Show Business is Murder

The man sighed. “Okay, tell Frank to call…” He paused a moment. “U.N. Friendly.”

“Could I have your number, Mr. Friendly?”

“Of course. It’s Pleasant 6-5211.”

“That’s funny,” I said. “Mr. Friendly has a Pleasant phone number.”

“Yes, a laugh riot,” he replied somewhat dryly. “Tell that son of a bitch Frank if he doesn’t call me by this afternoon that I’m going to tell the L. A. Times.”

Mr. Friendly didn’t sound too friendly. I figured, what the hell. “What will you tell them, Mr. Friendly?”

He laughed. “I’ll tell them they can renew my subscription. You just give Frank the message.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good girl,” he said, and hung up.

I added his admonition to the message and looked again at his name. Could it be a joke of some sort? I recalled in Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians the host who invited all the guilty people to the island was “U.N. Owen,” a homophone for “unknown.” So “U.N. Friendly.” Could it be as in the Unfriendly Ten? The ten Hollywood writers who were sent to prison for not cooperating with the House Un-American Activities Committee?

I looked through the Rolodex for the phone number Mr. Friendly had given me, and I found it when I got to the T’s. It went with the name Dalton Trumbo. Yes! He was one of the Ten!

I wrote down the address in Highland Park, which I discovered, from a street atlas in the bookcase, was a suburb of Los Angeles between downtown L.A. and Pasadena. I rifled the filing cabinets, searching for any files marked Rich or Trumbo. Nothing.

There were two whole drawers of Brave One files, but before I could start searching through them the door opened and in walked a woman in her forties, a bit chubby, wearing glasses, her hair pulled back in a bun. “Sorry, I’m late,” she said. “My car broke down.”

Maybe she’s someone with an appointment, I hoped.

She came up to me, stuck out her hand and said, “I’m Carey McNally.”

I stood up and shook her hand as my knees knocked. What was I going to do?

“Uh, Carey,” I said, being fast with witty repartee. “Uh, Carey, well, let’s see.” Finally it came to me. “How much do you get a day?”

“Twelve-fifty, but I seem to be starting two hours late, so I should get less for today.”

I opened my purse and pulled out a twenty. “Here, take this for today, leave now, and come back tomorrow.”

She stared at it in confusion. “I don’t understand,” she said.

“You don’t have to. I’m paying you twenty dollars in cash for not working today. Come back tomorrow morning. But you have to go right now and not ask questions.”

“I… but I don’t understand,” she repeated, not moving an inch.

I pulled another ten from my purse.

“If you’ll leave immediately and not ask any more questions, I’ll add this.”

“I couldn’t do that without calling the agency first. May I use your phone?”

I knew the jig was up. “Sure,” I said, got up and motioned for her to take my seat behind the reception desk. While she made the call, I picked up my purse, put the thirty dollars back inside, and walked out the door, wondering what Robert Rich would think when he came back in and found her behind the desk instead of me.

I sat in the window of the cafe across the street, wearing my sunglasses, and watched the building. Soon Robert Rich entered. After half a minute, he stuck his head out the door and looked both ways, as if I’d still be on the block, having left ten minutes before. He shook his head and went back in.

An hour later a Chrysler with fins so big they could stab a pedestrian drove up and three middle-aged men got out. I assumed they were his uncles. I rushed across the street and climbed up the hill alongside the building hoping to hear the ensuing conversation through one of the small, high, open windows. A few loud words made their way to my ears. Like “Keee-rist!” and “Holy shit!” Of course, I didn’t know if they were in response to my short presence there that morning or the phone message from Mr. Friendly.

A few minutes later, Robert Rich came out of the building holding a white business-size envelope and hopped into a beat-up, green 1949 Plymouth in a nearby parking lot. As he waited to make a left turn onto Sunset Boulevard, I jumped into David’s Chevy and made a U-turn to get into position to follow.

The Plymouth drove east on Sunset and left onto Highland. It went through Cahuenga Pass to the San Fernando Valley, alongside the gigantic Forest Lawn cemetery, past NBC and the Warner Brothers and Disney Studios, and east on Riverside Drive next to a bridal path, to Figueroa, where it made a left. The sign said Highland Park. It turned out to be a rundown, blue-collar neighborhood that looked to have been built in the 1920s. A lot of the people and stores seemed to be Mexican.

The Plymouth pulled up in front of Fuentes Drugs, a neighborhood pharmacy. Robert Rich got out, envelope in hand, and walked into the store. I followed, keeping a shelf or two between us. I saw him give the white envelope to the white-haired Mexican pharmacist behind the tall prescription counter, and get a larger, nine-by-twelve manila envelope in return. I ducked behind the cosmetics counter as the pharmacist picked up a telephone and dialed and Rich walked past me up the next aisle.

Outside, I watched him drive off, knowing there was little reason to follow him any farther. I’d learned long ago at John Jay College of Police Science to follow the money. Well, in this case, it was more like “follow the envelope,” but it looked like it contained money. A bribe, perhaps, for not telling the L.A. Times? But if so, what was in the larger envelope, the one the pharmacist gave to Mr. Rich?

It wasn’t easy to kill time inside a fairly small drug store. I bought several items I didn’t need. I’d heard of men being embarrassed to buy rubbers-not the kind for your feet-so they bought up a bunch of innocuous items, combs and toothpaste and such, to seem less conspicuous. But I bought only innocuous items; I had no need for rubbers, unfortunately. God, did they sell them to women? I’d never thought of that. In fact, it was hard to tell that drugstores sold them at all since they always kept them hidden behind the counter. Wouldn’t want any children catching a glimpse of a box of prophylactics and asking their Mommy what they were. No, sirree. Of course, maybe there’d be fewer babies born out of wedlock if they had.

Speaking of children, a teenaged boy, maybe fourteen or so, passed me and went up to the pharmacist. They chatted a moment. The boy was Caucasian, unlike most of the customers. He wore glasses and looked like he’d be in the science and chess clubs at school, not the football team. The pharmacist handed him the white envelope he’d received from Mr. Rich, and said to give his parents his best; and the kid walked by me and out of the store.

I stepped out front and saw him climb onto a Schwinn and pedal away. I’d never followed a bike with a car before. Good thing I didn’t have to jump into a cab and yell, “Follow that bike!” I learned it’s not easy to go slow enough to follow a bike while cars are honking at you to go faster. Nevertheless I did my best Lamont Cranston imitation, trying to remain invisible to my prey.

Eventually he turned off Figueroa onto a side street of small cottages, and up a hill. He disappeared behind a fence of the house on the hill, a larger whitewash California bungalow not quite Craftsman style, overlooking the neighborhood. I parked where I could keep an eye on it and waited for something to happen. I’d been there half an hour and eaten all the candy bars and potato chips I’d bought in the drug store when something did.

A man in his fifties with a mustache, horn-rimmed glasses, and thinning, water-slicked hair came out of the house and walked down the hill toward my car. I pretended to read the paper while he passed. But he didn’t. He opened the passenger door I apparently hadn’t locked and slid right in beside me. He wasn’t big and didn’t look threatening. On the other hand, he did look like an accountant in an Alfred Hitchcock TV show. You know, the meek little man who murders his large, domineering wife and cuts up her body and carts it away in those cardboard cartons they call transfer files.

“Hello,” he said.

I just stared at him in disbelief.

“You don’t look like FBI,” he continued. “Or HUAC. And you certainly don’t look like a member of the I.A.T.S.E.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The International Alliance of Theater and Stage Employees,” he said. “The watchdogs of the blacklist.”

“Oh,” I replied cleverly.