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

“Both authentic,” Murray said, before I could ask the question. “Now I suppose you want to know how that can be?” he said, and at once launched into an explanation. “Howard Strickling wanted to make Jean’s ceremony stand out from any of the others when he started to promote the movie Dinner at Eight, so Strickling arranged with Grauman to have it conducted on the theater stage, in front of an audience paying for the privilege of seeing Harlow in the flesh. First time it was ever done that way, and the last.

“The cement maven, Klossner, and his assistants wheel out the framed slab of wet cement on a flatbed dolly and move it onto the floor. She does her thing with the handprints, the shoes, the signature. So far, so good.” There were glasses of freshly brewed tea and a bowl of sugar cubes on the antique table between our armchairs in the conversation area. Murray stuck a cube between his teeth and, after giving his glass several stirs, tilted back his head for a healthy rinse and swallow. He signaled me to try it that way and continued: “Now comes the problem. Klossner’s cement dried faster than usual. While the assistants are lifting the slab back onto the dolly, it splits down the middle. Half falls out of the frame, drops onto the floor, and smashes to bits. Gone. Finished. Destroyed. So, four days later, the ceremony is repeated outside in the forecourt, the way it should’ve been done in the first place, and that’s the one that’s there, except for the pennies Harlow put in for good luck. So much for good luck.” Another swallow. “What else, Neil? You’ve been holding something back from me. I can tell.”

I sprang Alain De Guerre’s theory on him, but made it my own.

Murray gripped his belly in place while his jowls danced to the music of his laughter. He could not get words past an asthmatic wheeze until the lubrication set in from an inhaler he kept nearby.

“I were a betting man, I’d bet there’s nothing under Harlow’s block but the good earth that was there when Grauman built the Chinese to go with his Egyptian Theatre up the boulevard and the Million Dollar in downtown L. A.,” he said. “Makes for a good story, but too risky even for a Howard Strickling.” Another spritz. “The one I always liked? The one about Bern catching her in bed with Bill Powell, and Powell wrestles the gun away from Bern and Kaboom! Then, in comes Strickling to fix things up with the cops, City Hall, the press. Everything that never happened for the French director Alain De Guerre, remember? When Gillian Lance was shot dead a few years ago and De Guerre was indicted for murder and went running back to France, where they’ve always refused to extradite him because of the death penalty here?” He looked at me strangely. “What’s suddenly up with you, Neil? I say, something wrong?”

Murray’s observation had brought me back from the dreamland of Alain De Guerre’s out-of-control imagination. I grew increasingly nervous on the drive home, stung by the truth of the situation I had allowed Alain to lead me into. I was harboring a fugitive from justice; aiding and abetting. A D.A. bent on headlines and videotape at eleven could stretch the charges against me to include accessory to murder.

For his well-being and my own, I had to figure a way to stop Alain from night-crawling at Grauman’s Chinese and get him on a bus, a train, or a plane out of the country.

That was what? Aiding and abetting a flight to avoid prosecution?

How many years would that get me?

Maybe the judge would be compassionate, go easy.

The phone stopped ringing and the answering machine had taken over by the time I got inside my apartment. Alain. Sounding frantic. Saying, “I’ve run out of counting the times I have rung you up, mon ami. Where are you? We have new arrangements to discuss. Call me, call me, call me. Oui? Yes? How you say, Okay? I am waiting, damn you, Neil. Damn you, damn you, damn you.”

I rewound the machine and hit playback. His were a dozen of the fifteen messages, his voice growing increasingly strident, requests turning into demands, whines into tears of anguish at my failure to respond. All of them dealt with either his need for confirmation on the specific time we would be meeting or the idea that we should include a wooden mallet and slender chisel in our arsenal of attack weapons.

“I do not wish to destroy her block, and we can be most diligent with the mallets and the chisels,” went one of them. Two of them. Three of them. “But the shovel, the drill, all that we put on the list, bring them as well,” went another of them. Two of them. Three of them. “We are like Columbus tonight, making a great discovery for the ages,” he decided. “We empty the world of another lie,” he decided.

Once, he wondered if my ex was good in bed, explaining, “I always go to bed with my leading ladies, Neil. It is tradition. You shouldn’t mind. You are no longer man and wife, but I wanted you to know anyway. Only the great Deneuve was beyond me. My Gilly, she went to bed with her leading men, so what to do but to forgive her shameless behavior, oui?” The call ended with out-of-control sobbing.

More abrupt was the message later, in which Alain decided, “If the sex queen of the soap operas denies the role in The Jean Harlow Affair, I have in mind to offer it to Isabelle Huppert. I have never slept with Isabelle Huppert. You, Neil? You ever sleep with Huppert, Neil?”

I was tempted to pick up the phone, call and tell him—

What?

Alain, this is insane, this whole Harlow business. You’re crazy to be here. You have to go back home and—

And what?

Better, maybe, to drop a dime on him with one of my old pals at Parker Center — Steiger, DeSantis — the kind of cop cooperation that would take me off the hook? That made sense, and maybe it would even be doing Alain a favor. I’d always believed in his innocence. What better way to prove friendship than by pushing him to his day in court? Yeah. I’d be doing him a favor, but — at what price to my self-respect?

My dignity?

My honor?

To Alain De Guerre’s freedom, possibly his life, were a jury to find him guilty of killing Gillian Lance?

Alain trusted me.

He had called originally expecting better of me than to turn him over to the police.

I expected better of myself.

I jumped into a shower to wash away my feelings of guilt, then grabbed a Heineken from the fridge and settled at the computer to reaffirm my faith in Alain’s innocence.

My old L. A. Daily pass codes still worked, and got me to the florid prose filed by my one-time nemesis, Clancy McPhillip. I swam through the melodrama he always injected into his copy and reconfirmed that the D.A.’s decision to pin Alain to his wife’s murder stemmed mainly from evidence that at best was circumstantial, most of it derived from conflicting statements made by a husband besotted with grief, his emotions rarely under control from one minute to the next.

The facts that most often came together:

Alain, finished shooting Asthma, is preparing to return to Paris with his American-born wife. He agrees to stay an extra week so she can attend the premiere of her new film, Strangers, at Grauman’s Chinese. The promotion includes a forecourt ceremony for Gilly and her director, Walker Wheeler. Alain becomes increasingly agitated while Gilly is applying her signature to the wet cement. He begins deriding Wheeler when it’s the director’s turn, claiming Wheeler is a hack and has no business being immortalized at all, much less before Alain De Guerre. Heated words are exchanged. Alain accuses Wheeler of having slept with his wife during filming. The director denies it, strings together a series of X-rated curses, and is so distracted he misspells his signature in the cement. He scratches through it and chucks the stylus at Alain, who responds by whipping out a .22 and aiming it at Wheeler while repeating claims of an affair between the director and Gilly. Alain manages to fire a wild shot before the guards subdue him and drag him off kicking, screaming, and vowing revenge. The bullet flies over stunned fans behind the velvet ropes and plunges into one of the stone lion-dogs guarding the theater entrance. Studio publicists step in diplomatically. The .22 is returned and Alain is released without charges being filed after corner huddles with theater management and the LAPD.