The Movie-Town Murders (The Art of Murder 5)

Chapter Thirteen

“Snowball in Hell,”Jason taste-tested the title. Pretty apropos given the hours he’d spent scouring Georgie Ono’s library for books on film noir.

After he’d left J.J., Jason had headed back to Touchstone and Ono’s home office. His conversation with his partner had reminded him of a key facet of Ono’s character. She was a collector. Per her grandfather and Detective Child, she had put herself into financial jeopardy buying rare and out-of-print films. Which, Jason deduced, meant she had put together a significant collection: significant enough for her former boyfriend to attempt to lay claim to it, and for her family to formally donate it to UCLA’s archive. You didn’t formally donate a dozen DVDs and a VHS copy of The Maltese Falcon.

If there was one personality type Jason knew as well as Sam knew his psychos and socios, it was the fanatical collector.

Until now, he hadn’t taken too seriously Grandpa Ono’s insistence that a lost noir film might provide motive for Georgie’s death. But Calida Lois’s bitter comment about Georgie caring more about losing an imaginary film than a real-life relationship resonated.

It wasn’t so much about what people collected as it was the psychology of collecting. Something like forty percent of the population collected various things—everything from china thimbles to Old Masters. As to why humans collected the things they did, theories abounded. From the effort to impose order on a chaotic world to attempting to build financial wealth and/or social status, there was plenty of conjecture regarding collecting and collectors.

Frequently, the collectors Jason had encountered viewed collecting as embarking on a great quest. The hunt was a big part of the attraction, but so was possessing something no one else could have. Even so, it was during that initial stage of craving the desired object—the as-yet-unfilled art collector’s imaginings as to what rewards this particular golden fleece would bring—that delight of acquisition burned the brightest. Anticipating possession seemed to be even more pleasurable than having possession.

Georgie, from everything Jason could discover, had still been in that fever haze of longing for something just out of reach. Something tantalizingly close but not yet possessed. Lois believed that the deal, whatever it was, had fallen through.

But one thing Jason knew about collectors: they did not give up easily.

They did not always take no for an answer.

Georgie did not seem like someone who would take no for an answer.

So Jason had started his own hunt, and he thought maybe he’d found what Georgie had been after.

She’d sure been fond of her sticky notes and highlighters, but eventually he’d figured out her system. Or at least he’d worked out that the lavender adhesives were all stuck to pages with references, even if only the most fleeting, to an obscure 1957 film noir titled Snowball in Hell.

The film had starred two largely unknown (at least to Jason) actors. David Aubrey had played crime reporter Nathan Doyle, and Joe North had portrayed police lieutenant Matthew Spain.

A description of the film read: It’s 1943, and the world is at war. Reporter Nathan Doyle, newly returned from the European Theater, is asked to cover the murder of a society blackmailer—a man who, Homicide Detective Matthew Spain believes, Doyle had every reason to want dead.

Okay. A classic film noir setup, though noir was reaching the end of its heyday in 1957.

The film was supposedly based on “real-life characters” (a misnomer if there ever was one) and was the last to be directed by Henry Walsh, who’d had a nice little string of noirish successes before falling victim to the Hollywood Blacklist.

With a blacklisted director and a reportedly homoerotic subtext, it was no wonder the film had quickly and quietly sunk into oblivion, only ever showing in a handful of art-film theaters. By the mid-’60 Snowball in Hell had achieved cult status but was only available in chopped-up prints that had been severely edited for late night TV. By 1978, the film was officially classified as “incomplete or partially lost.”

Current status: a few fragments and a trailer survive at the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Also, a six-minute reel was found in the Portuguese Archive, which was copied to safety stock.

At one time, the soundtrack was believed to exist, but that seemed to have also disappeared. Maybe not surprising, given that the statistics for film in general—and the silents in particular—were pretty grim.

According to a study by the Library of Congress, seventy-five percent of all silent films were believed lost. Whether the numbers were quite that catastrophic, there was no doubt a huge amount of work was gone forever.

The survival odds for films made after the ’50s were higher, but still not great. There were all too many reasons for old films to go missing, including the common use of nitrate film. Not only did nitrate film deteriorate easily, it was highly flammable, and the resulting fires virtually unextinguishable. Unsurprisingly, that terrible combination had resulted in several disastrous studio fires, including a famously destructive one in the MGM vault.

But nitrate wasn’t the only reason so many films had been lost over time. Almost unbelievable shortsightedness and lack of imagination had also played a part. Black-and-white film prints had commonly been incinerated to salvage the silver image particles in their emulsions. Films disappeared when production companies went bankrupt. Sometimes, bafflingly, studios remade films and destroyed the original to eliminate comparisons or competition, or cannibalized set pieces that were then repurposed for new productions. Sometimes old films were simply junked to provide storage space for new films.

Film archivists were working against the clock in a way other art preservationists were not.

Jason could see why Georgie had bought into the possibility that Snowball in Hell still existed. For one thing, there was no apocryphal story of its destruction in a particular vault or at a particular studio. For another, bits and pieces of it did exist.

But how had she learned the film still possibly existed? How would that have come to her attention?

Who had contacted her? And why her?

If the film really did exist, why wouldn’t the possessor of the print go to one of the large and reputable archives? In particular, why not approach UCLA’s archive?

Especially puzzling, given the competing budgets of an institution like UCLA versus Georgette Ono’s strained credit cards.

Maybe there was something suspish in the film’s provenance.

Or…

What if Georgie had done the approaching?

But, again, how would Georgie become aware of the film’s existence?

Jason bit his thumbnail, thinking. He remembered his conversation with Alex. They’d been talking about cams and bootlegs and their role in film preservation. They’d been talking about YouTube.

“‘Broadcast Yourself,’” Jason quoted, turning his laptop on.

It was long after midnight when Jason finally clicked on the “Boogie Man” channel and watched, bleary-eyed, as the clip began to play.

“Lt. Matthew Spain” was seated alone in his office when reporter “Nathan Doyle” was shown in. The detective nodded to Doyle’s police escort, who backed out, shutting the door.

Jason paused the YouTube video, studying the two men frozen forever on the black-and-white screen. Both the picture and sound of this four-minute snippet of Snowball in Hell was remarkably good quality. The costume and set design weren’t bad either. And the two leads, Joe North playing Matthew Spain and David Aubrey playing Nathan Doyle were both startlingly handsome, though in very different ways.

Jason jotted down a couple of notes, then pressed Play.

“Sit down,” Spain said, and Doyle pulled out a chair and sat down on the other side of the tidy desk. Spain looked crisp and clean-shaven in a dark suit. He reached for a cup of coffee, and the camera focused briefly on the wedding band on his left hand.

A little cue, a little clue, for a particular audience. Jason made another quick note.

“Coffee?” Spain asked politely. “Smoke?”

“Thanks.”