The Picture Ranch 69

There was no sign of Dean. People said he lived in The Yellow Screen. There was nothing at all upstairs, except bunk-bedded rooms with no-one in them. We went back to the blood-spattered kitchen, none the wiser as to whose blood had been spilled.

'There might be a basement,' Miss G tiptoed round the still-sticky blood and tried the handle on a door too heavy to lead to nothing much. It was unlocked. There was something to slide a bar into on the inside of the frame, but no sign of any such bar.

It was a basement. I followed her in. Eleanor Gräfenberg was the most foolhardy moke I ever met. There was no light switch and no light, just a bordello smell of sex and junk and alcohol. We didn't even have a flashlight. I counted thirteen steps down, but they were deep in the riser and I was reaching for every step. I was relieved when we reached the floor, even though I couldn't see my hand in front of my face, though I felt Miss G's elbow in my chest sure enough.

'You coulda said "stop" or "wait" or somethin".

'Stand still I'm looking for a light switch.'

She found the bakelite before I had time to shut my eyes.

By the time I could see again, she was half-way down a corridor lined with doors that couldn't lead to any rooms bigger than a large coffin. I guessed they only needed space for one person to lie down.

I looked inside every room, since the lady had left each of them open after she had done so herself. These rooms were unoccupied. There were exotic furnishings. They looked uncomfortable, I guessed that was the point. Miss G's method of opening the door ensured each one hit something as it swung inwards. Maybe they should have used sliding doors, like the happy houses out in China. It wasn't until she got to the end of the corridor that we found anybody. Make that a body.

We had found Dean.

There was no blood. None at all. There was nothing strange about the room, apart from its size. It could have been a monk's cell, if it weren't for the faux movie posters on the wall. They must have cost a lot to print, each would have been a limited edition of one. The frames looked expensive, like the ones on paintings bought to hang in Beverly Hills colonials. 'Daughter of the Dragon', 'Shanghai Express', and 'Dangerous to Know' were plugged as if Anna Mae Wong were the star of all three. Only she wasn't in the posters, not really. The same boy was dragged-up as the actress. The boy in the restaurant had been a stand-in and now we knew whose.

Miss G sounded a bit choked up, 'That's… That's…'

And this time I told her it was.

I took a closer look at Dean. Apart from the marks on his throat and the smell of loosened bowels, he might have been asleep. If his usual nightwear was made of leather, that is. The cord round his neck was two-ply electrical and it had probably tattoo-ed the make up permanently into his skin. He wouldn't have to worry about that.

'A dead end, huh?' I said.

'Not funny, Fisher.'

She took 'Shanghai Express' off the wall and smashed the frame on the bedstead of the tiny cot. I dodged some glass, but most of it flew towards the corpse anyway. She handed me the poster. I took the next frame from her too, turning it over to smash it glass down this time. By the time I had all three posters , Miss G had searched Dean's daytime attire that was hanging on the only coat hanger on a rail that stretched the width of the room, over the bed-head. It looked like solid steel, maybe it wasn't a full time clothes rail.

'Nothing interesting but the bill-fold,' she held up a business card, 'And this'.

It was a business. A card for a business. Oh yeah, there was a person's name on it, but it was the kind of name made up by the studios. The kind to turn a Frances Gumm into an ingenue or a gal named Williams into a Manhattan sophisticate called Loy. The card read 'Molly Orlando', there was an Encino number and that was it.

I held up the posters, 'What about these?'

'We're going to burn them, Fisher, but not here.'