The Man in the White Hat
Loren D. Estleman

A painting the size of a barn door greeted Valentino inside the entrance to the Red Montana and Dixie Day Museum on Ventura. In it, an implausibly young Montana sat astride a rearing white stallion—Tinderbox, of course—smiling broadly and waving his milk-colored Stetson. Across from it hung a more subdued study of Dixie Day, the cowboy hero's wife, younger still and pretty in tailored white buckskins, leading her mare Cocoa. The guard stationed between the paintings found the visitor's name on the guest list and directed him to the reception.
He found the guests shuffling around a floor with a tile mosaic of Montana and Day backed by Old Glory. Scooping a glass of champagne from a passing tray, he wandered along the walls, admiring the framed stills from the couple's many horse operas until someone signaled for attention.
Red Montana in person was not as tall as he appeared on film, and he had put on weight since retirement; his chins spilled over the knot of his silk necktie. His suit, with flared lapels and arrow pockets, was beautifully cut, although it probably hadn't cost much more than his head of silver hair, a tribute to the wigmaker's craft. His voice was reedy with age, but retained an echo of the hearty bray of a circus ringmaster.
"Howdy, friends and neighbors. I ain't tall on speechifyin', so I'll make this short and sweet. As of this moment, the Dixie Day Foundation has raised more than two million dollars for cancer research. Dixie ain't feeling up to joining us, but she asked me special to thank all you folks for opening up your hearts and pocketbooks."
Hands clapped, flashguns went off. The cowboy star issued a mock-stern order not to be bashful about "bellyin' up to the cook wagon," and then the assembly broke into small groups. Valentino joined a line waiting to shake Montana's hand. He found the old man's grip surprisingly firm.
"You're that detective feller."
Valentino clarified. "Film detective. Actually, I'm just an historian."
"Meet me in the curator's office in five minutes."
There were exhibition rooms off the corridor, but Valentino didn't look inside any of them. He'd heard Montana had had the original Tinderbox stuffed and mounted and was reluctant to find out that the story wasn't just an urban myth.
It was obvious the curator's office actually belonged to Montana. The walls were covered with autographed pictures of him shaking hands with various presidents, Ernest Hemingway, and Albert Einstein. Montana's famous silver-studded saddle perched on a stand behind a desk supporting a computer console and a fax machine. The old man was seated at the desk, signing his name to one of a stack of eight-by-ten glossies at his elbow. He placed it on the stack and thanked Valentino for coming.
"Thank you for the invitation." He'd wondered why he'd been on the list, since neither he nor the UCLA Film Preservation Department had contributed to the Dixie Day Foundation.
"They tell me you can sniff out a foot of silver-nitrate stock in a pile of horse manure."
"I hope I'll never have to," Valentino said. "But I've found portions of lost classic films in some unlikely places."
"I need someone with detective skills. I'd go to a pro, but I've been in the movie business sixty years. I only trust film people. I hear you can keep a secret."
"It's important if I'm going to stay ahead of Viacom and Ted Turner." He wondered where this was headed.
"I'm counting on that." Montana produced a key ring with a silver horse's head attached, unlocked a drawer, and drew out an eight-by-ten Manila envelope. "You're aware my wife is dying."
Valentino expressed sympathy. All Hollywood knew Dixie Day had inoperable cancer and that the couple had chosen to spend her last months raising money for cancer research. Her popularity as the Sweetheart of the Range was an asset to the cause.
"These were faxed to me here last week." Montana opened the envelope and handed him a sheaf of paper.
It was plain fax stock. The images that had been scanned onto the sheets were smudged and grainy, but Valentino recognized Dixie Day's face from her old movies. She appeared no older than twenty, naked in the arms of an unclothed anonymous male.
"Are you sure they're genuine?"
"I checked that out years ago, the first time I saw them. They're enlargements of frames from a stag film Dixie made before she broke in at RKO. I paid a hundred thousand cash for the negative, and what I was assured was every existing print, and burned them. I thought that was the end of it."
"You can never be sure how many prints were made. Do you think it's the same blackmailer?" He gave back the pictures.
"I have no idea. I put the cash in a paper sack in a locker at LAX, as I was instructed in the letter that came with the sample print. The next day the negative and prints came by special delivery. I never made direct contact with anyone. This time I haven't even received a demand. Just these." He jammed the sheaf back into the envelope, returned it to the drawer, and closed and locked it. "I want you to find out who sent them."
"I wouldn't know where to start."
"Talk to Sam O'Reilly. He's living at the Actors' Home."
"Your old sidekick? I thought he died."
"He pretty much did, as far as the studios were concerned: drank himself right out of paying work. He's always blamed me for not going to bat for him. Drunks are never responsible for the jackrabbit holes they step in. It'd be just like him to try and get back at me by ruining Dixie's reputation."
"Why me? You've offered to match every dollar the Foundation brings in. That means you can afford to hire a private agency and pay for its discretion."
"I told you, I only trust film people. And I've got incentive. Switch off that light, will you, son?"
Valentino flipped the switch next to the door, plunging the room into darkness. At the same moment, Montana pressed something under the desk. A white screen hummed down from the ceiling and a wall panel opened behind the desk, exposing a projector. Montana pressed something else and the projector came on with a whir.
For the next five minutes, the film detective was entranced by ancient black-and-white images of galloping horses and smoking six-guns, accompanied by a tinny soundtrack full of thundering music and hard-bitten frontier dialogue. When his host turned off the projector, it took him a moment to find the light switch.
"Six-gun Sonata," Valentino said, recovering. "The first feature to pair Red Montana and Dixie Day. I heard it was lost."
"I bought it from Republic cheap in nineteen forty and put it in a vault. Later I struck off a new master on safety stock and destroyed the original nitrate print. A collector offered me a quarter-million for it last year. I told him I didn't have it. What do I need with another quarter-million? Now I'm offering it to you, payable on delivery of the blackmailer's name."
"I'm really not that kind of detective."
Montana sat back, resting his hands on his paunch. "Six-gun Sonata means nothing to me. If you turn me down, I'll burn it."
"What makes that different from blackmail?"
"I didn't say I was better than this scum. Just richer."
Valentino thought. He was reeling from the double blow of finding, then perhaps losing, a cinematic treasure and learning that this champion of the Code of the West had much in common with the blackguards he'd pursued in feature after feature.
"I'll see O'Reilly," he said. "I can't promise anything."
"There's the difference." Montana took a cigar from the box on the desk and produced a lighter with a diamond horseshoe on it. "I can." The jet of flame signaled the end of the meeting.
"He said that?
Sam "Slap" O'Reilly hadn't changed so much physically that the film detective couldn't recognize him from his comic bits in Red Montana movies. The whiskey welts on his long horsey features were new and his hair was thin, but brushed neatly. His room at the Motion Picture Actors' Home was as tidy as the man himself, seated in a deep armchair in loose tan slacks, slippers, and a white shirt buttoned to the neck. There was nothing present to mark his career in movies, only family photographs and a letter in crayon from a great-grandchild, tacked to a bulletin board.
"Montana's a liar," he went on. "It's true my drinking cut short my livelihood, but I never asked anyone to bail me out, least of all him. I haven't touched a drop in thirty years."
"What split you up, if not that?" Valentino asked.
"We never did like each other. Audiences liked me, and that was enough to keep me on contract. But I never really hated him until he stole Dixie from me."
"You and Dixie Day?"
He grinned, spurring memories of his old dimwit persona. "I was quite a man with the ladies off the set, guess you didn't know that. But it was a mistake to introduce Dixie to Montana. We were shooting a three-day oater on loan to RKO. He talked to the director and got her a bit, one line. The audience fell for her. Republic signed her and the next thing you know they're both billed above the title. They got married a year later."
"You must resent them both."
"Not Dixie. You can't blame a girl for taking advantage of a break, and anyway I don't think she felt anything for me. I did for her, though. Montana knew that, and he went after her the way he went after money and glory, and God help whoever got in his way."
"That was almost sixty years ago. A long time to be angry."
"I'm not angry. I was for a long time, but I got over it. If I'd married Dixie I'd have messed that up just like I messed it up with the woman I did marry." His face went slack. "Who'd you say you were with, again? My memory isn't so good these days."
"The Film Preservation Department at UCLA. I'm trying to track down a movie Dixie Day made before she met Red Montana." He'd cooked up the half-lie on the way there from the museum.
"I wouldn't know anything about it. I'd only been going out with her a couple of weeks when I brought her to the set. We met at a party. She came there with a cameraman. I'll remember his name in a minute." His mind wandered. "I hear Dixie's in a bad way."
"The doctors don't give her long to live."
"I'm sorry. She was a good old gal, too good for Montana. I hope that crumb doesn't stuff her like he did Tinderbox."
"The cameraman," Valentino prompted.
"Cameraman?" When the muscles in O'Reilly's features let go, he truly looked old. "Uh. Dick Hennessey. I remember his name on account of Hal Roach bounced him later. It was a big scandal at the time. Cops busted him for shooting stag films on the side."
The only promising-looking Richard Hennessey listed in Los Angeles County ran a production company in Pasadena. He answered his own telephone.
"My father was a cameraman," he told Valentino. "He passed away six years ago."
"I'm very sorry. I'm looking for a film he might have shot back in the thirties."
"For Hal Roach?"
"No, it was something on the side."
"Oh, you mean the porno stuff. Can't help you there. The judge had it all burned after Pop was convicted. He did a hundred and thirty-six hours of community service, a record then. Fatty Arbuckle didn't get that."
Valentino didn't bother pointing out Arbuckle was acquitted.
Hennessey's candor had surprised him. "That must be a painful memory."
"Not at all. Pop opened his own photo-supply store and did all right. His films were tame by today's standards. The A studios shoot steamier stuff all the time and get away with an R rating."
"You saw some of his stag films?"
"Better than that. I was his assistant. The only ten-year-old apprentice cinematographer in the business."
Hennessey Productions worked out of an ornate old Queen Anne house on San Diego Boulevard. The film detective tiptoed among the cables and equipment cluttering a large room on the ground floor and shook hands with a thickset man in shirtsleeves standing with a director half his age. Nearby a young couple sat up in bed, the woman smoking, the man having his makeup touched up by a technician. They were plainly naked under the sheet.
Hennessey was. a ruddy-faced sixty-something, with gold chains around his neck and his hair dyed glossy black. "We're shooting a two-reeler for the Playboy Channel," he said. "I'm not doing anything Pop didn't do, but now it's respectable."
He and his visitor adjourned to a break room equipped with a refriger-ator and microwave oven. They sat down at a laminated table.
"Valentino. Any relation?"
"My father says no. Let's talk about yours."
"Gladly. I owe everything to Pop. He helped me get set up in business and loaned me money to stay afloat through the last recession."
"You don't think it was irresponsible to expose you to his stag operation at such an early age?"
"I was a Hollywood brat. If you want to hear about exposing, talk to the producer who exposed himself to Shirley Temple in his office at Fox. At least my old man taught me a trade."
"Did that trade include Dixie Day?"
Hennessey showed no surprise. "Your eyes would pop out of your head if I told you the names of the future movie queens who took off their clothes for my father. I could make a fortune off cable if those films still existed."
"One of them does."
"It's true the cops missed one when they raided the studio. It was being developed in a custom lab at the time. I remember Pop saying something about it, but I don't know if Dixie Day was in it. It wasn't among his stuff when he died."
"You said he made you a loan before he died. May I ask how much it was?"
"A hundred thousand dollars."
Valentino dropped his gaze. He didn't want the glint to show. "That was generous."
"You could have knocked me over with a chorus boy. I never dreamed anyone could put aside that much selling Minoltas to tourists."
"Did he keep records?"
"He was anal about it. I've got three file cases in the basement. You can take a look if you'd like."
Valentino said, "I'd like."
The Montana-Day "ranch"—the Circle M—comprised fourteen acres in the Hollywood Hills, a tract that cost as much as a thousand-acre spread in Texas. The house was a rambling hacienda, 10,000 square feet of pink adobe with a red tile roof. The guard at the gate was got up like an old-time lawman, complete with Stetson and sheriff's star. He was expecting Valentino and waved him on through.
A stout Mexican woman in maid's livery led the visitor to a bright sun-room walled in with glass on three sides, where an old woman awaited him in a wheelchair. She spoke quietly to a younger woman in a nurse's uniform, who left the room on rubber heels.
"I met the original Valentino once, when I was seven years old," said the old woman. "You favor him."
"So I've been told. Thank you for seeing me, Miss Day. Or do you prefer Mrs. Montana?"
"Miss Day will do." The reply held a harsh edge. She had aged well, and skillful makeup disguised most of the ravages of her illness. The turban she wore to cover the baldness caused by radiation therapy was an exotic touch, but he could still see in her that well-scrubbed, ail-American quality that had won the simple hearts of Depression audiences. The Wild West Show glitter he wore in public was conspicuously absent from her present costume of blouse, slacks, and open-toed shoes. "How is Dick Junior? All grown up and then some, I suppose. His father certainly kept him busy around the set."
Over the telephone, he'd told her he'd spoken with Richard Hennessey. "I was afraid you'd deny knowing either of them," he said.
"You can't make the past go away by pretending it didn't exist. Lord knows I would if I thought it would work."
"I spent two hours in Hennessey's basement going through his father's records. He wrote down everything, even the details of his blackmail."
"That alone proves he wasn't cut out for it. He was desperate to save his son from bankruptcy or he never would have considered it. He came to see me while Red was in L.A., supervising the construction of the museum. He brought a print of the film with him. He offered to show it to me in the screening room, but I said that wouldn't be necessary. I knew what was on it. You saw some of the frame enlargements. I had a good body, don't you think?"
"You were a beautiful woman." He didn't know what else to say.
"Poor Dick. Do you know what he was asking for the film? Ten thousand dollars. I told him he could get ten times that from Red. He said he preferred dealing with me. He was so nervous, and so ashamed. I think he'd have given it to me for nothing if it weren't for Junior's situation. He would have been that glad to be out of it."
"Why didn't you pay him?"
"I couldn't. I don't have any money. The museum, this ranch, all the bank accounts and investment portfolios are in Red's name. I haven't had control of a cent since the day we married. I have to ask him for money to visit the beauty parlor. My husband is a mean, stingy man, Mr. Valentino. And that's not even his worst quality."
Valentino said nothing. He felt he was on the verge of learning something he'd just as soon never know; but the hints Dick Hennessey, Sr. had dropped into his daily journal had started him in a direction he couldn't reverse.
"Red has a violent temper. All our friends think I suffer from migraines. That's what Red tells them when they visit and I'm upstairs waiting for my bruises to heal. In nineteen fifty he threw me down a flight of stairs and told the press I broke my leg when I fell while exercising Cocoa, my mare. I won't go into every incident. It galls him to pay the servants as much as he must to keep them from selling the real story to the tabloids."
"Why didn't you divorce him?"
"Weakness. Pride. Red Montana and Dixie Day is one of the great love stories of Hollywood. Who was I to blow apart the fairy tale? The old studio system made us slaves to our public images. By the time I finally stopped car-ing, it was too late. You get used to living in hell. That doesn't mean you stop hating the devil."
Valentino had begun to experience the same dizzy sensation he'd felt at the museum. "What are you trying to tell me?"
"I haven't many weeks left," she said. "I suppose it's the time for confessions."
"You're the blackmailer?"
"Only indirectly. I told Dick he could squeeze a hundred thousand out of Red easily. I even helped him work out the details. The only thing my husband has is the pure white image of Red Montana and Dixie Day. It's an icon. He's built his fortune on it; it's his ticket to immortality. I knew if Dick succeeded I'd never hear a word about it from Red. I was right.
"Dick offered to split the money with me," she went on. "I didn't want it, but I did ask him for one thing."
"A print of the stag film."
She smiled a Dixie smile, straight off the milk carton.
"You shouldn't sell yourself short as a detective. I'd planned to release it to an exhibitor when Red died, but fate forced my hand. In a way I was glad. Now I'd get to watch him suffer."
"You sent him the frame enlargements."
"A very old friend of mine made them in the film laboratory at Sony. I felt the need to torment Red. They'll drive him crazy until I'm gone. He'll think he's safe then. What he doesn't know is I've arranged for my friend to make additional prints and send them to every sleazy theater and cable station in Southern California. Let Red try to exploit that for his own glory the way he did my terminal cancer. The only thing I've had since our wedding that was truly mine."
She balled her fists on the arms of the wheelchair. Beneath the makeup her face was a naked skull. "Think of it. However long he outlives me, he'll bear the stigma of the has-been cowboy hero who married Jezebel. And when he's gone, the world will be only too relieved to forget us both."
Suddenly Valentino found that sun-filled room in the Hollywood Hills suffocating. He wanted to be anywhere else.
His hostess misinterpreted his discomfort. "I'm sorry, Mr. Valentino. Whatever my husband promised you, I assure you he won't honor it when he hears the truth. You'd be better off telling him you failed. Is there something I can do to make it up to you? I'd offer to autograph a picture, but I don't think it will be worth much for long."
Valentino thought of Six-gun Sonata, that monument to chivalry and innocence, as thin as the celluloid it was made of. He didn't think he could watch it, or any Montana-Day picture, without seeing a bloated egomaniac and his battered, bitter wife. He shook his head and left. He didn't breathe easily again until he'd descended into the smog and smut of Los Angeles.