The Tomb That Ruth Built (A Mickey Rawlings Mystery) Page 16

  “What about Tom Van Dusen?” I asked. “Wasn’t he left in charge?” Van Dusen was the main reason I’d come today.

  “Oh, Tom’s writing a scenario now—some hokum about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. He’s leaving the rest of us to do pretty much whatever we please.”

  “Doesn’t Griffith keep track of what’s happening at his studio?”

  Margie laughed. “Not very well—and that probably explains the company’s finances. He sends a cable now and then telling us to prepare for some kind of scene that he’s planning, but then he usually changes his mind and we have to scrap whatever work we did. Mr. Griffith has always spent a lot of time traveling—Lillian Gish had to direct the first movie made here because he was off on a trip somewhere.”

  As we toured the sprawling grounds, Margie told me that Griffith had bought the land from the Henry Flagler estate three years ago for $375,000—a bargain price for such a grand property. Its twenty-eight acres included a mansion, a number of cottages, stables, a dock, a sandy beach, and a small forest. Many of the site’s natural features had already been used in Griffith’s motion pictures.

  There had also been numerous additions to the existing property. While we walked, we often had to tread carefully over electrical cables running from the generator Griffith had installed. Open spaces on the grounds had been used for the construction of movie sets too large for indoor filming. I recognized the Bastille, Notre Dame, and the royal palace that had appeared in Griffith’s French Revolution epic Orphans of the Storm. These sets had yet to be torn down, but most of them were starting to deteriorate badly. Margie mentioned that one of the advantages of having the studio outside of New York City was because the building codes were less stringent and safety inspections were rare.

  After seeing the grounds, including a thriving vegetable garden that provided food for the studio commissary, we headed up a flagstone walkway toward the main house, a stately mansion complete with turrets and towers. We passed smaller cottages nearby, and Margie pointed out the ones that were used as living quarters. One of these was reserved for Griffith and his current romantic interest Carol Dempster, an actress who only got roles in films that he directed.

  Inside the mansion, Margie showed me the changes that had been made to turn this vacation home into a working movie studio. The ground floor ballroom had been converted to an enormous stage, and the upstairs bedrooms were used as dressing rooms, offices, and storage space. A glass-walled studio, like a giant greenhouse, had been built adjacent to the mansion to take advantage of natural light. The camera department was in the basement and a specially-built laboratory for developing film was housed in another addition.

  It was an impressive place, and I’d been a fan of Griffith’s movies years before he achieved world-wide fame with The Birth of a Nation, but I couldn’t stay long. “I’ll need to catch the 11:15 back to the city,” I reminded Margie. That would get me to the ballpark in time for batting practice. “I’d like to see what you do here.”

  There was a happy glow in Margie’s eyes when she took my arm and led us up a curved staircase to the second floor. What had once been a bedroom was now crammed with racks of clothes, bolts of material, dressmaker’s dummies, and several drawing tables. The only person working in the room was one of the women from the train, a petite blonde of about thirty who gave the impression of a schoolmarm. Her hair was pulled in a high, tight bun and gold-rimmed spectacles were halfway down her nose. She was drawing on a sketchpad, and judging by the scowl on her face was not satisfied with the results.

  “This is Debra Hewitt,” Margie reminded me. “She’s the best costume designer in the business.”

  Hewitt looked at me over her spectacles. “And you’re Mickey Rawlings the Yankee.” She nearly spat the last word.

  “Yes, I am.” I forced a smile.

  “I’m a Red Sox fan,” Hewitt snapped.

  “I used to be one, too,” I replied. “In fact, until February I hated the Yankees.”

  “Well, perhaps you’ll come to your senses again.” She chuckled in a way that I knew she’d only been teasing me.

  Margie proceeded to show me some designs that she and Hewitt had come up with for women’s costumes. “Mr. Griffith is awfully old-fashioned,” Margie said. “If it was up to him, we’d all still be wearing bustles and hoop skirts. But it’s impossible to do stunts in such clothes. Debra and I are working on ways to keep the outside appearance the same, but making some modifications to the underclothes so that women can move more easily and do the stunts safely.”

  I looked over the drawings and made sounds of approval. I was impressed with their work, but didn’t understand any of it. After years of living with Margie, I still couldn’t figure out all the kinds of garments women wore.

  Margie and Hewitt began going into greater and greater detail, explaining every stitch and every button. I began to squirm, trying to be attentive, but I couldn’t focus on the minutia of fashion design. I nodded and smiled without knowing if my responses were appropriate to what they were saying.

  Eventually Margie burst out laughing. “I think we’ve tortured him enough,” she said to Hewitt, who joined in the laughter. To me, she said, “We just wanted to see how long you would try to stay interested. And you did very well—you’re sweet. Now come along and I’ll take you out of here.”

  After I said goodbye to Hewitt, we left the main building and walked to one of the smaller cottages. “This is Tom Van Dusen’s,” Margie said when we reached the door. “He should be inside working on his scenario.” She gave me a kiss. “I know you’ll need to get right to the ballpark after you talk with him. Tom will get you a ride to the train station, and I’ll see you tonight. I’m thinking of making spaghetti.”

  “Sound good to me. And believe me, I’d rather spend more time with you than talk to…” I tilted my head toward the door.

  “Me too. But go ahead and do your investigating.” Margie walked back to the main house and I paused to watch her for a moment. It occurred to me that I really did want to spend more time with her.

  From within the cottage, I heard the slow irregular clack of a typewriter. When I knocked on the door, I was greeted with an angry, “What is it now, dammit?”

  “It’s Mickey Rawlings,” I answered calmly. “I was hoping I could speak with you.”

  Shuffling footsteps approached the door and Van Dusen opened it. “I wasn’t expecting you, Rawlings.” He flashed a toothy smile. “I thought it was one of the studio idiots. Seems no one can do anything without me, and I can hardly get any work done.” It looked as if he had been working. Instead of dressing like a fashion plate from a moving picture magazine, Van Dusen wore a wrinkled soft-collar shirt and baggy trousers supported by olive drab suspenders. He needed a shave and his sandy hair had yet to be pomaded into place.

  The director stepped aside for me to enter. As I did, I took a quick look around. The one-room cottage appeared to function as an office rather than as living quarters and was sparsely appointed in dark, mission style furniture. The clean designs were almost smothered by the clutter that surrounded them, however. The walls of the place were crowded with publicity stills, lobby cards, and sketches for set designs; they seemed randomly tacked up, with many of them overlapping. The pigeonholes of Van Dusen’s writing desk were crammed and the stack of paper next to his typewriter was precariously high.

  “Say, I don’t mean to press you,” Van Dusen said. “But have you spoken to Babe Ruth again about making our picture? I’ve called his hotel a few times but he hasn’t gotten back to me.” He pressed his lips together in a pout.

  “Not yet,” I answered. “Actually, I came here to ask you about another matter.”

  “Oh.” The pout became more firmly fixed.

  “But I’ll be happy to talk to the Babe about your movie after today’s game,” I promised. “I’m sure he just needs a reminder.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” he said, mollified. He walked to a rol
ling service cart that was laden with bottles and glasses. “Drink?” he offered.

  “No, thank you.” As he began to pour one for himself, I added, “But that’s what I want to talk to you about.”

  Van Dusen laughed. “You want to talk to me about drinking?”

  “About your supplier: Spats Pollard.”

  The laughter turned into a cough. “Pollard?”

  “Yes. I believe you knew him.”

  Van Dusen turned to me and took a swallow from his glass. Adopting the tone of a politician, he said, “Well, as you know, the buying and selling of liquor isn’t legal at present. I would prefer not to discuss any such dealings I might have.”

  “Your name is on Pollard’s customer list. And don’t worry about revealing he’s a bootlegger—he’s a dead bootlegger now, and won’t mind anything you say about him.”

  “Dead?” Van Dusen was either genuinely surprised at the news or he was a better actor than a director.

  “Yes. Did you know him well?”

  “No, not really. To be honest, I didn’t particularly want to know him.”

  A sudden, ragged snore rumbled from the direction of the sofa. I hadn’t noticed before, but Natalie Brockman was curled up under an afghan, her pale head almost invisible on a white throw pillow.

  Van Dusen said, “She had a little too much of the hootch herself last night.” He quickly added, “Not anything from Pollard.” Brockman rolled over, her mouth agape, and the snoring became more regular.

  I turned my attention back to the director. “What did you mean you didn’t want to know Pollard?”

  “I didn’t care for his sales manner,” Van Dusen answered. “He bragged about famous customers, claimed that he could provide the best quality products, and implied that he had some rather powerful underworld connections. It was all supposed to impress me, but to be honest it worried me a bit—there are some kinds of people I don’t want to get involved with.” He sat down at his desk, swiveled the chair to face me, and asked, “What’s your interest in Pollard?”

  “We were on the Cubs together five years ago. He pretty much dropped out of sight after that, and I was wondering what became of him. After he turned up dead, I just got curious and found out that he’d become a bootlegger.”

  “I see… You were friends?”

  “Not really, just teammates. But teammates do tend to stick together.”

  He took another slug of his drink. “It’s your current teammate I’m interested in,” he reminded me.

  “I promised I’ll talk to him, and I will.” I paused. “Would you mind a few more questions while I’m here?”

  Van Dusen nodded to go ahead. He understood that the more he helped me, the more I was likely to help him with Babe Ruth.

  “When were you in contact with Pollard?”

  “Oh, around the holidays. December… January… something like that.”

  “Any time since then?”

  “No. I only met him a few times and he always initiated the meetings. I never bought from him, and eventually he must have caught on that I wasn’t going to.” He took another sip. “I didn’t need him—I have a good supplier in the city and another who makes deliveries here.”

  “How did he take your refusal to buy from him?”

  “I never out-and-out refused. I simply kept putting him off until he gave up.” His brow creased and he said, “You didn’t mention how Pollard died.”

  “He was murdered.”

  Van Dusen appeared frozen for a moment. Then he gulped down the rest of his drink.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I met Karl Landfors Thursday morning at a busy coffee shop on Seventy-seventh Street, across from the American Museum of Natural History. The aroma of hot buttered toast and fresh coffee, and the sound of sizzling bacon and frying eggs, were enticing, but I had already eaten an early breakfast with Margie. I ordered a cup of coffee at the counter and brought it to a small table near the window where Landfors was already seated.

  A half-empty mug and the remnants of his meal were in front of him. I removed his black derby from the chair he’d saved for me and sat down across from him. Touching a finger to the corner of my mouth, I said, “You got a…”

  “Oh, thank you.” He dabbed at a drop of egg yolk with his napkin and I nodded when it was gone.

  “So… Who is this fellow we’ll be meeting?” I asked. When Landfors telephoned me, he had been too excited to be coherent about the details. He didn’t have to convince me to meet him, though; I’d learned over the years that if he said something was important it probably was.

  Landfors sat on the edge of his chair. His eyes were bright and he was fighting not to smile. He looked altogether like a little kid with a secret he was bursting to tell. “Remember I told you that I’m looking into an Arnold Rothstein connection with the Dot King murder?”

  “Yes. How’s that going?”

  His eager expression faltered. “Well, to be perfectly frank, I’m not making as much progress on that as I would like. But I now have an excellent source within Rothstein’s organization and he’s starting to provide me with some very useful information.” Landfors paused to clean his spectacles with a handkerchief, letting the suspense build before coming to the point. “What’s more, he has some information for you.”

  “What kind of information?” I wasn’t eager to meet someone who worked for Arnold Rothstein. Simply being seen with an associate of the notorious gambler could end a ballplayer’s career.

  “I’ll let him tell you.” Landfors checked his pocket watch. “We meet him in twenty minutes.” Tucking the watch back in his vest pocket, he asked, “Have you come up with anything new on that dead pitcher?”

  I proceeded to fill him in on what I’d learned since we’d last spoken. When I recounted my meeting with Andrew Vey, Landfors agreed that Vey seemed to be smack in the middle of everything and he warned me not to trust him.

  “Vey seems more trustworthy than the cops,” I said. “I went to see Detective Luntz again, and either he’s the laziest cop on the force or there’s a reason he won’t investigate anything.”

  “Do you think he’s on the take?” Landfors asked.

  “I can’t imagine any other reason why a New York City police detective would be so indifferent about a murder. He says that one dead gangster will only be replaced by another anyway, and he isn’t doing any kind of investigation. I’m wondering if whoever killed Spats Pollard is paying Luntz to look the other way.”

  “It’s possible,” Landfors said. “Bootlegging is big business in this city, and the people running it can afford to buy anything and anyone.”

  I next told him of my meeting with Tom Van Dusen at the Griffith studio. If the director was telling the truth, Spats Pollard had been trying to build up his liquor business as recently as December or January. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel I could take Van Dusen at his word, so I would have to continue working with Pollard’s customer list.

  “You know,” I said, “one of the toughest things about this case is I don’t know who to believe or who to trust. Sometimes it seems the only people I can ever trust completely are you and Margie.”

  Landfors beamed at the unexpected compliment. “You can always count on me,” he said.

  I went on, “Even that fellow who runs the concession stand where Pollard was found—Joe Zegarra’s his name—I found out he isn’t completely honest, either.”

  “He lied about something?”

  “His bottles did. The labels are for near beer but he’s selling the real stuff. Doing a booming business with it, too, from what I could see.”

  Landfors’ skull-like head suddenly brightened into a lifelike expression and he blinked rapidly. “A bootlegger is found dead in a place that’s selling bootleg beer? That can’t be a coincidence! Maybe Zegarra’s behind it.”

  I’d already considered the possibility that Pollard and Zegarra had been competitors. “Possible,” I acknowledged, “But it doesn’t make sense to me. If
Zegarra killed Pollard, would he stash the body in his own place? I don’t think so.”

  Landfors frowned in response and pulled out his watch. “Time to go meet my contact,” he said.

  “He isn’t coming here?”

  “No, he doesn’t want to be seen with us.”

  The feeling was entirely mutual. “Where then?”

  “Across the street.” Landfors smiled. “In a most unlikely place to find a gangster. Or a baseball player, for that matter.”

  Minutes later, we were inside the venerable American Museum of Natural History, climbing a series of stairs to the fourth floor. When we reached it, we passed through the bone-filled Hall of Fossil Invertebrates and went into one of the museum’s newest exhibits, The Hall of the Age of Man.

  The cool, high-ceilinged room featured exhibits showing what the world was like when cave men populated the earth. There were murals depicting the landscapes, display cases containing the skulls of human ancestors, and frightening full-scale models of the animals they hunted. The first section we entered was identified as “Pleistocene of North America” and included the fossilized skeletons of a saber-toothed tiger and an American lion.

  Landfors nudged me and pointed at a gangly young man in a double-breasted wool overcoat that was a couple of sizes too big for him. His hat was also large, a black wide-brimmed fedora with a maroon band. The man was slowly pacing around a giant ground sloth, and seemed to be appraising it as if wondering which of them would win in a fight.

  Landfors and I casually drifted in the direction of the sloth. As we did, I glanced back and forth from a diorama of a prehistoric North American landscape to the young man whose face was barely visible between his upturned coat collar and the turned down brim of his hat. I saw that he somewhat resembled Landfors, with pale skin and gaunt features. His cheeks were pockmarked and a long fringe of blonde hair almost as light as Natalie Brockman’s poked from the edge of his fedora. I guessed his age to be about twenty-five, but the way he wore his oversized clothes, like a boy trying to wear his father’s suit, made him look younger.