Poodle Springs

"Shooting today." He consulted a batch of papers on his desk. All the papers were clipped together with a big metal spring clip. He licked his thumb. "They're shooting today…" He thumbed several papers, licked his thumb again, came to a mimeographed sheet, studied it a moment. "Shooting at the corner of Sequoia and Esmeralda. It's a playground."

He looked up at me with a big friendly smile, shifted the cigar to the other corner of his mouth. His teeth when he smiled around the cigar were yellow.

"Down the hill, left along the water, 'bout six blocks, can't miss 'em. Damn trucks and trailers and things all over the place."

I said thank you and went out and drove back down the hill and turned left and drove along the water. He was right. I couldn't miss them.

I parked behind a truck full of electrical gear and walked into the location. Every time I went to where they were shooting film I was struck by how easy the access is. Nobody asked who I was. Nobody told me to get out of the way. Nobody offered me a screen test. I stopped a guy at the commissary truck. He wore no shirt and his sunburned belly sagged out over his chino shorts.

"Who's in charge around here?" I said.

"Hell of a question," he said. "You from the studio?"

"No, I'm just looking for a guy. Who do I talk to about staff?"

The fat man shrugged. "Producer's Joe King," he said.

"Where do I find him?" I said.

"Last I seen him he's down by the cameras talking to the UPM." The fat guy had a paper cup of coffee in each hand and gestured with his belly in the direction of the cameras.

"Where you see all the lights," he said.

I walked where he told me to, picking my way over the tangle of cables and around light stands and generators. The crew had probably arrived with the morning dew because the ground was muddied and the grass had been churned into the mud by the equipment and the men setting it up. Movies made a mess even before they were shot.

There were several men grouped behind the cameras while the Director of Photography fiddled with the lighting.

"Which one of you is Joe King?" I said.

A tall young guy turned toward me. He was loose jointed and moved easily and there seemed to be a great natural calmness in him. He wore horn-rimmed glasses, and the sleeves of his white dress shirt were rolled above the elbows.

"I'm Joe," he said.

I showed him the photostat of my California license, inside the celluloid holder in my wallet.

"Name's Marlowe," I said. "Looking for a photographer named Les Valentine."

King looked carefully at my license, then looked up at me, friendly as an alderman at a picnic.

"Can't say I know him," King said.

"I was led to believe he was here, on assignment, shooting the stills."

King shook his head. "No, we have a regular studio photographer that does that for us. Name's Gus Johnson. I don't know any Les Val… whatever."

"If he were here would you know it?"

"Certainly."

"Thank you," I said.

"Care to stay, watch a little of the shooting. The star is Elayna St. Cyr."

"I have a picture of Theda Bara in my car. I'll look at it on the ride back."

King shrugged and turned back to the camera and I headed back to my car.

There were several things I thought as I drove back down the coast. The most important one was that Les Valentine was not who his wife said he was. Or who he said he was. He didn't have an office in L.A. He hadn't photographed Sondra Lee. He wasn't shooting stills on a movie being shot in San Benedict. After two days hot on his trail I knew less than I had when I started.

10

I'd been watching Muffy Valentine's house for a week, sitting in my car with the air conditioning on and the motor idling, building up carbon deposits in my cylinders. Every morning Muffy came out wearing a light raincoat over lavender tights and headed off to her exercise class. Two minutes later the Japanese houseboy came out of the house with two toy poodles straining on the leash and yapping, turned down the drive and walked off around the bend. Each day he returned with them about five minutes after his employer returned from exercising.

After- three days of this I followed him around the bend and watched him go in the front door of another house, poodles and all. He stayed in there for 45 minutes and when he came out I got a quick glimpse of a Japanese housemaid closing the door behind him. About twenty minutes later a woman with platinum hair and pink tights pulled up in a silver Mercedes and strolled into the house. Even from a distance I could see the light glinting on her diamonds.

I thought carefully on these matters and the following Monday, while Muffy and her neighbor were at exercise class and the houseboy was playing Japanese Sandman with his countrywoman, I set out to BE Muffy's house.

I had a clipboard I'd picked up downtown in the Springs, and a yellow pad on it, and a pencil behind my ear. That normally is enough to get you into the President's bedroom, unquestioned, but to make doubly sure I carried a tape measure on my belt. A tape measure combined with a clipboard will get you in while the President and First Lady are locked in carnal embrace. I parked out front of the Valentine house, walked up the front walk like a man with money in his pocket and measured the front door while I checked what kind of lock there was. It was a Bulger. I put the tape measure back on my belt, took out a collection of master keys I'd collected over the years and, on the second try, opened the front door. I put the keys back, checked along the hinges and the lock, took one more measurement, which was mostly showing off, and went in. There was no sound. If there was an alarm it was silent. If the cops showed up I'd deal with that when it happened. I was a hot shot from L.A., what had I to fear from the law in Poodle Springs? I checked my watch. I had about fifty minutes.

The front parlor yielded nothing I hadn't seen already, the dining room was just a dining room, neither had anyplace where clues might be stored. Neither did the kitchen. I went down the long hallway that ran across the back wing of the house and found their bedroom. I knew it was theirs because there were some men's suits in the closet, but the rest was hers. A huge pink canopied bed with a thick pink down comforter, maybe twenty-five pillows in white and pink. A long dressing table stood along the wall parallel to the bed. It was made out of some kind of pale wood, unpainted, but sealed with something that made it shine. There were bottles of perfume, containers of lipstick and rouge, mascara, eye shadow, wrinkle cream, hand cream and maybe thirty other items that I didn't recognize, though I'd seen some like them in Linda's bathroom. The drapes were pink and billowed out over the floor as if the decorator had made them five feet too long. The walls were white and there were two closets, one on either side of a very large dresser. The closet doors were pink, glazed with a whitewash which gave them a streaky antique look. There was a night table on either side of the bed with very large lamps of hammered copper on them. The shades were pink. Neither night table had a drawer in it.

The only drawers in the room were in the bureau. The top drawer contained women's lingerie in a tangle of pastel silk. In the far back corner under the tangle was an electric vibrator and a tube of KY jelly. I almost blushed, except that I was a hardened big-city gumshoe. In the second drawer were blouses, in the third were stockings and gloves. In the fourth were sweaters. In the bottom drawer were some men's shirts, socks, underwear. Nothing fancy. On the top of the bureau was a pink and white striped box about the size of a cigar box, and another, matching, nearly the size of a case of beer. The small one contained a pair of gold and turquoise cuff links, a tie clasp that matched, a gold collar pin. There was also a checkbook, a nail clipper, and a small bottle of eye drops. I pocketed the checkbook. The bigger box was full of jewelry. The two coat closets were full of women's dresses, plus about six men's suits, or suit coats and slacks, neatly hung together in coordination. There was a tie rack inside the closet door holding a dozen or so silk ties in most of the primary colors. Way in the back of the left-hand closet, behind the dresses, were several frothy and slightly comic see-through kinds of nightwear, black lace, white gossamer, like a young girl's idea of sexy.