Then he met Jimmy Powers, and things got worse.
Jimmy Powers had a cottage right down the line from the one Steve had rented. He came rolling up four or five nights a week in a big new Buick convertible. He had a nice collection of Italian silk suits, but when he was at the beach he preferred to lounge around in matching shorts-and-shirts outfits, all of which had his initials monogrammed on the pockets. Often he came for the weekend, hauling a case of champagne in the trunk of the car. On such occasions Jimmy was usually accompanied by a stock-contract girl from the studio where he was employed as a public relations man.
The thing that got Steve down was the fact that Jimmy Powers (Buick, silk suits, monogrammed shirts, champagne and starlets) was only twenty-three.
“How does he do it?” Steve asked himself over and over. “The guy’s got nothing on the ball. He can’t write for sour apples. He’s not even a good front man. It isn’t charm, or personality, or good looks, or anything like that. What’s his secret?”
But Jimmy Powers never talked about his work at the studio; and whenever Steve brought up the subject, he’d switch to another topic. But one evening, when both of them had half a load on, Steve tried again.
“How long you had this job, Jimmy?”
This time it worked.
“Almost three years.”
“You mean you started when you were twenty? Just walked into one of the biggest outfits in the business and snagged a public relations job?”
“That’s right.”
“No previous experience? And right away they let you do promotion puffs on their top stars?”
“That’s the way the ball bounced.”
“I don’t get it.” Steve stared at him. “How does a guy fall into something like that?”
“Oh, it isn’t so much, really,” Jimmy told him. “Only three bills a week.”
“Only three bills.” Steve grunted. “For a kid like you? I’ve never come close to a steady three hundred a week, and I’ve knocked around the Industry for years. What gives, Jimmy? Level with me. Do you know where the body is buried?”
“Something like that,” Jimmy answered. He gave Steve a kind of funny look and changed the subject, fast.
After that evening, Jimmy Powers wasn’t very friendly any more. There were no further invitations to the handsomely furnished cottage. Then for about three weeks Jimmy stopped coming down to the beach altogether. By this time Steve was actually in production, grinding away at a book.
He was hard at it that evening in June when Jimmy Powers knocked on his door.
“Hi, sweetheart,” he said. “Mind if I barge in?”
At first Steve thought Jimmy was drunk, but a double-take convinced him that the guy was just terribly excited. Powers paced up and down, snapping his fingers like a cornball juvenile in an expectant-father routine.
“Still writing the Great American Novel, huh?” Jimmy said. “Come off it, chum. Maybe I can steer you onto some real moola.”
“Like three bills a week?” Steve asked.
“Peanuts. I’m talking about big money. The minute I hit this angle I thought of you.”
“Very kind, I’m sure. What do I have to do — help you stick up the Bank of America?”
Jimmy ignored the gag. “You know where I just come from? M.P.’s office. That’s right — for the last five hours, solid, I’ve been sitting in Mr. Big’s office preaching the Word. Ended up with cart blank to handle the whole deal. Any way I want.”
“What deal?”
Jimmy sat down then, and when he spoke again his voice was softer.
“You know what happened to Betsey Blake?” he asked.
Steve nodded. He knew what had happened to Betsey Blake, all right. Every man, woman, and child in the United States had been bombarded for the past two weeks with news reports about the Betsey Blake tragedy.
It had been one of those freak accidents. Betsey Blake, the Screen’s Blonde Baby, the one and only Miss Mystery, was piloting her speedboat just outside Catalina Channel around twilight on the evening of June 2nd. According to the reports, she was preparing to enter the annual racing event the following Sunday, to try for her fourth straight win. Nobody knew just what had happened because there were no witnesses, but apparently her speedboat rammed into another boat head-on, killing a Mr. Louis Fryer of Pasadena. And herself.
Both boats had gone down immediately, and divers were still making half-hearted efforts to recover them from the deep water outside the choppy channel when, two days later, Fryer’s body was washed up on a lonely beach. The next day Betsey Blake’s corpse made a farewell appearance in the same place.
Betsey’s identification took another few days to be established definitely enough to satisfy authorities, but there was no doubt about it. The Blonde Baby was no more.
It was a big story, because The Blonde Baby had been up there for a long time. The “Miss Mystery” tag had been pinned on her when she first rose to prominence in pictures, and she’d always lived up to it, taking unusual care to conceal her private life, which rumor had it was just one lurid escapade after another.
So the papers had had a field day digging up her past. They managed to ring in the name of virtually every important male star of the past twenty years. Some of the scandal sheets hinted that they could also mention the names of most of the studio set-dressers, gaffers, and truck-drivers over the same period.
“What happened?” Steve asked Powers. “Did your boss have a heart attack?”
Jimmy nodded. “Just about. Her death puts us on a real spot. The Friday before, she’d just finished her part in Splendor. Studio wrapped the picture up, four million bucks’ worth of Technicolor, Super-Cinemascope, three top stars — the works. It’s all finished, no more retakes, the sets are struck, the film is in the can. And then Betsey kicks off.”
“So?”
“So? M.P. is sitting there with a very cold turkey. Sure, if he could push Splendor out to the exhibitors right away, maybe he could capitalize on the headlines a little. But this is our biggest picture for the year. We already set it up for late Fall release, around November, to catch the holiday trade and make a bid for the Awards. You begin to see the grief? Comes November, and Betsey Blake will be dead six months. By that time all the excitement is over. Who’s going to plunk down a dollar-twenty to see somebody who’s putting out free lunch to the worms? M.P. has to gross at least five million to break even. How’s he going to do it? So for the past two weeks he’s been nursing a real headache. Takes a lot of aspirin to cure a headache like that.”
“But where do you come in?”
“With the U.S. Marines,” Jimmy said. “Here M.P. and all the big wheels have been batting their brains out trying to come up with an angle — naturally, they had to junk the whole publicity campaign — and all they’ve got for their pains is sweat. Well, I got busy, and today I walked into M.P.’s office and laid five million potatoes right in his lap — maybe seven or eight.”
“You found a solution?” Steve asked.
“Damned right I found a solution! It was sitting there staring them in the face all the time. I say it — right on M.P.’s wall. I walked over and pointed to the picture. That’s all, brother.”
“Picture on the wall?” Steve said. “Whose picture?”
Jimmy made with the dramatic pause.
“Valentino.”
“Come again?”
“Rudolph Valentino, You’ve heard of him?”