LITMIR.BIZ

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be.”

      “You know, the fox you’re using stopped by here earlier to say hello.”

      “Harvey, the fox wrangler, told me. He said you gave the thing milk.”

      “A mistake I will never make again, I promise.”

      “I really don’t care,” Nora Frost shrugged. “The fox is Harvey’s problem, not mine. He’s the animal trainer, I hired him to provide and control the thing for the shoot, which clearly he wasn’t capable of doing, since it wandered away and came up here. But I’m not here to talk about the goddamned fox.” She leaned forward even further and started drilling holes into me with her eyes. “What you need to know is that my babies are going to big. They’ve got it. You know what it is? That mysterious appeal that you’re either born with or you’re not? Well, they were born with it, and that makes the others jealous.”

      Some got it and some don’t, Mae West said in my head, adding: As for me, I’d rather get it.

      “And these others are the bitches you were talking about?” I asked.

      “The mothers of all those other little brats.” She sprung up from her chair in agitation and began pacing back and forth in my office. “I’m not going to lie to you and claim this is not a tough business, Mr. Beauchamp. There are a lot of sows out there who think their little darlings are God’s gift to the world, and they are so wrong. So fucking wrong, and so vicious.” She leaned across my desk, her cold dark eyes locking on me, and her face hardened into a look of determination that would have made a mama tiger abandon the cubs and run for the treetops. I struggled not to show any signs of intimidation, even as I shrank back in my chair. “One of those miserable bitches threatened my babies,” she said.

      “Um, uh, how did she threaten them?”

      Nora Frost sat back down. “She said she would kill them. Kill them, cut them up, and mail the pieces back to me.”

      The sound of a whistle echoed in my head, and I knew instinctively it came from Bogart. If this revelation shocked him, how was I going to handle it?

      TWO

      “Um…have you gone to the police?” I asked weakly.

      “No,” Nora Frost said, deflating somewhat. “If I go to the police, they’ll end up questioning the boys, and I’m trying to spare them the fear. I don’t want them to know they’ve been threatened. I assumed a private detective could handle things more quietly.”

      “I see,” I said nodding, glad she had turned the high-beams off. “Do you know who it was who made the threat?”

      “If I did, I would go to her myself. No, I don’t know, but I have a suspicion. You see, the boys have been auditioning for a new reality show, and they’re blowing all the other little monsters right out of the room. A few days ago I received a letter telling me if I didn’t stop bringing them to the try-outs I could start preparing for their funerals.”

      “And that they’d be cut up?”

      “Those were the details.”

      “Did you save the letter?”

      “Yes. My first instinct was to burn it, but I didn’t.”

      “Good. I’ll need to see it.”

      Her eyes narrowed. “Why? Don’t you believe me? You require proof I’m telling the truth?”

      “No, it’s not that—”

      “Christ,” she muttered, “I can see I came to the wrong detective office.”

      “Nora, please, calm down,” I said. “I need to see the letter to see if there are any clues on it that might point to the sender. Ink, handwriting, even fingerprints, if we’re lucky.”

      “Oh, yes of course. I’m sorry, Mr. Beauchamp, I guess I’m becoming distraught. It’s just that the boys are all I have. I lost my husband two years ago.”

      “I’m sorry.” There was an awkward pause, which I broke by saying: “So, if I understand you correctly, you want to hire me to find out who it is that sent you this threatening letter.”

      “Yes.”

      “When I do find her…or him…since we don’t know for certain it’s a woman—”

      “It’s one of the bitch mothers, trust me.”

      “Fair enough, but when I do identify her, I will be obligated to notify the police. As an investigator, I don’t have the power to arrest anyone.”

      “As long as she’s out of the way and my babies are safe.”

      “My usual fee is fifty dollars an hour.” I waited for the inevitable protest, but it did not come.

      “Can I retain you for a lump sum instead?” Nora Frost asked.

      “What kind of lump sum are we talking about?”

      “Say, ten-thousand dollars for the job, up front?”

      I hope the gulping sound that came from my throat was not as audible to her as it was to me. Ten-grand was, what, two-hundred hours? Five weeks work.

      “If that is adequate I could write you a check right now,” she said.

      I could write a check, too, John Wayne’s voice cautioned inside my brain. Course it would bounce higher than a butte, but…I could write it. The Duke made a good point: I’d learned from experience not to trust every proffered checkbook. “I’ll tell you what, Nora,” I said, trying to sound like William Powell, and failing, “I’ll take a cashier’s check for half, five-thousand, as a retainer, and the rest on completion of the case.”

      “Still don’t trust me,” she said. “No matter, I can do that. I can’t go to the bank now, though. I have to get back to wrap the shoot. If I’m not there, they’ll screw it all up.”

      “If you don’t mind my asking, why are you shooting a foxhunt scene in an office building in Sherman Oaks? Shouldn’t you be out somewhere like Huntington gardens?”

      “You can’t bring a wild animal into a public place without a filming permit, and I didn’t want the hassle of that,” she replied. “So we’re using the studio downstairs.”

      “Studio? What studio?”

      “It was called Triex.”

      I knew that an outfit called Triex Distribution had offices downstairs, but I never knew exactly what they distributed. I saw the guy in charge every now and then, an older man with a perpetual smile and tinted glasses, but he moved out a couple of months ago. “So it’s like a photography studio?”

      She gave me a strange, probing look. “It was a film studio,” she said. “You didn’t know about it?”

      “No, and I’m a film buff. How ironic is that?”

      “Aren’t you too young to be a film buff?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you be a video game buff?”

      Now cut that out! Jack Benny shouted defensively in my mind. “I come by it honestly,” I explained. “My father is a walking movie encyclopedia. He saw everything on first release and re-release in theatres, and then when home video came out, he started renting and collecting. He even wrote some articles for fan magazines. I caught the bug from him.” The truth was, as a kid I was so pathetically bad at any kind of sports that staying inside and watching movies on TV, or reading about them, became my replacement activity for playing outside. I didn’t mind, and Dad didn’t mind, though between the two of us, we drove my mom a little nuts. “Still,” I said, changing the subject, even if in my own mind, “I can’t imagine what kind of films anyone would make in an office building in Sherman Oaks?”

      Nora Frost started laughing. “My god, you really don’t know?” she said. “You can’t even guess?” I shrugged, and she prompted further: “This is the

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