Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, No. 1. Whole No. 785, January 2007

“Nola Nielsen,” I said.

He repeated it to get the pronunciation down while he checked me for a gun. Then he looked over the Corsair and said, “Jack Paar told a pretty funny joke about Edsels the other night. I can’t remember how it went.”

“It was something about how the guys who drive them don’t like to be kept standing out in the sun, I bet.” I was a little sensitive about Edsel jokes.

Brando lost his grin, found it again, and said, “How do they feel about getting tossed out on their ears? Wait a minute,” he added, holding up a beefy hand. “Tell me when I get back.”

He came back quickly, but it wasn’t to toss me out. He showed me inside, acting puzzled about it, if not disappointed.

During my wait, I’d examined the house, a heavily timbered ranch, and imagined the interior to be something on the order of a hunting lodge. Instead, it was like a Park Avenue apartment writ large. Not that I got much of a tour. The man I’d come to see was out back, sitting next to a swimming pool with a mountain view.

Morrie Bender was thin and frail, gray-skinned and nearly hairless, but walking out to brace him, I felt a little like I had the day my outfit boarded ship for occupied France. It was his gaze that conveyed the threat. Though his eyes were yellow and rheumy, the look they were giving me was as fragile as a bayonet. It was a look I’d seen once or twice before in the eyes of dying hard-cases, a willingness — even a desire — to take someone with them.

He smiled when I drew close, but it didn’t soften things. “Hollywood Security, huh?” he said. “You one of Paddy Maguire’s boys?”

“Yes,” I said, trying not to glance at the chair he hadn’t invited me to use.

“How is the big mick?” he asked. He seemed to do about half his talking on the inhale.

“Fine.”

“Getting older?”

“Yes.”

That pleased him. “I tried to get him drunk one night. At Ciro’s, maybe. In ‘forty-three, I think it was. I was sixty-five then. I thought Maguire knew something I wanted to know, so I kept the drinks coming. That was a waste of my money. I changed the combination on my safe the very next day. I was that sure I’d told him more than he’d told me. Nothing about Nola Nielsen, though. I’m damn sure of that.”

“Paddy didn’t send me. He didn’t want me to bother you.”

“What bother?”

“But he did ask me to give you his regards.”

Those were the magic words. “Have a seat,” Bender said. “Tell me why you’re here.”

I started to tell him about Nielsen’s slab. He stopped me with a smile that really was a smile.

“I was there the night she made that thing,” he said. “It was nineteen twenty-eight. I was fifty. Thought I was still twenty-five. I wasn’t at Grauman’s officially. That wouldn’t have looked so good. But I was in the crowd. They had a regular little ceremony. We went dancing afterwards, I remember. Nola had her motor wound up that night, I can tell you.”

That brought us to the awkward part of my pitch. Experience had taught me that there was no smooth way to accuse someone of a crime, so I dove right in, describing the theft of the slab from the warehouse. Luckily, Bender had even more experience as an accusee than I had as an accuser. And he’d been accused of a lot worse than stealing concrete. His smile barely dimmed.

“You think I saw that story on the TV and decided I had to have her footprints as a keepsake? Not a bad thought, except that I hated that little blonde’s guts. If I’d lifted that slab, it’d been so I could use it for a urinal.

“So now you’re wondering what happened after that night at Grauman’s in ‘twenty-eight to get me feeling that way. So I’ll tell you. She walked out on me. Me. She thought she had to choose between her movies and me and she chose her movies.

“I would have talked her out of it, except that she ran away to New York, a town where I wasn’t welcome. Spent most of nineteen twenty-nine there. Working with Broadway dramatic coaches so she’d be able to talk on the screen, that was the story. But it was really to give me time to cool off, which I did.”

“You don’t sound that cool right now,” I said.

“That’s over what she did when she came back. She almost got me a seat in the gas chamber. After she killed herself, I had the cops in my hip pocket for weeks. They’d never been able to get me for something I’d actually done. But I was sure they’d get me for that, something I had no part in. Then it blew over.”

End of story and, I was afraid, the interview. I threw out another question. “Do you know anyone else who might have wanted a keepsake of Nola? Did she have any family?”

“Back East somewhere. I can’t remember their name. Nola Nielsen wasn’t her real name, but so what? Everybody changes his name out here. Even me. My real name’s Benderwitz. That’s how I signed myself in at Ellis Island in nineteen oh-one. I was twenty-three.”

“How about Nola’s friends?”

“I remember one pal of hers. Sort of a paid companion, a girl from her hometown. Her name was Rita something. She was a looker herself, was Rita. And a wildcat too, like Nola. They were a pair, those two.”

The memory of that pair wore him out, or maybe it was all the talking. He waved me out of my chair. “Thanks for coming. Tell that big mick boss of yours to keep his nose clean.”

It was time to report in and get an update on the kidnappers, but I still thought they were figments of Paddy’s imagination. So I drove downtown to the courthouse and followed a trail in its worn linoleum that led me to the office of the county recorder. There I asked to see a copy of Nola Nielsen’s last will and testament. I was hoping the will would point me toward Nielsen’s family and friends, that some of them would be in the greater Los Angeles area, and that at least one of those would still be breathing.

The clerk, who was old enough to have delivered Nielsen’s newspapers, said it would take awhile. He pointed to a row of gunmetal chairs and told me to make myself comfortable. I made myself uncomfortable instead worrying over whether Nielsen had bothered to change her name legally. Not every star got around to doing that. If Nielsen hadn’t, her will would be filed under Gladys Knockwurst or whatever her parents had christened her. And I’d be scrambling around trying to track that name down.

It was a nice little worry, more than enough to keep my pipe going at a steady clip. About the time I’d reduced all its tobacco to ash, the clerk returned with an extra-long folder and good news. Nola Nielsen had died under her screen name, like a good star should.

Though typed on a long sheet of paper, the will was fairly short. There was a token bequest to Dr. and Mrs. Herbert Axlerod of Columbus, Georgia, Nielsen’s parents, almost certainly. Another small gift went to “my pal” Rita Koenig. She had to be the Rita that Bender remembered so fondly, the paid companion. The bulk of Nielsen’s estate went into a trust to be managed by the Golden State Bank and Trust. The documents defining the trust weren’t included in the folder.

I asked my friend the clerk for that missing piece, and he referred me to Golden State’s trust department. “And good luck with that,” he said.

On my way out, I stopped in the lobby at one of a bank of pay phones. My phone’s directory contained no listing for a Rita Koenig. I then used the phone itself to call Grauman’s front office. The receptionist knew exactly who Patrick J. Maguire was. Everybody in the building did by then.

“Talk them out of a drink yet?” I asked when the man himself came on the line.

“No. It’s drier here than a Baptist funeral. No calls from any slabnappers either. I’m running out of stories.”