Эд Макбейн - The April Robin Murders

“If you don’t mind, Mr. Henkin,” Bingo said, “we’d like to get straight to the point. We’d like to know about April Robin.”

Leo Henkin heaved a particularly forlorn little sigh. He gestured to two Saarinen chairs and then sat in another chair facing the pool. Darkness had come with its customary suddenness. The flagstones surrounding the pool were black and shadowy, but the underwater lights cast a reflected glow into the lanai, tinting Henkin’s thin white hair with amber.

“Her real name was Abigail Ross,” Henkin said. “They changed it to April Robin when she began working for Metro in 1926. Her first movie was one of those Ruritanian romance things. The movie stank, but April Robin... ahhhhh!” Leo Henkin kissed his fingers. “She was only fifteen at the time, but God, what an actress! Have you ever seen her? Have you ever seen any of her pictures?”

“No,” Bingo admitted.

“A beauty, a beauty,” he said. “Like a bird, like a bird on the wing.”

“What did she look like?” Handsome asked, and his brow was furrowed and Bingo knew he was teasing his memory, coaxing it to come up with a photo of April Robin.

“Brown hair,” Henkin said, “as soft as mink. And big brown eyes. A delicate profile, high cheekbones, a rosebud mouth. Small-boned, she was, small all over, but with a beautiful figure. She was like a sister on the screen, do you know what I mean? But a sister with whom you wanted to commit incest. I’ll tell you what her secret was. Would you like to know what April Robin’s secret was?”

“Yes,” Bingo said.

“She was youth. She was fifteen and a star, both parents dead, most of her money going into a trust fund. Fifteen! Youth! And youth was in her face and her eyes and her body, and I’ll tell you something. She’d still be young today. She had that kind of beauty. If she was still alive today, she’d be forty-seven years old, and I’ll bet my house and my business and my life that she wouldn’t look a day over thirty-two. Unchangeable. The beauty that never grows old, a few have it, and they last forever. She’d be young always. You’d look at her and automatically think of her as a young girl.” Henkin shook his head. “If she’d lived. But she’s dead, isn’t she? A shame. A real shame.”

“How did she die, Mr. Henkin?” Handsome asked. His brow was still furrowed.

Henkin shook his head. “Oh, what a story,” he said, “what a terrible story. Do you know what happened in October of 1927?”

“Yes,” Handsome said. “The Jazz Singer opened at the Warner Theatre in New York.”

“The Jazz Singer,” Henkin said, nodding soberly. “And, of course, the revolution of the film industry. April Robin was working on a silent movie when the news broke. Somebody read the writing on the wall and immediately began reshooting it. It was a good thing, too. By the middle of 1928 the lousiest sound movies were outdrawing the best silent films all over the country. April Robin’s first sound film was released in December of 1928. She was just seventeen, I remember. She was one of the first silent stars to take the plunge.”

“What happened?” Bingo asked.

“I remember the opening,” Henkin said. He sighed. “It opened at the Pantages. There were signs all over the place.” He gestured with his hands. “Robin Speaks.” He paused. “Well, she spoke. And they laughed. Oh God, they laughed. They laughed because the voice wasn’t fragile April Robin. The voice was Abigail Ross of Brooklyn, New York. It didn’t fit the concept the movie public had of their star, and so they laughed. They laughed fit to bust. She ran out of the theatre, I remember. She grabbed the nearest car, and drove away. They said later that she really wasn’t a good driver, didn’t even have a license, in fact. They said that was what caused the accident.”

“She had an accident that night?”

“No, no,” Henkin said. “The next day. Nobody saw or heard from her that night. The next day the newspapers made a shambles of her career. One critic said she sounded like a millhand with laryngitis. She must have seen the papers. She was a very sensitive girl, and also a kid, don’t forget that. Only seventeen years old with a whole life ahead of her. In any case, for reasons nobody yet understands, she went to her Hollywood bank the next day and withdrew seventy-five thousand dollars — her entire savings. She was earning fabulous money, you know, but most of it went into a trust fund. Close to a million dollars at the time of the accident. But all she had in cash was seventy-five thousand dollars, and she withdrew that and drove off again. And then—”

Henkin paused. Except for the lights from the pool, the lanai was very dark. He switched on a lamp and then sat again, heavily, like and old, old man who had seen everything the movie colony could offer, the quick successes and the quicker failures, the overnight stardom, the exorbitant salary demands, the movies made and the movies remade, the cycles returning and vanishing, all of it.

“They found her at the bottom of a cliff the next day in the car she’d stolen. The car was a wreck, destroyed, completely burned — terrible, terrible. April Robin — the most beautiful and tender thing on the screen — she... she couldn’t be described, it was that bad. They... they also found a few charred hundred-dollar bills in the wreckage. They identified them as part of the money she’d withdrawn from the bank that afternoon. And they found her purse, of course, with identification. And that was the end. The press hushed it up. They didn’t like the idea that maybe their reviews had caused what looked like a suicide.”

Henkin stopped talking. The room was very silent.

Bingo waited for what seemed like a very long time. Then he said, “You knew her personally?”

“Yes. I knew her personally.”

“Would you say that Janesse Budlong resembles her?”

“I would,” Henkin said.

“Resembles her very much?”

“A little,” Henkin said. “Actually, she resembles her mother more. That flaming red hair. Exactly like her mother’s.”

Bingo felt a slight twinge of disappointment.

“And her mother?” he said. “What was her maiden name?”

Henkin chuckled a bit. “Victor would kill me if I told you this, and so would Alexandria. That’s her name. Janesse’s mother. Alexandria.”

“Alexandria what?”

Henkin chuckled again. “Alexandria Breckenfoote, and for God’s sake, don’t tell Victor I told you.”

“There isn’t then,” Bingo said morosely, “the slightest possibility that Janesse Budlong is April Robin’s daughter.”

Henkin’s eyebrows went up onto his forehead. “Not the slightest possibility,” he said. “Even if April Robin hadn’t died in 1928, why, for God’s sake, I know people who were at the hospital when Janesse was born. Alexandria’s her mother all right, no question.” He paused. “What gave you the idea—?”

“I don’t know,” Bingo said. “I guess I’ve been thinking of ghosts too much. May I use your phone, Mr. Henkin?”

“Please,” Henkin said.

He put a call through to the Skylight Motel. A woman answered the phone and said that Mariposa DeLee had not yet returned. Bingo went back into the lanai, thanked Henkin for his time and information, and then started out with Handsome.

At the door, some of Henkin’s flamboyancy seemed to come back. “Remember,” he said. “When you need studio space, actors, scripts, anything, just call on old Leo Henkin.”

“We’ll be sure to,” Bingo promised, “and thanks again, Mr. Henkin.”

As they walked toward the car, Handsome said, “Maybe that’s why I couldn’t remember about her, Bingo. Because the newspapers hushed it up. Maybe my memory’s all right, after all.”