Stuart Kaminsky - The Fala Factor

“And his address,” I said quickly, “in case the general wants to contact him confidentially.”

The request made little sense, but the woman was carried away with historical momentum. She gave me an address on Walden Drive in Beverly Hills just south of Sunset Boulevard, and a phone number.

“You have the general’s thanks,” I said and hung up.

I was headed for the address in five minutes wearing my semi-wrinkled trousers, the dark blue pull-over shirt, and a brown wind-breaker with a small oil stain under the right armpit.

Beverly Hills was occupied more than a century ago by the giant Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas. In the mid-1800s the ranch was sold to two Americans named Wilson and Hancock, who already owned the adjacent Rancho La Brea. They tried to found a settlement in the late 1860s and again in the late 1880s, but it was no dice till 1906 when the Rodeo Land and Water Company laid out a subdivision between Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevard and called it Beverly. The idea caught on and the next year Beverly Hills was laid out just northwest of it. The Beverly Hills Hotel went up in a bean field in 1912. By 1920 there were still only 674 people living in Beverly Hills, but Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Mary Pickford changed all that when they built Pickfair on top of one of the hills in the early 1920s. Celebrities began to pour in, trying and failing to outdo Pickfair.

John Barrymore built a mansion that he called the Chinese Tenement. When he tried to auction it off for half a million dollars, he had no takers and said, “Frankly, it was a kind of nightmare, but it might appeal to somebody, maybe some actor. Three pools. Incredible. In one of them I used to keep rainbow trout.”

Before he died in 1935, Will Rogers was Beverly Hills’s honorary mayor.

When the boom started in Beverly Hills in the 1920s, Rogers wrote in his column, “Lots are sold so quickly and often here that they are put through escrow made out to the twelfth owner. They couldn’t possibly make a separate deed for each purchaser; besides he wouldn’t have time to read it in the ten minutes’ time he owned the lot. Your having no money don’t worry the agents, if they can just get a couple of dollars down, or an old overcoat or shotgun, or anything to act as down payment. Second-hand Fords are considered A-l collateral.”

I knew the town, knew the houses where Freeman Gosdon, Grantland Rice, Elsie Janis, Sigmund Romberg, and the automobile wizards E.L. Cord and C.W. Nash lived, but I didn’t know Lyle’s house until I pulled up to the driveway. The place was typical of the area: elaborate metal gate, eight-foot-high stone walls. Down a driveway lined with whitewashed bricks stood a sprawling adobe hacienda.

I had some choices. I could press the button next to the gate and try to talk my way in. I could climb the fence and brass it out. Each option had a drawback. Lyle would probably recognize my voice, even if his secretary hadn’t. He had penetrated my Texas drawl with no problem. Climbing the fence might be possible, but my back told me it would be one hell of an effort and leave me in no shape for whatever I might find on the other side. Besides, that would be trespassing and Bass might well be in there. On the other hand, the dog might well be in there.

The hell with it. I took my.38 from the glove compartment along with the clip-on holster that went over my belt. I put them on and got out of the car to ring the bell and work my magic. If Lyle answered, I would improvise.

“Yes,” came a distorted woman’s voice from the speaker imbedded in the brick column to which the gate was anchored.

“Bullock’s. Delivery,” I croaked.

“Bullock’s?” returned the woman.

“Gift,” I said, straining my voice to its gravelly limits.

Something clicked in the gate and it popped open slightly.

I pushed it the rest of the way, got back in my Ford, and drove up the path, leaving the gate open in case I wanted to leave in a hurry. I drove up the driveway, turned the car around so it would be heading the right way, checked my gun, and got out. A curtain rustled in the room off the doorway, and I hurried to the door. It opened before I got there.

“Thanks,” I said to the woman in the doorway.

“Thanks?” she said.

“For returning my suit,” I told the woman I had known as Anne Olson. “It’s drying out now. Got caught in the rain yesterday.”

I wasn’t sure she looked better, but she certainly looked classier in the doorway. Part of it was what she was wearing, a blue skirt and matching jacket with the high Joan Crawford shoulders. Her blouse was white and fluffy and her dark hair was pulled back.

“Can I come in?” I said.

She stepped back, holding the door open, and I entered, smelling some flowery perfume as I passed her.

The house was decorated in early Zorro, serapes on the wall, paintings of Mexican peasants. Even the furniture was rustic and covered in handmade blankets.

“How did you find me?” she said, walking ahead of me and into the open room on our right, the living room.

“Deduction, logic,” I said. “Is Lyle a friend of yours, too?”

“He is my husband,” she said, turning to look at me, her chin up as if to say, go ahead and hit.

“Your …”

“My name is Anne Lyle,” she said. “The night you found me at Roy Olson’s I was visiting as … as …”

“As …” I finished. “You and Olson were very good friends?”

She nodded in agreement, her mouth closed tightly without speaking.

“You have a lot of good friends,” I said, sitting on the solid wooden arm of a sofa.

“Not too many, but a few,” she said. “Roy Olson was a decent, sensitive man, not an obsessed … Would you like a drink?”

“A Pepsi, no ice, if you’ve got it,” I said charmingly. “Is this story true? I mean, everytime I see you you have a new story and they’re all good and all sincere. Is your husband here? I mean I’d like a little verification this time. Don’t tell me. All I have to do is run up the stairs and find him. He wouldn’t be in the bathtub, would he? No, you wouldn’t hide him in the same place twice.”

“Pepsi,” she said. “I’ll see what we have. The maid is off and Martin isn’t home.”

“Don’t surprise me,” I said, following her out of the room and over the wooden floors covered with colorful throw rugs.

The kitchen was big, bright, and had a giant, heavy table of dark wood in the middle. She went to the refrigerator, found a Pepsi, and removed the cap with an opener attached to the nearby counter.

“No glass,” I said, taking the bottle from her and gulping. “Won’t you join me?”

“I didn’t kill Roy Olson,” she said. “I don’t know who did. Roy was upstairs when you came. He was a decent man. His wife was the one who pushed him into meeting with Martin. When you came to the door, and assumed I was Mrs. Olson, I thought Martin had sent you, and I was admittedly a little drunk. I didn’t know there was going to be a murder, that I …”

“And your husband killed Olson,” I said, shaking the Pepsi bottle with my thumb on top.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Someone must have been waiting for him upstairs. Must you do that?”

I sprayed the Pepsi into my mouth.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m overdoing the you-can’t-hurt-my-feelings crude act.”

“I didn’t trick you,” she said sincerely. “Not to hurt you.”

“But you tried to shoot me back in the clinic,” I said, finishing the Pepsi and putting the bottle down.

“No,” she sighed, her breasts rising softly “I came to the clinic to do just what I did, to shoot that damn bird of Martin’s. He loved that bird. I thought he killed Roy Olson because he was jealous, but I couldn’t bring myself to shoot Martin, as much as I would have liked. Shooting Henry helped.”