Chapter 18 Mountains Made of Clouds
Mountains Made of Clouds
Mist burns off fast, the week in a hurry to start.
The police station is a two-story building, with stone on the bottom floor and brick on the top, as if the building itself has grown and shifted alongside the Los Angeles population.
Palm trees flank either side, and a flagpole is off to the right, missing its flag.
Frankie parks on the side street, in front of houses that are small but tidy.
Before one of them, a man with a camera leads a pony up the path to a front door.
Nico has a photo from one of these photographers, one that captures his daughter, Gabriella, in Western gear atop a horse with white splotches that look like paint.
I tried telling her I had an entire make-believe world at her disposal, Nico explained, but the sight of a pony at her front door was irresistible.
Inside the station, there is noise. Phones ringing, shoes squeaking on the floor, and voices, so many voices.
The station’s switchboard—rows of operators concentrated on black panels with toggles and switches and cords—is off to the side.
Through another door is reception, and a hall that leads to the interrogation rooms. Pass reception, Nico said.
Don’t even look at them. Straight to the bullpen.
Act like you know where you’re going, and they won’t stop you.
Doing as told, Frankie doesn’t even pause.
She goes straight through the door on the right and into a large bullpen with detectives at their desks, cops crowded around an easel.
You’ll always find reporters in a police station, Nico warned her.
It’s where they get their scoops. In exchange, they answer phones and even make coffee.
And there, sitting on the corner of a desk, wearing a red dress as if determined to be seen, is Dottie.
Frankie turns to the wall beside her, pretending to study a map of Los Angeles.
Is Dottie here because it’s something she does, or is she here to follow up on a hunch?
We gotta get Jack away from her before he kills her.
What Nico said the night of the premiere. Did Dottie hear?
Keeping her back to the bullpen, Frankie edges along the wall, pretending to be interested in whatever’s pinned to bulletin boards while listening in on the conversations closest. Then there’s the smell of coffee, and Frankie hears the clatter of a spoon against ceramic.
“I know you,” a man says. “The writer. The one whose friend drove like a bat out of hell to that movie.”
Frankie turns. A cop stirs a cup of coffee behind her. It’s the officer they met outside the theatre, the man with no love for Hollywood, the perfect person to get the scoop from. If anyone’s going to reveal the rumors or suspicion, it’s someone not in the studio’s pocket.
“I thought that was you,” Frankie says. With a glance over her shoulder, she confirms that Dottie’s still on the corner of the desk, and is actually now on the phone. “My article took a turn. Ever since the star of that movie died.”
He gives a low whistle. “It’s all anybody’s talking about. She was young.”
“Hollywood’s taking a toll on young actresses.”
“You’re telling me. And her sister’s calling here every ten minutes. What are you doing? Are you trying to solve this? Bet that actress got herself into something. The number of times I’ve broken up parties and seen starlets making fools of themselves, it’s shameful.”
Frankie keeps her voice steady. “But June Finney was killed in a robbery, right? She didn’t bring that on herself.”
“Wearing a necklace like that?” He takes off his hat to scratch his head, and his forehead shines under the lights. “You bet she did. Someone followed her home because they saw her flaunting diamonds. That’s the truth of it.”
“Or,” Frankie forces herself to say, “because they overheard someone say there was no security following her home?”
Now he laughs. “Someone said that? That wasn’t smart.”
A wash of embarrassment—but then relief, because this was news to him, and Frankie wants to believe that’s because it’s not part of any of the working theories.
If the police don’t think it’s important that someone said what she did, then she can let it go and try to find out what’s being said about Jack, the real reason for her visit.
“She was the fiancée of the costar. Jack Sawyer?”
But the man doesn’t react to Jack’s name. Absentmindedly, he takes the spoon from his mug and sets it on the desk beside him, on top of a newspaper. Coffee seeps and spreads, darkening the print. “I don’t follow all that gossip. Though I did hear about the ex, a real creep.”
Another glance over Frankie’s shoulder. Across the room, Dottie places the receiver back on the phone just as an officer walks by and swats her butt playfully. She laughs, and takes her time getting off the desk.
“Nice chatting,” Frankie says right as Dottie turns to wave to someone across the room—someone right in front of Frankie.
Without thinking, Frankie lowers her head and hurries in the other direction, deeper into the station. But in another hall, she pauses, trying to decide where to go, and realizes that she’s standing directly in front of the chief’s office, and the door is open.
He’s watching her questioningly.
She smiles. “Nico wanted me to stop by.”
Impatiently, he waves her inside. Then he’s back to flipping through the contents of a folder, a black-and-white mug shot stapled to the cover.
“So,” she says, trying to think of something, because the truth is Nico sent her to be a fly on the wall, and she has failed monumentally.
Without looking up, he says, “Let him know the ME’s working on his report, but her reputation will be intact.”
The pregnancy. Still, no one knows about it, and with this discretion, it will stay that way.
“Good. Nico will be happy.” She smiles. “One other thing, that reporter, Dottie?”
He looks up, confused. “Who?”
“Never mind. I thought maybe you knew the reporters out there.”
“Of course I know them. Don’t let them tell you otherwise—letting them spend time at the station is a gift. From me to them. I vet each and every one of them.”
Frankie digests this. Because if Dottie’s not one of the regular reporters he’s vetted, that means she’s here for a specific reason, and could be chasing a story or a hunch.
When she leaves, Frankie veers off through the hall that takes her past the interrogation rooms, keeping her head down and walking quickly.
Maybe it’s his feet, the worn saddle brown of his shoes that she’s seen when he’s picked up Virginia, but something makes her look up to see Fred leaving the last room.
Fred, a middle manager at the studio. Middle managers are the perfect alibis, Nico once explained.
At the time, he was telling Frankie about the man who claimed he was the one who’d been speeding in one of their actors’ cars, not the actor himself, when that car hit a truck on La Brea and left the scene.
Frankie wanted to correct him, to tell him that the word he was looking for was patsy.
But instead, she watched him write a check out to the man, who’d be employed forever .
. . just as soon as he got out of jail. They’re high enough up that they’re invested in their job and want to be in the studio’s good graces, Nico continued, but they’re not high enough to say no.
When you gotta ask a favor, you have to find someone with need. Identify that need, and they’re yours.
Fred. Not moving up through the ranks, not in anyone’s good graces, enduring the end of his engagement, and now leaving an interrogation room when Frankie knows he was nowhere near Jack or June the night of the murder.
If Susan was right about him being a homosexual, the studio might know, and might be exploiting this.
Frankie would put money on Fred suddenly being an alibi, and before she gets in trouble by not knowing this detail of the story, she needs to talk to Nico.
While Frankie waits, Betty eats her lunch, cries about June, and drops details about the funeral, which is set for Wednesday at Hollywood Memorial Park.
Paramount Pictures sprang up on the original south side of the property, Betty tells her, so naturally the cemetery is where everyone wants to be.
Where everyone wants to be, said as if she’s referring to the latest nightclub.
Stars from both behind and in front of the camera are laid to rest there, including Rudolph Valentino.
Even Hobart Johnstone Whitley, the real estate developer known as the Father of Hollywood, and Hannah Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin’s mother.
“Valentino lay in state in New York,” Frankie says, “before they sent him to Los Angeles.” She’s sitting in a chair by the parrots’ addition, her legs bent and on the seat. Legs down like a lady, she was always told. “There were a hundred thousand people in the street.”
Fiona was a Valentino fan. She was the one who taught Frankie how to sneak in to see a film, instructing her to wait around the corner to the Bowery Theatre until a friend who worked the concession stand propped open the alley door with a brick.
At night, she whispered about Hollywood, brightening Frankie’s dreams with spotlights and tinsel.
When he first came to America, Fiona said about Rudolph Valentino, he couldn’t find work and slept on the streets.
From that to having an estate called Falcon Lair and four or five cars and horses for fun, just think of it!
As a distraction, when Frankie was scared, Fiona would repeat his full name—Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla—to the rhythm of the Lord’s Prayer.
Sometimes Frankie wonders if her mother was ever aware that Valentino was almost broke when he died.
She likes to think Fiona never knew. “I was there,” Frankie continues. “There were crowds for eleven blocks.”