He was getting used to sitting there holding a dead phone.
Ruth buzzed and told him she was putting through a call from “that
Prong
person.” When he opened his mouth to protest, a stranger interrupted him.
“Claudel Blount, Berkeley
Prong.”
The voice was deep but youthful, with a slight drawl. “You’re the man who found the deceased?”
He reminded himself to ask Ruth to brush up on her diversity. This man was no rapper. “Yes, but I—”
He had to put the man on hold to answer the other line. He recognized the light baritone of the evening anchor on KBLA. “Mr. Valentino, we’ve been trying to reach you for days. Would you agree to a live telephone interview about the Oracle Mystery?” His tone capitalized both words.
“I don’t think the police would—hang on.” The intercom was buzzing.
“The
Times,”
she said. “On three.”
“We have a three?” Before she could answer, he asked her to tell the caller he was out. Then he returned to Claudel Blount.
“I just wanted your comment on the fact that a busload of Native Americans here at Berkeley is on its way to Los Angeles to picket the theater,” said the young man from the
Prong.
“Whatever for?”
“Their spokesperson says they’re concerned the remains may be tribal and will end up as an irreverent display in a museum.”
“The bones aren’t Indian!”
“Are you an anthropologist?”
“No, but—” He stopped himself before he could blurt out what Harriet had told him about the body’s dental work and probable ethnic origins. He didn’t want to get her in trouble by going public with details the police might be holding back, or anger Sergeant Clifford into revoking his grace period. “Talk to the police.” He excused himself, cut the connection, and spoke to the TV reporter. “I just own the building. I’m a film archivist. I’ll be happy to go on the air and talk about my work, but I don’t know anything about murder.”
“It
is
murder, then?” The mellow voice was deadly calm.
His heart bumped. That was a bad slip. “I can’t answer that one way or the other. The police don’t confide in me. If you want to ask me about film preservation—”
“Thanks for your time.”
The intercom buzzed.
“I’m out, Ruth,” he said. “Tell them I’m in Tibet, looking for the abominable snowman’s wedding video.”
She left the speaker on. “I’m sorry, Miss Shasta. He’s out.”
He’d cracked her code. He jammed his thumb down on the lighted button before Ruth could hang up. “Hi, Fanta. Sorry about that. I’ve been conducting an impromptu press conference.”
“I’ll call back.”
“No!” He barked it. He apologized again. “People have been hanging up on me all day. I’m starting to feel like a telemarketer. Did you turn up any unexplained disappearances around the time Warren Pegler sold the Oracle?”
“Sure, but I did better than that. I found Pegler.”
“You’re kidding. Alive and kicking?”
“Maybe, if he had legs. But alive for sure.”
**
III
DISH
NIGHT
**
CHAPTER
14
THE PRINTOUT WAS from the
Pittsburgh Dispute
dated Friday, November 30, 1956:
POLICE SEEK PHILANTHROPIST’S SON
Officers with the Missing Persons detail of the Pittsburgh Police Department are searching for the estranged son of a prominent contributor to local charities after the son failed to show up at his mother’s home for a promised Thanksgiving visit Wednesday.
Albert Spinoza, 21, a former assistant projectionist at the Roxy Theater in Pittsburgh, left the home where he lived with his parents, Abraham and Eloise Spinoza, three years ago after an altercation and had not been heard from until last week, when he telephoned his mother to say he was returning for a visit, according to Mrs. Spinoza, who was honored recently with a Citizen of the Year Award for her many large donations to nonprofit foundations in the area. She told officers that the death last December of her husband, Albert’s father, had persuaded him to end their estrangement.
Mrs. Spinoza arrived at Union Station Wednesday morning to meet her son’s train, but he was not aboard. A clerk with the railroad told the
Dispatch
that no record exists of anyone purchasing a ticket anywhere in the United States under the name Albert Spinoza.
Lieutenant Howard Prosper of the Missing Persons detail said that foul play is not suspected at this time. However, he said that because of Mrs. Spinoza’s prominence in the community, every step is being taken to trace her son.
Valentino skimmed the sheet, then read it a second time more closely. He was seated in a blown-out upholstered armchair in the room Fanta shared with a female classmate, absent at the time. Precisely half the room was heaped with discarded clothing, stained pizza boxes, and college texts, while the other half—where Fanta sat in front of her computer—was as neat as if someone had dragged an enormous crumb scraper to the center of the floor. One bed was made, the other invisible under detritus. There was a dormitory smell of pepperoni and neglected laundry, and someone outside the open door to the hall was listening to Eminem.
“What nationality is Spinoza?” he asked.
“Dutch, I think.”
“That’s encouraging. Harriet Johansen said the victim was probably German or Dutch. The age is right.”
“If you’d told me she said that, I might have had this yesterday.”
“Forgive me; I’ve been preoccupied. How the heck did you find this?”
She smiled, all trace of resentment gone. Today she had on cutoff jeans, a denim baseball cap with her ponytail flowing out through the hole above the adjustable band, and a blue T-shirt that read LAWYERS DO IT ON THE BENCH. She was barefoot.
“I’ve got a Word Menu program on the computer. I had it keyword every job connected with a movie theater, on the hunch there was a professional link to the Oracle. I figured if it came up empty I’d just start from scratch.
Projectionist
hit the jackpot.”
“Did you stop there?”
“Duh. No, and I forgive you again for asking. An usher went missing in St. Paul in nineteen sixty and a candy-counter clerk did a Winona Ryder from a theater in New Jersey with the night’s receipts in fifty-four, but they found the usher drowned in the Mississippi a couple days later and arrested the clerk at a bus station. Anyway there were local connections in both cases.”
“We still can’t connect this one to the Oracle. I don’t like the fact his parents seem to have been well-to-do. Harriet said whoever drilled and filled Mr. Bones’s teeth did it on the cheap.”
“So it’s Harriet now.” She grinned.
He sighed. “Yes, Fanta, it’s Harriet. I’m carrying her love child.”
“Whoa!”
He apologized yet again. He seemed to have developed a habit of it with her. “I didn’t get much sleep last night.”
“I thought you looked bummed. Spinoza ran away, don’t forget. Even if they wanted to give him his allowance, they wouldn’t have known where to send it. Maybe he couldn’t stay away from the Milk Duds in the lobby and went to a quack.” She pointed at the printout. “The
Dispatch
ran a follow-up a week later, when the cops called off the search: no leads. I can make you a hard copy of that too, but it was mostly rehash.”
He shook his head. “This would explain why there was nothing in the L.A. papers. If the Pittsburgh police made inquiries there, it wouldn’t have been considered news. I doubt Spinoza’s own hometown sheet would’ve covered it if his mother weren’t a local hero.”
“If there was an inquiry, wouldn’t it be on file with the LAPD?”
“The big-city departments were just introducing computers then; dinosaurs with cooling units that filled rooms. If they bothered to transfer it to the memory bank back then, they wouldn’t waste space on their current hard drive with an obsolete file on a routine request from clear across the country.”
“Then Sergeant Clifford won’t have this.”
“Not unless she did what you did.” He flicked the printout with his hand. “As good citizens, we’re obliged to report this.”
“Morally, yeah. Legally—”
“—it isn’t evidence. That was your argument last time, and look at all the trouble it caused. The sooner she has this information, the sooner the case gets wrapped up and we get to keep
Greed.”
“Unless it’s a wild goose chase, and she wastes a lot of time the film doesn’t have running it out.” She turned her chair, a vinyl swivel patched all over with duct tape, tore a sheet off a pad on the computer station, and turned back. “This is where we’ll find Warren Pegler. We can ask him about Spinoza and save the cops some shoe leather.”
He read the hastily penciled note, recognizing the name of the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills. As a former studio technician during the Golden Age, Pegler would qualify for residency. “You just typed in his name and out came his address?”
“If it were that easy, you
would
have had this yesterday. But the older you get, the wider the paper trail.”
“He must be a hundred.”
“Ninety-eight. I pulled up his birth record. He’s a native, born in San Diego under Teddy Roosevelt. Married and widowed, no children. I found that feature piece you mentioned from when he bought the Oracle, but no documents or ink to back up the claim he lost both legs in an accident at MGM.”
“Hospitals move, their records get lost or go into the incinerator when they collect enough dust. Since the studio settled out of court, it probably kept the story from the papers at the time. After the Taylor and Arbuckle scandals, the last thing the industry needed was another, and back then it had the clout to silence the local press.”
“I was with you right up until Taylor and Arbuckle.”
“Not important. They were too hot to handle in nineteen twenty-two, but now they’re as cold as Albert Spinoza, if that’s him down at the morgue.” He took out his cell and punched buttons. “I’ve got a friend in Admissions at the Country Home. She can tell me if Pegler’s in shape to receive visitors.”
“You memorized the number?”
“Most of my sources have lived there for years. One or two more trips and I can claim it as my voting address.” A receptionist answered. “Kym Trujillo, please,” he said.
“Valentino!” This was a husky female voice, lightly touched by a Hispanic accent. “You ready to check in? You could hold your own in the conversation in the cafeteria.”
“Ask me again next year. I’d like to arrange a visit with one of your residents. Warren Pegler.”
“I know Warren. I admitted him myself. He’s a quiet sort, very popular with this crowd. Hang on.”
He waited three minutes. A picture of the late U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist and a James Dean poster hung on Fanta’s side of the room, opposite a painting of a bloated dead horse on her roommate’s.
Kym came back on, sounding subdued. “I talked to one of his nurses. He’s an Alzheimer’s case, has his good days and his bad. Today’s not so good. He’s usually at his best in the morning.”
He thanked her and said he’d call back then.
“I overheard,” Fanta said. “How many girlfriends do you have?”
He decided not to get mad. “She’s too valuable a contact to risk getting personal with.” He folded the printout, put it in a pocket, and patted it. “A possible victim and a possible witness—or suspect,” he said. “Two for one. Dish night.”
“What’s that?”
“During the Depression, theaters gave away a free piece of china with each ticket, one night a week. The idea was to keep customers coming back to collect the set.”
She shook her head. “I’ll never take it all in. This is worse than studying for the bar.”
“You’re doing fine.” He struggled out of the quagmire of his chair. “That was excellent work. You’ll make a great lawyer.”
“That sounds like the dump speech. I’m going with you tomorrow, aren’t I?”
“How many classes did you miss while you were sitting at that computer?”
“When I want to be hassled I’ll call my father. I’m the one who
found
Pegler.”
“If you went up there with me, all you’d be doing is reading magazines in the visitors’ room. I earn my salary talking to these people. They’re old and frail, their memories come and go, they know their weaknesses and they intimidate easily. Whatever Pegler’s part in this is, he might think he’s being ganged up on by two strangers. If he panics or clams up, we’ll have made the trip for nothing.”
She slumped forward, resting her wrists on her bare muscular thighs. “My nana was in a nursing home, with dementia. She got violent sometimes, and she was the sweetest old gal you ever met.”
“She was the script girl?”
She nodded, staring at the floor,
“It isn’t the dump speech,” he said. “If anything comes of this, I promise you’ll be the first one I call.”
“Hey!” She sat up. “What about getting to see the show?”
“The show?”