The Baker Street Letters Page 9

  “Yes,” said Reggie.

  She was still studying him closely.

  “I can sort of see the family resemblance,” she said, “though you don’t have your brother’s eyes, exactly.”

  She got up and crossed to the mantel above a gas fireplace. She moved aside framed photographs and several old books that hid a tin box. Then she came back and sat on the couch with one leg tucked underneath her, the Saint Bernard lying comfortably with its head at her knees.

  She put the box between herself and Reggie and opened it.

  Reggie leaned forward and caught a glimpse of the contents as she sorted through them. There was a vehicle ownership certificate, some ticket stubs, a small gold butterfly pin, and—

  Suddenly she stopped. Then she started from the top again. She thumbed carefully through, past greeting cards and ticket stubs, handwritten notes that might have been poems—until she had reached the bottom.

  She looked at Reggie with what he took to be genuine surprise.

  “It’s gone,” she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure,” she said, annoyed. She withdrew the box protectively to her lap; she stared at the contents with a puzzled expression, then at Reggie with an accusatory one.

  “I just got here,” said Reggie. “Just what is it that’s missing?”

  “The thing you’re asking about,” she said.

  She got up and walked to the window near her paintings. “My father was in his study,” she said. “I came in, and he had these sheets of really thin paper that he was looking at. They were on the desk, on the floor, all over the place. I wanted him to play. I sat down and started drawing on one with a crayon. He got really angry, he said the papers were very, very important, and he picked them up and put them in the bottom drawer of his desk.”

  “You seem to remember it very clearly.”

  “I should; I thought it was the reason he went away.”

  She paused when she said that, then continued. “After he went missing, I made copies of all of it. I walked all the way to the stationery store and made them. It took a ton of dimes. And then I came back, and—you have to understand, I was barely eight, and I read a lot, but mostly just novels, and—”

  “I understand,” said Reggie.

  “I sent one copy in my letter to Sherlock Holmes. And I kept the other copy in this box; you couldn’t miss it if it was here.”

  “Does anyone else have access to your apartment? A boyfriend, or—”

  “None of your business,” she said. Then she added, “No. No one else has access.”

  “Have you had a break-in?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t think so.”

  Reggie considered it for a moment. He wanted to be careful about this, but there seemed only one possible connection to make.

  “This neighbor of yours—the one I saw on the steps the other day—”

  “What about him?”

  “Has he had access?”

  Mara looked at Reggie, then out the window as if to express her amazement to the world, and then back at Reggie again, and Reggie realized he might have phrased it better.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said with precise emphasis.

  “I don’t mean access to—you—that is, I only meant, could he have had the opportunity to—”

  “Look, it’s like this,” she said. “The guy moved into the building a month or so ago—and right away he’s hanging around the mailbox when I come home, every single day. And playing that ‘I really want to get to know the real you’ shtick to the hilt.”

  “Always at the mailbox?”

  “Well, yes. But he pretty much never has any mail. I can tell he’s just waiting there for me.”

  “To chat you up.”

  “Exactly. And he had a shtick.”

  “Good shtick?”

  “Not that good. But I did make the mistake once—just once—of letting him come up for coffee. And he laid it on real thick about getting to know the real me. Asking about my family—and we’re talking about how I grew up, and how tough it was when my dad left, and did I ever hear from him again, did I get to have a quinceañera, what kind of stuff did I keep from when I was a kid, and—”

  She stopped abruptly when she said that and stared down with realization at her box of keepsakes.

  “Did you show any of this to him?” said Reggie.

  She nodded. “I showed him my maternal grandmother’s recipe for Irish burritos—and next thing I know, he’s got his hand on my knee. And then—”

  Now there was a sharp, authoritative knock at the door.

  “And then I threw him out,” said Mara, and she might have continued—but now the knock at the door was even more commanding. She got up quickly and started toward the door, Mookie trotting alongside.

  She left the box behind, and Reggie looked in closely. In a bottom corner, a scrap of thin photostat paper was wedged into the crease of the box. As if someone had pulled something out hastily, and this piece, caught in the crease, had torn off and been left behind.

  The dog stuck its head between Mara and the door and emitted that now familiar rumble from its throat. From his vantage point, Reggie could not see who it was, but he could hear the voice. It was Lieutenant Mendoza, introducing himself to Mara.

  Reggie extracted the bit of paper from the joint of the box and stuffed it in his jacket pocket. Then he got up and went quickly into the kitchen, out of the line of sight should Mendoza step in.

  Mercifully, Mendoza did not step in. Not yet. But he was still within earshot.

  Reggie heard Mendoza ask if Mara knew her neighbor well—a man named Howard Fallon.

  Mara replied that she didn’t know any Howard. Her neighbor’s name was Lance—Lance Slaughter.

  That was the name on the man’s Screen Actors Guild card, Reggie heard the detective say. But the name on his driver’s license was Howard Fallon.

  So Mara’s neighbor had been using a stage name.

  And a bad one at that.

  Mendoza then said something in a softer voice that Reggie did not quite catch. For a moment, as near as he could tell, neither Mara nor Mendoza said a word. But the dog started a low growl.

  “I . . . really didn’t know him very well,” Reggie heard Mara say.

  Reggie held his breath. He supposed Mendoza would ask now if Mara had noticed anyone of British extraction hanging about.

  But Mookie was getting louder, and Mara told him to hush. Reggie strained to hear. Mendoza was giving her his card. He was going away.

  Reggie waited until he heard the receding footsteps; then he stepped out from behind the kitchen door.

  Mara, still standing at the open doorway, stared at Reggie. Mookie was pressed protectively against her legs.

  “You knew this?” she said; then she demanded, “Did you know about this?”

  “About what . . . exactly?” Reggie said in his closest approximation of an innocent voice.

  “Get out,” she said. “Now.” The dog was not growling; it was looking at Reggie as though it had sighted a rabbit.

  Reggie found as much space as he could and edged out the doorway.

  Then the door slammed shut, and the young woman turned the locks behind him.

  Reggie hurried down the stairs and then checked for the detective’s car before stepping out of the stairwell.

  He didn’t know why Mara had not revealed his presence to Mendoza; for all he knew, she had changed her mind and was calling the police right now. It was probably not a good time to be seen about.

  And he was beginning to wish he’d rented a car.

  He walked four blocks and caught the first taxi he found.

  “Where to?”

  “One moment.”

  Reggie called the local SAG office on his new mobile, provided the stage name used by Mara’s neighbor, and got the name and address of the talent agent who handled Lance Slaughter.

  As they drove, Reggie reached into his coat p
ocket and found the slip of paper he had taken from Mara’s box of keepsakes.

  It was just a scrap, one corner and a few square inches, but it was enough to make a very general guess at its purpose.

  The copy was not great quality, but he could see that the original had been printed with thin vertical lines—one column listing depths and the other displaying a series of faded handwritten marks—chemical symbols, percentages, and other notations.

  And in the corner heading was a date and something that was probably an identifier—or at least might be to someone who knew the acronyms.

  Reggie called Ms. Brinks in London, catching her just as she was about to leave for the day.

  “I need your help,” he said.

  “Of course.”

  “I’m going to send you a fax,” he said. “Some sort of geological analysis, I think. Find someone who can tell you exactly. Ring me back as soon as you can.”

  The cabbie found a place for Reggie to send the fax. Then they drove north on La Brea and turned right on Sunset, heading for the agent’s office.

  It was Reggie’s first time in Hollywood. He was not impressed. The architecture was less than ordinary, and the streets were dirty.

  They drove two blocks, then stopped at a three-story pink stucco building dating probably to the thirties. At the entrance were placards for a dance studio and an actor’s studio on the ground floor. The Silberman Agency—and several similar establishments—was listed for the first floor up.

  The dance studio was just now letting out. Young women in form-fitting spandex were escaping rapidly in all directions. Into compact Hondas on the adjacent residential street, into other studio classes in the same building, and one or two striding boldly and quickly down the boulevard, looking neither right nor left but drawing hostile glares from two ladies of the afternoon posing at the corner.

  A slender young woman, wearing faded jeans over dance leotards, her high cheekbones pink and glowing from her workout, and with hair that fell in perfect dampness behind her ears, opened the door and stepped out as Reggie was going in.

  Of course, what had he been thinking? The city’s reputation for glamour had never been for its architecture.

  Reggie smiled as she passed by, and she avoided eye contact with the air of a woman who knows she’s been smiled at by someone beneath her.

  This was a tough sort of glamour. Reggie couldn’t recall being hit with that degree of indifference since his first year at Cambridge.

  The building had no lift; Reggie took the stairs to the office marked for the Silberman Agency. From the size of it, the agency was not likely to be mistaken for William Morris.

  The woman seated behind a desk in the outer office—or maybe it was the entire office—swiveled in her chair and asked Reggie how she could help him. He asked to speak to Leslie Silberman.

  The woman first studied Reggie’s face for a moment, then leaned back in her chair and conspicuously appraised the rest of him.

  “We’ve got about a dozen of your type already,” she said. “But Spielberg isn’t on the line right now, so I’ll forgive you. Can you do anything special? Martial arts? Impersonations? You can drop the British accent shtick.”

  “I’m not an actor. I’m looking for one.”

  She pushed out a chair for him. “Just tell me what you need.”

  “An actor by the name of Lance Slaughter?”

  She frowned. “Lance Slaughter. Aka Howard Fallon. Classic reality show reject. Yeah, I represent him. Pretty much.”

  “I’m hoping that you can—”

  “I don’t think he’s available,” she interrupted, “but I got a dozen better of the same type. No one broke any mold when they made Howie, whether they should’ve or not, know what I’m saying?”

  “I’m not interested in anyone else.”

  She shrugged agreeably and turned to a file cabinet to locate the actor’s folder. “Just so it’s clear from the start that all payments to Howie are going through me as his legal agent and representative. The standard deal. Clear enough?”

  “Of course.”

  “Yeah, well, I got burned by this guy once already,” she said as she gave Reggie the folder. “I got him an assignment early in the summer, tremendous break for the kid. A full year of busting my tail for him, one day this guy from something called New Vista Productions calls. Heard of them?”

  “No,” said Reggie.

  “Me neither, and that shouldn’t be. But what they ask for fits Howie’s profile perfectly. So I set up a meeting; he goes and reads for the part, and that afternoon they call back and say he wasn’t right after all.

  “I figure the kid feels real bad that he didn’t get the part, and I make a special effort to find something else for him, which isn’t easy, reason being he has the talent God gives a clam. I find something, a walk-on, that maybe he can do if he remembers not to open his mouth.

  “I call his numbers. Disconnected. No message machine, nothing. I figure the kid’s given up and gone back to Omaha, or wherever. Two days later, I’m having lunch at Hanrahan’s, I walk outside, and there the creep is. He’s driving a brand-new Porsche. He’s stopped at the light. I go up to him, ask him what the deal is, and he says he doesn’t need an agent, he’s got his own connections. He says he’s got an in that I’d kill for. I ask who, then the light changes; he gives me the finger, honks that obnoxious Porsche horn, and drives off.

  “I know what this means. This means Howie and New Vista decided to cut out the middleman. So I go back upstairs and I call the only number I had for New Vista, and guess what?”

  “Disconnected?”

  “Damn right. I thought maybe they were on the Paradigm lot, because I saw a Paradigm parking sticker on his car—but nobody at Paradigm had heard of them, and at a certain point it’s just not worth the trouble.”

  “Paradigm. I think I’ve been there,” said Reggie. It was the general area where he had tracked Nigel’s cab. “That’s the tall glass thing in Burbank?”

  “Well, that’s the corporate headquarters. The lot is just south of it. Same parking for both. But like I said, they’d never heard of New Vista—somebody’s tax dodge, I bet.”

  Reggie opened the folder and turned quickly past the glossy head shots to the résumé.

  “He hasn’t much professional experience, has he?” said Reggie.

  “You kidding? The highlight of this kid’s résumé is the ability to carry four dinner plates simultaneously. In fact, zero screen credits was something they were looking for.”

  Now she reached across and took back the folder. “Which makes me wonder,” she said, “why you or anyone else would be wanting to hire him. So what’s this really about? And don’t give me any nonsense about looking for a fresh face. You’re no casting director. And if you really were looking to hire this guy, you would have just phoned.”

  “You’re right,” said Reggie. “I’m making inquiries for a friend. I think your Mr. Fallon has been doing some moonlighting.”

  “What sort of moonlighting?” said the agent.

  “I don’t know yet. Maybe something you wouldn’t want to accept a commission for. Thank you for your help.”

  “You know, you’ve got a nice voice; you might consider voice-overs.”

  “I’m hoping it doesn’t come to that.”

  “But like I said, you should tone down the accent. I’ve heard better.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve heard one exactly like it recently?”

  “No. And I’d remember.”

  Reggie exited the office and took a cab back into the Valley, traveling the same route he had taken earlier.

  The Paradigm studio lot comprised several acres of square stucco buildings, wood-slat bungalows, and exterior sets. It was just on the other side of the parking garage for the corporate tower that Reggie had already visited.

  There was a guard booth, but the guard was preoccupied with a delivery van.

  Reggie strolled in casually as if he belonged. He
walked past several aluminum-faced production stages until he found a row of off-pink wood-slat bungalows—surprisingly casual and unsubstantial structures, given the money amounts he knew such ventures involved.

  But then this was the production lot. The real money and power had to be in the tower.

  Reggie found the bungalow for Selman Productions—the first company Nigel had phoned from the Roosevelt.

  At a receptionist’s desk, in front of stacks of scripts with titles written on their spines in black felt pen, sat a tanned young woman, perhaps twenty-five, with suspiciously perfect white teeth and a professionally flirting charm done so well that Reggie couldn’t tell at all whether it might be directed at him personally.

  “Mr. Selman isn’t in,” she said almost musically. “The whole office is out protesting the Great San Fernando Shaft.”

  “The what?”

  “This monster hole they want to dig in the Hollywood Hills. For one of the subway lines; I forget which. All the canyon people aren’t real thrilled about it. You hadn’t heard?”

  “No.”

  “That must be because you’re from out of town. But trust me—if you want to get invited to parties, you’re against it.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind. What about the little ditch at the end of the street? Am I against that as well?”

  “Oh, no. Not that one. We’re all for it. I’ve got a memo from our corporate owners to prove it.”

  “I see. I’m for the ditch. I’m against the Great San Fernando Shaft.”

  “Right. Also known simply as the Shaft, as in . . . well, you know.”

  “Yes, I get it,” said Reggie. “I’m sure everyone gets it.”

  She looked at Reggie to verify that his pun was intentional, then smiled.

  “So. Do you have an appointment?”

  “No, but perhaps I won’t need to speak to Mr. Selman at all,” said Reggie. “I’m just looking for someone who might have been here yesterday. His name is Nigel Heath.”

  The young woman shifted just the slightest bit of her charming resources to saying no, she could not give out that kind of information about Mr. Selman’s appointments.

  “I doubt that my brother had an appointment,” said Reggie.