Page 90 of The Happy Month
“Yes. That and coffee.”
“Coming up.”
I went downstairs, grabbing theL.A. Timesoff the front stoop and then to the kitchen to make the coffee. We had some pancake mix in the cupboard which I’d put together before. Just add water. If it looked like I was ‘making’ breakfast I might be able to get Ronnie to fry some bacon to go with them.
I was getting out a bowl and a measuring cup when the house phone rang. I grabbed it. Not surprising, it was Lydia.
“Tuesday 9 a.m.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
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 seeStonewallat 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.
“DominickReilly.”
“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.
