JS & DP. Double red dots.
Kiki. A black heart.
One name catches my eye. Danny Gentry. He was a friend of Stein’s and just a notch below him in the billing for Murdering Mouth. With no other clues and nothing better to do, I dial the phone number.
After a few rings, someone picks up. When they don’t say anything I say, “I’m looking for Daniel Gentry.”
“Who are you?”
Judging from his voice, he was asleep. By the way he slurs his words, he might have been sleeping one off.
“I’m a friend of Chris Stein’s.”
“Who?”
“Chris Stein. The actor.”
“I know who you’re talking about. I just haven’t heard from anyone who knew him in twenty years. What do you want?”
“Just to talk.”
I hear a low grumbling sound; either he’s moaning or he fell back to sleep.
“Gentry?”
“Look,” he says slowly and deliberately. “I’ve talked to the cops. I’ve talked to the papers. I’ve talked to his friends. I don’t have anything else to say abo
ut Chris.”
“What if I don’t ask questions? What if you just reminisce for an hour?”
“Forget it.”
“I’ll give you a hundred dollars.”
“Two hundred,” he shoots back.
“For two I get to ask questions.”
“Prick. Fine.”
He gives me the address and it’s the same one in the address book. He’s been in one place for a long time.
“When can we meet?”
“You think I have a busy schedule?”
“I’ll be over in an hour. Be there.”
“Where else am I going to be?”
I shower, try to beat the worst of the dirt out of my coat, and have a few cups of coffee before getting on the Hog.
Gentry lives in the Kiernan Arms on a side street at the edge of Burbank. The Arms was kind of famous in the days of the old studios. They put up writers and young performers not big enough yet to move closer into Hollywood. But the building looks like it hasn’t been maintained since Fatty Arbuckle was the king of comedy. It used to be kind of elegant, but these days it’s a dingy fortress. An anti-junkie electric gate to get into an outer area with a dry fountain. There’s another buzzer on the door to get into the building. Barbed wire on top of the metal fence out front. The neighborhood isn’t quite what it once was.
If the outside is bad, inside, the Arms is a pile of junk. Half the doors on the mailboxes along the lobby wall have been torn off. The elevator is out of service. There are shaky banisters on the stairways where someone painted right over the splintered wood. Each floor features at least one unlit side corridor. Gentry is on the fourth floor. That can’t be an easy walk for a guy in his seventies.
Each apartment has a little suburban-style doorbell. I ring Gentry’s a couple of times because the apartment next door is blasting some kind of teeth-grinding country pop loud enough to make the hall light fixtures shake. It takes Gentry a couple of minutes to open the door. When he does, he gets one look at my face and says, “Christ. It’s Lon Chaney.”