“Yes?”
“Are you Mrs. Sommer?” I asked, channeling my inner Jack Webb.
“I’m Florence Sommer…” she began with no little caution.
“My name is Graham Woodard,” I told her. “I work with the Silent Film Appreciation Society?” Came off as a question. Not very firm.
“Oh, Leslie and Barbara,” Mrs. Sommer said. “Nice ladies. Well, come on in. Hope you like cats!”
Jake and I exchanged glances and he shrugged. We went on in. It smelled like cat shit and ammonia, a combination that wrestled my nostrils and won in nothing flat. Florence Sommer tottered from the door to the nearby kitchenette, where she hovered over the range.
“Tea?” she squawked. She sounded like Louis Armstrong’s little sister. When she fired up a filterless Camel, I could see why.
“You got any beer?” Jake said.
I jabbed him in the ribs with my elbow. “Tea is fine, thank you.”
He hissed in my ear: “I’m fucking sick of tea, man.”
I jabbed him again. His eyes watered and he smiled nicely at the old lady.
“I’m sorry to tell you I haven’t gone back through my father’s things since I last talked to Leslie,” she said, setting the kettle on the burner. “I’m sure she’s getting impatient, and I wouldn’t blame her one bit. Are you boys her enforcers?”
She tittered. It was like a goose choking to death.
“Ha, no,” I deflected. We hadn’t discussed whether to tell Mrs. Sommer that Leslie was dead, primarily because it hadn’t occurred to me whether we should. I was too preoccupied with thoughts of my ex-wife, which led me directly to re-experiencing all the anger I had ever had about her. Now I was in the mix and had to make the call, and fast. “Ma’am, do you mind if we sit down at the table for a moment?”
A dark look overcame her jowly face and Mrs. Sommer nodded, gesturing for us to sit down first. The table stood just to the side of the half-kitchen, the top cluttered and stacked high with magazines, unopened mail, and cans of cat food. When she sat across from us, she laced her fingers as a fat orange cat leapt up on the table in front of her. I was startled, but she just petted the animal and waited for me to begin.
“I’m afraid I have some ugly news,” I said, wincing at the banality of my wording. “Ms. Wheeler has, well — she’s passed away.”
“Oh, no,” she said, bunching her eyebrows and looking down at the cat.
Jake cleared his throat.
“It’s a little more serious than that,” he said.
I said, “Jake…”
“Look, Graham — this situation is fu — it’s dire, man. I mean, isn’t it? Now that we’re in it?”
“We’re not in it. I’m in it. You’re just here.”
My heart was starting to pound in my chest. That anger I was harboring toward my missing ex was finding a new target in Jake. As for poor Florence Sommer, her eyes were getting glassy wet and her mouth hanging open, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I dropped it.
“Leslie Wheeler was killed yesterday,” I said. I said it like we were talking about someone neither of us knew, a third-rate celebrity we vaguely remembered. Florence Sommer erupted into tears.
“Oh God, oh my God,” she sobbed. The kettle screeched. I looked to Jake, and he rushed over to take care of it. “I barely knew her, but God. God. What happened?”
Jake was pouring hot water, being domestic. I could have laughed otherwise.
“It’s all pretty hazy right now, but it certainly looks like it has everything to do with the film,” I said.
“My father’s movie? Angel of the Abyss?”
“That’s the one, yes.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, her voice even more gravelly, if such was possible.
She tamped her smoke out in an empty can of cat chow and immediately fired up another. I pulled the pack from my pocket, shook it and asked, “Do you mind?”
“No, no — go ahead. Smoke up a storm. God’s sake.”
I lit up. Filtered, which made me feel like second fiddle to her hardcore habits.
“I take it the police haven’t come around to talk to you?” I asked her.
“No, nobody. This is news to me. Dreadful news. I’m so sorry about Leslie, but how in the world could this possibly have anything to do with that old movie?”
I tightened my mouth, half-amazed at the cops’ ineffectiveness — we’d gotten to Florence Sommer before they did? — and half completely expecting it. Overworked and understaffed, maybe. Hell, it wasn’t like they didn’t have other murders to contend with. This was Los Angeles, after all.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Whatever it is, whoever it is, they’re taking it seriously enough to have killed one person already and tried to add me to the list.”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“Everything makes sense, even if you don’t quite get it yet,” Jake said, stepping slowly over with two steaming cups. I was impressed with his Zen, even if it was bullshit.
“I think what he means is that there’s an answer to all of this, we’re just in the dark now.”
“It’s crazy,” she said, accepting her cup from Jake with a small smile. “I’ve found loads of odds and ends from Dad’s estate, called all over the city to find people to deal with them. That movie was just one of them — I didn’t even know what it was until I looked it up.”
“Nobody knowing what it is seems to be a status quo somebody wants to maintain,” I said.
“But it’s just an old movie,” she muttered. It was getting to be a song I was tired of hearing despite the truth in it.
“It’s got to be more than that, given what’s been happening. I don’t know if you read anything about Grace Baron when you looked the picture up, but she disappeared shortly after the movie was made. She was declared legally dead a little while after that.”
“What are we talking about here?” she asked me. “The 1920s?”
I nodded. The cat purred loudly.
“Crazy,” she said again. Like I didn’t know.
“Mrs. Sommer, do you think we could have a look at your father’s things?”
“The estate?” she said, eager to be sure we were all on the same page as to the definition of the collection.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I don’t keep that stuff here, I haven’t got the room. There’s a storage unit I rent, in North Hollywood. That’s where it all is.”
“I’d really like to go check it out,” I said. “If you’re willing to do that.”
“Hell, honey,” she said, shaking her head. “Truth is, it’s all junk. Most of it, anyway. Half of it’s broken and most of the rest worthless to begin with. I was only reminiscing, going through some of it, when I chanced upon that old film can. Far as I’m concerned, you can borrow the key.”
Jake said, “That would be very kind.” I was surprised by his manners.
Mrs. Sommer rose from her chair, grunting a little, and wobbled back into the short hall by the front door where she rooted through a drawer. The fat orange cat followed, slaloming her legs, and was joined by another cat, this one black and thin. When she came back, she was dangling a bronze key by a plastic fob. She put it in my palm and I looked at the fob. It said JUNIOR’S STORAGE, NORTH HOLLYWOOD. The street address and phone number were printed in gold underneath.
“Thank you.”
“I’d go with you, but to be honest, I don’t really know you boys, do I?” said the lady who let us into her house and gave me a key to her dead father’s personal possessions. I shrugged and forced a smile.