The X-Rated Corpse Read online

  "I hope you do. You see, he still loves me. He says. So much so that he seems to have lost his perspective. He no longer cares whether he ruins me and himself in the bargain. So it all boils down to this—his latest ultimatum. Either I consent to love him again, be his mistress, or what have you, or he will give the story to the local sob sisters, the other newspaper wire services and anybody else who would be interested. He is that sure everyone would be delirious to get some dirt on me. More so, in this idol-toppling day and age."

  "He's right," I said. I could have thought better on a drink but I did the best I could, considering the barren wasteland of my throat. "But it's a bluff, of course. A—What newspaper would touch it without proof? B—It's worth a million in libel. C—Even if a scandal sheet printed such a story, nobody ever believes them fully. D—If anything, such juicy 'only human' frailties only add to a performer's name. You said the guy was famous, too. So it would all come under the heading of 'That's-Just-Hollywood'."

  Violet Paris shook her head. Her eyes—I never did get their true color that night—stirred.

  "I'm afraid you don't understand."

  I admitted that just might possibly be true. "Maybe I would if you told me this gallant character's name."

  Her sad smile was Joan's at the stake in Rouen.

  "B.Z.," she said.

  I blinked. "You're pulling my leg."

  "B.Z.," she repeated, almost with relish then. "The Grand Old Man of Hollywood. The Patron Saint. The Archangel. The man you have to love because everybody else does."

  Suddenly, the need of a drink became more acute.

  I stared at her, trying to focus on what she had said.

  B.Z. Big Z. The oldest movie producer of them all.

  Bennett Zangdorfer. Lap dissolves tumbled in my mind.

  He was a lot more than anything she had said.

  He was eighty-three years old and had dangled Shirley Temple on his knee. Douglas Fairbanks Sr. had once borrowed four dollars from him to get a tuxedo out of hock. Charlie Chaplin had danced at his fiftieth wedding anniversary. Cecil B. De Mille had traded punches with him in the old Brown Derby because C.B. had thought that B.Z. was beating his time with a sexy little redhead named Clara Bow. Famous? He was walking Kliegville history. The man had a legion of stars and followers that would have filled the ballparks of the country. He was revered, and I do mean, revered. My mind developed a hundred flickering pictures even as I stared at Violet Paris. B.Z. Bennett Zangdorfer. White, billowing, senatorial hair. The craggy, rocky facial serenity and kindness and steel of a Sandburg. The lofty brow of a Lincoln. The soft wondrous voice of a faith-healer. A prince among men. A sweetheart. That rarest of all public figures. A human being. The genuine article.

  Up to now, of course.

  My face must have mirrored my disbelief. My pain.

  Violet Paris laughed. A trifle harshly. The velvet, irritated.

  "Kills you, huh? Well, he's senile now. An old fool. He's slid back almost overnight. Nature gets in the last laugh. All the time, Mr. Noon. My fall with B.Z. was ten years ago when I was just turned nineteen and anxious to get started. And the grand old chaser was a kid of seventy-three. And I'll tell you this, my dear Mr. Noon. There isn't a man more devoted to carnal acrobatics than that old slob. You name it, he could do it. I'm telling you. With one foot in the grave, he had a wiggle you wouldn't believe possible. He scared the hell out of me that night."

  "If he's senile, Miss Paris, he could be pulling your leg. Sounds like an old man's idea of a joke."

  "No joke," she said, icily. "And I want you to get going on this as soon as you can. Right away. It's very important to me. I'll go for any price you name."

  I was stymied. Baffled, like the cops were later on with her lovely corpse. Nude and butchered. And pathetically dead.

  "Start where? What proof does he have other than saying he tried the very famous Violet Paris out on a casting couch?"

  I had hit low. She winced and the eyes flamed at me.

  "He took pictures."

  "You're kidding. You have to be."

  That brought a 'Last Scene' flush to her face and a fine rage burned over her stinging comeback. Her reading was perfect.

  "Am I? I told you that the old fool was capable of going that far. I never knew about the pictures until last week. Being great in the sack isn't all he was good at, it seems. As a sneak movie maker—home-movies, that is, he's in a class by himself. His dirty little screen test of me was produced like an A flick. With a sound track and musical scoring to boot." She shivered in the Bolero jacket and fearsome breasts heaved. "All these years he's kept that film without my even suspecting—God! Even if he never gives them to the mud-slingers, the mere idea that he could show them to anybody in the industry, that he may have shown them to his old cronies down through the years, behind my back—everybody in the business! People I've worked with and have to work with in the future! Not to mention my fiancé—"

  She couldn't finish. The ghastly world she was setting up all around herself was closing in like a nightmare from all sides.

  "Bennett Zangdorfer," I repeated. "You've just brought another idol tumbling down from its base. The world we live in."

  She showed me her teeth again.

  "It's a jungle, friend. A filthy bunch of vines and tall grass where you have to claw and scratch for survival—"

  I got up from the butterfly chair and moved across the soft tufted carpet toward the glass doors which led out to the mile-long foyer where I had left my hat. Her eyes popped with surprise and a frown made a deep 'V' on her impeccable forehead. She almost looked like she might cry or throw a vase at me or something. Nobody had ever walked out on her before, obviously. Not under such intimate conditions. Not in a low-light, low-key paradise like the Pad.

  I wasn't crazy. I just knew I couldn't help her and I was also painfully aware that she wasn't interested in me as someone who wore pants. I had no gender for her other than private investigator. Man-with-ability-and-skill-to-get-the-dirty-film-back.

  "Where are you going?" She sounded only human, then.

  "Home. I can't help you. I'd ask you for your autograph but I guess that might be rubbing it in, somehow."

  "You can't—" She scrambled erect with a low rustle of sound, a flurry of movement and was across the floor, tapered hands closing appealingly over my arm. "This is worth everything to me. Anything the traffic has to bear. Oh, please. Be a good guy, can't you? You mustn't turn me down! There's nobody in Hollywood I can trust for something like this. You can see that, can't you—I'd be at their mercy for the rest of my natural life—"

  "I can't touch B.Z., Miss Paris." I was trying to be kind but I was lousing it up miserably for her. "For love or money. He's an institution. With bodyguards and bankroll and czar power to match. What could I offer him to make him hand over that film? Nothing, that's what. He'd laugh at me and than have his goons throw me out of the house. Besides, I didn't tell you. I haven't got the stomach for this kind of work. No, not even for a doll like you. You're a great actress, lady, and I've had the hots for you like about ten million other guys since the first time I saw you up there on that crazy silver screen I love so much. But I was in love with Jean Arthur and Barbara Stanwyck and a trainload of others, too, and I managed to survive without them loving me back. So please get out of the way and let me get out of here. I'm sorry but that's the way it has to be."

  She let go of my arm.

  She stepped back, staring up at me, shaking her head as if she didn't believe I was real, either.

  And then she did cry.

  Low, fierce sobs rushing as if on cue from the depths of the Bolero jacket. Her eyes unloaded, too. Spilling unhappiness.

  She must have been banking very heavily on the combination of her looks and my eager masculinity. I read her all wrong. I thought she was play-acting.

  I let her cry.

  And I left.

  Even as I exited from the fabulous Pad, walking quickly down the curved,
pebbled driveway to the car I'd rented from Avis in North Hollywood, I seemed to hear the lingering echoes of her very low, very theatrical sobbing. She cried like a major leaguer.

  I was nowhere near the swimming pool she must have owned but I half-expected to hear some shots ring out with me at the end of them, doing the Holden stagger brought on by Gloria Swanson's vengeful blasting in Sunset Boulevard.

  That's the kind of movie yo-yo I am.

  Less than three hours later, Violet Paris was dead.

  Which shows you how wrong a man can be.

  Sometimes.

  The Dirty Old Fan

  The papers were crammed with nothing else all that week. Hanoi was pushed off Page One, a jetliner crash that killed a hundred people in Chicago, was relegated to Page Two and an earthquake in Chile that shook South America, barely made Page Three. Nothing could compete with the murder of a movie star. She, Violet Paris, was somehow at the head of the newsworthy class. That's the kind of world we live in. One person's death, one symbol's extinction, one living doll's dying throes, seemed to center all the tragedies of Mankind into one round little ball called Center Stage.

  A great screen beauty had been murdered and that was all the communications media needed. They went to town in red and black ink. A veritable orgy of print. And sensationalism.

  Los Angeles rags, particularly, had a field day.

  They dug into their morgue files, dredging up the Past, the Present and the Future, reviving Thelma Todd's still unsolved death in a garage, the William Desmond Taylor shooting, the Fatty Arbuckle Case and even poor Marilyn Monroe's bizarre finale. As well as a dozen other less well-known scandals. Nothing was sacred.

  It only made matters juicier and continued-in-tomorrow's-edition that the police were up the old, familiar tree. With the jewel-handled dagger as the murder weapon and a thousand possible suspects, there was no single, substantial lead to a murderer.

  Anybody could have killed Violet Paris. Anybody at all.

  The important dagger seemed to be a precious memento of the celebrated Paris career, being a historic prop from one of her very earliest film successes. A desert epic named Daughter Of The Sands. With the usual blatant stupidity, following her Oscar-winning chore in The Indifferent Drummer, her home studio, Coronet Pictures, had rushed her into an adventure flick with Burt Lancaster where she showed more skin than acting ability. The film cleaned up at the box office when audiences, specifically the men, saw just how much Violet Paris did have to show. For some reason, only the dagger ever remained in Violet Paris' keepsakes from all her films. Perhaps, it served as a constant reminder to the lady herself never to appear ever again in such entertaining nonsense as Daughter Of The Sands. And also, for reasons again known only to herself, the fake blade of the dagger had been replaced by the Real McCoy, as had the bits of glass on the crescent-shaped handle. The blade became Toledo steel. The bits of glass pure diamond chips. Sixteen in all, counting both sides of the haft.

  I read all the papers for two whole days, holing up in my room at the Dunlap, trying to think straight. The discovery of the body had come the next morning when an assistant director from the Coronet studio had come by to see why the leading lady wasn't on the set that day. The cops didn't come looking for me, either. I wondered when they might hear about my midnight visit. It was inconceivable that they wouldn't. But the time stretched out and my phone didn't ring and they never showed.

  The suspect list was a pocket-sized Who's Who of Hollywood. Violet Paris saw at least a hundred people a day, every day of her life. From lowly folk on the sound stages to the elites of the star-filled heavens. Her associates, colleagues, friends and acquaintances would have accommodated all the pages of an AAA Directory.

  That fiancé she had mentioned proved to be a U.S. Senator's only son, one Richard X. Fairman, who was a millionaire advertising agency executive in his own right. I began to understand just a bit better why she had been so upset about the damaging home movie.

  If there was such a home movie, after all.

  The local fuzz had their hands full. And I couldn't help. Not really. Not without dragging in the famous name she had given me, not without emptying a sack of dead cats all over the case. Even though she had told me all about B.Z. and the casting couch epic in pornography. Her Sin. I had no proof. Only hearsay. Only the words of a very dead woman. Still, it bothered me.

  Bothered me two whole days' worth.

  Bothered me enough until that Sunday, which was the third morning after the murder and only twenty-four hours before they were going to bury Violet Paris atop the high hill in Holy Cross Cemetery, that I stirred from self-imposed lethargy.

  I climbed into the rented Toyota, consulted a Los Angeles-Hollywood street map provided in the glove compartment on the dashboard, and then drove out to the climbing environs of Laurel Canyon. It was a fabled section of the older land grant where I knew Bennett Zangdorfer called a seven hundred and fifty thousand dollar, thirty-five acre estate home. A palace in the hills.

  B.Z. had retired only about five years ago, leaving a billion dollar, black ink motion picture studio complex to younger men and his present lair was the very last of a long, proud line of ancient Xanadus. His wife, Jessie, had died in '56 and Old Hollywood's only living museum piece was ending out his string a bit more simply these days. All of that, plus some of my own mental filings, I got from the sponge inside my head that passes for a brain.

  The sky was blue, the clouds were white, the grass was green along the roundabout roadway that day. But my mood was black.

  I had a feeling of being pushed from the graveyard.

  Violet Paris was sitting alongside me, still wearing the Bolero jacket and Capri slacks, sobbing in a low whimper: Go see him for me. Get that film back, please. It isn't nice. . . .

  Whether she was really there or not, I had to agree with her.

  It wasn't.

  Not a nickel's worth.

  I shot the red Toyota forward, driving hard.

  The Zangdorfer roost was as far up Laurel Canyon as you could go. An eyrie parked on a slope of mountainside. A long, curving driveway, bordered with ten-foot high privets led right up to the front of the place, after a series of hair-pin, winding turns left you confused and breathless getting there. The drop into the canyon was an eye-opener. It looked deeper than Hollywood Bowl. I edged the little Toyota along a marching row of gnarled sycamore trees and braked on an incline, cutting the wheels, Telegraph Hill-style. The last fifty yards of clearing opened on the front door of the mansion. There were no gates.

  As mansions go, the estate was a little smaller than Texas but all Connecticut gentleman-farmer in architectural design. I had a feeling that a man in overalls with a gold-plated pitchfork over one shoulder would answer the door. I was wrong.

  My use of the heavy bronzed knocker on the oaken portal drew a Zombie in solemn butler's black from the gloomy interior. The man had a face as wrinkled and weathered as a dollar bill that had remained in circulation too long. He heard me give my name without batting an eye, inquired as to the nature of my call, and when I said, "Violet Paris sent me", he disappeared back into the house, leaving me standing under the rambling balcony. He was back in less than two minutes with a quietly-voiced message: "Mr. Zangdorfer is in the library and will see you there. Will you follow me, Sir?"

  All around us, Laurel Canyon was as undisturbed as a deserted golf course. Almost as green, too. I tagged after the butler, very cautiously. I had seen no signs of goons, bodyguards or strong-arm men. Somehow, that didn't wash. B.Z. was too old to play it solo.

  The manservant or whatever his proper designation was, ushered me down a long, parquet-tiled hallway, bore left under an overhanging stairwell and then motioned me forward, stepping back so I could pass. I felt like I was moving in a museum of some kind. But I entered a large, sun-lit, well-stocked library of a room and came to a halt. The Zombie stalked off. Perhaps, the perfect servant for a Bennett Zangdorfer. If he was one half the amazing swinge
r that Violet Paris had said he was.

  One tenth the ancient hell-raiser. The goaty old fool.

  Bennett Zangdorfer, the legendary B.Z., rose like a tall ghost from the antique chair in the heart of the big room, waving me to a seat with a hand that looked like a talon. His craggy, so familiar face, was oddly expressionless. And saying nothing. It was my move, all the way. And I had to be careful how I played the hand. If there was a game at all. I couldn't be that sure.

  He remained standing, staring at me. Waiting.

  His face and figure went well with the five-rows high book cases on all sides of the room. The varying hues and textures of thousands of book bindings, catching some sunlight, threw a haze of further immortality over his tall, stooped figure. He was dressed in a faded scarlet smoking jacket that seemed out-of-style in the lush and lavish surroundings of great wealth. Everything else gleamed and shone, expensively. The jacket looked old enough to have been worn by his father's grandfather. As old as that.

  I sat down, taking a leather-backed comfortable chair.

  I suddenly felt the idiocy of the bold intrusion. For all of Violet Paris' ghostly prodding, what could I hope to accomplish?

  Bennett Zangdorfer, octogenarian, might not be able to tie his own shoelaces without using an oxygen tank. He was withered and sere.

  "Well, you wanted to see me, young fellah?"

  The nasal twang leaped across the room like a broken banjo string.

  About all I could do was nod. I was jockeying for an opening.

  "Do I know you?" Bennett Zangdorfer crackled, lurching forward.

  "No."

  "Noon. Noon. Noon." His voice was now a wheeze from the tomb, as he came closer. "Well, seems as if I should know that name. Anything to do with the industry, young fellah?"

  "No, Mr. Zangdorfer. But the industry is what brings me here. I came to see you because Violet Paris wanted me to do just that."

  His old head jerked at the name and he stopped coming on, tottering to a halt. His eyes peered down at me, as if he might be cursing himself for not putting on the spectacles he certainly ought to need at his age.