Тимоти Уилльямз - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 769 & 770, September/October 2005

“And to play Jean Harlow in our film—”

“Let me guess... Jean-Paul Belmondo.”

“Too old, and also the same, alas, for Alain Delon, for whom I was named after by my sainted mother. Non, mon ami, as Le Blonde Bombshell I see your wonderful and beautiful ex-wife, the gifted Stephanie Marriner, the once-upon-a-time sex queen of the soap operas, which I watched like my religion after they began on our television.”

A week later, shortly before nine o’clock, the evening sky darkly sinister, only a quarter moon to show for the hour, I was waiting for Alain inside the Global Bus terminal in Pasadena, where movie studio press agents once staged their celebrity arrivals. This was before TV, when theater newsreels were a main source of publicity and the station’s hacienda motif made for a far more colorful backdrop than the main terminal twenty minutes away in downtown L.A., on the cusp of Skid Row. The terminal was empty, except for eight or ten people who were also waiting out the bus and a collection of bums sleeping it off on corner benches, their shopping carts piled high with life on the streets, the smell of their cheap whiskey clouding the room and scraping my nostrils raw.

I passed the time reflecting on Jean Harlow and Paul Bern, weeding out fantasies from the facts surrounding the MGM producer’s death on July 5, 1932, three days after he’d wed the Platinum Blonde under the approving eyes of studio genius Irving Thalberg and Thalberg’s own glittering star of a wife, Norma Shearer.

Harlow is away overnight from their Benedict Canyon cottage, visiting with her mother.

In the morning, Bern’s naked body is discovered by the butler, lying facedown in front of a full-length mirror in the bathroom of the white-walled master bedroom, reeking of Harlow’s favorite perfume, Mitsouko. A bullet through his head. A .38-caliber pistol by his side.

The butler, panicked, phones MGM instead of calling the police.

In no time, Thalberg arrives with studio boss Louis B. Mayer and Mayer’s publicity chief and principal henchman, Howard Strickling. Strickling phones for police after Mayer discovers a handwritten suicide note of apology to Harlow:

Dearest Dear,

Unfortunately this is the only way to make good the frightful wrong I have done you and to wipe out my abject humiliation. I love you.

Paul

You understand that last night was only a comedy.

Case closed, or was it as simple as that?

So open and shut?

What new truth did Alain De Guerre believe he had discovered?

What evidence did he think he’d found that made worthwhile his risking capture by this trip to Hollywood?

The squeal of brakes signaled the arrival of Alain’s bus. I moved outside and drank in the fresh air while searching for him among the dozen or so passengers who stepped onto the arrival platform and did some combination of stretch and yawn, greet and hug, and watchful wait while the driver unloaded luggage from the undercarriage.

Alain wasn’t among them, or so it appeared until I reacted to tapping on my shoulder and turned around to confront a man clutching a fat gym bag, in a rumpled black suit and matching skullcap, barely any face showing past Coke-bottle glasses and a salt-and-pepper bush of a beard stretching down six or eight inches from an off-center bulb of a nose broken once too often.

That nose was the giveaway. It had been broken three times that I was aware of. Tabloid stuff. Once by the husband of some young actress who wound up on his cutting-room floor; once by the young actress, following the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival; once, after it had healed, by Alain’s late wife, within hours of her learning from the tabloids about her husband and the young actress.

I said, “Alain?”

He pressed a finger to his lips. “Lower your voice, mon ami. They may be on to me.” His eyes did a quiet dance, signaling me to check behind, to my right. A couple in their mid to late seventies, suitcases in hand, seemed to be studying us. “They have looked suspicious since they boarded behind me, like they knew better than my disguise.” The couple headed in our direction slowly, each step a seeming adventure in pain. “Quickly. Where is your car?”

“The parking lot. An old Jag.” I rattled off the license plate number.

Alain’s eyebrows rose. “A limousine, how nice it would have been right now for the getaway.” He charged off hugging his gym bag to his chest, leaving me to deal with the elderly couple. They got to me and kept going, heading for a teenage kid with long hair, nose rings, and drooping jeans two sizes too large for his skinny-hipped frame; standing in the entrance with his arms raised apologetically, huffing and puffing an explanation: “Grandma, Gramps, so, like, sorry, really sorry. I got busted for speeding on the freeway...”

“That was a close call,” Alain said. He was crouched below see level in the backseat of the Jag. Until he spoke up, I’d feared he was in the parking lot, aiming for the wrong car or on the lam from Grandma and Gramps. I said so as I slid behind the wheel and sparked the ignition. Alain made a noise that sounded like a severe gas pain and, not entirely convinced, urged me to pay attention to my rearview for headlamps that wouldn’t go away before changing the subject. “I confess, Neil, of having had hopes of you surprising me by bringing your ex-wife to help in welcoming me for our auspicious reunion,” he said.

“Stevie’s in the middle of Texas, on location for another twelve weeks, costarring with Clooney and Depp in a remake of Giant.”

“Merde. Nobody leaves good enough alone in Hollywood. They wanted me to remake Breathless. I smiled in their faces one at a time. I said, ‘What would we call it? Asthma?’ They looked at me like I am joking and laughed to win my favor, except the one vice president who reminded me of the first schoolgirl I ever kissed with my tongue. She thought it was a wonderful suggestion and that it would have special attraction for people suffering from asthma.”

“Alain, you did direct Asthma.”

“The money, mon ami. At a time I had more debts than principles. Besides, I could bring my dear precious wife and live in the laps of luxury in Hollywood, in the Benedict Canyon, while mending our broken relationship.”

“Instead, she was murdered and you were—”

“Neil!” He used my name to put a period to the subject. “The only murder bringing us now together is Paul Bern, by the hand of the legendary Blonde Bombshell, Jean Harlow,” he said. “Do me the favor of paying attention to your driving, will you do that? I booked into the Renaissance Hotel, behind the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.” He stretched out on the rear seat with his gym bag for a pillow and within minutes was asleep.

I snapped on the radio to KJAZ. With the jazz station as the soundtrack to my thoughts, I used the half-hour drive to Hollywood to reflect on rumors that had circulated at the time and in years since had gained strength, but not substantiation. Most began and ended with Mayer’s man, Howard Strickling, loyal and powerful, known privately as “The Fixer” because of his ability to manipulate the government, the newspapers, and anybody and anything else, in the service of his boss.

So, no surprise that almost the first words from Alain when I met him the next morning were: “Howard Strickling, mon ami. You know his name, that villain?”

Alain was waiting for me outside the Renaissance Hotel, situated on the towering backside of the Hollywood & Highland shopping complex that surrounds Grauman’s Chinese, constructed at a cost of six hundred million dollars to resemble — in true motion-picture kitsch — one of the colossal sets that had been built for D.W. Griffith’s epic Intolerance. Alain clucked like a hen on speed and lamented that the closest France had come to so magnificent a creation was the Eiffel Tower and perhaps the Arc de Triomphe. He looked too serious to be joking.