We piled my stuff into David’s spiffy aqua-and-white Chevy Bel Air convertible and he put the top down at my request. I’d never ridden in a convertible. (When I tried to untangle my Semitic curls that evening, I swore I’d never ride in one again.)
David asked me what my case was about, shouting over the wind as he drove up San Vicente, a wide street with trolley tracks down the middle, on our way to Hollywood. I told him it was to track down somebody named Robert Rich.
He laughed, saying that was the biggest mystery there was. It was all over the papers. The whole town wanted to know who Robert Rich was.
It seems Mr. Rich had won the Oscar a few weeks earlier for Best Original Story for the Screen, for a movie about a little boy and a bull called The Brave One, but nobody could find him. Or many people were claiming to be him. Or both. When the award was announced, Jesse Lasky Jr. of the Writers Guild stepped up to the microphone on national television and said, “I’ll accept this on behalf of my close friend Robert Rich, who is at this moment at Santa Monica hospital where his wife is giving birth.” But Hedda Hopper checked all the hospitals and no such baby had been born. A few days later when push came to shove Lasky admitted he had never met Robert Rich and hadn’t a clue who he was.
You’d think the producers of the movie who bought the story would know who they’d bought it from, but it didn’t seem that way. They were brothers named King. When a reporter noticed they had a nephew by the name Robert Rich, the nephew gave a statement saying, yes, he’d written the picture. But then his uncles denied it.
“Did the Kings hire you to find the guy?” David asked.
“No, the L.A. Times did,” I shouted back over the hot wind-something David told me the locals call a Santa Ana. “Their reporters haven’t been able to find him so they decided to try a private eye.”
“Makes sense. But we have our own private eyes right here in Los Angeles. You know, like Philip Marlowe?”
“Yeah, but he’s fictional. They wanted a factual one,” I said. “I don’t know why, maybe they’re just prejudiced against fiction, being a newspaper and all.”
“But why bring one in all the way from New York?”
I shrugged. “Not sure. I just know I got a call from some guy who said he worked there. Named Chandler.”
David did a double take worthy of Oliver Hardy. “What first name?”
“Uh, Norman. Yeah, Norman.”
“Norman Chandler doesn’t work at the L.A. Times,” said David with a laugh. “He owns it.”
“Oh,” I replied snappily.
“How’d he happen to pick you?”
“You’ll never guess.”
David sat quietly for a moment, then said, “You’re right. So tell me.”
“A friend of his recommended me.”
“Yes? Yes?”
“J. Edgar Hoover.”
David broke out in laughter and said, “I should have guessed.”
I’d had a sort of weird relationship with Mr. Hoover in the case that involved David. I wouldn’t say I was exactly friends with the person who’d been called the most powerful man in America, but we had developed a kind of healthy respect for one another. Well, respect, anyway. Maybe “healthy” isn’t the operative word.
I checked into the Hollywood Sands Motel at Sunset and Highland, across the street from Hollywood High. It was new and boxy and full of red and yellow plastic. Two single beds with bedspreads made of some chemical material that sucked the moisture from my fingers, drapes that stopped about an inch short of the bottom of the window, and prints of ducks in a swamp on the off-yellow walls. I liked it. No place ever felt less like the Morris and Sylvia Weinstein home in Canarsie, Brooklyn, New York. Not an antimacassar in sight.
After more sightseeing, David and I hit the Formosa Cafe on Santa Monica Boulevard for dinner, across the street from the Sam Goldwyn Studios. David called it a Hollywood dive. The walls were full of pictures of movie stars you never heard of. And some you have. David warned me if the chow mein moved of its own accord, I probably shouldn’t eat it. As far as I could tell, it was lying there fairly still when I tried to pick it up with chopsticks and get it all the way to my mouth before it fell back onto the plate and I started all over again. I’d never used chopsticks before. And I swore I’d never do so again. Back East we have things called forks. David said eating chow mein by this method was so much work it had minus two calories.
The following morning, I borrowed David’s car and drove it to the Sunset Strip, past the Mocambo and Ciro’s, those glamorous nightclubs I’d seen in movies all my life, the places where all the sophisticates go. Or used to. It all looked a little seedy now. The Mocambo had been “closed for alterations” for about three years, and Ciro’s-where a few years before Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and the Will Mastin Trio starring Sammy Davis Jr. had headlined-had replaced its floor show with an all-you-can-eat buffet.
A few blocks farther west was a small white stucco building with beveled corners, round deco windows, and black wood trim. The words KING BROTHERS PRODUCTIONS were embossed on a gold placard on the shiny black door.
It hit me that this could be an important case for me. I’d been thinking of moving to L.A. A lot of my work involved show business companies and they’d been moving west in droves. Getting on the good side of the L.A. Times would be a great way to build up a clientele.
I parked on the street and walked up and down the block thinking about how to play this. I knew there were three King brothers: Frank, Hymie, and Maury, and that their nephew-named Robert Rich, but allegedly not the Robert Rich-worked there, too. What could I say that would elicit more information than they’d already given out?
As I stood in front of the door, contemplating any options I could think of, and finding none, the door opened right into my foot. “Ouch!” I said in response.
“Oh, sorry,” said the young man who had pushed it into my big toe. His looks kind of reminded me of Anthony Perkins, who’d been nominated for an Oscar the year before for Friendly Persuasion, only this guy seemed a little crazier. He wore an alligator shirt and cotton pegs, and held several stamped letters in his hand. “Were you on your way in?”
“Uh…” Well, there was only one answer that made much sense. “Yes.”
“Oh,” he replied. It was a scintillating conversation.
He looked me over. I felt naked. “Are you the girl from the agency?”
Before I could weigh the consequences I said, “Yes.”
“Good, good. Come in,” he bid, holding the door open for me. I had the feeling he smelled my hair as I passed.
“What’s your name?” he said, looking directly at my boobs.
I thought of answering, the left one’s Zelda and the right Rebecca. Instead, I said, “Naomi. Naomi Weinstein.” I’d learned when I first started out that staying as close to the truth as possible was usually best. That way I didn’t have to spend so much time remembering which lie I’d told.
“Oh,” he replied, letting the door close behind him. “They said the girl was named Carey something. McNally, I think.”
My heart stopped while I searched for a reply. “Oh, yeah. Carey couldn’t make it. She got called back to another job she was on last week. So they sent me.” I only prayed that the agency in question was a secretarial agency, not a talent agency or an out-call brothel. The good part about being a lady private eye was that everybody always assumed I was a secretary. Or bank teller. Or school teacher. Or nurse. It made it awfully easy to pass. In fact, the one thing no one ever believed I was, when I told them, was a private eye.