Why would he?
“I’m checking the loan-outs. Helps to have a time, when she might have been here.”
“First of the year. You’re still on this, huh?”
“Aren’t you?”
“I’ll tell you something. The way it works? At a certain point you think, I’m just spinning wheels. It’s getting late. I can feel the chill on this one already. How many weeks now? And all I got is one girlfriend who wasn’t there.”
“What? Who?”
“The Miller kid. On your contract list,” he said, a tiny delay, making a point.
“How do you figure that?”
“I showed glossies to the night clerk, the real one, not Joel. He ID’d her. But not Joel. Never saw her. So I checked her out. And he’s right, she wasn’t there that night. So, nothing.”
“You never told me.”
“Keep your pants on. Tell what? We don’t have anything if she wasn’t there, a hit and run. If I ran an item on everyone who got laid, there wouldn’t be enough paper. So they screwed around and he’s dead, but where’s the connection? No story.”
“But you ran it down anyway.”
“It’s always nice to know. Something to put on the layaway plan. Might come in handy, you never know.”
“If she makes it,” Ben said. “Then you can give it to Polly.”
“Tch, tch, is that nice? Anyway, what’s in it for Polly? He’s dead. Sorry, I didn’t mean—but he is. And not a star. So the only way it plays now is if she is and he was the secret love of her life. Which doesn’t sound like it was. The clerk saw her once. You can’t do much with a one-nighter, not even Polly.”
Ben said nothing. One night. La Jolla, the Biltmore, all the others still hers, not tucked away in anyone’s file.
“Hey, speaking of which, you know the Fed at the Market you asked me to check out?”
“Riordan.”
“Yeah, the Technical Consultant. Turns out he was. Republic paid him. Worked for your brother on the series, just like he said. So.”
“Why speaking of which,” Ben said, trying to follow.
“Oh, Polly’s secretary. You said he came to the funeral with Polly, so I figured she’d know him.”
“And?”
“Well, I told you, they never retire, they just find other garbage to go through. He’s been freelancing for Tenney—you know the one with the committee. A bunch of old hands from the Bureau dig around for him. He sends stuff over to Polly, and sometimes Riordan takes it. That’s how Polly knows him. Tenney stays clear, so nobody figures where the stuff is coming from.”
“So he’s a messenger?”
“More like a supplier. Anyway, he’s who he says he is. And a little more. Christ, there’s the ME, I have to go.”
“Wait, one more thing. The clerk who ID’d Rosemary? He saw her? They didn’t go through the back?”
“No, he saw her. They must have come in the front. I gotta run. You want, I’ll keep poking around, but this is already going away. What I can’t figure is the studio. But maybe they got trigger happy—grabbed the phone before there was anything to cover up. It happens, you get nervous about people. Maybe they don’t like Rosemary screwing around. But that doesn’t get us anywhere. We need someone there that night. Or every night—the romance that broke his heart. But all we’ve got is a jump. Yesterday.”
Check the loan-outs. Danny had rented the Cherokee months before Rosemary. Maybe for someone he didn’t bring through the front door. He started out for Personnel to get the monthly lists, but got sidetracked by Hal instead, excited about something.
“I was thinking about the guards,” he said, leading Ben to the cutting room. “You know the faces are hard to see. Medium pan shots, nothing closer.”
“It’s newsreel film. Army. They don’t do close-ups.” Heads tilted up to the light, long lashes making shadows.
“Right. But take a look at this.” At the Moviola, a frozen frame of the guards being led away. “Just for the idea. It’s a work print. But they should have the camera originals in Culver City. Now look.”
He took a lens and held it over a section of the viewer so that a single face leapt out of the frame.
“Blow up the negative here. Show his face.”
Ben looked at the spot enlargement, the guard’s eyes caught forever on a piece of film. In the full running shot he’d be turning away from the camera, a close-up of shame itself.
“It’ll cost, though, the lab work. You’re not just splicing.”
“What if the quality’s not good enough? The stock’s grainy.”