The Monet Murders (2 page)

But I didn't smile, because I understood. I'd been there too. Still was, really, though my lost love was alive and married, more or less, and spending her days at the country club and being photographed by the local newspaper. Her being alive and well and living in Ohio made losing her all that much harder to live with, because it held out false hopes that were hard to dismiss. So I understood Manny. It didn't matter what a man looked like on the outside; we were the same sad fools on the inside.

“But that ain't Minnie David,” said Manny Stairs. “
This
is Minnie David.” He showed me another photo in another silver frame, and it looked to me like it was just another shot of that same woman in a slightly different pose.

“I don't understand.”

“Amazing, isn't it? They could be identical twins,” he said. “But they weren't. This one is named Catherine Moore. She's the problem.”

The story went like this—one day about three weeks ago, Manny Stairs had been idly looking out his office window just as some tourists were being ushered through the lot. There were maybe twenty of them, all the predictable kind from somewhere in Middle America, snapping pictures of the exotic sets with Kodak box cameras or looking with wide eyes at the pirates and cowboys and other assorted extras who were lounging outside the commissary, complaining about their agents. But then Manny had noticed one girl who was bringing up the rear, walking by herself, kind of aloof but obviously fascinated by the entire scene. Manny had almost
keeled over from shock, because the girl was a near-perfect duplicate of Minnie David, his dead wife. After he got a grip on himself, he ran downstairs; but by the time he got there, the group had boarded their tour bus and left.

So Manny called studio security and set them on her trail. It wasn't hard to find her again, because the studio had a list of the tourists who came through each day. She was a local, living in a small week-by-week apartment in Santa Monica and working as a secretary in an insurance company. Manny called her up and introduced himself and asked for a date, and she agreed. And from there, things took off in a romantic whirl. Manny suddenly found himself being really happy again, swept away for the first time in the years since his wife had died. They went dancing at the Trocadero (he bought her the evening gowns), had lunch at the Brown Derby, dinner at Romanov's, drinks at the Coconut Grove; and in between he showed her around the studio and they watched movies being made and sets being built, and they walked around the lot, moving easily from the OK Corral to the Great Wall of China and through the canals of Venice that had been drained recently to allow some leaks to be repaired, and it was all a wonderland to her, and he hoped that she was being swept off her feet by the glamour of the place. As they moved between sets and sound stages, he made sure to have a few angry confrontations with nervous directors, just to show her who was running the show. He also gave her a few baubles along the way—nothing that she could pawn and live happily ever after on, but shiny enough to indicate that the gravy train was gathering steam in the station.

And Manny was no fool: he never introduced her to the male stars who might be dumb enough to make a pass at
her. He knew the ones who were capable of that level of clueless narcissism and the others who were aware of who paid the bills. He restricted her access to these latter fellows. He also knew that all this glamour reflected on him and to some extent blinded her, and that if not for that glamour, she would probably not be so interested in a five-foot-two goggle-eyed producer originally from Brooklyn whose accents and inflections had come there via Minsk.

But that was nothing new to him. It had been the same with his first wife, and that had worked out fine until she killed herself, accidentally, most likely. It was almost like she had come back to life, because this girl, Catherine Moore, was just as beautiful and just as dim-witted as Minnie had been. The crowning moment of the relationship had been when Manny took Catherine out to his beach house in Malibu—a house that was only just then being built and was only half finished—and they stayed there through the night and watched the waves rolling up onto the beach and the stars shining and the moon setting, while they talked of this and that and drank chilled champagne and ate cold lobster, until they got down to what Manny described as some really prime schtupping.

This went on for three weeks and Manny was deliriously happy, until one day he got a letter from Catherine saying that her fiancé from St. Paul was coming to town and they were running away to get married. She was sorry, but she felt she owed it to him, her fiancé, because she had given her promise and although she had loved every minute of her time with Manny and especially going to the beach and the schtupping (which she misspelled, not being conversant with Yiddish), she felt it was her duty to marry this other guy, and so,
wishing Manny the best of luck and hoping that he would always think of her fondly and hoping that one day they might even be friends, she told him good-bye.

In short, she gave him the mitten.

“So, what would you like me to do?” I asked when Manny had finished his story. To tell you the truth, I felt a little sorry for him, even though incongruity is the soul of comedy and there was nothing more incongruous than the thought of Manny and this beautiful airhead. He had met this woman in a dream, and he had dreamed it a while, and now had awakened to find that the dream girl had vanished. I understood.

“I want you to find them. Her, I mean. I had the studio security boys look around, but she's left her job and left her apartment, so they drew a blank. Besides, this is in the nature of a confidential assignment. It wouldn't do for the story to get around that I was what you might call obsessed with this broad. The security boys are used to arranging quickies, but it's gotten past the stage where I can use them safely without spreading gossip.”

“What about the cops? The missing persons.”

“They'd say she ain't missing. Just gone. And then they'd give me the horselaugh, and it would spread. I can't afford to get the horselaugh. Not in this town. The horselaugh in this town is like blood in the water.”

“And if I find her, then what?”

“Don't say ‘if.' Say ‘when.'”

“All right—when.”

“I'll worry about that later. Maybe I'll have the guy bumped off.” He grinned as if to indicate he was kidding. But it made me wonder. “And maybe they haven't gone through with it yet. Maybe there's still time to get her to come to her senses.”

It occurred to me that, maybe, that's exactly what had already happened. She'd figured out that being the wife of an insurance salesman in St. Paul, dull as it would ultimately and very quickly become, was better than being schtupped by Manny Stairs. After a very quick while, seeing movie stars in person isn't all that different from seeing regular people on a downtown bus. The glamour wears off pretty fast. It's all imagery, after all, with nothing behind it. And that goes double and triple for producers. Stripped of his Savile Row suit, Manny would probably not be a sight to make the female heart beat faster, except maybe in panic. You wouldn't want to imagine him in his shorts.

“When did you get this letter?”

“Last Friday. So you see, they even might not be married yet.”

“So all you want from me is to find out where she is?”

“More or less. First things first. There might be something else after that. We'll have to play that one by ear. But, you understand, there is some sense of urgency about this.”

Well, so far as I could see, the only urgency was in this guy's imagination. He wanted her back and he wanted her now. I understood what he was thinking. In the long run, it wouldn't matter to him whether she was married or not; divorces were easy to come by in Hollywood. Mexico was only a couple of hours away, and divorces there were cheap and, more importantly, quick. No, he was longing for her, plain and simple. It was eating at him, hurting, and he wanted it to stop. Well, as I said, I understood.

“Can I have this picture?”

“No, but I have another one.” He pulled open his desk drawer and gave me a snapshot of the two of them standing
in front of the Great Wall of China, Hollywood version. He was grinning from ear to ear, and she was staring at the camera like the proverbial deer in the headlights. From her expression, I figured it was a recent photo; she had second thoughts written all over her face. Even so, she did look gorgeous.

My business card said “Bruno Feldspar, Private Detective to the Stars.” The name wasn't my idea. Ethel Welkin had dreamed it up when I was out here last year trying half-heartedly to get into the movies. (I'd met her at the Polo Lounge one day, and we'd struck up an acquaintance. Which, after I gave up on the movies, turned into her giving me a hand in getting set up as a detective.) I say “trying half-heartedly” because it didn't take me long to figure out that the movie business wasn't meant for me, or I for it. I mean, you don't have to go to more than one audition and sit around with fifty other guys trying to look like some version of Douglas Fairbanks and waiting to be called into a room with a couple of gnomes who give you thirty seconds to make an impression to understand that this business is not for grown-ups. I did that once and it was enough. I did end up with one bit part, a wagon driver in
Cimarron
, but that was it for me.

Of course, I liked California and the good weather and all the beautiful women. There's nothing not to like about that. But the business itself seemed not worth doing, like being the head chef for Hostess Twinkies. There were too many people pulling you this way and that and no one really knowing what was going on, because the people who controlled the
money were a bunch of rag merchants from the east, and most of the people who made the films and considered themselves artistes were just guessing about what they were doing and what would appeal to the masses.

So there was a lot of screaming and temper tantrums and silliness and posing, and underneath it all was a vast and abiding insecurity. Almost all of those people were worried that someday they would be found out. Someone would shout from the sidewalk that the emperor was buck naked, and it would all be over. That made them chronically nervous, and worse, and consequently not fit to be around. There might be some places in California where not everyone was on the make, but it wasn't Hollywood. The money was great, of course, if you were a hit, but that was a long shot under the best of circumstances. The few who did make it were pretty much just lucky, and I never liked relying on luck. It came and went without reason. Luck was for gamblers, and most gamblers were losers.

Then there was that little matter of those capers back East last year, before I came out here, and it seemed to me that putting my rugged features on the silver screen was not the smartest thing to do just then. There wasn't much chance that anyone in either Detroit or Youngstown would recognize me or connect me to that hijacking in Detroit or the money-laundering scheme in Youngstown. But even so, I figured it would be the better part of valor to lie a little low for a while and keep in touch with my friend from the FBI.

I explained some of this to Ethel, though not the part about the capers, and she more or less understood. After all, she didn't care whether I was a big star or a carnival barker. To her, movie stars were so many head of mostly beautiful
cattle. She was only interested in one thing; and when I told her I was thinking of becoming a private detective because I had been reading some novels that made it sound at least interesting, she let loose one of her hundred-decibel cackles and said “That's perfect. A private dick. Yum.”

Well, she was not what you'd call a lady.

But she was useful and not even that bad a bed partner, though you wouldn't think it to look at her, dressed. Nothing you would want as an exclusive arrangement, of course, because she more or less resembled a fire hydrant in both length and shape, and her fondness for garlic bagels, pickles, and pastrami was a definite drawback. But she was a jolly soul and made no demands other than the one, which was something quickly taken care of in a couple of afternoons a week—she was generally pretty efficient. The rest of the time, I was on my own.