Show Business Is Murder Read online

  With imminent death comes a compensatory indifference, borne not of resignation but of humor . . . couldn’t remember where he’d read that but it was true; his present circumstance seemed somehow funny. Even whimsical.

  —and here’s Margo, weeping, probably standing vigil next to him, his body still bloodied with that special goop the young director insists on—looks so real it turns your stomach—Corey imagined her there, head bowed, alone on the darkened set. Sobbing.

  As for his killer, would justice prevail? Probably. Howard will more than likely brag about it, tell the story to some producer who’ll drop a dime. Or the autopsy will reveal the lethal injection of drugs, cops’ll get a list of enemies. Something . . .

  Everyone knows you can’t get away with murder in Hollywood.

  The Search for Robert Rich

  BOB SHAYNE

  I’D COME FROM a land called Brooklyn where everybody was Jewish and poor. Now I was going to a land called Hollywood where everybody was Jewish and rich. Well, that might be a bit of an exaggeration on both ends, but it seemed that way.

  It was 1957 and I was twenty-five. I may or may not have been the youngest licensed private detective in the New York phone book, but I was certainly the femalest. My name’s Naomi Weinstein. The second syllable rhymes with the first.

  We pulled into Los Angeles Union Station at 1:32 P.M. on a late April afternoon. I’d slept well and long to the rock and sway and the clicking wheels, and I was looking forward to seeing my dear friend David. He’d moved to Hollywood four years earlier, after a slight problem wherein he’d been charged with murder. I had a hand in getting him off, but then I’d had a hand in getting him accused, so it seemed only right.

  “Naomi!” he shouted as I stepped off the train in the bowels of Union Station. We ran to each other and embraced. He picked me up and swung me around in a circle. I wriggled out of his arms to avoid throwing up on him, stepped back, and took a look.

  He was just as tall and skinny as always, the ever-present gold modernistic mezuzah resting just under his Adam’s apple, his long pointy nose angled slightly to the right, hazel eyes, enough of that thick, wavy, dirty-blond hair for two or three guys, and that great crooked smile that always made me smile to see.

  He was studying me, too, all five foot three, fuzzy reddish-brown hair, and a few too many pounds of me. I stuck out my breasts and sucked in my tummy as his eyes passed various portions of my anatomy. If I could have added a few inches to my calves I would have done that, too.

  “How was your trip?” he asked as he grabbed my bags and we walked toward the Moorish-Aztec style lobby. I doubt that the Moors ever met the Aztecs, but apparently the architect had.

  David took me for lunch on a nearby block called Olvera Street. It’s supposed to be a 150-year-old section of old Los Angeles, but it looked more like Coney Island to me. A block of souvenir shops and taco stands. (Okay, in Coney they’d be hotdogs stands instead.) I bought three things that were advertised as Mexican jumping beans. Later in my motel room I opened one; it turned out to be a soft capsule, and inside was a ball-bearing, so that when you dropped it the little bearing would roll to one end then the other making the capsule jump. How authentic can you get! I didn’t know then it was the perfect metaphor for Hollywood.

  We piled my stuff into David’s spiffy aqua-and-white Chevy Bel Air convertible and he put the top down at my request. I’d never ridden in a convertible. (When I tried to untangle my Semitic curls that evening, I swore I’d never ride in one again.)

  David asked me what my case was about, shouting over the wind as he drove up San Vicente, a wide street with trolley tracks down the middle, on our way to Hollywood. I told him it was to track down somebody named Robert Rich.

  He laughed, saying that was the biggest mystery there was. It was all over the papers. The whole town wanted to know who Robert Rich was.

  It seems Mr. Rich had won the Oscar a few weeks earlier for Best Original Story for the Screen, for a movie about a little boy and a bull called The Brave One, but nobody could find him. Or many people were claiming to be him. Or both. When the award was announced, Jesse Lasky Jr. of the Writers Guild stepped up to the microphone on national television and said, “I’ll accept this on behalf of my close friend Robert Rich, who is at this moment at Santa Monica hospital where his wife is giving birth.” But Hedda Hopper checked all the hospitals and no such baby had been born. A few days later when push came to shove Lasky admitted he had never met Robert Rich and hadn’t a clue who he was.

  You’d think the producers of the movie who bought the story would know who they’d bought it from, but it didn’t seem that way. They were brothers named King. When a reporter noticed they had a nephew by the name Robert Rich, the nephew gave a statement saying, yes, he’d written the picture. But then his uncles denied it.

  “Did the Kings hire you to find the guy?” David asked.

  “No, the L.A. Times did,” I shouted back over the hot wind—something David told me the locals call a Santa Ana. “Their reporters haven’t been able to find him so they decided to try a private eye.”

  “Makes sense. But we have our own private eyes right here in Los Angeles. You know, like Philip Marlowe?”

  “Yeah, but he’s fictional. They wanted a factual one,” I said. “I don’t know why, maybe they’re just prejudiced against fiction, being a newspaper and all.”

  “But why bring one in all the way from New York?”

  I shrugged. “Not sure. I just know I got a call from some guy who said he worked there. Named Chandler.”

  David did a double take worthy of Oliver Hardy. “What first name?”

  “Uh, Norman. Yeah, Norman.”

  “Norman Chandler doesn’t work at the L.A. Times,” said David with a laugh. “He owns it.”

  “Oh,” I replied snappily.

  “How’d he happen to pick you?”

  “You’ll never guess.”

  David sat quietly for a moment, then said, “You’re right. So tell me.”

  “A friend of his recommended me.”

  “Yes? Yes?”

  “J. Edgar Hoover.”

  David broke out in laughter and said, “I should have guessed.”

  I’d had a sort of weird relationship with Mr. Hoover in the case that involved David. I wouldn’t say I was exactly friends with the person who’d been called the most powerful man in America, but we had developed a kind of healthy respect for one another. Well, respect, anyway. Maybe “healthy” isn’t the operative word.

  I checked into the Hollywood Sands Motel at Sunset and Highland, across the street from Hollywood High. It was new and boxy and full of red and yellow plastic. Two single beds with bedspreads made of some chemical material that sucked the moisture from my fingers, drapes that stopped about an inch short of the bottom of the window, and prints of ducks in a swamp on the off-yellow walls. I liked it. No place ever felt less like the Morris and Sylvia Weinstein home in Canarsie, Brooklyn, New York. Not an antimacassar in sight.

  After more sightseeing, David and I hit the Formosa Cafe on Santa Monica Boulevard for dinner, across the street from the Sam Goldwyn Studios. David called it a Hollywood dive. The walls were full of pictures of movie stars you never heard of. And some you have. David warned me if the chow mein moved of its own accord, I probably shouldn’t eat it. As far as I could tell, it was lying there fairly still when I tried to pick it up with chopsticks and get it all the way to my mouth before it fell back onto the plate and I started all over again. I’d never used chopsticks before. And I swore I’d never do so again. Back East we have things called forks. David said eating chow mein by this method was so much work it had minus two calories.

  The following morning, I borrowed David’s car and drove it to the Sunset Strip, past the Mocambo and Ciro’s, those glamorous nightclubs I’d seen in movies all my life, the places where all the sophisticates go. Or used to. It all looked a little seedy now. The Mocambo had been “closed for alterations” for about
three years, and Ciro’s—where a few years before Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and the Will Mastin Trio starring Sammy Davis Jr. had headlined—had replaced its floor show with an all-you-can-eat buffet.

  A few blocks farther west was a small white stucco building with beveled corners, round deco windows, and black wood trim. The words KING BROTHERS PRODUCTIONS were embossed on a gold placard on the shiny black door.

  It hit me that this could be an important case for me. I’d been thinking of moving to L.A. A lot of my work involved show business companies and they’d been moving west in droves. Getting on the good side of the L.A. Times would be a great way to build up a clientele.

  I parked on the street and walked up and down the block thinking about how to play this. I knew there were three King brothers: Frank, Hymie, and Maury, and that their nephew—named Robert Rich, but allegedly not the Robert Rich—worked there, too. What could I say that would elicit more information than they’d already given out?

  As I stood in front of the door, contemplating any options I could think of, and finding none, the door opened right into my foot. “Ouch!” I said in response.

  “Oh, sorry,” said the young man who had pushed it into my big toe. His looks kind of reminded me of Anthony Perkins, who’d been nominated for an Oscar the year before for Friendly Persuasion, only this guy seemed a little crazier. He wore an alligator shirt and cotton pegs, and held several stamped letters in his hand. “Were you on your way in?”

  “Uh . . .” Well, there was only one answer that made much sense. “Yes.”

  “Oh,” he replied. It was a scintillating conversation.

  He looked me over. I felt naked. “Are you the girl from the agency?”

  Before I could weigh the consequences I said, “Yes.”

  “Good, good. Come in,” he bid, holding the door open for me. I had the feeling he smelled my hair as I passed.

  “What’s your name?” he said, looking directly at my boobs.

  I thought of answering, the left one’s Zelda and the right Rebecca. Instead, I said, “Naomi. Naomi Weinstein.” I’d learned when I first started out that staying as close to the truth as possible was usually best. That way I didn’t have to spend so much time remembering which lie I’d told.

  “Oh,” he replied, letting the door close behind him. “They said the girl was named Carey something. McNally, I think.”

  My heart stopped while I searched for a reply. “Oh, yeah. Carey couldn’t make it. She got called back to another job she was on last week. So they sent me.” I only prayed that the agency in question was a secretarial agency, not a talent agency or an out-call brothel. The good part about being a lady private eye was that everybody always assumed I was a secretary. Or bank teller. Or school teacher. Or nurse. It made it awfully easy to pass. In fact, the one thing no one ever believed I was, when I told them, was a private eye.

  “Well, good,” he said. “Here.”

  He motioned to the reception desk facing the door. It was beige, like all the other furniture in the room. Everything had rounded edges and moderne designs. They must have picked it up at a going-out-of-style sale.

  “Just answer the phones and take messages and I’ll be back as soon as I mail these letters,” he said, licking his lips repeatedly. There was something reptilian about him, like William Buckley.

  I wished I could get a look at the letters before he deposited them in a mailbox. “Would you like me to mail those for you?” I asked.

  “Naw. I’m gonna get a cuppa at Ben Frank’s since you’re here. Want me to bring you back one?” Well, he might appear dangerously psychotic, but he was certainly polite.

  I said, “No thanks.”

  “By the way,” he added, “the rest room is right though that door, the one next to my office, if you need to use it at any time. But tell me first so I can cover the phones for you.”

  I nodded, and shivered a little. I had a feeling he’d probably drilled a peephole in the wall between his office and the bathroom. Just then the phone rang. I picked up the receiver and pushed down the button that was flashing.

  “Just say . . .” he was saying as I did.

  “King Brothers Productions,” I said into the phone.

  “Good,” he said with a cockeyed nod.

  “Hello, this is Robert Rich,” said a voice at the other end of the phone. I want to give you my address to send my Oscar.”

  “Hold on just a moment, Mr. Rich,” I said, and put the line on hold.

  “Did they say they were Robert Rich?” said the young man. He twisted his mouth into a grimace.

  I nodded.

  “That’s funny, because I’m Robert Rich,” he snapped.

  I felt like I’d walked into the TV show To Tell the Truth. But where was Bud Collyer?

  He picked up the phone on the other desk and pressed the blinking button. “Listen, you lying bastard, you just go jump in a lake.” And he hung up.

  “What was that all about?” I asked with the greatest of innocence. I may even have fluttered my eyelashes.

  He snickered. “You know, our movie, The Brave One? It won the Oscar for Best Original Story. But no one knows who or where the writer is. My uncles, they used my name for the credit. They didn’t know it was going to win an Oscar,” he shrugged. “I tried to cover and tell the Academy I’d written it, but I sort of lost my nerve when they started questioning me. So my Uncle Frank told them it was actually another Robert Rich who he met in Germany some years ago.”

  “Was it?” I asked, even though he’d more or less confessed it wasn’t.

  “Oh, yeah. Of course,” he said much too quickly. “They’ve been trying to locate him to give him the award.”

  “I see,” I said, although I didn’t see at all. “Any luck?”

  “Naw.”

  I took a chance. “Then why did you hang up on the man on the phone?”

  Robert Rich was startled. Perhaps he realized he’d dug himself a hole. “It . . . it was the wrong guy,” he stuttered, and walked to his office as quickly as he could. He couldn’t have known it was the wrong guy since he hadn’t heard the guy’s voice when he hung up on him. It could only have been the wrong guy if there was no other Robert Rich to be found. So I guess I had the answer to question number one: The Brave One was written by someone not named Robert Rich.

  His departure gave me a moment to look over the outgoing mail he’d left on the desk. Phone bill payment. Electric bill payment. One to the Producers Guild. One to somebody named King in Glendale. And a letter to Blue Chip Stamps. I’d noticed from the signs in gas stations and on grocery stores that that was a big premium company in L.A., like S & H Green Stamps back where I came from.

  Robert Rich came back in with another envelope. I caught him looking at my boobs again as he gathered up the letters he’d left and headed for the door. “I’ll be back in a few. My uncles are due to return this afternoon,” he said, and left.

  As the door closed behind him, I whirled around and started thumbing through the Rolodex on the side table. There was a Robert Rich in it, probably the one I’d just met. But I jotted down the address and phone number anyway. Before I finished, I was startled by the ringing phone.

  “King Brothers Productions,” I said into the receiver.

  “Hello, is Frank there?”

  “No, I’m sorry, he’s not. May I take a message?”

  “How about Maury?” said the somewhat high-pitched male voice.

  “Afraid not.”

  “Hymie?”

  “Sorry. They’re all due back this afternoon.”

  “Okay, give me that little pipsqueak Rich.”

  “Sir, I’m afraid he’s out as well. May I help you?”

  The man sighed. “Okay, tell Frank to call . . .” He paused a moment. “U.N. Friendly.”

  “Could I have your number, Mr. Friendly?”

  “Of course. It’s Pleasant 6-5211.”

  “That’s funny,” I said. “Mr. Friendly has a Pleasant phone number
.”

  “Yes, a laugh riot,” he replied somewhat dryly. “Tell that son of a bitch Frank if he doesn’t call me by this afternoon that I’m going to tell the L. A. Times.”

  Mr. Friendly didn’t sound too friendly. I figured, what the hell. “What will you tell them, Mr. Friendly?”

  He laughed. “I’ll tell them they can renew my subscription. You just give Frank the message.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good girl,” he said, and hung up.

  I added his admonition to the message and looked again at his name. Could it be a joke of some sort? I recalled in Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians the host who invited all the guilty people to the island was “U.N. Owen,” a homophone for “unknown.” So “U.N. Friendly.” Could it be as in the Unfriendly Ten? The ten Hollywood writers who were sent to prison for not cooperating with the House Un-American Activities Committee?

  I looked through the Rolodex for the phone number Mr. Friendly had given me, and I found it when I got to the T’s. It went with the name Dalton Trumbo. Yes! He was one of the Ten!

  I wrote down the address in Highland Park, which I discovered, from a street atlas in the bookcase, was a suburb of Los Angeles between downtown L.A. and Pasadena. I rifled the filing cabinets, searching for any files marked Rich or Trumbo. Nothing.

  There were two whole drawers of Brave One files, but before I could start searching through them the door opened and in walked a woman in her forties, a bit chubby, wearing glasses, her hair pulled back in a bun. “Sorry, I’m late,” she said. “My car broke down.”

  Maybe she’s someone with an appointment, I hoped.

  She came up to me, stuck out her hand and said, “I’m Carey McNally.”

  I stood up and shook her hand as my knees knocked. What was I going to do?

  “Uh, Carey,” I said, being fast with witty repartee. “Uh, Carey, well, let’s see.” Finally it came to me. “How much do you get a day?”

  “Twelve-fifty, but I seem to be starting two hours late, so I should get less for today.”