David Morrell - Double Image

The headline for the October first issue was about Franklin Roosevelt and the President’s efforts to deal with the Depression. A related story described the worsening economic conditions in Los Angeles. International news about fears of a war in Europe were next to a report of a local fire in which five children and two adults had burned to death. If you weren’t in a bad mood when you woke up, Coltrane thought, you would be after reading all this.

As the machine’s fan whirred, preventing the heat of the bulb from burning the microfilm, Coltrane spooled further on. He paid close attention to the entertainment section in each issue but failed to find any mention of Rebecca Chance. Even when he got to October tenth, the day the police had been told that she was missing, he still didn’t find any mention of her. Was the studio keeping her disappearance quiet in order to avoid a scandal? If so, what kind of scandal?

On page eighteen, two days later, October twelfth, he finally found it, “Actress Missing,” a story only six inches long that basically summarized what was in the police report. She had failed to report for work at Universal. The studio had grumbled to her agent. The agent had tried to phone her and then had gone to her home, where no one answered. A neighbor said that he hadn’t seen any sign of activity in the house, including lights, for at least a week. When police searched the house, they found nothing that appeared to have been disturbed or missing. An assistant director at the studio said that she was always on time and knew her lines – it wasn’t like her to fail to be punctual. There weren’t any gaps in her clothes closet to indicate that she had packed and gone on an unannounced trip. Foul play was suspected.

A photograph accompanied the article, and Coltrane had the impression that the article might not have been printed at all if Rebecca Chance hadn’t been so beautiful. Although the photograph, obviously a studio still, didn’t do her the justice that Coltrane knew was possible, he had trouble taking his eyes away from it. The tone of the article wasn’t reverential. It didn’t treat her as a star. That the small piece was buried in the middle of the newspaper reinforced the impression that this was being considered more a crime story than a show-business one. Up-and-coming and promising were the words used to describe her. At the end of the article, Coltrane wrote down two titles, the films she had most recently appeared in: Jamaica Wind and The Trailblazer .

Finishing the issue for October twelfth, he continued to the next day, and the day after that. On page twenty of the latter, Rebecca’s photograph, another studio still, immediately caught his attention. It, too, couldn’t compare to Packard’s amazing depictions of her. Nonetheless, her gaze held his own. When he finally broke away and read the article, he learned that the only hint of progress in the investigation was that an actress friend at Universal had told the police about crank phone calls and obsessive fan mail Rebecca had complained about. The calls and the letters all seemed to have come from the same person, and they were all about the same thing: vows of eternal love. “The ‘eternal’ part sounded creepy,” the actress friend said. Rebecca had apparently thrown the letters away – when the police went back to search her house again, they couldn’t find them. The police were speaking to other actresses who might have received similar letters. Other than that, there weren’t any leads.

Coltrane leaned back in his rigid wooden chair and rubbed his forehead. The copy of the police report that Rodriguez had given him made no mention of an overinsistent fan. Did that mean the file was incomplete, or did it mean that the police had put no credence in the story the actress friend had told? Perhaps the actress friend hadn’t been such a close friend after all; perhaps her only motivation had been to get her name in the newspaper. If the police discounted her claims, would they have mentioned them in their report? This wasn’t the only discrepancy Coltrane had noted. The first article had listed Rebecca’s age as twenty-two, while the missing persons’ file had given her age as twenty-five, a figure supplied by her parents. At the same time, it had not mentioned Rebecca Chance’s real name. Ohio, and not Texas, was now her home state. All of this suggested to Coltrane that the newspaper hadn’t gotten a look at the police report but had received its information through an intermediary, what seemed to Coltrane like a studio publicist who was protecting the studio’s investment in her, persisting in its white-bread image of her.

The effort had worked. Coltrane scanned the bold print at the start of every article in every issue on the microfilm, continuing through to the end of the year, feeling an odd sense of time overlapping when he reached December twenty-ninth, the same date as when he now examined the microfilm. There were no further references to the disappearance of Rebecca Chance. He rubbed his eyes, which felt as if sand had fallen into them. Stretching his arms, he glanced at his watch and blinked with shock. A few minutes before six o’clock. He had been here seven hours.

“JAMAICA WIND ?”

“Yes.”

“ The Trailblazer ?”

Coltrane nodded.

“Never heard of them.” The purple-haired clerk was about twenty. Videotapes crammed the shelves behind him.

“I’m not surprised. They never heard of them over at Tower Video, either. But they told me that if anybody would know how to get a copy of them, it’d be you.”

The clerk, who also had a ring through his left nostril, straightened a little, his pride engaged. He pulled Leonard Maltin’s Movie and Video Guide from beneath the counter and started to leaf through it.

“They had a copy of Maltin’s book over at Tower,” Coltrane said.

“These movies aren’t in it?”

Coltrane shook his head.

“Well, if Maltin doesn’t list them, it’s a pretty good sign these things have never been shown on TV.”

“Except maybe since that edition of the book came out,” Coltrane said. “And Maltin himself admits that his book doesn’t include every minor film that ever had only a couple of showings at midnight forty years ago.”

The clerk, who was wearing an Edward Scissorhands T-shirt, pulled another reference book from beneath the desk. This one was called A Worldwide Filmography . It was oversized, battered, and thick. He looked through the pages. “ Jamaica Wind . Yep, it exists.”

“I never doubted that.”

“Universal, 1934.”

“Right.”

“Guy Kibbee, William Gargan, Beulah Bondi, Walter Catlett, Rebecca Chance.”

Coltrane felt his pulse increase.

“Sounds like a remake of Rain ,” the clerk said.

“What?”

“This is almost the same cast as Rain , but without Joan Crawford.”

“You really do know your movies.”

The clerk, who wore a Mickey Mouse wristwatch, straightened with greater pride. “I try. But I have to tell you – I never heard of this actress here at the end: Rebecca Chance.”

“She had a short career.”

“What else was she in?”

“That other movie I’m trying to find.”

“ The Trailblazer ? Let’s have a look.” The clerk flipped to near the back of the book. “Yep. Same company. Same year. Bruce Cabot, Hugh Buckler, Heather Angel, Tully Marshall, and…” The clerk made a drumroll with his hands. “Rebecca Chance. Now we’re getting somewhere. The picture was directed by George B. Seitz.”

“Who?”

“A couple of years later, Seitz did The Last of the Mohicans . Matter of fact, some of these actors were in that movie.”