The Color-Blind Detective
 

Left on the Cutting Room Floor

Published in Judas Ezine in November 2001

As a kid I loved the dark, that’s where I was equal. As the light faded beyond the perception of cones, my color-challenged retinas took the fore. It was as if I’d been given extra rods, or like a cat the photons reflected off the back surface and I got a second shot at them. I became a noir kind of ten year-old, but it’s not a noir world if you’re human. So I fit myself in, could even second a pretty date’s praising of tints and hues at the art museum. But, you know, it’s really not such a big deal to fool people, especially people who see colors.

So, you’re wondering where this is leading. Well noir is my genre, from twilight hours to the dark foreboding novels of the forties and fifties. Noir, yes, that includes dark movies, more for their tone than their plots.

It was Noir Week on one of the UHF stations. The first film of the week was 'Out of the Past' and then 'Body Heat', two of the best plotted noirs ever, but it went downhill from there. The last film was a four year-old mystery titled "Portland Blues," produced in our fair city. I diligently sat through an increasingly disconnected plot and a mercifully short denouement. I scanned the credits to see if they’d used any locals I knew. That’s how I saw it, Lola Martin.

I hadn’t seen Lola Martin for more than ten years. Lola wasn’t her real name, nor was Martin, but she was an actress, so that was expected. In fact, her real name was Marilyn Monroe, and that just wouldn’t do, like some kind of perverted anti-truth in advertising.

The memory of Lola, unbidden, formed complete in my mind like the past was only yesterday. I mean, we only dated for a month, forever ago. I was briefly stationed in Los Angeles, in my pre-investigator days. I was the front guy, responsible for ‘do diligence,’ business-speak for making sure everything was on the up-and-up. Lola took on the responsibility of keeping my spirits high. It wasn’t like it was a job, but she was good at it anyway. Lola, that is, my memory of her, had earned a little shrine-like niche in my psyche. She was a person who was truly deep-down good all the time. Sure, I can hear you now, if we had known each other longer, had time to scrape off the masks, but hey, that’s the shrine-ness of it, like unrequited love, it was untested and unblemished.

I’m not so attentive watching movies, but I didn’t think I’d miss her. But you never know. So I went to Blockbuster, but they didn’t have it. I tried the foreign/off-the-beaten-track rental place on Thurman. They had it in their tiny made-in-Oregon rack. It was right next to the old black and white films, but then for me, that pretty much categorized the entire store.

Back in my Portland office/townhouse, I loaded the tape and paid attention. I didn’t waver, but Lola was nowhere to be seen. My friend, Dennis Doyle would say maybe they took her picture using special colors, invisible to me. Such is what passes for humor to your typical homicide cop. I couldn’t see it myself.

But back to Lola. She wasn’t there, but the credits listed her about halfway through the cast; Lola Martin as Penny Jackson. So I watched it again, no, I listened this time, recalling her distinctive alto, it’s finishing tone of breathlessness. It wasn’t there, although one line from the female star went, "I saw you and Penny together, and I’ll never forgive you!" Hey, cool it, I didn’t write it.

This time I used my pause button to move slowly through the credits. I scratched down some names, then switched the set off.

Lola would be about thirty-two or -three right now. She was tall, about five-ten, a hundred and twenty pounds, rail thin, normal boobs, her own. She told me she was a blond, but it was just a pretty, soft gray to me, a shade lighter than her well-spaced transparent gray eyes. She had full lips, but nothing like today’s collagen crinkled kissers, and straight white teeth, cosmetically enhanced was how she described them. She dressed a little outrageously for the staid businessman I’d been, basically the same guy I am now. Her look was typical LA.

I met quite a few of her acquaintances in our month together; too many gay guys, too many drugs, too much booze, too many parties, too much sex, too little responsibility. "Too" was the one word that described the Hollywood lifestyle. I don’t live at the "too" level. Still, I accompanied her through her world for a month, but as a famous liar once said, I didn’t inhale. It was a polluting world, but Lola Martin was untouched by it all, a good girl in Gomorrah. That was why I was a bit in awe of her, at that ability to remain above it all, uninfected by it. I left this gem to get on with my life. The recollection of it made me sad.

I spent an hour on the internet looking for Lola, but she wasn’t in Los Angeles. The name was too common to search the country. I left a message with an operative I knew in the big city.

* * * *

I found the film’s director, Adam Welton, in the phone book. We agreed on lunch. He made it clear it was on my dime. When I got to the Heathman, the waiter directed me to his table off in the darkest corner of the restaurant. He stood to shake hands. He had a firm, practiced grip.

Welton looked like he sounded, polished. He was good-looking in a Hollywood way, an aging ageless George Hamilton type. His dyed dark hair was off-set with the gray strategically streaked back in. He was about five-ten, a fit one-sixty. His well-spaced features were slightly stretched, in a sea of shallow lines on recently tautened skin. The wrinkles on the neck were more indicative of his real age, my guess, mid-sixties. His dark eyes, deep set beneath thick black eyebrows, were aggressive, almost intrusive, but I got used to it quickly enough.

I had learned a little about Adam Welton on the internet, and from the LA operative I’d called about Lola. The director was on a long string of setbacks, though not yet categorized a loser. The downhill run had started with the eagerly anticipated, then universally panned "Portland Blues". He wasn’t exactly on his uppers, but he’d cashed five million out of his house in Malibu and moved into a luxurious apartment in Santa Monica. Welton also owned a house in Portland, in the exclusive West Hills, left him by his mother who died shortly after he sold the place in Malibu.

After some scrounging around, I found the press releases for "Portland Blues". It had gotten top of the line treatment prior to the film’s release. The script was written by Welton’s wife, Jacki Montreau, who also starred in the mystery. The movie, despite millions in advance advertising, was in the second-run theaters in three weeks. From a Variety article, it appeared only Welton and his wife made any money from the fiasco. In the process they managed to mistreat and alienate their backers. It wasn’t that they were blackballed, but the really good work suddenly went elsewhere. This was particularly distressing to Montreau. She was getting to that age, thirty in actress years, forty in people years, where the ingenue looks and the boobs no longer compensated for a mediocre talent.

One reference on the web reported Montreau was in a sanitarium drying out for the fourth time, or was it the tenth time? My operative said Jacki was in a discreet loony bin in Tijuana, and her return was not imminent. She said she’d follow up on the details. I owed her one. In our business it’s good to have debts.

Welton ordered a salad. I did the same, plus the restaurant’s signature lobster bisque. He ordered wine. I had a pint of McTarnahan’s. We got through the chit-chat preliminaries before I brought him back to topic. "Mr. Welton, as I told you on the phone, I saw ‘Portland Blues’ for the first time the other night."

He deprecated his film. "Your name can be added to the ten people who saw the first run."

I waited, that wasn’t all I’d told him.

He filled the void, "Yes, and you asked about Lola Martin, said you saw her name in the credits, but she wasn’t in the movie." I watched his eyes darken to total opaqueness, then he lied, "I don’t recall the girl myself, but I looked through my notes. She was one of the featured actresses, and per the original script, she had a pretty important part. Are you sure she wasn’t there?"

I nodded.

"Maybe she was cut in the edit for television?" He made it a question.

I answered, "That was my first thought too, but I got the movie out of a video store."

Another question, "Someone carries it?"

I told him where I found it. "She wasn’t on that tape either."

He interlaced his fingers and rested his chin. "Well, I guess we cut her in the final edit."

I was mildly incredulous. "And left her in the credits?"

"You haven’t worked in the business?" He cocked his head and eyed me.

I shook my head. "No, never had the pleasure."

He used his hands to create a vision of confusion while he talked. "Well, when you’re working on the final cut, decisions are being made on the fly for a hundred different scenes. As one of the critics said, we must have left the good stuff on the cutting room floor."

"Still, how does that happen?" I asked.

Welton looked confused, like he’d already forgotten Lola.

"Cutting Lola but not her name?"

His complexion darkened. "When you’re running behind schedule, everything gets a bit hectic. We finished filming seven weeks behind schedule, but the producers wouldn’t move back the release date. We, Jacki and I, well, we knew the plot cold, I mean, Jesus, we’d worked with it every day for six months. When we saw the final cut, we were sure we’d kept the continuity," he paused to give substance to his admission, "but we were too close to it, we didn’t see the gaping holes. Two more weeks, and some test viewing, and we’d have gotten it right."

He put on a rueful look of coulda, woulda, shoulda. A better actor than his wife, but then, maybe he wasn’t acting.

"So in the confusion you left Lola’s name in the credits?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "In retrospect, that’s probably the least of our mistakes."

I asked him if he had any of the original footage. He said no, and as far as he knew there wasn’t any. I left it at that.

* * * *

I scanned the credits for the film editor, Jacob K. Klein. I found him using the internet. He was living in Tucson, Arizona, but still kept a Los Angeles phone number. He picked up on the first ring, and once I got him talking he wouldn’t stop. Briefly, it seems he’d lived in Tucson all his life, was retired now one year, had dumped his apartment in Beverly Hills, his wife had died two years ago, his kids didn’t speak to him, and he had never thrown away a foot of film he’d edited. We scheduled to meet the next day.

I had some problems getting a seat in coach, so I flew first class. The plane was late, and when we landed, the flight attendant got on the microphone to say most of the luggage was inadvertently loaded on the wrong plane. Me, I had some underwear and toothbrush in a shoulder bag. As to the rest of it, I was wearing it.

I hadn’t been in Tucson for six or seven years, it hadn’t changed. Same big cow town, only bigger. From the air I could see it had spread out in every direction. If water didn’t run through it, they’d build on it, and sometimes over it. The desert and mountains are perfect for my black and white vision, like I’m a walking Ansel Adams camera. I considered living in Tucson about eight years ago, but the summers are unbearable, and there’s no fishing. Anyway, I don’t much care for the sun, and in Tucson it never takes a rest. Hard to remember now what I saw in the place.

Jacob Klein lived in a large adobe house above a new development in the foothills of Sabino Canyon. The home, expanded ten times over the original adobe ell now shared its unparalleled view with the hundreds of structures dotting the hill. Klein told me he’d owned it all once. It’d made him a rich man.

Jacob Klein’s face looked sixty-five, but he had the body of a ninety-year-old. He was a short man, probably five-four when he stood straight, but bent by time to more like four-eight. He tilted his body back until I could see his clear, bright, darting eyes. The lines across his forehead continued halfway up his bald head as he arched thick bushy gray eyebrows for an unobstructed view of my face. He led me to a small projection room. He hopped up into his chair which was padded about six inches higher than mine, eye to eye, and the top of his head suddenly smoothed.

He listened intently while I told him about Lola, about my concerns, then, "Is she missing?"

I shrugged. "I don’t know yet. I think so." Anyway, what the hell was I doing?. Spending money, chasing down leads. The girl’s probably in Montana, married with three kids by now. Except, I didn’t believe it. I had no more than intuition to go on, and the lie I’d seen in Welton’s eyes.

Klein let it pass. "I spent last night arranging the clips, then spliced together everything interesting."

He pointed to the complex machinery lining one wall. "We can fast forward as required."

I thanked him ahead of time for his efforts, then accepted a cold beer.

He fiddled with the player until we found a speed that moved quickly, but not too fast. The tape started with the very last minute edits, and worked backwards. Lola was not in those final cuts.

We found her after thirty minutes of tape. It was a scene from early on in the film, where Lola’s character was seducing the male lead, while Jacki Montreau’s character listened from the other room. Lola was prettier than I remembered, but make-up has a way of hiding the flaws. The Lola I knew, the one outside of the studio, just didn’t care, a very non-star-like quality.

The long scene filled in a big hole in the film. I stated the obvious. "If you guys cut scenes like this, it’s no wonder the viewers got lost."

Klein held up his hands. "Hey, I’m just the editor, the technician. They ask me to roll it forward, roll it backward, stop right there, snip this, snip that."

I read the mocking sound to his voice. "You’ve got no opinions?"

He laughed like I was a naive boy. "I’ve got a ton of opinions, and most directors ask for it. Welton and his crazy wife did the whole thing themselves. It was like I wasn’t in the same room. I was just another machine."

After another hour I said, "That must have been her only scene."

Klein shook his head. "No, I’m starting to remember this. There’s a dinner party scene."

As if on cue, there it was, Lola doing the verbal seducing, dressed in a gray gown, her fluffed gray hair spread to both shoulders, her black lips moving, touching the male lead’s ear. It was more unexplainably deleted plot.

The tape finished. I asked, "Is that all of it?"

The little man held up the second tape. "I’ve got some out-takes. You know, screwed up scenes, that type of thing. Some were funny, some mistaken shots, most discarded the day they were made."

I settled back in, with my third beer. "What the hell, I’m here and my plane doesn’t leave for," I looked at my watch, "four more hours. If it’s okay with you, Mr. Klein, I’d like to see it all."

So we watched. Unlike the first tape, these scenes were ascending by date. There were a number of cuts including Lola, flubs and the like of her two scenes. There were three other scenes that looked like trial balloon ideas that had fallen flat. The last piece of tape was the most intriguing. The scene opened in an office setting with the male lead and his partner arguing, I recognized it from the movie. There was a sudden disruption as Jacki Montreau came skittering across the floor behind the desk, falling hard and tipping over a potted tree. Lola entered from the right, following Jacki, anger marking her face.

Lola waved a bound manuscript at Montreau and screamed, "It’s not going to happen, you bitch. It’s not yours, and your not going to get away with it." She threw the manuscript at Jacki, turned and stormed off the set.

"What’s Lola got there?" I asked.

Klein was puzzled. "It’s the script, the red one." He answered the question on my face. "Montreau’s script."

* * * *

I recalled Lola said she was from Norman, Oklahoma, back when she joked she was "normal in Norman." I changed my flight and landed there around noon the next day.

There were a hundred Monroes in the phonebook. I started dialing. It took only two calls to find a relative, one more to talk to her mother. We met at a coffee shop in one of the small suburbs about ten miles out of downtown.

Janet Monroe was about sixty, and aging pretty well. Instead of young people gray hair, hers was seasoned citizen gray, cut in a flattering page boy. I thought hopefully that this would be Lola in another thirty years, but I didn’t believe it. Janet had those same transparent eyes, but more so as the sun drained the gray to white, and the same direct look, like you had her full attention.

I told her how I knew Marilyn from LA, as Lola Martin. Janet described the joyful youth of a girl who was seldom unhappy, a sunny spirit. Marilyn was an only child, A student, cheerleader, softball and soccer player. She had boyfriends, went to her junior and senior proms as the queen, worked in the local grocery store at the checkout, and helped deliver meals to old folks on Sundays after church. She didn’t do bad things, didn’t have bad thoughts. She was understanding of the weaknesses of others, and though she might disapprove, kept any dissenting opinions to herself.

Janet said Marilyn went off to Hollywood and had on-and-off success for eight years. She and her husband supported their daughter’s monthly needs. When Marilyn got ahead, she sent them what she could afford. But time had worn on and Marilyn was nearing a decision point for her acting career, where she had to "fish or cut bait," the expression her mother used.

Then one day she stopped writing, just disappeared from the face of the earth. The police told them these girls sometimes just up and leave town, driven by failure, drugs, men, or whatever, it wasn’t a big deal. Janet and her husband said not our girl, but they didn’t carry any weight. So they hired a private investigator, and he built up a lot of data, but found nothing. Marilyn had returned to her apartment after the flight in from Portland, then she was gone. The detective had retrieved her used plane ticket from the apartment manager who had stored away her meager possessions.

"You said she wrote?"

The woman nodded. "Every month for seven years."

"Did you keep her letters?"

"Yes, her letters." Janet reached down to the handled cloth grocery bag she’d brought with her. It was heavy with the letters. "I read them all again this morning. She had nice words to say about you."

I kept my emotions to myself.

She left me the letters. Marilyn wrote long letters, like a diary she’d send out every month end. I leafed through her life, love for her parents, love for her career, and despite everything being stacked against her, a good girl. She really did have nice things to say about me. Even sitting alone, I blushed. I hadn’t realized she cared so much. As to acting, the parts were few and far between, but she got by. She told her mother that unless she slept with the men who counted, the odds were really against her. Still, she kept to her own path and didn’t appear to regret the missed opportunities.

Five years ago she met a young writer, recently moved from Portland, Jeff Jones, and fell in love. She was helping him with a screenplay for a mystery, the same plot line as "Portland Blues". Then one day he was hit by a truck on a street corner, the driver an illegal alien without insurance. Jones, a man without a family, was in the hospital, basically a vegetable. The county was going to move him to one of their approved long care facilities, they call it warehousing. Marilyn wanted to help, said she’d found a way to raise the two hundred thousand she’d need to put him up in a private facility for five years. She said that was a start.

Later she wrote that she’d received a twenty thousand down payment and Jeff was safe under the care of people she trusted. She visited him every couple weeks and read to him, sometimes from his script. She described a painful unrequited love. Still, she understood the Jeff she knew was dead. Once she settled this last debt, she would finish her grieving and get on with the rest of her life. Her last letter was posted from Portland. She said she would be flying down to LA in a week to say goodbye to Jeff.

That last letter mentioned a restaurant she visited. One of the diners had a heart attack. I was there, same time, same place, serendipity delayed. Coulda, woulda, shoulda. Another piece of my heart was broken off, buried wherever they’d put poor Marilyn.

I didn’t need to be a detective to deduce the rest of the story. Jacki Montreau had bought the plot, then reneged on the payment. She and Lola fought, first on location, then off. Lola probably threatened to go public, Montreau killed her, got rid of the body, then flew to LA with her ticket and bags. I wasn’t sure how she dealt with the airport identification, but she probably made herself up to be a reasonable facsimile. It’s surprising how much some very pretty girls look alike at the basic structure level. Then again, maybe it’s not so surprising at that.

Waiting in the airport, I used my cell-phone to plumb the bureaucracy to find Jeff Jones. It took about two hours dealing with the various government agencies, then the long-term lack-of-care facility they’d parked him in. I landed in LA and looked in on Mr. Jones. The fetal lump smelled of misuse. Marilyn’s instincts to move him out had been right.

I found the private facility where Marilyn had sent him four years earlier. I talked to the head of admissions, then wrote out a check for six months and started the paperwork to have him moved.

* * * *

I was back in Portland by nine. I picked up my car and drove out to Welton’s home in the West Hills. I rang the bell ten times before the director opened the front door. He’d been drinking.

He focused on me, then accessed the fuzzy stores of his short-term memory. Recognition, "What are you doing here?"

I strode past him.

He grabbed my shoulder.

I turned and spun him. "I’m here to talk to you about Lola Martin, and Jacki Montreau," I paused, "and murder."

I glared, he cowered.

He nodded sadly, resignedly. He closed the door, then he led me to the living room.

He was facing away from me when he said, "That was the start of the end for Jacki."

I said nothing.

The director spoke to the air over my shoulder, "You know, she’s crazy, mad as a hatter since Lola. Not right away, understand. She said she was justified, that Lola attacked her with a knife."

"And?"

He shrugged, not with indifference, but at some ponderous inevitability. "She lied. I knew it. She knew I knew it. When Lola died, our lives came apart. Then the great movie we’d filmed died by our own hand." He turned drunk wet eyes to me. "What was I to do? Turn in my own wife?"

I was in no mood to offer pity. "It might have been better for her."

He gave me the same shrug. "Yes, twenty-twenty hindsight, but I couldn’t make myself do it. I knew Jacki wasn’t going to get better. The bouts of drinking became worse and worse, the manic periods longer and longer. Last year I put her in an asylum. The doctor said she’d never get out."

Justice is a strange thing. Sometimes it finds its own way through the subterfuge of its assailants, just not often enough. This time justice was triumphant.

Back to being the impassive questioner. "Why didn’t Jacki just pay Lola what she’d agreed to?"

He held his hands out, palms up. "Jacki was getting paranoid, the first symptom of her schizophrenia. She starting seeing it as blackmail. There’s no reason for it. I mean, it was a straight financial deal, we could afford what we’d agreed to. But Jacki was convinced she was being blackmailed, and blackmailers never stop. So she stopped Lola."

I made a rhetorical statement, "Lola was a good girl. She didn’t think that way."

Welton answered it anyway. "You don’t understand, it only mattered what Jacki thought."

I asked Welton if he knew why Lola needed the money.

He said no.

I explained about Jeff Jones. I told him if he paid to keep Jones in the facility until he died, and if his wife stayed in the asylum, my investigation would end right then and there. I gave him the bill for my work, including the check I’d written for Jones’ care.

I wasn’t sure Welton heard me when I said he should re-edit "Portland Blues," give it another shot. I told him Klein still had all the film. I said he should give Lola another chance.

I flew back to Norman the next day and told Marilyn’s parents the whole story, of her murder by a mad woman. They agreed justice had been done.

A year later I saw a review on the newly released director’s cut of "Portland Blues". It was a smash, and there were plans to re-release it to the theaters. There were complimentary notices on the performance of a fine young actress, Lola Martin, a promising career cut short by her strange disappearance after the movie. Even more mysterious was the accrediting of the screenplay to both Montreau and an unknown writer, Jeff Jones, a man who had miraculously come out of his coma after five years.

Welton sent Marilyn’s residual checks to her parents.

-the end-

 

 

 

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