The Rocky Mountain Moving Picture Association; A Novel

by Loren D. Estleman

• ISBN13: 9780312866761
• ISBN10: 0312866763
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 1999-03-15
• Publisher: Forge Books

Summary

In the tradition of "Billy Gashade", Estleman's latest novel again takes readers on a trip through the early movie-making days of Hollywood. The cast of "big guns" includes D.W. Griffith, Tom Mix, Lillian Gish, and unseen villain Thomas Edison.

Author Biography

Loren D. Estleman was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and graduated from Eastern Michigan University with a BA degree in English Literature and Journalism in 1974. In 2002, the university awarded him an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters for his contribution to American literature.

He is the author of more than fifty novels in the categories of mystery, historical western, and mainstream, and has received four Western Writers of American Golden Spur Awards, three Western Heritage Awards, and three Shamus Awards. He has been nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award, Britain's Silver Dagger, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. In 2003, the mammoth Encyclopedia of Detective Fiction named him the most critically acclaimed writer of U.S. detective

Table of Contents

The Rocky Mountain Moving Picture Association

1926

A Death in Season

Buck would have loved it: the throngs in fedoras, straw boaters, and cloches, compressed into squares by Jimmy Walker's Finest, the best cops money could buy, in their shining rubber ponchos and cap shields; the ropes and barricades erected to funnel the mourners from four abreast to two, forming a line eleven blocks long; the rain sizzling off the awning of Frank E. Campbell's Funeral Chapel and making the sea of black umbrellas glisten. That last was a bit of cooperation from the weather Buck had never managed to achieve, which was why he refused to make up a shooting schedule, preferring to hold off the cemetery procession until the rain decided to fall. Plugging in the desert chase when the sun insisted on shining. Buck, who never believed in chance good fortune, would have scanned the rooftops looking for men with hoses. Airborne cloud-seeders weren't out of the question, provided Adolph Zukor agreed to a quid pro quo with George M. Cohan in return for permission to rain on Broadway. No one understood the territorial imperative better than an old pirate.

He shook his head, missing Buck, and handed five dollars to a fellow who had stood in line two hours for the express purpose of selling his position. He was in no great personal hurry, but the price would only go up, and he'd heard a rumorthat Harry Klemfuss would soon seal the casket to prevent the taking of souvenirs. It was the kind of rumor that could spark another riot--the mounted patrolmen were already in place, prepared to charge--and in any case he hadn't come all this way and stood in the rain all this time to look at a silver-bronze box.

Klemfuss didn't care who took souvenirs. Another riot would actually help ensure the box office for the two unreleased films in the can. Hell, Hollywood would say, Harry will do anything to get you ink, even after you're dead. Buck and Klemfuss would have gotten along. Until their interests conflicted.

The crowd was orderly. Not like earlier in the day, when gangs of young women armed with umbrellas had laid siege to the entrance and had to be beaten back with billy clubs. Many wore black veils and armbands, although here and there he spotted a fancy boy in droopy balloon pants and a sodden bolero vest; even at the height of the "pink powder-puff" controversy the press had ignored the man's vast homosexual following. The woman to his right, a plump chatterbox clutching a framed studio print to her breasts, said she had seen A Sainted Devil seventeen times. Her makeup was streaming, but he suspected it was more from the rain than from tears. She was as animated as if she were on her way to a personal appearance.

Inside the entrance he stood aside to let the woman start up the stairs ahead of him. The deep red runner was striped down the center with brown mud tracked in from the street. From here on it was step up, wait, step up, wait. The wait was seldom longer than a second. He'd heard that a woman who had fainted from anxiety and the August heat had been allowed a three-second visitation to compensate her for her ordeal.

He was on the landing now, close enough to see through the open door into the small room where the body lay in state,where it had been moved from the larger and more prestigious Gold Room after the ornaments and fixtures had been sacked by rioters. He saw the tall candles, the marble statuary, the wall of ferns behind the bier. He couldn't see the casket or its occupant for the Hollywood fascisti surrounding it. Another Klemfuss coup, although Mussolini had sent a cable denying ownership of these particular Black Shirts, or of an ostentatious wreath bearing the legend FROM BENITO.

Hellinger and Winchell were back in their offices banging black-box Remingtons to commemorate the spectacle, and of course Jimmy, the Night Mayor of New York, had had words to say. Grogin of the Evening Graphic had faked up a cadaver shot before the genuine corpse had even arrived at the parlor and composited a cordial meeting with Caruso in the Afterlife. No confirmation yet that Capone men would board the funeral train in Chicago to accompany the body across the continent with tommy guns in their laps; that one had Runyon all over it.

Anyway, it was a woman's event. Pola Negri, they said, had paid her respects in three-thousand-dollar widow's weeds, with the help of an army airmail plane to whisk her there from the West Coast. Ziegfeld beauty Marion Kay Brenda, a floradora in search of a surname, had taken umbrage, claiming that she, not the Polish actress, had been the deceased's future intended. Mary Pickford was expected to show up at the services later at St. Malachy's. No suicides there, that was reserved for those who didn't know him. In London an apache dancer had poisoned herself. In New York a housewife had swallowed iodine and shot herself twice, sprawling poetically on a pile of eight-by-ten glossies. In Santa Monica a woman had put on her wedding dress and walked into the ocean; but that was California. He wondered if any of them thought they had a better chance of meeting the object of their passion in a crowded heaven than they'd had on earth.

He was in the room now. The air smelled woozily of flowers--thousands of flowers, sent from as far away as bolshevik Russia, bouquets and baskets and pots and gondolas of roses, carnations, hibiscus, peonies, buttercups, tulips, lady's slippers, lilies, poppies, geraniums, chrysanthemums, primrose, orchids, bluebells, African violets--all the obnoxious and dazzling bounty of a death in season. The room had not been sufficient to contain them and they had been spread out throughout both floors. Farther in, in the aftermath of olfactory overload, he noticed the more prosaic odors of melted wax, rubber galoshes, and wet wool. These smells reminded him of a field trip to a museum.

He took his turn at the bookstand, where he was forced to wait while yet another guestbook was borne away, heavy with the weight of its signatures, and its replacement brought. The spine cracked when it was opened by a young attendant in a black cutaway and white cotton gloves. He accepted the feather quill and without thinking signed a name he hadn't used in ten years. He'd been ruminating too deeply on the past.

He made no attempt to correct the mistake, but surrendered the quill and shuffled forward with the line, his hat now in his hand. Now he heard sobbing (genuine, probably, Klemfuss's hired female mourners having wept their bit shortly after the doors opened), a whispered snatch of the Twenty-third Psalm, the toneless chant of the Black Shirts' selected spokesman to "Keep it moving, keep it moving." And now he was at the opening in the ropes, and now he was there before the casket.

They had him propped against a white satin pillow in a black tuxedo with extravagant lapels and a silk bow tie, under a dome of shatterproof glass; so much for souvenir hunting. They'd wound a rosary around his folded hands, the white fingers with their waxy nails, and turned his head three quartersso he could share a slight conspiratorial smile with his visitors, amused by the ludicrous turnout, far better than any of his premieres. Especially the most recent.

Peritonitis. It seemed a drastic thing to have to do to win back one's audience. Jerry Jarette would have found a way to fake it.

He looked down at the marble-white features, the obvious paint. Where was the powder puff now? There was the lacquered black hair, no gray in it or dye, as why should there be at thirty-one, showing the marks of the comblike grooves in a new record. There were the razored sideburns, the dimpled upper lip and long swooping lashes. It couldn't be real. He looked too much like his movies.

And then his second was over. He turned away, descended a homely set of stairs with a rubber runner, and passed out through a side door where he suspected the corpses entered, wrapped in rubber sheets and without music; out into the snotlike rain, among the klaxons and electric signs and the stink of horseshit, the last so reminiscent of a Rocky shoot. Putting on his hat thinking, Rodolpho Alfonzo Rafaelo Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguolla, Great Lover, Mighty Sheik, O Immortal Valentino, in what unlabeled pauper's ditch would you be lying had not Arthur Bensinger, Jr., tripped over a bucket of washers in the Bensinger & Rausch Hardware and Electrical Supply of Union City in 1909?

Copyright © 1999 by Loren D. Estleman

Excerpts

Chapter One

The name came to him the way everything did that he trusted, when he was reading Jack London.

    He had just opened the semimonthly magazine of The San Francisco Call , the December 1, 1912, number containing the story "The Captain of the Susan Drew." The provocative pen-and-ink illustration, and the electrifying byline, warmed him in a way the wood-burning stove at his elbow could not. But the lead paragraph might have been written in Balinese for all he comprehended it.

    Suddenly he put aside the magazine, touched the blunt point of the whittled yellow pencil to his tongue, and wrote the name on the sheet of coarse paper he'd been using for his figures. He looked at it, holding the sheet out at arm's length, the way his father tried to read things when he'd misplaced his glasses, then put it down and copied out the legend again and again, now printing, now in cursive, upper case, lower case, upper and lower; stacking it down the sheet like a bride-to-be trying out her new name.

    He had to see it in type. He reached across the rickety worktable, slid over the Blickensderfer No. 7 on its wooden pallet--good, loyal Blick, fellow veteran of a hundred thousand unpublished words--rolled another sheet into the platen, and pecked out the letters.

    "Who's Tom Boston?"

    He jumped. He'd been so engrossed he hadn't heard the door opening behind him or even felt the rush of razor-cold air that came in with Yuri. The big half Tartar was wearing his bearskin coat and hat, and at a glance he appeared to be covered with coarse hair from his head to the tops of his lace-up boots. Only his Rasputin eyes and wind-chapped condor's beak of a nose showed between the long whiskers and thatched brows. His moist breath had frozen the hairs about his mouth into stalactites. He was staring at the sheet in the machine.

    "I am," said the young man, calmed now by the Ukrainian's presence, which was like a huge enveloping muffler. "If it works. Does it work?"

    "What's wrong with the name your father gave you?"

    "Nothing, except that I was ten years old before I could spell it. Would you buy a story from someone named Dmitri Andreivitch Pulski?"

    "Why should I buy one? You read them to me all the time for free."

    "I mean if you were an editor. Jack London got a hundred and sixty rejections before he made his first sale. That's twelve less than me. I'm just as good a writer as he was when he started. It must be the name."

    "Why Tom Boston?"

    "It just came to me. Forget you've known me as Dmitri all my life. How does it sound?"

    "I guess it's okay. I don't read anything but signs. If I was to start, it wouldn't be because of a name."

    "Not everyone's like you." He looked at the sheet. "Tom Boston." It was the first time he'd said it aloud. He tore out the sheet, folded it, and put it in the breast pocket of his heavy woolen shirt. It would be a valuable artifact. Then he lifted the typewriter's cover from the plank floor and snapped and latched it into place. The curved wooden case looked like it belonged to a sewing machine. "Anything wrong?"

    "I just came in to tell you we're ready to start cutting."

    "I'll be out in a minute."

    When Yuri left, the young man put on his mackinaw and fleece-lined cap, buckling the strap under his chin so his ears would stay covered, and found his mittens. He gave himself the indulgence of an affectionate look around before he turned out the lantern. The six-by-eight shack, built of corrugated iron with a tar-paper lining, was the only private place he knew. Although it was intended for the workers to escape the weather and warm up over coffee, they seldom entered it when he was inside. Everyone who worked for the Sierra Nevada Ice Company knew that the owner's son was going to be a great writer like Pushkin, and that writers required privacy the way ice-cutters needed strong backs and vodka. Guilt for his selfish acceptance of this favor kept him from personalizing the shack beyond the occasional copy of Century and The Overland Monthly and a picture of Jack London using a boulder for a desk, clipped from Cosmopolitan and tacked to the wall above the worktable. He did most of his writing and reading there and stuffed his manuscripts into brown ten-by-twelve envelopes for mailing. He thought of the place as his study, but never referred to it as anything but the shack.

    He remembered to smear lampblack under his eyes before stepping outside, and he was glad he had. Although Yuri and his crew had thoroughly planed the snow from the lake's surface, the ice beneath remained white enough to dazzle in the bright sun, and if one failed to take precautions against the glare, to blind. To the east, Mount Shasta below its frozen peak was the precise deep blue of the sky, and might have broken away from it in a jagged shard, as if the sky were a pane of glass and something had struck it from the other side.

    As he watched, a wind fourteen thousand feet up skinned a slice of dry snow from the peak and scrolled it outward like smoke. The curl would measure a mile. It confounded all his senses to think that that distant puff was a dozen times more powerful than the gust that now came at him from the opposite direction, pushing a solid volume of air that boxed his ears and shook the side of the shack, making tinny thunder. He turned his back to keep the ice crystals from cutting his face. It was just the kind of scene he labored hours over the Blick trying to get right and hadn't yet, not to his own satisfaction. But he would.

    Once the lake was cleared of snow, activity had continued with all haste before it drifted back. The ice plow, built heavily of elm and cast iron, required a six-horse team to pull it. The driver, an elderly Cossack named Esaul, labored to haul himself into the iron seat and groped for the lines, at which point the years fell away like the halves of a dried pod. With a series of barks and whistles through his remaining teeth, he coaxed the brutes forward, cutting twin furrows as straight as piano wire from east to west. At the end he turned the team and repeated the procedure from west to east, and when the entire lake had been scored in this way he drove to the north shore and began cutting from north to south, carving the surface neatly into three-foot squares. Then the sawyers moved in.

    This was where Dmitri took his turn. As the son of the owner, he was there to oversee the operation, but as he began to spend more and more time while on site in the shack, reading and typing, Yuri had assumed most of his responsibilities as foreman. The young man insisted on carrying his weight, however, and had surprised and impressed the others by selecting the most arduous of all the chores involved in harvesting ice.

    The work commenced with chipping a hole in one corner of the first square with a pick or chisel. When an opening had been created that was large enough to insert the end of a long, square-toothed sawblade, the cutting began in earnest, each man sawing along the lines scored by the plow. Showers of ice shavings like sawdust stung faces and made eyes water. Once a brisk rhythm was established, the friction did much of the work, slicing through the ice like a heated knife through lard; but on bitter days when temperatures neared zero, as they did today, merely pausing for breath allowed the ice to refreeze around the blade, locking it in place. A series of huffing, two-handed lunges was then required to break it free. Very soon Dmitri was sweating in spite of the cold. He paused after cutting his third block to strip off his coat and mittens.

    At the end of a section, he and the others traded saws for crowbars and cant dogs, prying loose the section and heaving it aside with the hooks, hinged like the jaws of a mastiff, to form a canal of open black water. Men then moved in with poles and pushed the floating cakes along the canal or heaved them up onto the uncut ice and slued them to shore, where the rest of the crew waited with cant dogs to hoist them onto chaindriven belts operated by hand cranks. The cranks were seized and turned. The chains clankety-clanked, caught up the slack, and carried the great silver-blue blocks up to the icehouse on the hill, where they plunged through a loftlike opening onto a plank floor covered with sawdust. As architecture, the storage building was considerably more substantial than the shack, which had been thrown together as an afterthought with sheets of corrugated roofing left over from the larger construction. It was as big as a warehouse, with triple walls built of native pine, the spaces between packed tightly with sawdust and wood shavings as insulation against the heat of summer, when the lake was open blue water and even the white cap of Shasta had dwindled to half its present size. By then the great stack of ice would be nearly as valuable as bullion.

    The harvest complete, Dmitri climbed the slope to the shack, foundering a little in the deep drifts, as much from exhaustion as from the awkwardness of the footing. He carried his coat slung over one shoulder with the mittens in the pockets. His own sweat had begun to chill him beneath the flannel lining of his shirt; he hoped the ashes in the stove were still hot. He didn't look forward to starting a new fire from scratch, shivering in the dank interior cold.

    A puff of warm air surprised him when he opened the door. Then he realized the lantern was lit. His father was seated at the worktable, holding the sheet Dmitri had been scribbling on earlier.

    "Who's Tom Boston?"

    Andrei Ivanovitch Pulski was a compact man, small for a Russian, who looked more like a St. Petersburg haberdasher than a man who had spent most of his life laboring with his hands. He wore suits everywhere, even up here, where he had on heavy tweeds with the trousers neatly tucked into the tops of knee-high stovepipes. His overcoat with its astrakhan collar and cuffs hung over the back of the chair. He brushed his thick brown hair straight back and had his goatee trimmed by a barber twice a week.

    Dmitri hung up his Mackinaw and cap and went over to warm himself by the stove. The woodbox was nearly empty. All those years of cutting and carrying ice had left the elder Pulski with a chronic chill that even in summer forced him to lay a fire and spread a blanket over his knees when he studied the company ledgers in the evening. Dmitri had never seen him read a book or give more than passing attention to a newspaper.

    "Just a character." He didn't want to get into it just then. "I didn't see the Ford."

    "Your Uncle Paul dropped me off. He's in town picking up the mail. Is this what you do when I send you up here to work?" He brushed the sheet with his fingertips.

    "I just finished cutting a ton of ice."

    "That's not your job."

    "I'm better at it than I am at giving orders. Half these men watched me grow up. They've seen me in knickers."

    "Then there shouldn't be any confusion about whose son you are."

    He made no answer. His father was slow to anger, but once he began there was nothing to do but wait until his passion had run its course. Andrei's own grandfather had cut ice in Alaska to fill the demand created by the Gold Rush, then when the demand subsided had come to California to hunt sea otters for the Russian-American Company. When the otters played out, San Francisco was still in need of ice, and so Andrei's father and a partner had formed the Sierra Nevada Ice Company to harvest the northern lakes. He was the grandson of a mountain man and trapper, the descendant of an officer in the Czar's army, and stubborn traces of the career soldier and hearty pioneer remained beneath the executive exterior, like the tough sierra grass under two feet of snow. He had spent his youth working side by side with his own father's employees until the business was sound; now he took it as a personal affront that his son should do the same, as if the years of toil had made no progress. Dmitri couldn't tell if his father was more upset by that or by his own ambition to be a writer instead of an iceman.

    Andrei surprised him, for the second time that day, by letting the matter drop along with the scratch sheet. "How much ice do we have in inventory?"

    The young man hesitated. "About eight tons, including today's."

    "I've received an order for all we have."

    "Who from, the City of San Francisco?"

    "Some company in Los Angeles." He pronounced it with a hard G , as did everyone Dmitri knew. Only the occasional Mexican who came up to work with them for a winter softened the consonant. As he said it, Andrei drew a folded sheet of paper from an inside breast pocket, snapped it open, and hooked on his gold-rimmed spectacles to look at it. "The Rocky Mountain Moving Picture Association. Have you heard of it?"

    He said he hadn't. Moving pictures. He'd seen two or three flicker shows at the end of the vaudeville bill at the opera house in San Francisco--crude, jerky images of firefighters in action and young women undressing--but it had never occurred to him that anyone made a living making and showing the things.

    "We don't sell that much by August," Dmitri said. "It's only January."

    "See for yourself."

    Dmitri accepted the sheet and turned it toward the lantern. The name his father had read was professionally printed across the top, along with an address on Yucca Avenue.

    Dear Sir:

An exhaustive survey conducted among suppliers of ice throughout the Pacific Northwest has led us to the conclusion that the Sierra Nevada Ice Company offers the highest quality product at the most reasonable rates.

Kindly accept our order for ten tons of quality ice, or if you have not that much on hand, as much ice of the highest grade as you can supply us at this time, provided the amount is not less than six tons. Delivery to be arranged pending your positive response on or before 15 January 1913.

Yours very sincerely,

Arthur Bensinger, Jr.

President

    "I didn't know there were different qualities of ice." Dmitri gave back the letter.

    "There are two: thin and thick." His father glanced again at the typewritten words, then laid down the sheet and returned his glasses to his pocket. "I think we ought to check out this Rocky Mountain company. No one I've asked has heard of it or Arthur Bensinger."

    "It's good stationery."

    "Anyone can manage that. It doesn't mean they can pay for eight tons of ice."

    "What do you suppose they plan to do with it?"

    "That's one of the things I want you to find out."

    "Me?"

    "I want you to drive down and take a look at their operation and report back to me. I'll lend you the Ford. Don't wreck it. I'd send you on the train, but how would you get around once you got there? Los Angeles is a desert town, strung out across ten miles of dust."

    "Why me?"

    "I can't spare the time, especially if it turns out to be a wild goose chase. Sooner or later every crook and four-flusher in the country winds up in southern California. Moving pictures." He stood and put on his coat. "Learning how to separate the charlatans from the solid customers will help you run this business. I have nothing against your wanting to write, Dmitri. But when times get hard, entertainment is the first thing people find they can live without. Meanwhile they'll always need ice."

Copyright © 1999 Loren D. Estleman. All rights reserved.