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

I compared the photo to the slab.

There was a difference.

The Harlow slab in the photo had a different inscription: To Sid Grauman, With Sincere Appreciation; here hand and footprints, nothing more.

Alain ripped the photo away from me, refolded it, and jammed it back into his pocket. “Now you begin to see,” he said, looking at me as if he expected an apology.

“What does this have to do with the death of Paul Bern?” I said, the question catching the attention of a few nearby tourists. Alain noticed. He took my sleeve and led me away, over Rex Harrison and Cary Grant, across Jeanne Crain and Natalie Wood, to a back area that gave us a rest bench and a modicum of privacy.

He checked for spies, then whispered, “The fine hand of Howard Strickling at work, Neil, mon ami.”

“I don’t understand, Alain.”

“Of course, but I cracked the puzzle; putting one and two together and getting four.” He adjusted his glasses and nodded in self-accord. A flickered smile gave a momentary animation to his false beard. “The photo is of the block of cement Harlow truly, in fact, did before she murdered Paul Bern.”

“Yes?”

“That terrible night, she summons Howard Strickling to her mansion. This is even before Mayer, anyone. Merde. Strickling recognizes the seriousness of what has happened. He sends Harlow on her way to her mother. He bribes the houseman, who will eventually disappear from the face of our planet, with a large sum of money from a bottomless pot of gold. He does the same with a studio person who writes a suicide note to his specifications. Fearing not all fingerprints will be safely removed, he calls one of his police or gangster connections and soon he has replaced the murder weapon with a .38-caliber pistol that will conveniently have only the prints of Paul Bern. And so on and so on. Now do you begin to understand where I have come from?”

His eyes were beacons of anxiety.

“Tell me, so I’m certain.”

“There is also a confessional note that Harlow has written before Strickling arrives on the scene. As with the true weapon of death, he has confiscated the note. But the Fix-It Man, like so many others, has respect for history and cannot entirely bring himself to destroy this evidence to the truth of what happened. He hides the evidence and, after a safe period of time, he hides it one more time, like a time capsule.” He threw an accusing finger in the direction of the Harlow slab. “Under there. Strickling buried the truth under there.”

He stamped a palm with his fist. His look challenged me to dispute the claim and carried a sense of growing desperation.

“Alain, how could that be?” I said, my mounting uneasiness about his behavior tempered by a newspaperman’s natural curiosity.

“What a Fix-It Man does, Neil. He bribes Grauman. He bribes Jean Klossner, who is the true M. Footprint, a stonemason whose family worked for three generations helping to complete the Notre Dame cathedral, inventors of the wet cement that made—” tossing his arms away — “all this possible. In dark of night at the theater’s forecourt, under a tent of secrecy guarded by police of Strickling’s choosing, in the company of Strickling and Jean Harlow, Monseiur Klossner broke out the old cement, then removed himself, at Strickling’s request, until Strickling could dig down deep enough into the soft earth to place a strongbox in which were the .38 and the confessional note Harlow had written. He smothered the box in the dirt, whereupon Klossner returned and caused the new cement block to be created by Harlow. The hands. The high-heels. But Harlow, she got the inscription wrong and, too quick for Strickling to prevent, she inserted the black pennies.”

Alain grew quiet, his hands folded palms up in his lap, and surveyed the passing parade. A smile lit his lips. “I can smell fresh popped corn soaking in the butter, Neil. I love it, the fresh buttered popped corn. The smell. The taste.” He kissed his fingertips and threw them away. “A cineaste’s true aphrodisiac. My beloved wife, Gilly, and I, we would have it when we attended the cinema. No matter where. I would like some before we leave, the taste on my lips to remind me of our mission when we come back here, oui?”

“Our mission?”

“Yours and mine. They will let us inside for the popcorn? A large-size box. My treat.” He went for his billfold.

I stopped his hand. “Exactly what is our mission, Alain?”

“I have said already, mon ami ... To uncover the truth.”

Alain allowed me to pry myself loose from him only after I had promised to return at nightfall with the supplies we’d need. “And two shovels, especially,” he said, repeating himself endlessly about the shovels. “Two shovels, one for you, one for me, so we dig two times as fast, before we are maybe seen by gendarmes and must go on the run.” He remained obsessed with the shovels until we parted at the hotel, when he chased after me in the underground garage to request: “And an axe for use to crack the cement into pieces we can quickly discard in reaching our goal.”

“Already on our list, Alain.”

He decided he needed to see the list again. He studied it intently, like a student preparing for finals. “Ah, bien. Tres bien. Good, good, good. Two axes, one for me and one for you, also to work swiftly, like with the shovels. We will begin after the last screenings, after the workers all depart and the theater goes empty and dark, oui?”

“An excellent plan, Alain.”

I’d have agreed to two hookers driving tanks down the boulevard if he’d asked, anything to help get me away now from behavior increasingly bordering on the bizarre. I was not going to be party to any dig at Grauman’s Chinese, of course. That was not the issue confronting me. The issue was what to do about Alain De Guerre; how to keep him from going through with his crazy scheme.

I was no sooner behind the wheel of the Jag and turning the key than he was rapping on the window, shoving his face into the opening the instant the glass lowered, beard glistening with sweat, to say, “Are we better off using a drill like the drill they use on streets when they are replacing the asphalt?”

I said, “Excellent thought, Alain. I’ll add them to the list.”

“Also, a torch, one for you and one for me? You agree?”

And one for the little boy who lives down the lane?

“Yes. The drills and the torches, both. Better safe than sorry.”

He said, “Perfect, yes. Two to the list. Two, like the axe and the shovel. The shovel, the kind that are like gravedigger shovels, Neil. We are doing that, are we not? Like gravediggers? Raising a corpse, not laying a corpse to rest; exhuming the body of a tragic crime to once and for eternity reveal the truth.”

I gunned the motor.

A second time.

He smiled at that and stepped away from the car, still giving me instructions, his rapid-fire speech a sputter of confusion, barely understandable as more of it came in French. I glided from the parking slot. Easing toward the garage exit, I caught Alain in the rearview, his arms airborne, fingers raised in what was a Churchillian “V for Victory” or a last reminder about the two shovels, the two axes...

Halfway home, I swung off Sunset and trailed down into Beverly Hills, to a shop on Little Santa Monica Boulevard, M. Berman’s Gallery of Greatness, which I often visited when doing research on Hollywood history. The proprietor, Murray, a man in his mid to late sixties, had more minutiae stored in memory than the Internet. He didn’t let me down after I’d described the two Harlow cement squares, the one in the ground at Grauman’s Chinese and the one in the Alain De Guerre photograph.