said to DeCiro, “Go.”
DeCiro twitched a smile. “I was invited.”
“I’m uninviting you. Go.”
His face tightened and he thought about saying or doing something. But my eyes were on him like magnets on metal and instead he gathered his date and her decolletage and took a powder.
“Are you ready to go home?” I asked Thelma.
“No,” she said, with a shy smile, and she squeezed my arm, and went back to the table of twelve where her party of Hollywood types awaited. She was the guest of honor, after all.
Two hours, and two drinks later, I was escorting her home. She sat in the back of the candy-apple red Packard in her mink coat and sheer mauve-and-silver evening gown and diamond necklace and told me what had happened, the wind whipping her ice-blonde hair.
“Nicky got himself invited,” she said, almost shouting over the wind. “Without my knowledge. Asked the host to reserve a seat next to me at the table. Then he wandered in late, with a date, that little starlet, which you may have noticed rhymes with harlot, and sat at another table, leaving me sitting next to an empty seat at a party in my honor. He sat there necking with that little tramp and I got up and went over and gave him a piece of my mind. It…got a little out of hand. Thanks for stepping in, Heller.”
“t’s what you pay me for.”
She sat in silence for a while; only the wind spoke. It was a cold Saturday night, as cold as a chilled martini. I had asked her if she wanted the top up on the convertible, but she said no. She began to look behind us as we moved slowly down Sunset.
“Heller,” she said, “someone’s following us.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Somebody’s following us, I tell you!”
“I’m keeping an eye on the rear-view mirror. We’re fine.”
She leaned forward and clutched my shoulder. “Get moving! Do you want me to be kidnapped, or killed? It could be Luciano’s gangsters, for God’s sake!”
She was the boss. I hit the pedal. At speeds up to seventy miles per, we sailed west around the curves of Sunset; there was a service station at the junction of the boulevard and the coast highway, and I pulled in.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
I turned and looked into the frightened blue eyes. “I’m going to get some gas, and keep watch. And see if anybody comes up on us, or suspicious goes by. Don’t you worry. I’m armed.”
I looked close at every car that passed by the station. I saw no one and nothing suspicious. Then I paid the attendant and we headed north on the coast highway. Going nice and slow.
“I ought to fire you,” she said, pouting back there.
“This is my last night, Miss Todd,” I said. “I’m getting homesick for Chicago. They got a better breed of dishonest people back there. Anyway, I like to work for my money. I feel I’m taking yours.”
She leaned forward, clutched my shoulder again. “No, no, I tell you, I’m frightened.”
“Why?”
“I…I just feel I still need you around. You give me a sense of security.”
“Have you had any more threatening notes?”
“No.” Her voice sounded very small, now.
“If you do, call me, or the cops. Or both.”
It was two a.m. when I slid the big car in in front of the sprawling Sidewalk Cafe. I was shivering with cold; a sea breeze was blowing, Old Man Winter taking his revenge on California. I turned and looked at her again. I smiled.
“I’ll walk you to the door, Miss Todd.”
She smiled at me, too, but this time the smile didn’t light up her face, or the world, or me. This time the smile was as sad as her eyes. Sadder.
“That won’t be necessary, Heller.”
I was looking for an invitation, either in her eyes or her voice; I couldn’t quite find one. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. Do me one favor. Work for me next week. Be my chauffeur one more week, while I decide whether or not to replace you with another bodyard, or…what.”
“Okay.”
“Go home, Heller. See you Monday.”
“See you Monday,” I said, and I watched her go in the front door of the Cafe. Then I drove the Packard up to the garage above, on the Palisades, and got in my dusty inelegant 1925 Marmon and headed back to the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. I had a hunch Thelma Todd, for all her apprehensions, would sleep sounder than I would, tonight.
My hunch was right, but for the wrong reason.
Monday morning, sunny but cool if no longer cold, I pulled into one of the parking places alongside the Sidewalk Cafe; it was around ten thirty and mine was the only car. The big front door was locked. I knocked until the Spanish cleaning woman let me in. She said she hadn’t seen Miss Todd yet this morning. I went up the private stairway off the kitchen that led up to the two apartments. The door at the top of the stairs was unlocked; beyond it were the two facing apartment doors. I knocked on hers.
“Miss Todd?”
No answer.
I tried for a while, then went and found the cleaning woman again. “Maria, do you have any idea where Miss Todd might be? She doesn’t seem to be in her room.”
“She might be stay up at Meester Eastmon’s.”
I nodded, started to walk away, then looked back and added as an afterthought, “Did you see her yesterday?”
“I no work Sunday.”
I guess Maria, like God, Heller and Thelma Todd, rested on Sunday. Couldn’t blame her.
I thought about taking the car up and around, then said to hell with it and began climbing the concrete steps beyond the pedestrian bridge that arched over the highway just past the Cafe. These steps, all two-hundred and eighty of them, straight up the steep hill, were the only direct access from the coast road to the bungalow on Cabrillo Street. Windblown sand had drifted over the steps and the galvanized handrail was as cold and wet as a liar’s handshake.
I grunted my way to the top. I’d started out as a young man, had reached middle age by step one hundred and was now ready for the retirement home. I sat on the cold damp top step and poured sand out of my scuffed-up Florsheims, glad I hadn’t bothered with a shine in the last few weeks. Then I stood and looked past the claustrophobic drop of the steps, to where the sun was reflecting off the sand and sea. The beach was blinding, the ocean dazzling. It was beautiful, but it hurt to look at. A seagull was flailing with awkward grace against the breeze like a fighter losing the last round. Suddenly Lake Michigan seemed like a pond.
Soon I was knocking on Eastman’s front door. No answer. Went to check to see if my client’s car was there, swinging up the black-studded blue garage door. The car was there, all right, the red Packard convertible, next to Eastman’s Lincoln sedan.
My client was there, too.
She was slumped in front, sprawled across the steering wheel. She was still in the mink, the mauve-and-silver gown, and the diamond necklace she’d worn to the Troc Satury night. But her clothes were rumpled, in disarray, like an unmade bed; and there was blood on the front of the gown, coagulated rubies beneath the diamonds. There was blood on her face, on her white, white face.
She’d always had pale creamy skin, but now it was as white as a wedding dress. There was no pulse in her throat. She was cold. She’d been dead a while.
I stood and looked at her and maybe I cried. That’s my business, isn’t it? Then I went out and up the side steps to the loft above the garage and roused the elderly fellow named Jones who lived there; he was the bookkeeper for the Sidewalk Cafe. I asked him if he had a phone, and he did, and I used it.
I had told my story to the uniformed men four times before the men from Central Homicide showed. The detective in charge was Lieutenant Rondell, a thin, somber, detached man in his mid-forties with smooth creamy gray hair and icy eyes. His brown gabardine suit wasn’t expensive but it was well-pressed. His green pork-pie lightweight felt hat was in his hand, in deference to the deceased. Out of deference to me, he listened to my story as I told it for the fifth time. He didn’t seem to think much of it.
“You’re telling me this woman was murdered,” he said.
“I’m telling you the gambling syndicate boys were pressuring her, and she wasn’t caving in.”
“And you were her bodyguard,” Rondell said.
“Some bodyguard,” said the other man from homicide, Rondell’s brutish shadow, and cracked his knuckles and laughed. We were in the garage and the laughter made hollow echoes off the cement, like a basketball bouncing in an empty stadium.
“I was her bodyguard,” I told Rondell tightly. “But I didn’t work Sundays.”
“And she had to go to Chicago to hire a bodyguard?”
I explained my association with Fred Rubinski, and Rondell nodded several times, seemingly accepting it.
Then Rondell walked over and looked at the corpse in the convertible. A photographer from Homicide was snapping photos; pops and flashes of light accompanied the detective’s trip around the car as if he were a star at a Hollywood opening.
I went outside. The smell of death is bad enough when it’s impersonal; when somebody you know has died, it’s like having asthma in a steam room.
Rondell found me leaning against the side of the stucco garage.
“It looks like suicide,” he said.
“Sure. It’s supposed to.”
He lifted an eyebrow and a shoulder. “The ignition switch is turned on. Carbon monoxide.”
“Car wasn’t running when I got here.”
“Long since ran out of gas, most likely. If what you say is true, she’s been there since Saturday night…that is, early Sunday morning.”
I shrugged. “She’s wearing the same clothes, at least.”
“When we fix time of death, it’ll all come clear.”
“Oh, yeah? See what the coroner has to say about that.”
Rondell’s icy eyes froze further. “Why?”
“This cold snap we’ve had, last three days. It’s warmer this morning, but Sunday night, Jesus. That sea breeze was murder-if you’ll pardon the expression.”
Rondell nodded. “Perhaps cold enough to retard decomposition, you mean.”
“Perhaps.”
He pushed the pork pie back on his head. “We need to talk to this bird Eastman.”
“I’ll say. He’s probably at his studio. Paramount. When he’s on a picture, they pick him up by limo every morning before dawn.”
Rondell went to use the phone in old man Jones’ loft flat. Rondell’s brutish sidekick exited the garage and slid his arm around the shoulder of a young uniformed cop, who seemed uneasy about the attention.
“Ice cream blonde, huh?” the big flatfoot said. “I woulda liked a coupla of scoops of that myself.”
I tapped the brute on the shoulder and he turned to me and said, “Huh?”, stupidly, and I cold-cocked him. He went down like a building.
But not out, though. “You’re gonna pay for that, you bastard,” he said, sounding like the school-yard bully he was. He touched the blood in the corner of his mouth, hauled himself up off the cement. “In this, town, you go to goddamn jail when you hit a goddamn cop!”
“You’d need a witness, first,” I said.
“I got one,” he said, but when he turned to look, the young uniformed cop was gone.
I walked up to him and stood damn near belt buckle to belt buckle and smiled a smile that had nothing to do with smiling. “Want to go another round, see if a witness shows?”
He tasted blood and fluttered his eyes like a girl and said something unintelligible and disappeared back inside the garage.
Rondell came clopping down the wooden steps and stood before me and smiled firmly. “I just spoke with Eastman. We’ll interview him more formally, of course, but the preliminary interrogation indicates a possible explanation.” “Oh?”
He was nodding. “Yeah. Apparently Saturday night he bolted the stairwell door around midnight. It’s a door that leads to both apartments up top the Sidewalk Cafe. Said he thought Miss Todd had mentioned she was going to sleep over at her mother’s that night.”
“You mean, she couldn’t get in?”
“Right.”
“Well, hell, man, she would’ve knocked.”
“Eastman says if she did, he didn’t hear her. He says there was high wind and pounding surf all night; he figures that drowned out all other sounds.”
I smirked. “Does he, really? So what’s your scenario?”
“Well, when Miss Todd found she couldn’t get into her apartment, she must’ve decided to climb the steps to the street above, walked to the garage and spent the rest of the night in her car. She must’ve have gotten cold, and switched on the ignition to keep warm, and the fumes got her.”
I sighed. “A minute ago you were talking suicide.”
“That’s still a possibility.”
“What about the blood on her face and dress?”
He shrugged. “She may have fallen across the wheel and cut her mouth, when she fell unconscious.”
“Look, if she wanted to get warm, why would she sit in her open convertible? That Lincoln sedan next to her is unlocked and has the keys in it.”
“I can’t answer that-yet.”
I was shaking my head. Then I pointed at him. “Ask the elderly gent upstairs if he heard her opening the garage door, starting up the Packard’s cold engine sometime between two a.m. and dawn. Ask him!”
“I did. He didn’t. But it was a windy night, and…”
“Yeah, and the surf was crashing something fierce. Right. Let’s take a look at her shoes.”
“Huh?”
I pointed down to my scuffed-up Florsheims. “I just scaled those two-hundred-and-eighty steps. This shoeshine boy’s nightmare is the result. Let’s see if she walked up those steps.”
Rondell nodded and led me into the garage. The print boys hadn’t been over the vehicle yet, so the Lieutenant didn’t open the door on the rider’s side, he just leaned carefully in.
Then he stood and contemplated what he’d seen. For a moment he seemed to have forgotten me, then he said, “Have a look yourself.”
I had one last look at the beautiful woman who’d driven to nowhere in this immobile car.
She wore delicate silver dress heels; they were as pristine as Cinderella’s glass slippers.
The Coroner at the inquest agreed with me on one point: “The high winds and very low cold prevailing that week-end would have preserved the body beyond the usual time required for decomposition to set in.”
The inquest was, otherwise, a bundle of contradictions, and about as inconclusive as the virgin birth. A few new, sinister facts emerged. She had bruises inside her throat. Had someone shoved a bottle down her throat? Her alcohol level was high-.13 percent-much higher than the three or four drinks she was seen to have had at the Troc. And there was gas left in the car, it turned out-several gallons; yet the ignition switch was turned on….
But the coroner’s final verdict was that Thelma died by carbon monoxide poisoning, “breathed accidentally.” Nonetheless, the papers talked suicide, and the word on the streets of Hollywood was “hush-up.” Nobody wanted another scandal. Not after Mary Astor’s diaries and Busby Berkley’s drunk-driving fatalities.
I wasn’t buying the coroner’s verdict, either.
I knew that three people, on the Monday I’d found Thelma, had come forward to the authorities and reported having seen her on Sunday, long after she had “officially” died.
Miranda Diamond, Eastman’s now ex-wife (their divorce had gone through, finally, apparently fairly amicably), claimed to have seen Thelma, still dressed in her Trocadero fineries, behind the wheel of her distinctive Packard convertible at the corner of Sunset and Vine Sunday, mid-morning. She was, Miranda told the cops, in the company of a tall, swarthy, nattily dressed young man whom Miranda had never seen before.
Mrs. Wallace Ford, wife of the famed director, had received a brief phone call from Thelma around four Sunday afternoon. Thelma had called to say she would be attending the Fords’ cocktail party, and was it all right if she brought along “a new, handsome friend?”
Finally, and best of all, there was Warren Eastman himself. Neighbors had reported to the police that they heard Eastman and Thelma quarreling bitterly, violently, at the bungalow above the restaurant, Sunday morning, around breakfast time. Eastman said he had thrown her out, and that she had screamed obscenities and beaten on the door for ten minutes (and police did find kick marks on the shrub-secluded, hacienda-style door).
“It was a lover’s quarrel,” Eastman told a reporter. “I heard she had a new boy friend-some Latin fellow from San Francisco-and she denied it. But I knew she was lying.”
Eastman also revealed, in the press, that Thelma didn’t own any real interest in her Sidewalk Cafe; she had made no investment other than lending her name, for which she got 50 percent of the profits.
I called Rondell after the inquest and he told me the case was closed.
“We both know something smells,” I said. “Aren’t you going to do something?”
“Yes,” he said.
“What?”
“I’m going to hang up.”
And he did.
Rondell was a good cop in a bad town, an honest man in a system so corrupt the Borgias would’ve felt moral outrage; even a Chicago boy like me found it disgusting. But he couldn’t do much about movie-mogul pressure by way of City Hall; Los Angeles had one big business and the film industry was it. And I was just an out-of-town private detective with a local dead client.
On the other hand, she’d paid me to protect her, and ultimately I hadn’t. I had accepted her money, and it seemed to me she ought to get something for it, even if it was posthumous.
I went out the next Monday morning-one week to the day since I’d found the ice-cream blonde melting in that garage-and at the Cafe, sitting alone in the cocktail lounge, reading Variety and drinking a bloody Mary, was Warren Eastman. He was between pictures and just two stools down from where she had sat when she first hired me. He was wearing a blue blazer, a cream silk cravat, and white pants. He lowered the paper and looked at me; he was surprised to see me, but it was not a pleasant surprise, even though he affected a toothy smile under the twitchy lttle mustache.
“What brings you around, Heller? I don’t need a bodyguard.”
“Don’t be so sure,” I said genially, sitting next to him.
He looked down his nose at me through slitted eyes; his diamond-shaped face seemed handsome to some, I supposed, but to me it was a harshly angular thing, a hunting knife with hair.
“What exactly,” he said, “do you mean by that?”
“I mean I know you murdered Thelma,” I said.
He laughed and returned to his newspaper. “Go away, Heller. Find some schoolgirl who frightens easily if you want to scare somebody.”
“I want to scare somebody all right. I just have one question…did your ex-wife help you with the murder itself, or was she just a supporting player?”
He put the paper down. He sipped the bloody Mary. His face was wooden but his eyes were animated.
I laughed gutturally. “You and your convoluted murder mysteries. You were so clever you almost schemed your way into the gas chamber, didn’t you? With your masquerades and charades.”
“What in the hell are you talking about?”
“You were smart enough to figure out that the cold weather would confuse the time of death. But you thought you could make the coroner think Thelma met her fate the next day-Sunday evening, perhaps. You didn’t have an alibi for the early a.m. hours of Sunday. And that’s when you killed her.”
“Is it, really? Heller, I saw her Sunday morning, breakfast. I argued with her, the neighbors heard…”
“Exactly. They heard-but they didn’t see a thing. That was something you staged, either with your ex-wife’s help, or whoever your current starlet is. Some actress, the same actress who later called Mrs. Ford up to accept the cocktail party invite and further spread the rumor of the new lover from San Francisco. Nice touch, that. Pulls in the rumors of gangsters from San Francisco who threatened her; was the ‘swarthy man’ Miranda saw a torpedo posing as a lover? A gigolo with a gun? A member of Artie Lewis’ dance band, maybe? Let the cops and the papers wonder. Well, it won’t wash with me; I was with her for her last month. She had no new serious love in her life, from San Francisco or elsewhere. Your ‘swarthy man’ is the little Latin lover who wasn’t there.”
“Miranda saw him with her, Heller…”
“No. Miranda didn’t see anything. She told the story you wanted her to tell; she went along with you, and you treated her right in the divorce settlement. You can afford to. You’re sole owner of Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Cafe, now. Lock, stock and barrel, with no messy interference from the star on the marquee. And now you’re free to accept Lucky Luciano’s offer, aren’t you?”
That rocked him, like a physical blow. “What?”
“That’s why you killed Thelma. She was standing in your way. You wanted to put a casino in upstairs; it would mean big money, ver big money.”
“I have money.”
“Yes, and you spend it. You live very lavishly. I’ve been checking up on you. I know you intimately already, and I’m going to know you even better.”
His eyes quivered in the diamond mask of his face. “What are you talking about?”
“You tried to scare her at first-extortion notes, having her followed; maybe you did this with Luciano’s help, maybe you did it on your own. I don’t know. But then she hired me, and you scurried off into the darkness to think up something new.”
He sneered and gestured archly with his cigarette holder, the cigarette in which he was about to light up. “I’m breathlessly awaiting just what evil thing it was I conjured up next.”
“You decided to commit the perfect crime. Just like in the movies. You would kill Thelma one cold night, knocking her out, shoving booze down her, leaving her to die in that garage with the car running. Then you would set out to make it seem that she was still alive-during a day when you were very handsomely, unquestionably alibied.”
“You’re not making any sense. The verdict at the inquest was accidental death…”
“Yes. But the time of death is assumed to have been the night before you said you saw her last. Your melodrama was too involved for the simple-minded authorities, who only wanted to hush things up. They went with the more basic, obvious, tidy solution that Thelma died an accidental death early Saturday morning.” I laughed, once. “You were so cute in pursuit of the ‘perfect crime’ you tripped yourself, Eastman.”
“Did I really,” he said dryly. It wasn’t a question.
“Your scenario needed one more rewrite. First you told the cops you slept at the apartment over the cafe Saturday night, bolting the door around midnight, accidentally locking Thelma out. But later you admitted seeing Thelma the next morning, around breakfast time-at the bungalow.”
His smile quivered. “Perhaps I slept at the apartment, and went up for breakfast at the bungalow.”
“I don’t think so. I think you killed her.”
“No charges have been brought against me. And none will.”
I looked at him hard, like a hanging judge passing sentence. “I’m bringing a charge against you now. I’m charging you with murder in the first degree.”
His smile was crinkly; he stared into the redness of his drink. Smoke from his cigarette-in-holder curled upward like a wreath. “Ha. A citizen’s arrest, is it?”
“No. Heller’s law. I’m going to kill you myself.”
He looked at me sharply. “What? Are you mad…”
“Yes, I’m mad. In sense of being angry, that is. Sometime, within the next year, or two, I’m going to kill you. Just how, I’m not just sure. Might be me who does it, might be one of my Chicago pals. Just when, well…perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps a month from tomorrow. Maybe next Christmas. I haven’t decided yet.”
“You can’t be serious…”
“I’m deadly serious. Right now I’m heading home to Chicago, to mull it over. But don’t worry-I’ll be seeing you.”
And I left him there at the bar, the glass of bloody Mary mixing itself in his hand.
Here’s what I did to Warren Eastman: I hired Fred Rubinski to spend two weeks shadowing him. Letting him see he was being tailed by an ugly intimidating-looking bastard, which Fred was. Letting him extrapolate from this that I was, through my surrogate, watching his every move. Making him jump at that shadow, and all the other shadows, too.
Then I pulled Fred off Eastman’s case. Home in Chicago, I slept with my gun under my pillow for a while, in case the director got ambitious. But I didn’t bother him any further.
The word in Hollywood was that Eastman was somehow-no one knew exactly how, but somehow-dirty in the Todd murder. And nobody in town thought it was anything but a murder. Eastman never got another picture. He went from one of the hottest directors in town, to the coldest. As cold as the weekend Thelma Todd died.
The Sidewalk Cafe stopped drawing a monied, celebrity crowd, but it did all right from regular-folks curiosity seekers. Eastman made some dough there, all right; but the casino never happened. A combination of the wrong kind of publicity, and the drifting away of the high-class clientele, must have changed Lucky Luciano’s mind.
Within a year of Thelma Todd’s death, Eastman was committed to a rest home, which is a polite way of saying insane asylum or madhouse. He was in and out of such places for the next four years, and then, one very cold, windy night, he died of a heart attack.
Did I keep my promise? Did I kill him?
I like to think I did, indirectly. I like to think that Thelma Todd got her money’s worth from her chauffeur/bodyguard, who had not been there when she took that last long drive, on the night her sad blue eyes closed forever.
I like to think, in my imperfect way, that I committed the perfect crime.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I have taken liberties in this story based on the probable murder of actress Thelma Todd, changing some names and fictionalizing extensively. A number of books dealing with the death of Thelma Todd were consulted, but I wish in particular to cite Marvin J. Wolf and Katherine Mader, authors of Fallen Angels (1986).