The Ronald Reagan Murder Case
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The Ronald Reagan Murder Case: A George Tirebiter Mystery
© 2015 David Ossman. All Rights Reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopying or recording, except for the inclusion in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This version of the book may be slightly abridged from the print version.
Published in the USA by:
BearManor Media
PO Box 71426
Albany, Georgia 31708
www.bearmanormedia.com
ISBN 978-1-59393-053-0
Cover Design by Valerie Thompson.
eBook construction by Brian Pearce | Red Jacket Press.
Table of Contents
SATURDAY, JANUARY 13, 1945
Chapter 1: A Day at The Beach
Chapter 2: I’ll Take Mulholland
SUNDAY, JANUARY 14
Chapter 3: Meet Meat Musso’s
Chapter 4: Mr. Pickwick’s Paradise
Chapter 5: The Extra Girl
Chapter 6: The Tam, The Place & The Wife
MONDAY, JANUARY 15
Chapter 7: Radio Parade
Chapter 8: Backlot to Danger
Chapter 9: Melody For Three
TUESDAY, JANUARY 16
Chapter 10: On The Strip
Chapter 11: Crossroads
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 17
Chapter 12: Fannies by Gaslight
Chapter 13: Destiny Rides Again
THURSDAY, JANUARY 18
Chapter 14: Dress To Kill
Chapter 15: Home of The Stars
FRIDAY, JANUARY 19
Chapter 16: The Big Broadcast
SATURDAY, JANUARY 20
Chapter 17: Remember Pearl?
Chapter 18: Not So Grand Hotel
Chapter 19: Dinner I’ll Eat
SUNDAY, JANUARY 21
Chapter 20: That’s Entertainment!
Chapter 21: Once in a Blue Movie
MONDAY, JANUARY 22
Chapter 22: 4th and Paranoid
Chapter 23: The World of The Future
TUESDAY, JANUARY 23
Chapter 24: Love Nest
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 24
Chapter 25: The Scene of The Crime
THURSDAY, JANUARY 25
Chapter 26: The Hideout
Chapter 27: Drawing Room Comedy
FRIDAY, JANUARY 26
Chapter 28: The Chase, Pt. 1
Chapter 29: Poppy Blossoms
Chapter 30: The Chase, Pt. 2
Chapter 31: Radio Daze of 1945
SATURDAY, JANUARY 27
Chapter 32: Post-Mortem for Two
Afterwards
The Legends of Filmland depicted in this work of fiction are almost entirely fictional themselves, and their fictional activities herein are meant only to entertain.
The author gratefully acknowledges untold contributions to the Legend of George Tirebiter made over the years by PHIL AUSTIN, PETER BERGMAN and PHIL PROCTOR, his companions in THE FIRESIGN THEATRE.
For My Wife Judith Walcutt
Yes I Will Yes
Chapter 1
A Day at The Beach
You can still spit on Gus Lemming’s enamel-pink beach hacienda if you lean far enough over the edge of the Santa Monica Palisades. I spit at it frequently in the early Forties, when Gus was my boss at Paranoid Pictures. He was cruder than the four Warner Bros. put together, more powerful than a speeding Louis B. Mayer, and he owned me and loaned me for seven long years. In January of 1945, I still had three years to go. It seemed like a life sentence.
This particular Saturday, Gus was hosting a wrap-party for Pardon My Pinup, a sarong-filled B-programmer destined to be shown on oil-stained sheets hung between battered palm trees “somewhere in the South Pacific.” I had been the unlucky director, my cast was strictly 4F, but we got through it on schedule in spite of Buster Bailey’s Big Band collapsing with stomach flu, down to the last trombone. Buster thought it was tainted oysters from a wedding party at the Coconut Grove.
I had slept late after the usual excitement of my Friday night radio show, and Wilshire was unusually slow with beach traffic, so it was the middle of the afternoon as I drove down the Incline, which connects the middle-class city dwellers of Santa Monica to the millionaires whose homes stretch along the sand, and headed north on the Pacific Coast Highway. My radio was tuned to an Eddie Condon jazz concert, and my mind was empty of business, at least for a day.
You wouldn’t have known there was a war going on only a few thousand miles west. Catalina Island loomed bluely on the horizon in the balmy winter sunshine, still the land of the free and the Home of the Cubs. The glittering Santa Monica shore had no webs of barbed wire, only high fences separating the recently rich from each other and from the mostly fatherless families gathered around their blankets and portable radios.
The American Way, for which we had been hard at war for three years, assured that everyone who tanned tanned equally, at least in California.
Gus’s hacienda was only about a mile north of the Incline, and he had a couple of Samo High-school boys parking cars for his guests. I gave up my midnight-blue ’39 Mercury coupe to one of them, along with a quarter.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Tirebiter. Thank you, sir. Say, I really liked your show last night. You sure made mincemeat out of that pickled Shakespearean ham!”
I was still trying to sort out the kid’s menu as he peeled away into traffic. Since I wasn’t going to get any new tires for the duration, I wondered how many miles he’d just left on the asphalt in front of me.
The wrought-iron gate stood open under a mission-style arch dripping with orange bougainvillea. The delirious combination of hot orange and shocking pink wouldn’t be popular for another twenty years or so, but it reminded Adrian D’Excesse, a Metro set-designer who also did producers’ houses, of Summer in Sorrento, for which he had almost been given an Oscar. Beyond the gate, I could see a sapphire pool surrounded by famous faces and infamous bodies, a long bar with white-coated Filipino waiters doing chilly things with good gin, and Gus himself, holding court with his stooges — the Three you know about and half-adozen others who ran Paranoid Pictures for him.
“Hiya, Georgie!”
Mae West sidled up alongside me.
“Is that a microphone in your pocket, Georgie, or are you just glad to see me?”
I gave Mae a twirl — Gus’s big console phonograph was playing Cugat’s new one, “The Walter Winchell Rumba,” and passed her on with an exchange of sexy winks, to Jerry Colonna.
“I’m daring Dali to a duel, George,” he stage-whispered. “Lip fur at twenty paces!”
Salvador Dali made a surreal pair with Alfred Hitchcock at the bar. The painter of soft women and soft watches was in town to dream up some nightmares for Spellbound, and his oiled mustachios vibrated like rhinoceros horns in the brilliant flashes of lightning from the pool.
“You can’t win unless you melt his wax, Jerry,” I said, taking Mae back for a spin that came so close to the edge of the deck that Chico Marx nearly pulled us into the deep end.
Mae said, “I like my lip fur shaved close and kissable.” She spun back to Jerry and I was on my way to join Jack Houseman at the bar when Chico splashed past me out of the pool and settled into a deck chair next to Lemming.
“Hey, Gussa, baby!”
Gus loved it when Chico used his sliced salami dialect. “Wha’chu wanta me, Chic’?”
“Is ita true whata t
hey say? You t’ought Georgie Tirebiter was Charlie McCarthy when he comina to see you on hisa firs’ day ata Paranoid? Atsa gooda joke, eh, boss?”
“Ha!” Gus tried to laugh around his seven-inch Romeo y Julieta cigar. “George walks inta my office and I say, ‘You the new office boy? Jeeze, didn’t they tell ya I wanted an egg salad an’ a lemon Coke for crapsake?’ Right, George?”
“Right, Gus.”
“An’ the wastebasket is full again, I told him.”
“And I said, ‘I’m Georgie Tirebiter, Mr. Lemming. You hired me. From radio, remember?’ ”
“Yeah! An’ I sez, ‘You? I tell ’em to get me the new Awsome Welles, they send me the old Henry Aldrich!’ ”
The flacks and stooges laughed. Why not? I’d set him up for the punch line. My topper’s timing was a steal from Jack Benny:
“So, I emptied the wastebasket…”
There’s nothing like leaving on a good laugh, and I did, ending up clinking a cheery gin and tonic against Houseman’s balefully pale Miller High Life. He had only recently returned from the Overseas Radio Propaganda Service and was producing an Alan Ladd quickie.
“How’s the new picture coming, Jack?”
“You might like to meet the writer, before I kill him.”
Houseman gestured toward a spectacled gent in a natty window-pane-plaid sport coat standing off to one side of the patio, puffing on a pipe and gazing toward the waves, where a trio of starlets were giggling at the edge of the chilly surf.
“That’s Raymond Chandler?” I said. “The Big Sleep? Lady In the Lake? Not exactly Bogie, is he?”
“It’s a matter of days before we lose our star, Tirebiter, the script’s not finished, and the God-damn picture is half-shot…”
“So’s Chandler, by the look of him.”
Jack and I crossed to the patio wall and I was introduced. The famous writer of hard-boiled detective stories shook my hand with his small, cold cat’s paw and murmured a greeting.
“Tirebiter…”
“I enjoyed The Lady In The Lake very much, Mr. Chandler. It ought to make a great film.”
“Metro thinks so. I’m supposed to get to work on it as soon as Blue Dahlia is done.” He took a gulp of his drink. “You don’t think a wounded war vet with a steel plate in his skull could murder his army buddy’s wife do you, Tirebiter?”
“Not in a musical.”
Chandler located my eyes — with some difficulty, I thought — and seemed to be debating whether to take me seriously.
“There’s an idea, Ray,” said Houseman. “What do you think of my engaging Tirebiter here for a few rewrites? He could elbow all that dialogue aside, subvert the audience’s attention with a hot musical number, and afterwards no one would remember who had done what to whom.”
Chandler pursed his lips and returned his gaze to the starlets.
“Why don’ t you put Marlowe on the case, Mr. Chandler?”
“He’s been acting up on me. Doesn’t like plots. Can’t focus on the plots.”
“Alan Ladd’s due at Fort Dix in two weeks, Ray.”
“To hell with plots.”
Houseman shrugged at me behind Chandler’s back and rolled his eyes.
Chandler’s voice was barely audible, what with the waves, the girls, and the party music. “I think I’ll have to get drunk, John. I’ll figure it out if I’m drunk.”
“The studio won’t understand that, Ray.”
“I think I’ll start now.” He held out his paw. “Good to meet you Typewriter…”
“Tirebiter,” I said.
“Did somebody say something about another bourbon?”
He drained his glass and picked his way carefully across the dance floor, trailing pipe smoke. It smelled like Three Nuns to me. The record player paused between platters, leaving him alone, blinking in the sunlight. The music started again. It was “Brazil,” a big hit. The dancers closed ranks as he reached the bar and I lost sight of him — for good as it turned out.
“A chill wind seems to follow him around, poor fellow.” Jack shivered. “Well, I’m going to walk home while the sun’s still up.”
“I’ll stroll along with you, if you don’t mind company.”
“Absolutely not. You can tell me about this next feature Lemming’s given you. Three WACS in a Jeep?”
We walked on up the beach toward Malibu.
“There’s been a title change. First WAC In Tokyo. If you can believe it, Gus wants me to work in a dance number for Charles Laughton.”
“He can do it, but can you?”
“I’ve got our dance director working on a parody of this Captain Kidd picture he’s doing next. Sort of cross it with ‘Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.’ We’ll back him up with a lot of dancing seamen.”
“He’ll like that.”
The Bay curves West, backed by a craggy line of mountain ridges. To the East, where the summits are higher, some snow glinted under the darkening blue of Southern California’s winter sky. It certainly was an improvement on Elk Forest, Illinois, where I had lived nearly twenty of my twenty-five years. Houseman and I walked along in silence, the steady crash of the surf broken only by screams for help.
“Are those screams for help?”
“I thought I was having a Surrealist epiphany.”
Off to our left we could see a figure in swim trunks standing in the shallow surf, waving.
“Good God, it looks like Ron Reagan.”
“Who’s that?” asked Jack, picking up his pace across the sand.
“Contract player at Warners — ‘Do it for the Gipper,’ remember? He’s been in the Army recently.”
“All-American Boy. What’s he got there?”
We were running now, toward Ron, whose wife Jane Wyman had been in Smart Blonde with my wife Lillie, and whom we’d entertained on a couple of occasions. He’d always seemed to me a level-headed guy and we could easily trade stories back and forth about radio in the Midwest in the Thirties.
A large red and yellow object was washing sluggishly in and out of the waves. Ron was tugging at it with one hand and waving at us with the other.
“Help! That you, Tirebiter? Help, for heaven’s sake!”
“What have you found, Ron?” I kicked off my loafers and waded in to help beach the thing.
“It’s a duck! It’s a dead duck!”
“A dead duck? On Malibu Beach?” Houseman stayed above the water line and clucked his tongue. “Bad for property values, I should think.”
“Never happens at Arthur Treacher’s parties,” I riposted, helping to drag the monstrous, feathered thing out of the water and onto a pile of kelp. A cloud of sand fleas rose like a plague.
“Golly!” Ron Reagan stared down at the soggy mass. “It’s a duck, but it’s not a whole duck. It’s just the top half.”
Dexter D. Duck, Paranoid’s trademark cartoon cross between Daffy and Donald, stared up at us from the kelp. The fleas settled back down on its bright yellow beak. A pair of naked human legs stuck limply out from the bottom of the costume.
“There’s a guy inside! Come on, fellas!”
Ron pulled the legs and I pulled the head and the head came away in sodden cardboard chunks. What we saw was so unexpected, Houseman gave a little screech. It was a body, of course.
“It’s a dead guy!” yelled Ron. “But, jeepers! The dead guy is me!”
He was right. Tanned, handsome and possessed of a small black hole right through the heart of his white bathing togs, Ronald Reagan lay at our feet, his skin beginning to pucker.
Chapter 2
I’ll Take Mulholland
The three of us gazed down at Reagan’s face. Had I been writing one of the popular radio melodramas of the day, I would have cued a portentous musical sting from the orchestra and a woman’s hysterical scream from the sound man. Fade to black. Commercial.
However much the occasion demanded the disembodied elegances of my beloved medium, they remained uncued. Instead, the actual Ron Reagan (or perhaps not
— I had no way of knowing at the time) kicked a rubbery frond of seaweed across the dead Ronnie’s face.
“Looks like the duck forgot to duck. This is a whole new seventh inning.” Ron gestured at Houseman. “Who’s that fella?”
I made the briefest introduction possible under the circumstances. Jack closed his mouth before opening it again to say, “Pleased to meet — ah — both of you, Reagan.”
“Ron,” I said. “We’re going to have to call the Sheriff. There’s a party at Gus Lemming’s place. I’ll go back and use the phone there…”
“No, no Sheriff! And keep everybody away. Call PAcific 1-9-4-4. Tell whoever answers to get Col. Casey out here with a squad of MPs. This duck is a military secret, Tirebiter. The outcome of the war may depend on keeping him absolutely quiet.”
“He looks quiet to me,” murmured Houseman. Reagan assumed the pose of calm authority he would call upon many times in the future. “Wellp, I’ll stand guard until the troops arrive.”
All I knew then about Ron’s military service was that he was stationed at the old Hal Roach studios in Culver City, converted for use by the Army to make training films. Hollywood gagsters called it “Fort Whacky,” but most of us, more respectfully, knew it as Fort Roach. (My bad eyes, allergy to feathers, and status as the sole support of my elderly mother had kept me out of the service, except to serve up our boys and gals a series of such harmless movie entertainments as were ordered of me by the studio, and to keep the homefront laughing with my “Hollywood Madhouse” radio variety show.)
Reagan, who had come out to the Coast from radio a few years before me, was employed by Uncle Sam as a film narrator, but, naturally I had never seen any of his finer efforts — “Rear Gunner,” “For God and Country,” and “Mustangs Over Yokohama.”