“Is that where the trust fund came from?”
“Some of it. From a rich aunt. But a lot of it was Nola’s own dough. She was making a thousand a week once she hit it big in pictures. That was serious money back then.”
It still was, for people like Koenig and me. I said, “Then The Jazz Singer came out and the world changed. What happened next?”
“Nola ran off to New York to learn how to talk without a Southern accent. Took her the better part of a year.”
Koenig had worked the same trick, but then she’d had thirty years in little Vesta. She was on her second Old Gold by then, lighting it from the first.
“She came back pregnant. Some Broadway director, she said. Might have been some Broadway cabdriver. She wasn’t far along. She had time to make one last picture.”
“Sunshine,” I said.
It was more information than a flunky trying to trace a next of kin should have had, but I didn’t expect Koenig to call me on it. I’d already asked her questions I shouldn’t have asked and revealed more interest in her past than I should have had. She seemed more than willing to chat, at least about the dead and buried.
“After the movie, we went upstate and hid out until Nola had the kid. That was the start of the bad times.”
“What happened?”
“Nola got the blues. They can hit a woman bad after her kid is born.”
“I know,” I said. “My wife had two.”
“And then Sunshine’s release was delayed. Because it stunk, Nola decided. She got real worked up about it. On top of her depression, it was too much. Next thing I knew, she was dead and I was stuck with the kid.”
Not a very sentimental summing up, but I let that pass. “He’s the one I’m looking for,” I said.
“Well, you can just keep looking.” She ground her cigarette under a dainty heel. “I don’t like your story, the little I’ve heard of it. Nola didn’t leave any property lying around. I knew where every nickel was stashed. Who really sent you?”
Not what business but what person. There was only one who’d be interested, as far as I knew. “It wasn’t Morrie Bender,” I said.
She’d been bracing herself to hear that name, and it still made her jump. She was halfway to the lunch wagon before I could get off the bench.
“I’ll never tell you anything,” she said as she backpedaled. “You or Bender, either. I’ll die first.”
8.
I knew Paddy would be critical of my approach to Rita Koenig. For one thing, I hadn’t once mentioned Grauman’s loss. And I hadn’t tried to bribe her, if you didn’t count the pack of cigarettes. Paddy would have lit her first one with a five-dollar bill just to catch her eye.
But I thought my boss would approve of what I did next, which was to stop at a corner store on the same street as Koenig’s boardinghouse and buy two very cold bottles of Coca-Cola. Armed with those, I ambled to the boardinghouse itself, where Marjorie Main’s understudy was still fighting her losing battle against the weeds.
She turned down the offer of the little bottle opener from my pocketknife and dispatched her bottle’s cap by rapping it expertly against the stone sill of one of her windows. But she did accept my story that I’d gotten turned around and hadn’t been able to find Koenig’s diner. She patiently repeated her instructions and had me parrot them back.
That left us with most of our Cokes to finish. We’d just about killed them when her curiosity finally got the better of her.
“This isn’t some trouble for Rita, is it?” she asked.
“Could be,” I said.
“With the kid? She’s had all the trouble she needs from that skunk. I told Rita him moving down to L.A. was a big mistake.”
“It might be about him.” I took an envelope from my pocket — my phone bill — and pretended to study it. “What’s his name?”
“Peter Thorpe.”
“Nope,” I said. “Different trouble.”
I walked back to the mom-and-pop where I’d left the Corsair and used the store’s phone to call Hollywood Security. The woman who answered, Peggy Maguire, Paddy’s wife and the firm’s secret brain trust, promised she’d have a line on Peter Thorpe by the time I got back.
I called her again from a roadside booth on the coast highway around Castellammare. Her directions took me into the hills above West Hollywood, to a house built out over the edge of a canyon.
A late-model Continental convertible was baking in the driveway, though the house had an attached two-car garage. The Mark III could have belonged to a visitor, of course. Or there could have been two even more valuable cars in the garage. But I was hoping the space was otherwise occupied. I tried the overhead door. It was locked.
I moved from there to the front door. The man who answered it was dressed for cocktails at the yacht club in white flannels and a dark blue blazer. He was blond and slight and nervous.
“Peter Thorpe?” I asked.
He stammered his yes. I showed him my card and asked if he’d be willing to help with an investigation I was conducting. He said yes again, making a real project of it this time. By then I was sure I’d come to the right place. As I backed him into the low-ceilinged living room, I decided to skip the foreplay.
“Those slabs you had lifted from Grauman’s warehouse, got ‘em handy?”
If my question surprised Thorpe, his reply really shocked me. He reached into a side pocket of his blazer and pulled out a gun. Or almost pulled it out. It was a snub-nosed revolver, and its hammer got caught on the corner of the pocket, as hammers will. I had time to grab his wrist and tag him on the chin, more or less simultaneously.
In my haste, I hit him harder than I had to. He would have collapsed into his white buck shoes if I hadn’t had a firm grip on his gun hand. I steered him to an armless sofa and disentangled the revolver, which I put in my own pocket.
Then I hunted around until I found the connecting door to the attached garage. The space beyond the door was empty except for something that looked like a card table draped in canvas. I pulled off the tarp, and there was Nola Nielsen’s concrete autograph, resting on a pair of sawhorses. She’d had tiny feet and the handwriting of a ten-year-old, if you could judge a person’s writing by how they did with a stick in wet cement. I looked everywhere but down in the canyon for the other two slabs. There was no sign of them.
By then, Thorpe was sitting up. “It’s mine,” he said. “I have a right to it.”
His speech was a little thick, but I’d evidently cured his stammer. “Are we talking about the gun or that little souvenir in the garage?”
“She was my mother. I don’t have anything of hers.” He contradicted himself by looking toward a low-slung fireplace. Above it hung an old photograph of a striking young woman with bobbed platinum hair and a smile that curled wickedly at the ends. Nola Nielsen.
“You have her money,” I said, looking around the rest of the room. The bric-a-brac alone was worth as much as my car. “Rita Koenig could use some of your spare change, by the way. Things are a little tight for her just now.”
“She’s gotten all of my mother’s money she’s going to get. She sponged off Nola when she was alive, then she lived in style off my trust fund. Living right on the beach, like she was the movie star.”
“She’s moved inland since,” I said.
“I don’t care where she is. She got a year more on the gravy train than she was entitled to. That’s more charity than she deserves.”
“How did she manage that?”
“By lying to me and everyone else about my age. Her and that shyster trustee. I should have prosecuted them. They controlled the trust fund until I turned twenty-five. That’s how my mother set it up. Rita always told me I was born in 1930. That kept me under her thumb until 1955. But when I finally got to see my mother’s papers, I found my birth certificate. I was really born in 1929. Rita’d cut herself in for an extra year of easy living.”