Chapter 25

August 5, 1996

Late Monday morning

The rest of Sunday was a wash. I got it in my head that I should take a day off. Not something I'm good at. Ronnie went off to meet with clients. Junior tried to talk me into walking over to see Stonewall at The Art. That sounded intense and a little challenging. Well, maybe more than a little.

We ended up watching a couple of Cary Grant movies on the American Movie Channel. Well, I didn't watch either of them entirely, I slept through long chunks. But, not to worry, Junior caught me up on the plots. He was sipping wine the whole time and started to gush about how sorry he was that Ronnie and I were moving out. I assured him we'd be by to collect his rent. That made him laugh.

Monday morning, I was out the door right after breakfast. It was around nine-thirty. I'd decided it was time to go to the Motion Picture Academy's library up in L.A. I tried to wait out rush hour but still caught the tail end of it.

Beverly Hills is the worst part of L.A. to get to from Long Beach. There are no major freeways nearby— nice for them, sucks for everyone else. I took the 405 to the 10 and went up La Cienega. The library was just north of Olympic. I'd driven by it a hundred times but never knew what it was.

Sitting in the middle of an increasingly valuable green space, the library was a cream-colored Spanish-style building that looked a bit like a church—it had a tower and a circular window over the door that called out for stained-glass but was just clear—and had two very long wings.

There was parking at the tennis center next door, so I paid to leave the Jeep there—otherwise I would have been circling the neighborhood until the apocalypse.

Walking into the library, I found myself in a marble foyer. I followed the signs up a flight of stairs to a reception desk. Behind it was a very young volunteer, squeaky-clean and overly enthusiastic. After he greeted me, I said, "I understand you have Ivan Melchor's papers here."

"I believe we do, yes. Do you have an appointment?"

"No. I don't. I just took a chance and drove up from Long Beach."

"You really need to have an appointment."

"Do you have anything today?"

He pursed his lips. I could tell he was unhappy about this. He looked through his book, and said, "We have an opening at two this afternoon."

Okay, well that sucked. I could drive home, eat a sandwich, then drive back; or I could spend almost three hours floating around Los Angeles.

"Your name?" he asked.

"Dominick Reilly."

"And what school are you affiliated with?"

I was tempted to name the Catholic High School in Bridgeport that I'd graduated from, but decided I'd have more luck with the truth. "I'm not affiliated with a school."

"This is a research library. We support scholars from all over the country doing research on the film industry. You can't just look at things because you want to."

I actually thought that was the whole point of any library, but okay.

"I've been hired by the family of Patrick Gill. Mr. Gill lived with Ivan Melchor for decades. I believe he's the one who donated the papers to the library. I've been asked to look into the murder of a woman named Vera Korenko, who was a friend of Misters Melchor and Gill during the forties. I'm looking for diaries of any kind, appointment books, address books, things like that."

He stood up, saying, "Why don't I go talk to one of the librarians. I want to make sure it's worth your while to come back this afternoon."

I stood there staring at the room beyond. The ceiling was… I guess you'd call it coved. It was like the inside of a barrel. As though the books and the scholars were some kind of fine wine being aged. There were rows of shelves with reference books and long tables in between.

I wondered how long this would take. Part of me wished I still smoked. If I did, I'd walk back down the steps and stand outside in their well-manicured grounds to have a cigarette. It was a beautiful day, and now that I was a non-smoker I often forgot to enjoy things like that.

Then the receptionist was back with a woman about my age. Her hair was graying. She wore a heavy-rimmed pair of glasses and a rather severe suit.

"I'm Mrs. Brewster. Your name is…"

"Dom Reilly."

"You're some kind of investigator, I believe."

"Yes. As I said, I'm working for the Gill family."

"Yes, I remember Mr. Gill. I've been with the library for nearly fifteen years. The donation came in around nineteen eighty-five. Why don't you come with me."

Okay,I thought, I'm lucking out. I followed her. As we walked, she explained, "We have a warehouse. Much of our collection is there. That's why you normally need an appointment. You request what you want, and it's brought over in the morning. You may have gotten lucky though." Had she just read my mind? "A professor from UCLA is writing an article about set designers in the postwar period, so we have quite a lot of Mr. Melchor's papers on site at the moment. Can you tell me exactly what you're looking for?"

"Appointment books, desk calendars, diaries of any sort, personal or professional, address books."

"What years?"

"Oh, of course… nineteen-forty-eight and nineteen-forty-nine."

"All right. Why don't you have a seat and I'll see what we have."

There were plenty of seats. There were no more than ten people in the library at that particular moment. Given that appointments were needed, I doubted it ever got crowded. The room was very, very quiet. So, this was the exciting life of a scholar.

About ten minutes later, Mrs. Brewster returned. In her hands, she carried a shallow blue plastic tub. She now wore a pair of white cotton gloves. When she set the tub down, I saw that there were two identical red clothbound books that said DESK PRIVATE on top. Beneath that was the year. One said 1948 and the other 1949. Also in the tub was another pair of white cotton gloves—for me.

"The Melchor papers are things he kept at his home. Monumental Studios also has a significant collection of his work in their archives. They have not relinquished rights or ownership of materials he generated related to his employment. You cannot publish or profit from your research without their permission. I know that probably has nothing to do with what you're doing, but I have to say it."

"Is that as strict as it sounds?"

"Yes and no. If you're publishing an academic paper in a journal, they're accommodating. If you wanted to put together a coffee table book of his designs, they'd be a lot stricter."

"Sorry, just curious."

"Of course. It's all fascinating. These desk calendars have been examined by staff. They are business appointments for the most part. Presumably, he brought these home from the studio. We didn't note any personal appointments, but that doesn't mean they're not there. When I say ‘examined' that doesn't mean read fully cover to cover."

"I understand."

"There weren't any address books for those years. These appointment books each have a section for addresses. Presumably that's why there are no separate address books. Though, they might also be in the Monumental archives."

I nodded.

"We ask that you only use pencil in the library. Did you bring anything for note taking?"

"I left my notebook in the car." And didn't have a pencil.

"You could go out and get it if you like. We have pencils if you need one. Or we offer copying if you find something of interest."

"Thank you. I'll use the copier if I find something."

"We do it for you. If you find something you want copied just come to the desk. Please wear the gloves when handling the calendars."

"I will," I said, reaching into the tub for them. I slipped them on as she walked away.

I sat and thought for a moment. How did I want to approach this? I knew the day Vera Korenko died. October 1, 1949. A Saturday. I could have gone right to that date. Instead, I picked up 1948 and began flipping through it. I wanted a sense of who Melchor was before I zeroed in on the period surrounding the murder.

Flipping through, I noticed a couple of things right off. First, there were two sets of handwriting in the book. One was square, boxy and printed. The other was curling and steeply slanted to the right. They were so different, it seemed unlikely they belonged to the same person. That told me Melchor had had a secretary—as they called them in the forties—who recorded some of his appointments into the book.

The other thing that was immediately obvious was that he liked to doodle. Quite a few of the pages had doodles in the corner. Cubes, spheres, cones, thatching, the occasional word in three-dimensional lettering. On a few pages, there would be a tree with a branch that crossed the top of the page and roots that ran across the bottom.

There were very few meetings in the mornings, but many in the afternoon. I suspected that meant he did his creative work in the morning. Most of the meetings had a person's name, while others said things like PRODUCTION MEETING, BUDGET MEETING with the title of a film, like Ladies Night Out or Pinch Hitter.

I was flipping through the summer of 1948 when I noticed that he'd sometimes put a P in the corner of a page. He'd often draw a box around the letter and then turn the box into a cube. Was the P for Patrick? As I turned through the pages, as summer became fall, there were more P's. And then, PV. Also in a cube. In October, there was the first IP VG. Ivan and Patrick; Vera and Gigi.

That told me something I hadn't known. Vera's relationship with Gigi began in the fall of 1948. Did it continue right up to her death a year later?

Before moving on to 1949, I looked through Melchor's appointments again. A lot of meetings were crossed out, as though were canceled. I wondered if he was having problems because he was gay? That didn't seem right, though. People always acted like Hollywood accepted gays in background creative positions like set director. As long as he didn't get arrested or announce he was gay in the newspaper, Ivan would have been fine.

Of course, there could have been other reasons he was having trouble at work. Not to mention, the cancellations might have had nothing to do with him. It could be that the movies were cancelled and not his working on them. I didn't know enough about film history to be sure.

I zeroed in on the holidays. Thanksgiving, the twenty-fifth, was blank. But on the following day, the twenty-sixth, there was a list of names. The first three were Patrick, Vera and Gigi. There were eight other names. All first names. Six men, two women. There was a note written on a pink pad that said WHILE YOU WERE AWAY at the top. In the same handwriting that appeared often in the diary it said, Caterer called to confirm Friday. Will arrive at ten.

It was likely, Patrick and Vera were with his family that Thursday. His sister had said it was possible she met Vera that day. That's why there was nothing on Melchor's calendar for the holiday and why he gave his Thanksgiving dinner the day after.

Turning to December, I noticed there were several days on which he'd written IP VG. They'd double-dated many times. On Christmas Day there was a note that said, ‘Portrait of Jennie – Skip.' I knew that movie from when I was a kid. It played on WGN all the time. There was a P on Christmas Eve. They'd gotten to spend that part of the holiday together and it looked like Patrick had Christmas dinner with his family while his boyfriend went to a movie with a friend—Skip. On New Year's Eve there was a notation that said ‘Cinegrill' along with ‘IP VG.' Had the two couples gone dancing? It made sense. Ivan and Patrick wouldn't have been able to go alone.

I turned to 1949. It was more of the same. The two couples continued to go out with each other. That made me wonder… Rocky Havoc said that Gigi was married. Why was she so available? Were she and her husband separated? Or was she actually not married at all?

I turned to the end of September, September thirtieth. A Friday. At the top of the page there was a notation in the corner: ‘IP VG Malibu.' Melchor had no meetings that afternoon. I understood exactly what that meant. The two couples had planned to spend the weekend in Malibu somewhere. Except, they didn't. Vera was found dead in Pasadena on Sunday morning October 2, 1949, having been killed sometime the day or night before. If she went to Malibu on Friday afternoon, she'd have needed to leave that night or the next morning.

I thought back to my conversation with Georgia Dawson. She'd talked about Vera's last day at work. She said they couldn't wait to leave. If Vera had left early, she would have mentioned that—wouldn't she? I might need to talk to her again.

I decided to assume that Vera and Gigi did not go to Malibu. So, did Patrick and Ivan? There were no notations for October first and second. On the third and the fourth, all of the appointments after Monday at noon had been canceled by Melchor's secretary, crossed out and the word ‘cancelled' written beneath. Flipping through the following week, I saw that the secretary had rescheduled many of the meetings.

Melchor must have heard about Vera's murder around noon on the third. He'd taken the rest of that day and the following day off, presumably to be with Patrick, and possibly Gigi if they were true friends. I flipped forward a couple of months. I didn't see any G's though. But then, there weren't any P's either. The alphabet soup appeared to have disappeared.

I sat there for a few minutes attempting to look at this from every angle. If Melchor and Patrick were involved in Vera's murder, they could have killed her in Malibu and dumped her body in Pasadena.

But that didn't make sense for a lot of reasons. If you kill someone in Malibu there are dozens of places to dump the body much closer than Pasadena. And… in 1949 there would have been dozens more since the city wasn't as built up.

Also, there was Gigi. If Melchor and Patrick did kill Vera, where was Gigi? Did she watch? Did she run away? Why did she never tell? And how does any of this fit with Rocky Havoc's belief that it was Gigi's husband who killed Vera?

What did make sense was that Vera and Gigi either didn't go or left early because of Gigi's husband. That then resulted in Vera's death somehow.

I went back to 1948 and flipped to the address section in the back. Quickly, I saw that it was not meant to be a complete address book. In fact, there were just four pages, each with the word ‘telephone' at the top of the page.

It was easy to see that most of the names were professional contacts. Neither Vera nor Gigi nor even Patrick were there. I scanned through and found Skip Harkness. TR2-7998. I figured this was the Skip who Melchor spent Christmas Day at the movies with. I wondered if he might work with Melchor. Quickly, I flipped through the pages and eventually found a meeting: ‘Properties, Suspect the Night, Skip H.' That answered that. Skip did props on a movie they did together.

I went back to the day after Thanksgiving dinner and checked to see if any of the names appeared in the back. I found another: ‘Annette Kohler SY5-7987.' Skimming through, I saw that she had costume meetings with Melchor on several films.

It was after one and my stomach was growling like a circus animal. I took the tub up to the desk and asked Mrs. Brewster if they could copy all of November and December of 1948, September 30 through October 4, 1949, and the complete address sections from the back of each book.

"That's probably fifty or sixty pages. It's a dollar a page," she told me.

"Do you take credit cards?"

"We do."

"Then there's no problem."

I'd be passing the cost onto the Karpinski brothers. Both of whom charged around two hundred and fifty an hour.

"You mentioned a professor at UCLA who's researching Melchor, can you give me his name?"

"Oh," she said, seeming surprised. "I'm not sure. I've not been asked a question like that before. I'm going to say no, just to be safe."

"Okay," I said. I was already sure I could find him on my own.