The Million-Dollar Wound (Nathan Heller) Read online

  But this wasn’t the real world, it was Glendale, where I caught a cab, despite the six-mile ride I was in for. All expenses were paid on this little jaunt, after all; that was the deal: two hundred bucks, all expenses, no strings. I could enjoy the trip to sunny California, pocket the two C’s, and head back for the windy city, even should I refuse the job.

  Which well I might, but I didn’t see how I could turn down this preliminary offer. Besides, I was going to meet a real-life movie star, unless that was a contradiction in terms.

  “Where to?” the cabby said. He was a blond handsome kid of about twenty, who’d been sitting behind the wheel at the curb reading something called the Hollywood Reporter.

  “One forty-four Monovale Drive,” I said.

  “That’s in Beverly Hills,” he said, matter of factly.

  “If you say so.”

  I climbed out of my raincoat, folding it up and easing it into my overnight bag; anticipating warmer weather here, I’d taken the lighter coat, but was already warm in spite of it. The sun was bright in a blue sky, bouncing off the asphalt, slicing between the fronds of palm trees. This was California, all right.

  “What street is this?” I asked, after a while. This seemed to be a central business and amusement district—shops, movie houses, office buildings, some of the latter approaching skyscraper stature (if not Loop skyscraper stature).

  ROBERT MONTGOMERY

  “The Boulevard,” he said. He wasn’t friendly; he wasn’t unfriendly.

  “Hollywood Boulevard?”

  “Right.”

  I’d thought people might sleep till noon out here, but I was wrong. Either side of the Boulevard was busy with folks sauntering along looking at each other and themselves, reflected in the shop windows, where fancy displays showed manikins wearing expensively informal clothing, the latest polo shirts and sport jackets for men, sporty blouses and slacks for women, earlier examples of which the window-watchers were already wearing, white their predominant color. A few years before, I’d been in Florida; this seemed much the same, and not just because of the sun and pastel art-deco look—the spirit here was similarly that odd combination of sophistication and naivete I’d noticed in Miami.

  Not that I wasn’t impressed.

  “That’s the Brown Derby,” I almost shouted, pointing over toward the east side of Vine Street, where a great big hat squatted. Chicago’s Brown Derby was just a building.

  “Sure is,” the cabby said, blasé.

  Pretty soon he turned off on a side street, into an area of stores, taverns, small hotels, motor courts, drive-in markets, apartment houses. We passed green parkways, pepper trees, palms. A pastel rainbow of stucco bungalows, white, pink, yellow, blue, with tile roofs, often red.

  Then we turned onto a major thoroughfare. “What’s this?”

  “Sunset Boulevard.”

  Soon, he condescended to inform me, we were on the “Strip”: he pointed out such movie-colony night spots as the Trocadero and Ciro’s and the Mocambo. Many buildings along the Strip were painted white with green shutters, housing various little shops with windows boasting antiques or couturiers or modistes and other French-sounding, expensive-sounding nonsense, and restaurants with Venetian blinds protecting patrons from the glare of sun and passersby.

  Hollywood was every bit as strange a place as I’d expected. Later that day, in another cab, I’d pass a small independent movie studio where chaps in chaps and sunglasses and Stetsons, and girls in slacks and sunglasses and bright kerchiefs (protecting their permanent waves) were standing at a corner hot dog stand either flirting or talking shop or maybe a little of both. The hot dog stand, of course, looked like a great big hot dog. Giantism was big out here: fish and puppy and ice cream cone buildings, mingling with papier-mâché castles. It was like the ’33 World’s Fair, but screwier. People ate in their cars.

  Right now, however, I was in a cab winding its way through the rolling foothills of Beverly Hills, on which were mansions, luxuriating behind fences in the midst of obscene green lawns, two stories, three stories, white Spanish stucco, white English brick, yellow stucco, red brick, you name it. The rich north suburbs of Chicago had nothing on these babies.

  “This is Robert Montgomery’s house,” the cabby said, breathlessly, pausing before entering onto the private drive.

  “So what?” I said, unimpressed.

  After all, what was it to me? Just another rambling two-story Colonial “farmhouse,” white frame and brick, surrounded by a rustic rock garden, perched on a hill against a horizon of more hills. Hell, there’s one of them on every third corner back in Chicago.

  He took me up the winding drive, up the sloping lawn. Plenty of trees, too, and not a palm in sight. Clearly this Montgomery was a guy with dough who wasn’t afraid to spend it. Clearly, too, this was a guy who’d rather not be in Hollywood, to the point of reinventing the place into New England.

  I got out of the cab and handed in a sawbuck to the guy, saying, “Keep it.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “Do you know Robert Montgomery?”

  “We’re like this,” I said, holding up crossed fingers.

  “I’m an actor, too,” he said, earnestly.

  “Aren’t we all,” I said, and turned my back on him and went up the sidewalk.

  I knocked on the polished white door, and soon it swung open and a small, attractive woman in her thirties, with light brown hair and a fine smile, greeted me, smoothing her crisp print dress, blue on white, as she spoke.

  “You’d be Mr. Heller,” she said.

  I had my hat in my hands. All I could think of was I hadn’t brushed my teeth since that goddamn sixteen-hour plane ride.

  “Yes I am,” I said, the soul of wit.

  “I’m Mrs. Montgomery,” she said.

  I hadn’t taken her for a servant.

  “Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

  She offered me her hand and I accepted it, a smooth, cool hand which I gently grasped rather than shook.

  “Please step inside,” she said, taking my overnight bag (although I could use the toothbrush therein about now) and she stepped graciously aside and then I was in.

  The hall was knotted pine, and the smell of pine was in the place too; it brought to mind Pegler’s aftershave, which was fitting I suppose, since Pegler brought me here. Mrs. Montgomery paused to gracefully point toward an elaborately framed picture that seemed a little out of place, amidst the otherwise early American trimmings of the place: a bunch of royal-looking dopes in a carriage.

  “This picture is a special prize,” she said. “We were in England at the time of the Silver Jubilee, and this is a signed copy of the Jubilee picture. Painted by Munnings.”

  “By Munnings. Really.”

  “Yes. That’s Queen Mary and King George V on their way to Ascot. And there in the carriage are the Prince of Wales and his brother who became, of course, King Edward VIII and King George VI, respectively.”

  “Of course.”

  A stairway curved gently to the left; also opening to the left was the open-beamed dining room, where dark mahogany early American furniture was surrounded by wallpaper brightly depicting scenes from the Revolutionary War, redcoats and bluecoats cheerfully fighting. I guess I knew who Queen Mary and King George V would’ve rooted for. At a bay window, next to sheer ruffled curtains, sat a small oval table. At the small oval table sat Robert Montgomery. He was reading the Daily Variety, a cup of coffee before him.

  “Mr. Heller’s here, Bob,” Mrs. Montgomery said, and Montgomery rose and smiled. It was the same urbane smile I’d seen in any number of light comedies; it was also the same urbane smile of the killer in Night Must Fall.

  He was about my size, six foot, and weight, one-seventy, casually attired in white shirt and brown slacks; and, like me, was in his mid-thirties or so. His eyes were blue and his hair brown, and he wasn’t strikingly handsome, exactly—it was one of those faces that seemed soft and strong at once—but you knew you were in the presence of somebody
.

  We shook hands. He had a solid, strong grip, and his hands were not the smooth movie-star hands I’d expected; this man had, at some time in the not too distant past, worked a real job.

  “Please join me,” he said, gesturing to the chair opposite him at the small oval table, and he sat down, and I sat down.

  “We waited breakfast for you. Is French toast all right? Orange juice and coffee?”

  “Sure. That’s very gracious of you.”

  He folded the Variety and put it to one side of his place setting; only his coffee cup was before him—he really had waited to have breakfast till I got there.

  “I knew what time you were getting in,” he said, shrugging, smiling just a little. “And I know what those flights are like. You’ve grabbed a random bite at this airport cafeteria and that one. And, despite sleeping on the trip, you’re very tired, aren’t you?”

  I was. I hadn’t noticed it, really, but I was bone tired.

  “I guess I am,” I said.

  “Well, you can relax some, while you’re here. You’re to stay at least overnight. I’ve made reservations for you at the Roosevelt.”

  “Yes, that was my understanding. Thank you.”

  “Thanks for coming out here on such short notice.”

  His wife brought the food in and served it; again, no servants, at least none in sight.

  “It looks delicious,” I told her, and it did.

  “Breakfast is usually a one-man affair at our house,” she said. “I’m sure Bob will appreciate the company.”

  They smiled at each other, quite warmly, and she left. This was a civilized house, that was for sure. Of course with dough like this, they could afford to be civilized.

  Well, the breakfast tasted as good as it looked, the orange juice everything fresh-squeezed California orange juice is supposed to be including pulpy, and we didn’t talk about the pending case, rather talked about my flight and other general small talk. At one point he asked me what I thought about FDR seeking a third term; and I said, I didn’t know it was official; and he said it wasn’t, but that it was going to happen; and I said, I’d probably vote for the guy again.

  “I worked for him in ’33 and ’37,” he said, thoughtfully, seriously, “but it goes against my grain to support any president for a third term. We stop short of royalty in this country, thank God.”

  Jubilee painting or not.

  “I liked you in that movie where you played the killer,” I said.

  He smiled, but it wasn’t the killer’s smile. “It was the role I liked best,” he admitted.

  “You got an Academy Award nomination for that, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.” He laughed to himself. “Do you know what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences really is?”

  “Uh, not exactly, no.”

  “A company union.” Now he smiled the killer’s smile. “A failed company union. You see, Louie B. Mayer wanted to fight any legitimate unionization of actors and directors. The Academy was to be the contract arbitrator between the studio and the guilds. You can imagine just how impartial that arbitration would be. Well, we put a stop to that.”

  “That’s good.”

  After breakfast he ushered me into the nearby “study,” which was bigger than my entire suite at the Morrison: fireplace, built-in shelves of leather-bound books, hunting prints on pine walls, tan leather furniture (none of it patched with tape, either). He settled at one end of an absurdly long leather couch and helped himself to the pipes and tobacco on a small round table before him. He nodded to an overstuffed leather chair opposite him and I sat down in it, and I mean down, in, it.

  “Smoke, if you like,” he said, lighting up the pipe.

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “I thought all private eyes smoked.”

  “Nope. And my secretary isn’t in love with me, either.”

  That amused him. “So the Hollywood clichés don’t apply in real life, hmmm? Well, some do.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Let’s just say, Jimmy Cagney, Eddie Robinson, and George Raft seem to be drawing from life.”

  Well, Raft, anyway.

  “By that you mean,” I said, “there really are gangsters in this wicked old world.”

  “Precisely. And in this wicked old Hollywood as well.”

  “Pegler told me Willie Bioff has muscled into the unions out here. And that that’s what you wanted to talk to me about.”

  He nodded sagely, puffing at the pipe, getting it going. “I’m one of the people who got SAG off the ground. A three-time past president.”

  “SAG?”

  “Screen Actors Guild. We aren’t under Bioff’s thumb—yet. He’s been making some moves in that direction. Now, I invoke Bioff’s name, but in fact the president of the IATSE is Browne.”

  “But Browne’s just the figurehead.”

  “Right. Do you know a man named Circella?”

  “Uh, isn’t that Nicky Dean’s real last name?”

  “Yes it is. He and Bioff and Browne are all but inseparable, out here.”

  “That’s bad, Mr. Montgomery.”

  “Bob.”

  “Bob. And if you’d call me Nate, that’d be just swell, too, but I don’t think I’m going to take this job. I hate to have taken your money and your plane ride and breakfast and all, only to turn you down, but…”

  “But what, Nate?”

  “Nicky Dean is an Outfit man.”

  “Syndicate, you mean. Crime Syndicate.”

  “Yes. He’s one of Frank Nitti’s people. And I’m from Chicago. I live in Chicago. I work in Chicago. And I can’t do either of those things, particularly the first, if I get on Frank Nitti’s bad side. It’s his town.”

  “So will this be, if something isn’t done.”

  I started to rise. “That’s very noble, and I hope you can do something about it. I just ain’t going to be part of it.”

  Patiently, he gestured for me to sit. “Hear me out.”

  “Mr. Montgomery—”

  “Bob. Hear me out. You came this far, after all.”

  “Well. Yeah, I did come a distance. Okay. I’ll hear you out. But I’m afraid I’ll be wasting your time on top of your money.”

  He sat forward, tapped his finger on a manila folder on the little table between us. “Bioff’s got one foot in the figurative grave already. Evidence gathered by an investigator, a former FBI man whom I hired with SAG’s approval, has already been turned over to the Treasury Department.” He pushed the folder toward me. “Those are your copies.”

  I picked the folder up and looked in it. Photostats of letters on IATSE stationery from Browne and Bioff both; statements from disgruntled union members; nothing much. Except for one thing: a photostat of a check made out to Bioff for $100,000. Signed by Joe Schenck.

  “Isn’t Schenck…?”

  “Vice president of Twentieth Century-Fox,” Montgomery said, smiling like an urbane killer again.

  “How did your investigator get this?”

  He shrugged. “There are rumors of a break-in at the IA offices.”

  “That’s illegal.”

  “So is extortion.”

  I flapped the folder at him. “Is that what you think Bioff’s doing? Extorting money out of the movie executives? Selling them strike-prevention insurance?”

  He shrugged again, puffed at his pipe. “It would certainly be cheaper for the studios than paying their help what they’re worth.”

  “Yeah,” I said, looking around. “It’s a tough life.”

  He sat up straight; bristled. “Don’t judge Hollywood by these standards. I’m a lucky, lucky man. The rank-and-file union members in this town—in whose behalf Bioff and Browne are supposedly fighting—are average working joes and janes. They deserve better than being sold out.”

  “But is that little pimp powerful enough to blackmail somebody like Schenck?”

  Nodding forcefully, he said. “Or Thalberg or Mayer or Jack Warner or anybody else. Remember
, Bioff has under his thumb the movie projectionists, who alone can shut down every theater in every major city in the country. And a few such dark days would deliver a blow to the industry that the studios couldn’t recover from.”

  “If the Treasury Department has this evidence, they should be able to prosecute Bioff.”

  “Perhaps. On income-tax evasion, which is fine, but I need to show Bioff for what he is. His drunkard friend Browne is a convincing public speaker; and conditions for workers were so wretched prior to unionization that Bioff and Browne can sell the working man out and he won’t even know it.”

  “So you’d like to see Bioff smeared, to keep him and Browne and the union they represent from attracting any converts. Specifically, to keep the actors out from under their greasy thumb.”

  “Yes. But ‘smear’ isn’t the word.” He pointed with the pipe. “Expose.”

  “Yeah. That’s why you linked up with Pegler.”

  “Certainly. He’s a yellow journalist; a muckraker. But that’s what’s called for in this situation.”

  “You have Pegler. You don’t need me.”

  “I need a good man in Chicago. So does Pegler.”

  “You’ve already hired a private detective.”

  “He’s an L.A. man. Nate, the SAG board authorized me to spend five thousand dollars to investigate Bioff. You see, I assured them if the investigation didn’t prove that Bioff is a very sour apple, I’d personally refund the five thousand.”

  “Five grand, huh? Uh, how much have you spent so far?”

  “Let’s just say I’m prepared to offer you a thousand-dollar retainer, on top of the two hundred dollars you’ve already received, plus expenses, and if your daily fee eats up the thousand, I can authorize you up to another thousand.”

  My mouth felt dry. “That’s a lot of money.” It wasn’t the most money I’d been offered for a case this week, but then again, unlike Eddie O’Hare, Montgomery was alive.