1
ONE FOOT OVER the threshold of her condominium, Harriet Johansen leaned back to confirm the number on the door.
“I thought I got off the elevator on four by mistake,” she said. “My neighbor there scrubs biochemical labs for a living.”
Valentino grinned. “I just tidied up a little.”
She looked around. The hours she spent working with the LAPD forensics team hadn’t trained her in housekeeping. She was a minimalist by necessity, furnishing her home in Spartan fashion: There wasn’t a knickknack or a throw rug or a decorative pillow in the place. You could sweep it out with a leaf-blower. Nevertheless, stale air, gray film, and garments shed in a hurry had managed to breed and multiply like rabbits—or more accurately, dust bunnies. Unavoidable neglect was the cause, and the arrival of a roommate with more time on his hands the cure. The flat smelled of Febreze and Lemon Pledge and shone as bright as new chrome.
She looked down at her feet. “I own a carpet shampooer?”
“I rented it. I churned up enough popcorn kernels to stock the concession stand in the Oracle for a year.”
“If I knew I was going to live with Howard Hughes, I’d have told you to check into a Motel Six.”
He took off his apron and used it to wipe his hands. “You’re not pleased.”
“I don’t mind so much that you’re Felix Unger as the suggestion that I’m Oscar Madison. I put in more hours at work on a regular basis than you did even when you were up to your neck in asbestos and horsehair plaster in your theater. When there’s a gang uprising in East L.A., I only stop by to change clothes before I go back to opening up cadavers.”
“I know that. Since you won’t let me help out with the mortgage, making myself useful is the next best thing. I didn’t reorganize the kitchen,” he added quickly. “I know how important it is to you to know your way around.”
“I couldn’t care less if the potato masher’s where the sieve should be. Little Caesar feeds me most of the time.” She shrugged out of her jacket, made a move to toss it on the sofa, then stopped and folded it over her arm. “Just tell me you didn’t change anything in the bathroom.”
“I was afraid to touch the jars and bottles. I don’t know what half that stuff is for.”
“No, and you never will, if we ever decide to cohabit permanently. I prefer to be a woman of mystery.”
Their living arrangement was temporary. The Oracle, the old motion-picture palace Valentino had been restoring through the last three presidential administrations, was undergoing yet more construction to build a proper bathroom onto the projection booth he used as a living quarters. Previously, he’d freshened up in one of the customers’ rest rooms; but technological advances had allowed him to replace the ancient gravity-operated water heater in the utility room next door to the booth with a state-of-the-art unit in the basement and install facilities on the floor where he slept.
It had turned out to be a not-so-mini-reunion with the civic and construction migraines that had accompanied the original project. That situation had been exacerbated by a megalomaniac theater designer, a crooked building inspector, and a series of murders to solve—on amateur detective Valentino’s part, not professional Harriet’s.
He stepped forward, holding out a hand. She gave him the jacket with her police ID clipped to it. He opened the closet, hung it up, and shut the door before she could see how he’d rearranged everything by color and season. “Does a steady diet of pizza mean you’d rather pass on lasagna?”
She sniffed the air. “That doesn’t smell like Stouffer’s.”
“Sue me. My grandmother was half Italian.”
“My great-grandmother was Cherokee; you know, the tribe where when the woman got fed up, she piled all her husband’s belongings outside the lodge and that was the end of the relationship. Let that be a lesson to you.” She smiled and went up on tiptoe to kiss him. “I’m starving.”
“Good. I made enough for a regiment. I should explain my grandmother ran a restaurant. She couldn’t cook for any group fewer than a hundred.” He pulled her chair out from the cloth-covered dining table and held it for her.
They’d finished the salad and he was dishing up the entrée when a tinny orchestra started playing “Saturday Night at the Movies.” Valentino said, “That’s mine.”
“No kidding.” Harriet’s ring tone was the elevator song that had come with her phone.
He got out his and looked at the screen. “Dinky Schwartz. I haven’t heard from him since my sophomore year.”
“I’m sure there’s a cute story behind how he got the nickname.”
“It’s on his birth certificate.” He excused himself and answered.
Still famished, she tuned out the “How-are-you-and-what-have-you-been-up-to” portion of the conversation and dove into her lasagna, washing it down with a California rosé. She glanced up during the hemming-and-hawing on Valentino’s end. Finally he said, “Dinky, I don’t know. I can’t promise anything. I’ll get back to you.”
He punched out, frowning at the object in his hand as if it were a jury summons. “You’re in danger of reestablishing your relationship with Little Caesar,” he said, looking up.
“A funeral?”
“Worse. Dinky’s bought a movie theater and he wants me to help restore it.”
2
DINKY SCHWARTZ’S PARENTS had a twisted sense of humor; otherwise they wouldn’t have given him that name based on his premature birth weight of less than two pounds. Fate—and an impressive growth spurt in high school—had turned what may have seemed a cruel joke into a party-pleaser whenever he entered the room.
At nineteen, he’d stood six-three and weighed two hundred ten pounds, most of it in his chest and shoulders. His size and strength had earned him a place in the line on the Bruins’ second string, but his lack of coordination (and a humiliating finish in the fifty-yard dash) had denied him a scholarship. He’d dropped out of UCLA in his second year to work in construction.
A sign posted in front of a recently demolished building downtown read:
FUTURE SITE OF JUBILACIÓN ARMS, A PLACE FOR SENIORS TO RESIDE IN 70 STORIES OF DIGNITY AND LUXURY
D. SCHWARTZ CONTRACTORS, INC.
Stepping through the opening in the board fence surrounding the property, Valentino reflected that his old friend’s dreams of gridiron glory had turned into what must be a comforting reality. The property, located equidistant from Beverly Hills and South Pasadena, was worth many millions (especially considering the likely wherewithal of its prospective tenants), and whoever owned it wouldn’t award the building contract to just anyone.
To all appearances, Dinky had recruited his crew from his old defensive line. A man of average height could not wander among those giants in hard hats without wondering if he’d shrunk since breakfast. One, whose thick bony ridge of forehead made his protective headgear seem redundant, pointed his steaming Starbuck’s cup toward a plywood trailer on the northeast corner of the lot. A monster diesel pickup with tractor-size tires was parked next to it, gleaming show-floor new.
“Val! You haven’t changed a bit!”
But Dinky had, some. The man who leapt up from behind a steel desk to shake his hand had put on an extra twenty or so pounds, mostly around his waist, and grown a second chin; however, the eyes embedded in his broad red face twinkled with youth, and his grip could still crush a bowling ball. His visitor was still trying to shake circulation back into his hand when the contractor swept a stack of blueprints off a folding chair for him to sit.
“You look good, Dink. I’ve seen your signs all around town. I never put D. SCHWARTZ together with my old study partner.”
“Partner, hell!” Schwartz straddled his seat. “If you hadn’t stepped in as my unofficial tutor, I’d have flunked out before my first practice. It bought me time to consider my options. If not for you I’d be one of those fat losers you see guzzling beer in sports bars, gassing about the touchdown they scored in the big game against Podunk State.”
“Nobody’d ever mistake you for one of those.”
“You either. Seems I can’t go online without seeing your kisser next to the title of some movie I never heard of. You must be head of the department by now. Remember old man Broadhead? I bet they buried him with a stake through the heart.”
“Actually, he’s still head of the department. We work together.”
Schwartz’s mouth dropped open, exposing expensive dental work; Valentino missed the familiar old gap in his front teeth, a mark of character. “No kidding! What is he, a hundred?”
“That’s what I drew in the pool.”
“I was looking for the easy A when I took his course. Who’d think film history was so much like math? All those dates and running times and three minutes’ difference in footage between the rough cut and the release. See, I still remember the language. It’s like having a song you can’t ditch, running over and over in your head.”
The film archivist decided the time for reminiscing was past. “I remember you never had much interest in the subject. That’s one of the reasons I was so surprised when you called, and what about.”
“It’s a pain in the butt is what it is. A shopping mall I built went belly up even before it opened and the syndicate that hired me to build it couldn’t come through on the last payment, a biggie. Back when they were flush, they bought a drive-in theater that busted flat under Nixon, thinking to sell it to Walmart for a superstore, only Walmart backed out, which I’m guessing is part of the reason the syndicate’s in Chapter Eleven. Anyway we cut a deal: I get twenty acres in the Valley, and I don’t wait in line behind a thousand creditors waiting to get my fifteen cents on the dollar.”
“But why build another drive-in, if the first one failed?”
“Well, the original plan was to doze what’s left of it—heck, it’s just a ticket booth and a concession hut and a few hundred speaker posts, Lord knows what became of the screen—and throw up a housing development; but rezoning’s a nightmare. And then there’s this.” He opened the top drawer of the desk, took something out, and slapped it down on his guest’s lap.
Valentino recognized the white-on-red masthead before he read it. It was an issue of Parade magazine from the third week of July, showing a couple snuggling in a convertible facing an enormous outdoor screen showing a scene from Star Wars. DRIVE-INS THEN & NOW read the legend superimposed on the image, and below in smaller type The Comeback of an American Treasure.
“I snitched it from my dentist’s waiting room,” Schwartz said. “My tablet went dead or I’d never have picked it up. Talk about kismet!”
Little about the evolution of film escaped Valentino: He’d seen the issue when it came with the Sunday Times, but he opened it to the cover article and read it once again. It trumpeted the renaissance of the open-air movie theater, an icon of the Atomic Age. At the height of the Baby Boom, families migrated to rural America to watch movies on a huge outdoor screen, devouring splashy Biblical epics, juvenile delinquent exposés, rock operas, and a menagerie of Martian invaders, gigantic insects, and fifty-foot women, all without leaving the car. On Saturday night, the roads resembled a key scene from Exodus.
The American Drive-In Theater had surfaced during the Great Depression, treaded water throughout World War II, then crested with the rise of post-war suburbia. But then a slew of social changes—soaring gas prices and smaller, more cramped automobiles, to name just two—pulled the plug. Multi-screen cineplexes, shopping malls, fast-food restaurants, and covered sports arenas took over the sites.
Valentino looked up. “Says here they’re due for a comeback. Social distancing and drive-in entertainment were made for each other.”
“Plus you can stretch out your legs in an SUV and listen to surround sound on kick-ass factory speakers. Val, I’m telling you—”
“Hang on, Dink. This is just a feel-good summer feature the editors dug up from the file, not a crystal ball. Five years ago, the industry predicted that all motion pictures would be shot in three-D by the end of the decade. Didn’t happen. I’m big on all things movie, but I can’t advise an old friend to risk everything based on a puff piece in a Sunday magazine.” He leaned forward and laid Parade on the desk.
Copyright © 2023 by Loren D. Estleman
