November
3rd 1934 CON'T
With
a couple of hours still left before the plane was due to leave for Los Angeles,
I was determined to make our new found friend’s stay in Savannah interesting.
Using the airfield phone I made a call to the police and reported that I had
witnessed a woman being abducted and believed murdered, at the Adelphi Hotel,
identifying myself as the occupant of room 16, one John Smith. Having satisfied
my petty need for revenge, me and Marcus boarded the Silver Saber.
November 4th 1934
 |
| HOLLYWOOD HILLS |
The
flight to LA was long and it was midday before we touched down. The Grand
Central Air Terminal was in Glendale, north of LA proper and we caught a cab to
a hotel downtown. It was a Sunday and little was open, even in this bustling
place, so we organised a hire car, then rested and planned our next moves. I
rang Mrs Winston Rogers and told her what we had found and warned her that
someone was invested in ensuring we stopped snooping around.
November
5th 1934
In
the morning we were determined to get an early start. Our destination was the
First Bank of Long Beach, a trip that would take us the best part of a day, where
we believed we held a key for a safety deposit box there. Marcus suggested a
change of clothes, something that would allow us to blend in a little better
and we stopped at a department store on the way. Marcus decided to take off his cleric's collar, a decision that surprised me, but one I agreed with. We left LA, heading south.
 |
| THE LONG BEACH OIL FIELDS |
Los Angeles was a sprawling place, its building height limit enforced due to the area’s frequent and devastating earthquakes. With a population of over a million, the city was booming, a result of her finance, real estate, and tourism, and a growing film and entertainment industry. As we traveled further south we found ourselves surrounded by towering derricks, ceaselessly pumping oil; producing the wealth that LA had grown fat on.
 |
| LONG BEACH IN RUINS |
When
we finally did reach Long Beach, to our surprise, we found the city in a state of
ruination, caused by a nasty quake that had struck in March of last year. Despite some restoration, many
buildings were still in a state of disrepair or collapse. The First Bank of
Long Beach was not spared the destruction and we located it near the city
centre, a boarded up shell, whose broad stone steps were badly cracked and occupied
by an assortment of vagrants, squatters, and drunks. It was quite clear that no
banking was done here anymore, and that this had been the case for some time.
A
pockmarked vagrant called “Boils”, in exchange for a buck, was happy to direct
us to an entrance into the derelict building, where we would find a squatter, Jim
Olson, who used to work at the bank. We found Mr Olson inside, where he and
some other hobos had taken up residence. He was invectively bitter about his
predicament, but more than willing to share his knowledge of the bank’s misfortunes.
When we told him we were after a safety deposit box, he told us that he assumed
it was with the FDIC, as they had taken over the books and whatnot.
We
paid Jim Olsen a ten dollar bill for his troubles and started making some
enquires into the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, eventually reaching an
Irving Hoff, the head of the LA FDIC, who proved to be a stiff and by the books
egg. He couldn’t process our request over the phone, so we were forced to race
back into downtown LA before the department shut for the day.
Reaching the FDIC just before closing, Hoff’s direct report, a Marv Burlington, was the staffer with the First Bank of Long Beach on his plate. We convinced Marv of the urgency of our case, and in exchange for dinner, he was willing to call ahead to the warehouse and arrange to have the safe deposit box delivered to our hotel.
November 6th 1934
There
was one man, a Latin American, who was in all of the photos. He had the biggest
perverse grin out of all the degenerates caught on film; he looked like he had
been enjoying himself the most. We established he could only be one man, the mysterious
Echavarria, we had heard about. And there was Edgar Job too; the sick bastard. Now
I knew why I had the urge to punch him in the face back at Joy Grove.
I thought I recognised one of the women in the photos too, but couldn’t quite remember who she was or how I knew her face. Her face although, did lead me to recognise another man, Richard Spend, an actor I had seen in a film called The Man in the Forest, who I had remembered hearing somewhere, had died in 24’ in some kind of incident. I thought I knew the details of that “incident in 24’”. He had been on the up until his untimely death.
Marcus put the photographs back into the envelope and stored them in the deposit box. The ledger we had almost forgotten and I now flipped through its pages to discover it was a book of accounts of some sort, written in a code that neither Marcus nor I had any chance of deciphering. Tucked into the back cover was a hotel buck sheet, with the words Echavarria = “Black” and Buchwald = “Towncar” written on it, in what I deduced to be Henslowe’s handwriting.
We sat for a while after that. Our coffees had gone untouched and were cold. The contents of the deposit box weren’t what I had expected. I wasn’t sure what I had expected, but it wasn’t that. When we left the room we locked the photos in the box, I wasn’t getting caught with those on us, taking the coded ledger with us and headed for the City Hall.
The records from Los Angeles City Hall provided us with some further information. We confirmed that Richard Spend had passed away in 1924, aged 32, leaving his sister, a Yolanda Spenzel, still a resident of LA. We also found the address and phone number of Edgar Job’s professor at UCLA, George Ayers. Echavarria came up with little, as we still hadn’t discovered his first name.
Reaching the FDIC just before closing, Hoff’s direct report, a Marv Burlington, was the staffer with the First Bank of Long Beach on his plate. We convinced Marv of the urgency of our case, and in exchange for dinner, he was willing to call ahead to the warehouse and arrange to have the safe deposit box delivered to our hotel.
November 6th 1934
When
we went downstairs for a late breakfast the concierge informed us that
something had arrived. It was the safety deposit box. We skipped
breakfast, Marcus opting to secure us two cups a joe instead.
 |
| THE DEPOSIT BOX |
We
locked the door to our room and sat the box on the table, opening the curtains wide
for light. The old key we had found inside Douglas Henslowe’s notebook thankfully fit
and gave a satisfying click when Marcus turned it. He opened the box and pulled
out two items; the first a bulging yellowing envelope, the second a large worn
ledger. Marcus passed me the book, while he opened the envelope and begun
thumbing through what appeared to be a dozen or so fading photographs. The look
of disgust on his face and the way he crossed himself held my attention firmly and I quickly learnt the cause behind
his revulsion.
The
photographs were perverse and disturbing to say the least. They each showed between
three and a dozen people engaged in depraved sex acts in a variety of interior
and exterior locations. When I got over the initial shock I could clearly tell
that the photographer had taken them from concealment. I had taken pictures
like this myself, when spying on cheating lovers, but never anything like this.
Not like this.
Most
of the pictures were taken in an opulent residence, rich and tastefully
furnished, the others outside in private gardens. Two photos were taken in the
same working-class apartment, maybe a servant’s room. When they wore clothes at
all, those in the photos wore robes and went hooded. Some wore elaborate jewellery.
 |
| ECHAVARRIA |
 |
| RICHARD SPEND |
I thought I recognised one of the women in the photos too, but couldn’t quite remember who she was or how I knew her face. Her face although, did lead me to recognise another man, Richard Spend, an actor I had seen in a film called The Man in the Forest, who I had remembered hearing somewhere, had died in 24’ in some kind of incident. I thought I knew the details of that “incident in 24’”. He had been on the up until his untimely death.
Marcus put the photographs back into the envelope and stored them in the deposit box. The ledger we had almost forgotten and I now flipped through its pages to discover it was a book of accounts of some sort, written in a code that neither Marcus nor I had any chance of deciphering. Tucked into the back cover was a hotel buck sheet, with the words Echavarria = “Black” and Buchwald = “Towncar” written on it, in what I deduced to be Henslowe’s handwriting.
 |
| THE BUCK SHEET |
We sat for a while after that. Our coffees had gone untouched and were cold. The contents of the deposit box weren’t what I had expected. I wasn’t sure what I had expected, but it wasn’t that. When we left the room we locked the photos in the box, I wasn’t getting caught with those on us, taking the coded ledger with us and headed for the City Hall.
The records from Los Angeles City Hall provided us with some further information. We confirmed that Richard Spend had passed away in 1924, aged 32, leaving his sister, a Yolanda Spenzel, still a resident of LA. We also found the address and phone number of Edgar Job’s professor at UCLA, George Ayers. Echavarria came up with little, as we still hadn’t discovered his first name.
Marcus
made some enquiries at the university, securing an appointment with a certain
Dr. Hamish MacDunn, at twenty past five sharp, who would discuss Professor
Ayers, while I contracted a clipping agency to look into articles on Richard
Spend.
 |
| THE HOUSE OF DONALD MAGWOOD |
Our
best lead was Spend’s sister and following the address we drove north into the affluent
suburb of Wilshire. The house was a gated mansion, surrounded by other gated
mansions. Miss Spenzel had obviously done well. The doorman at the gate almost
turned us away, he didn’t know of any, Yolanda Spenzel, and this was the home
of a Donald Magwood, but then recollection registered on his face and he
directed us through the gate and along a short service road to a coach
house.
Yolanda Spenzel would have been pretty in her younger years but time had not been altogether kind on her. She made us wait outside the carriage-house apartment where she lived while she obviously attempted to dull herself up. Yolanda told us that after Richard’s death she’d been forced into taking a job as a domestic servant, a job she neither particularly liked nor was good at.
She wasn’t especially pleasant to talk to, but was more than happy to discuss her brother. “Not too many people coming around asking about Ricky these days. He got mixed up in some stuff; which it sounds like you already know. For a couple of months before he died, he was going to these parties that his friend Echavarria was throwing at his mansion. Did I say parties? I meant ‘parties.’ Did he ever invite me? No. Probably for the better. He never admitted it, but I think they were filming pornography up there. Nasty stuff, I’m sure, which is probably why he was always sneaking around about it, coming in at all hours, missing his calls for his real work.”
“I confronted him about it. I wasn’t scared of him. I never was. I told him he was being stupid. Putting everything we had worked for at risk like that. And for no reason. He laughed at me, laughed right out loud. Who’s laughing now? Nobody, that’s who. Later on, I did kind of start to get scared of him. He was moody. Sometimes he got violent. Sometime he just sat in a chair until he started, you know, drooling out of his mouth.”
When we pushed her for more information about this Echavarria, she told us what she knew. She told us his full name. Ramon. Ramon Echavarria. She knew his address too, in the hills of Highland Park. She knew the address of the barn as well, where the incident of 24’ had occurred, somewhere outside the city.
“You know, now that I think about it, the police came around once, asking about Ricky, before he died. There were plenty of people asking after he died, but now that we’re talking about it, there was this pair of detectives that came around before he died. They were asking about Echavarria, too. Weird questions, too — what was Ricky reading, did he take any drugs, did I know anything about ‘honey.’ No, that’s not it, not honey. ‘Nectar.’ They asked about ‘nectar.’ I’m sure that was the name of some perverted movie he was working on. Or the name of a hooker.”
We left Wilshire with some good leads and drove straight to the clipping agency office downtown. They had already found quite a few articles relating to Spend, mostly surrounding his death. We asked them to continue and added the names Ramon Echavarria and Donald Magwood to the list. We would come back tomorrow.
The articles they had were of two camps; tabloids relayed he had been stabbed to death at some crazy party in a barn in the north country, while mainstream papers reported he had died peacefully in his sleep from natural causes. I knew which I believed. Of the most interest to us from the articles, was a name, Olivia Clarendon, the name of the face, of the women in the sordid photos I thought I had recognised. Olivia Clarendon was once a B-grade movie star, who was now in the big time. She had certainly moved up in the world and it seemed that Spend and Clarendon had been friends. Special friends.
It
was getting close to the time for Marcus’ appointment at the university and we
made the trip out to Westwood just as it was starting to get dark. I had
decided to seek out a cryptologist while we were there, to help decipher the
ledger, so we parted ways and agreed to meet back at the car.
The
book of accounts recorded information about the inventories and sales of a
product identified by the letter “N”. “N” was tracked in very small volumes of
liquid ounces. I instantly related this “N” product to be the “Nectar” that
Yolanda Spenzel had spoken about. The distribution occurred through a network
of anonymous retailers identified by code names like “Slick”, “Moses”, and
“Umbrella”. A single unit of “N” appeared to have fetched roughly 3 bucks. The
code names “Black (Echavarria) and “Towncar” (Buchwald) appeared throughout the
book, with “Towncar” clearly being the code name of the accountant who kept the
books.
Yolanda Spenzel would have been pretty in her younger years but time had not been altogether kind on her. She made us wait outside the carriage-house apartment where she lived while she obviously attempted to dull herself up. Yolanda told us that after Richard’s death she’d been forced into taking a job as a domestic servant, a job she neither particularly liked nor was good at.
 |
| YOLANDA SPENZEL |
She wasn’t especially pleasant to talk to, but was more than happy to discuss her brother. “Not too many people coming around asking about Ricky these days. He got mixed up in some stuff; which it sounds like you already know. For a couple of months before he died, he was going to these parties that his friend Echavarria was throwing at his mansion. Did I say parties? I meant ‘parties.’ Did he ever invite me? No. Probably for the better. He never admitted it, but I think they were filming pornography up there. Nasty stuff, I’m sure, which is probably why he was always sneaking around about it, coming in at all hours, missing his calls for his real work.”
“I confronted him about it. I wasn’t scared of him. I never was. I told him he was being stupid. Putting everything we had worked for at risk like that. And for no reason. He laughed at me, laughed right out loud. Who’s laughing now? Nobody, that’s who. Later on, I did kind of start to get scared of him. He was moody. Sometimes he got violent. Sometime he just sat in a chair until he started, you know, drooling out of his mouth.”
When we pushed her for more information about this Echavarria, she told us what she knew. She told us his full name. Ramon. Ramon Echavarria. She knew his address too, in the hills of Highland Park. She knew the address of the barn as well, where the incident of 24’ had occurred, somewhere outside the city.
“You know, now that I think about it, the police came around once, asking about Ricky, before he died. There were plenty of people asking after he died, but now that we’re talking about it, there was this pair of detectives that came around before he died. They were asking about Echavarria, too. Weird questions, too — what was Ricky reading, did he take any drugs, did I know anything about ‘honey.’ No, that’s not it, not honey. ‘Nectar.’ They asked about ‘nectar.’ I’m sure that was the name of some perverted movie he was working on. Or the name of a hooker.”
We left Wilshire with some good leads and drove straight to the clipping agency office downtown. They had already found quite a few articles relating to Spend, mostly surrounding his death. We asked them to continue and added the names Ramon Echavarria and Donald Magwood to the list. We would come back tomorrow.
 |
| OLIVIA CLARENDON |
The articles they had were of two camps; tabloids relayed he had been stabbed to death at some crazy party in a barn in the north country, while mainstream papers reported he had died peacefully in his sleep from natural causes. I knew which I believed. Of the most interest to us from the articles, was a name, Olivia Clarendon, the name of the face, of the women in the sordid photos I thought I had recognised. Olivia Clarendon was once a B-grade movie star, who was now in the big time. She had certainly moved up in the world and it seemed that Spend and Clarendon had been friends. Special friends.
 |
| UCLA |
I
was directed to the Mathematics Department and to seek out a Ronald Schroeder,
the university’s resident cryptographer. Ronald was a very studious looking
kid, thick glasses, cardigan, the works, but was obviously quite brilliant. He
did this stuff as a hobby on the side, in between doing proper maths stuff. He
didn’t blink an eye at the coded ledger, told me to give twenty minutes and got
to work. When I returned he was beaming like a school boy. He handed it over
and gave me a quick rundown on what he had found.
 |
| THE CODED ACCOUNTS BOOK |
I
told Ronald how impressed I was and promised to make a donation to the
Mathematics Department in his name. When I asked him about an old fellow maths
student of UCLA named Edgar Job, the name did not ring a bell with him, but he
directed me to Stewart Tichener, the graduate advisor.
Professor
Tichner confirmed that Edgar Job was a memorable but not particularly good
student of mathematics at UCLA, who was an undergraduate from 1918–1922. His
grades were mediocre and he focused on math coursework. Job applied and was
admitted to a graduate program of mathematical study in 1923 and Tichener remembered
Job for his desperate need to be better than he actually was, pulling all-night
work sessions whose triumphant output was often completely wrong. The professor
was quite clear — Job was simply not a very good student, despite desperately
wanting to be so. Tichener recalled that Job up and disappeared in the middle
of a semester and assumed that Job had finally realized that his pursuits were
largely pointless.
When
I finally found Marcus waiting at the car he told me that he hadn’t had much
luck with Dr. MacDunn of the History Department. The man had momentarily showed
the Father a telegram from Professor Ayers, who was apparently in a dig in Africa,
which mentioned Echavarria and some important volumes, but had revealed little
else. Marcus was convinced that MacDunn was lying.
When
we pushed past MacDunn’s uptight secretary and let ourselves into his office,
Dr MacDunn was more than a little taken aback. He started to protest but I
threatened him with evidence that his wayward Professor Ayers had been philandering
with his under aged students and he quickly sat down and shut up. It was
obvious he did not want any bad publicity for his Department.
We
demanded the telegram along with anything else on Professor Ayer’s resent
exploits. MacDunn reluctantly retrieved a box from Ayer’s old office, which
strangely still had his name on the door, ten years since he’d occupied it. The
box was filled with documents, newspaper clippings and books.
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