The Ronald Reagan Murder Case Read online

  It was my habit in the Forties to take a stroll down the boulevard after Sunday lunch, browse the international newsstand on Las Palmas, and I often dropped in at Pickwick to find a new page-turner to occupy me in the dead spots of my working day. The bookshelves rose high enough to require a ladder, virtually every volume in print was available and there were always bargains housed higgledy-piggledy on tables in the back, at the top of a single flight of creaky wooden stairs. The front door even had a little bell which tinkled sweetly as I entered. The real world was once rich with radio sound effects.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Tirebiter. Can I help you with something?” “Thanks, Grace. Yes. I thought I might pick up a couple of new mysteries to read on the set.”

  “Certainly. Dorothy B. Hughes? Cornell Woolrich? Of course we have all the latest Pocket Books if you’d prefer Christie or Gardner.”

  “Someone suggested a title to me — I don’t know the author. It’s called “Nightmare in Black Glass.”

  “Oh, yes. S.S. Van Dyke. Halfway up the stairs, to your right, bottom shelf. Alphabetical by author.”

  “Thank you, Grace.”

  I squandered a little time looking vaguely at Travel, Poetry and First Editions, so as not to appear too anxious. There was a large display of paper-backs with the usual garishly graphic covers, bannered “Send A Book Overseas.” The most popular titles seemed to be “The Pocket Book of Boners,” “See Here, Private Hargrove,” and “The Case of the Curious Bride.” “The Thin Man” and Ogden Nash were also in evidence.

  Van Dyke was near the end of the mystery section. I crouched and ran my fingers along the backs. There it was! Only one title, and only one copy. I made sure I was unobserved, slipped the book out and stared at the dustcover. The red-haired girl in the clutches of the shrouded skeleton was screaming horribly. She seemed unaware that her dress was being kept up only by prominent features of her remarkable anatomy. I whistled and, as if summoned, a folded slip of paper fell from inside the pages and fluttered to the floor, like a baby robin on its first flight from the nest. I caught hold of it softly, rose and ambled nonchalantly to the back of the aisle, pretending to admire the variety of Hobbies available to those with something called “free time.”

  I opened the paper, releasing a vaporous whiff of ripe gardenias which swarmed over me like white satin gloves on the dance floor of a Havana nightclub. The note was written in soft, inky curves, laid out as suggestively as a black negligee on cream-colored sheets. The stationary was monogrammed S.S. V. Her voice seemed to whisper to me:

  “Dearest George. Thank goodness you came! I have good reason to believe you are in great danger. We are both being followed, and I can’t risk being seen with you…”

  How did she know I was being followed? Was I being followed?

  “I’ll be in the fifth row of Grauman’s Chinese for the five o’clock show on Wednesday. Meet me in the dark and we’ll talk. Come alone, please. Please!”

  It was signed “Stella Sue.”

  The tango music and the flowery scent faded away. I almost expected the notepaper to flash into flame and burn to ash between my fingers, but it didn’t. Soft and vulnerable, it rested quietly in my hand. I slipped it into my inside coat pocket and went back downstairs with the book.

  “Oh, I’m sure you’ll enjoy that, Mr. Tirebiter. His last one was thrilling — “The Groom Wore Red.”

  “His?”

  “Sure. S.S. Van Dyke.” Grace flipped open the back cover and showed me the author’s photograph. “Nice looking, if you like the Sunny Tufts type. See?” She indicated the short biography below the photograph. “He works in a defense plant on the graveyard shift and writes murders during the day.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “I’m sure it’s possible, Mr. Tirebiter. That’ll be $2.95, plus 3 cents tax. Two-dollars and ninety-eight cents total. Out of five…”

  She rang up the sale, gave me my change and slipped the book into a brown bag with jolly Mr. Pickwick’s picture on it.

  It gave me a creepy feeling to think that I was being watched, or followed. I walked back to the lot where I had left my borrowed Dodge, and decided on a cup of coffee at one of the local drive-ins. If somebody suspicious pulled in, I could keep an eye on him. Or her. Also, I could see if “Nightmare in Black Glass” contained any clues. Clues about what? Anything. I was a confused young man.

  Chapter 5

  The Extra Girl

  Herbert’s was a circular building set in the midst of an asphalted corner lot near Hollywood High. The lower part was all plate glass and glass brick, topped by a sort of sombrero roof fringed with spotlights and a tall, curvaceous marquee with H-E-R-B-E-R-T-S spelled out in flashing neon letters. A juke-box, piped out to the car-park through bullhorn speakers, played “I’ll Be Seeing You.”

  The car-hops wore spotless white bolero jackets and white slacks with a maroon stripe up the side. They also wore roller skates. Some of them were better skaters than others. There was a minor crunch as my waitress rolled into the door. She saved her tray from flying through the window by setting it on the roof of the sedan.

  “Can you roll your window a little way up, please?”

  “Sure.”

  She fastened the tray in place. It had a heavy china mug, a cloth napkin, stainless steel spoon, two little pitchers of cream and a matching bowl of individually wrapped sugar cubes. You got a lot of service for a dime in 1945.

  “Mr. Tirebiter?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Gosh, I thought it was you when you ordered your java? I asked Myrna to look at you, ‘cause she was on the set with me? And she said it was you okay and to go ahead and say hello and maybe you wouldn’t mind? Do you mind?” “No, that’s all right. Can I give you an autograph for your little brother or something?”

  “Oh, no!” She laughed with her mouth closed and covered it with her hand. She had nice hands and good fingernails painted a red that Uncle Joe Stalin might consider a little gaudy for May Day. She looked around and stuck her head conspiratorially into the car window.

  “Can I talk to you, Mr. Tirebiter? I’m on my break in ten minutes.”

  “Do I know you?”

  “Well, sure. My name is Melody Jakes? That’s my screen extras name?” She ended most of her sentences with a question mark, which I identified with being from Texas. “I guess you don’t remember me, but I’m in that new picture of yours? Pardon My Sarong? I’m an extra nurse? In a crowd scene? I was sort of kneeling right near Dennis O’Keefe? Oops! I gotta go, Mr. Tirebiter, but I’ll be back in ten.”

  Melody slipped her head out, barely missed knocking over my coffee cup with her pointy little chin, and skated away toward a beige Pontiac. There were not a lot of cars pulled in around the restaurant. A couple of teenagers in jalopies, a nice ’37 Ford convertible a few spaces away with a uniformed guy and his date, eating hamburgers and guzzling a single strawberry malt out of separate straws. As I put cream in my coffee an early ’30s Hudson Terraplane pulled in almost out of sight on the far side of the building. I opened my new book.

  I don’t usually go in for the prep-school sports and steam-room vulgarity of the Athletic Club, (it began), but business is business and mine is usually murder. I dressed for the occasion in my new suit, the one with the barely visible burgundy check which matched the silk display handkerchief. My shirt was the pale blue of a new day in high mountain air and I’d got my shoes shined by the hunch-backed Negro boy in the Parker House lobby. My appointment with Wallace Colby was at 3 p.m.

  So far, so good. A little preoccupied with clothes, but that was understandable for a woman writer.

  Colby is already the publisher of a big Los Angeles newspaper, but he has designs on the Mayor’s job. I knew his face from the grainy photograph that headed his weekly column, “The Hot Seat,” and his politics from the column itself. In it, he spilled dirty secrets, made friends and taunted enemies, and flattered himself by dropping the names of show-business types.
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  People drove in next to me on the passenger side. It was an older couple in a De Soto with a badly dented left rear fender and bald tires. I sipped some coffee and turned the page.

  That was enough to make me dislike him, but not enough to turn down a job. When Lopez called to say he’d recommended me as hired protection for two days in Coronado I could hear my creditors sigh. I was supposed to pick Colby up at the Athletic Club and drive his Caddy south. It wasn’t the dumbest thing I ever did, not by a good six inches…

  My passenger side door opened with a throaty squeak. I jumped, and spilled a couple of drops of coffee on the upholstery. Melody got in, her skates clunking heavily on the floorboards. The juke-box was playing “It Had To Be You.”

  “Gee, I never thought a big movie director and radio star would drive a car like this?”

  “My other car smells like a swimming pool.”

  “Really? Wow! Swimming pool? I wish I even had a car, let alone one that smells like a swimming pool! Holy cow! Excuse my skates, but I just work here as a hop to make ends meet, you know? And sometimes I fill in over at Western Costume, because I did costumes for that dumb play “Our Town?” At my High School? That was Boone High in Plano, Texas? Before I moved here? I mean my family moved here, ‘cause my daddy does sheet metal work and he’s indispensable for the war effort? Anyway, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about!”

  “The war effort? Or ‘Our Town’?”

  “Unh uh. Western Costume. I cut your picture out of the paper, see?”

  She took a square of newspaper out of her bolero pocket, smoothed it out and handed it to me. The headline read, ‘Unidentified Duck Found on Beach,” and there was a gruesome photo of two attendants shoving a stretcher into an ambulance, human legs dangling from the feathery cardboard corpse.

  “This isn’t my picture.”

  “But the story says you were there? You were one of ‘filmland’s famous’ who found it? Here’s your picture, here.”

  She turned the paper over. It was me all right, standing beside my car like a deep-sea fisherman with a record-breaking tuna. ‘Radio Star Drops in Unexpectedly on Film Queen.’ Not reading the L.A. tabloids saved my ego a certain amount of heart-break, but I’d obviously missed what my writers had chuckled over that morning.

  “That’s me, I’m sorry to say. But I’m not sure my little accident has anything to do with the unidentified duck.”

  “Well, reet! But I know who the duck is, I mean I think I do, because like I said, I work these two or three evenings a week at Western? And last Monday — I know it was Monday, because the Teen Canteen is open Tuesday through Saturday, and when I’m between extra jobs, I have an act I do there with another girl? We’re called the Four Bobby Soxers, which is a joke nobody seems to get, but it’s because we have four feet, reet? We do some Andrews Sisters and Myrna does a magic trick which works sometimes?”

  I felt like I had run a mile along the beach wearing Frankenstein’s Monster’s boots.

  “Ah…Western Costume?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you! Last Monday I rented out a Dexter D. Duck costume and it never came back yet! Well, I didn’t rent it out exactly, but I went back in the racks and found it for Irv, who was actually doing the renting out, physically, if you know what I mean — except here’s the weird thing — Irv says to this guy, ‘So, are you in a movie or what?’ You know, making gab? And the guy says, ‘Surprise party.’ And Irv says — he’s such a dumbo — ‘Yeah, too early for Halloween,’ and so the guy says ‘Not in Hollywood,’ and he picks up the package with the duck suit and walks out the door and maybe he’s the unidentified man you found on the beach! God! Was it horrible?”

  “No, it was very peaceful, actually, except for a chord of dramatic music and a woman’s scream that seemed to come out of nowhere. But I don’t see what I can do…”

  “Well, his name and address are on the receipt and…”

  “Ah, Miss…”

  “Jakes? Melody Jakes? It’s my screen extras name?

  “Well, why don’t you give your screen extras name to the papers, Miss Jakes? Give the renter’s name to the police. They’ll trace it, if they’re interested. He — he didn’t look like anyone familiar from the movies, did he?”

  “Oh, no! He looked foreign. I think it’s a gang, Mr. Tirebiter. An espionage gang? My sister — I have two sisters and we all came here from Plano? Princess works at a poker club in Gardena and Rosie works at Lockeed? But she’s not a riveter if you know that song? And what if I told on this man who got rubbed out, then the gang that rubbed him out would kidnap me and Rosie would have to turn against her own country and steal bomber blueprints or something to ransom me? Or Princess would have to pick up the ante, or whatever they do in Gardena? I’d never get to be a movie star that way, so what if I just get the receipt for you and then we’d both be doing something for our country, reet?”

  Working my way through the syntax, I realized that Melody had more of a point than she realized. I said, “I suppose it is really better if you don’t go to the police. I can…well, I have channels — to pass it along. Reet?”

  “I knew you weren’t a sad-sack, Mr. T.! Rosie will never know what you’ve done to save our family. I’ll get the receipt at the store tomorrow and you meet me, how about at the Hollywood Bowl trolley stop on Cahuenga at 10:15 at night? Where I transfer for Glendale?”

  “I think I can manage…”

  “And gee, Mr. T., if you need anybody to wax the jeep in your next movie, just call me.”

  “Wax the jeep?”

  “Isn’t it called Four Waxing a Jeep?”

  “Not any more.”

  “Oh, well.”

  And with that she opened the door and roller skated away. I flipped my lights on and off and put a quarter on the tray. She was back in a flash, unscrewed the tray, raised it above her maroon pill-box hat and spun twice on her way back to the kitchen. My head was spinning too. “Clang, Clang, Clang!” went the juke-box. I ground the sedan into gear, backed out and was about to pull into traffic when I noticed the Terraplane pull out behind me. It cruised half-a-block back as I headed east on Sunset.

  Chapter 6

  The Tam, The Place & The Wife

  The Terraplane stayed visible behind me as I cruised over the Cahuenga Pass, down Dark Canyon Road, crossed over the Los Angeles River, under the illuminated Burbank sign and past the Warner Bros. soundstages. This part of the city, where the river bed curves around the foot of Cahuenga Peak, never fails to remind me of the Old Hollywood I had seen on Saturday matinees at my neighborhood Odeon. Since the days of Birth of a Nation, the marshy river bottom with its craggy, chaparral-covered backdrop had been used for picture making. Cahuenga loomed over Western backlot streets, New England country roads and outdoor settings from Scotland to the Sahara.

  More than twenty years after the adventure that was presently overtaking me, in the throes of my personal Sixties Revolution, I took up residence in a teepee built for me by a Mohawk Indian, hidden in a grove of eucalyptus trees not two hundred yards from the traffic-heavy canyon pass. I felt I was sleeping safely between the paws of the great bear which California’s natives had once seen in Ca-hueng-na’s hump-backed profile. Medicinal herbs, wild tobacco and crisp watercress grew in abundance, and my Indian friend took me to find a quiet clearing where a clear spring always bubbled up. This marked the site of the original native village, he claimed, and I have no reason to disbelieve him. Standing in that spot I could see the crumbling Himalayan lamasery of Shangra La, which rose for decades out of the Warner’s lot, above the concrete river banks.

  The Terraplane turned into the studio gate as I watched it in my rear-view mirror. I actually felt let down, having stretched my imagination as far as possible to make the old car into a physical threat.

  Lillie and I lived in a patioed Spanish-style house with wrought-iron grills over the windows, a Mission tile roof and the usual variety of semi-tropical plants that had been tended,
before the war, by a retinue of Japanese gardeners. Those horticultural miracle-workers having been interned for the duration in desert prison camps, Lillie spent a good deal of her time puttering in the flower beds, and the Guzman father-and-sons kept the lawns trimmed and abundantly watered. We had bought the house in the first flush of my Hollywood success, right after our wedding in 1941. I had married the boss’s daughter.

  Lillie’s father, Albright Ames, had been a Broadway producer in the Teens, a partner in the Knox-Haymarket vaudeville theatre circuit in the Twenties, and a major owner of Mid-Western radio stations as broadcasting caught on big in the early Thirties. A child actor from the age of ten, I found myself appearing in radio dramas as soon as my voice changed. I had regular work on Ames’ flagship station, WOP in Chicago. Poetry, commercials, prosperous young men-about-town, character roles, I did them all. I developed a series for myself, “Young Tom Edison, Electric Detective,” and wrote each daily episode for three years. More writing jobs and network broadcasts came my way, and by 1939, only Jack Benny and Orson Welles were better known to radio fans than I was.

  Under her mother’s tutelage, Lillie had studied voice and gone to a Swiss finishing school. Her father’s influence got her an audition for O.Z. Dillingman’s celebrated review series, Vandals, and her career as a show-girl was launched. When we met, she was a glamorous thirty year-old New York sophisticate, nearing the end of commercially profitable youth, and I was a much too full-of-myself twenty year-old radio star. We thought we needed each other, courted via cross-country express trains, and finally married two days after I turned twenty-one and signed my Paranoid Pictures contract. Memorably, it was Pearl Harbor Sunday.