The Long Silence Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Gerard O’Donovan

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Extract from a deposition discovered at the home of the deceased

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Afterword

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Gerard O’Donovan

  The Tom Collins Series

  THE LONG SILENCE *

  Mike Mulcahy and Siobhan Fallon Mysteries

  THE PRIEST

  DUBLIN DEAD

  * available from Severn House

  THE LONG SILENCE

  Gerard O’Donovan

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2018 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY

  This eBook edition first published in 2018 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2018 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD

  Copyright © 2018 by Gerard O’Donovan.

  The right of Gerard O’Donovan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8774-0 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-889-7 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-951-0 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  For my mother, Jo, who taught me to read and gave me the world

  ‘Do you remember the Taylor case?’ he asked Maigret abruptly. ‘You probably don’t read American papers. Well, Taylor, one of the best known movie directors, was murdered in 1922. At least a dozen people’s names were mentioned in connection with the case – stars, beautiful women and so on. But no arrest was ever made.’

  A Man’s Head, Georges Simenon

  Extract from a deposition discovered at the home of the deceased:

  A guy once told me secrets are the best insurance on earth. I thought then he meant moneywise. Like when you know something a body doesn’t want anyone else to know, you can always lever some dough out of them when times are tough. That was the game this guy was in, and I helped put him away for it. But that is blackmail, and there is a difference. I was a kid back then, a big Mick rookie in a baggy blue uniform, barely off the boat. But the idea stuck.

  Folk always wanted to whisper in my ear. Maybe because compared with some of the other apes on the job I was the quiet one. At the end of a day dragging in deadbeats, when we’d drop into Dooley’s or some other Irish joint, it was always my ear got bent by the mournful drunks at the bar. Maybe I was the only one who’d listen to them. But, like I say, the idea stuck. A few years later, after I left all that behind and switched coastlines and cities, a uniform for a suit, and found good times in a place where looks are everything and lies are the order of every day that dawns, that’s when I really got to know the secrets business is a good business to be in.

  Back in the time I’m thinking of, I hitched my wagon to the fortunes of a man called Zukor. He took a real shine to me for a while. That was 1917, just a couple of months after Wilson joined the war in Europe and Congress passed the Draft. Good men were hard to come by. Said he’d pay me five times what I made as a cop and make sure I wasn’t called up. I didn’t need to think about it.

  Southern California was pretty as a postcard back then. Never saw blue like it, first time I took the tram out to the shore. But as God himself found, soon as you start putting people in paradise, things begin to sour. Sure, the rot set in long before we got there – Los Angeles was already a hard little city with plenty of hard city problems – but we were the ones helped it take hold. All the money and dreams and high living. There were benefits to be had sticking on the edges of it.

  All that’s gone now. And they’re all dead. Most of them forgotten, though they were known across the world once. Even Zukor is gone. Saw it in the paper last week. No man has a right to 103 years on this earth, even if he did invent half the dreams of the twentieth century. Must have begun to think he was immortal after all. And I’m not so far behind I can let this lie any longer. I’ve kept my long silence long enough.

  Thomas J. Collins, June 16, 1976

  ONE

  North Hollywood, February 1, 1922

  As soon as he wrestled Swann’s lifeless form into the roadster, he clambered in behind the wheel, reaching across and holding a hand out to the girl.

  ‘Tom Collins,’ he said. ‘Get in.’ It was the only invitation he was going to give her.

  She stared at it a moment before grabbing on and pulling herself in. ‘Colleen … Colleen Gale,’ she said, not quite meeting his gaze.

  ‘That your real name?’ He raised an eyebrow. He’d been in the business long enough.

  ‘Since I came out West. I’m used to it now.’

  ‘It’s not so bad. Has a nice Irish ring to it. It’ll look good up on a marquee someday.’

  Her eyes followed his thumb and forefinger as they traced out the oblong against the city lights below. She was nineteen, maybe, straw-blonde hair bobbed and curled at the bangs, eyelids smeared with kohl, lips rouged and raw-looking.

  ‘My mom and pop are I
rish – came over in the nineties. You too, I guess?’

  ‘A little later than that,’ he laughed, wondering how old she thought he was. But she wasn’t short of smarts, clocking the accent like that. ‘You got the right idea, anyhow. Irish is a good thing to be in this town, so long as you don’t overplay it.’ He flicked the ignition and the motor coughed into life, lamps illuminating the dirt wall of the passing place he was parked in, midway up the hill.

  ‘He’s Hank Swann, ain’t he?’ Her tone was more matter-of-fact than curious about the short, plump, extravagantly mustachioed man propped between them, his face alabaster, eyes like blown bulbs seeing nothing, belly like a circus sea lion swelling out from under his shirt. ‘I seen him in those Keystone comedies. You in the business, too?’

  None of that needed answering. Instead, he asked if she would grab a hold of Swann while he steered the auto back on the road. Once they got going, the wind through the open cab bit down on them like fangs.

  ‘Where you from, Coleen Gale?’

  ‘Grinnell, Iowa.’

  ‘Iowa, she says!’ That cracked him up. ‘Well, I don’t reckon we’ll be getting you back to Iowa tonight. Don’t you have anywhere closer?’

  She shook her head, embarrassed, as if she didn’t know.

  ‘Look, I gotta stop off at a pal’s place first – make sure knuckle-head here’s safe away. After that I’ll drop you where you want, OK?’

  She nodded and sat chewing her bottom lip, drawing the lapels of the jacket close beneath her neck, arms across her chest, shivering.

  ‘Maybe we can do something about that, too. Meantime, take this.’ He fished behind the seat, pulled out his beaver car coat. A remnant of better times.

  Once she got that on, the girl did a better job keeping Swann from sliding as they twisted down the steep incline, yellow headlamps carving a route through the dark. The cold air was working into Swann, and though his head still rolled like a skiff in a squall, his legs at least were planted on the floor. The first drops of rain fell as they eased out on to Franklin, and came down steady the rest of the way.

  By the time they parked out front of Sennett’s apartment building, they were wet through and bone cold. There had been blizzards in the mountains for days, newspapers packed with stories of rescue parties in the high passes and marooned autoists. But here on the coast, not a snowflake. Only rain. Swann was semi-conscious now. Hauling him out of the roadster was easier than getting him in, but he hadn’t mastered staying upright, let alone walking. Nobody this side of heaven would guess he was clown enough to pull in $1,500 a week capering in front of movie cameras. Carrying him was the only option.

  Sennett’s was one of the newest buildings on the Boulevard, towering several floors above its low-slung neighbors, the facade looming white out of the dark a block or so east of Gower. Seemed like every time Tom passed that way, something newer, taller, fancier had shot up. Ten years earlier, you couldn’t have slingshot the distance between the houses, and the hotel up the street was a sleepy old health resort nestled amid orange groves and pepper fields. So they said. Nothing left of it to see. Every last foot of streetfront snatched for some upstart enterprise to soak the movie-making hordes: ration houses, milk bars, clothiers and drug stores – even the banks looked half built, flung up in the rush for easy money.

  ‘Your pal must have quite a place,’ the girl said, wide-eyed.

  Inside the heavy teak doors, the lobby was even more imposing: polished marble, fancy French mirrors, a chandelier burning electric light despite the hour. Most important, there was an elevator. Sennett occupied the penthouse, though it wasn’t his real home. That was a white-pillar palace over in West Adams, with enough land to stable horses and keep a few head of cattle – which his mother, so he claimed, liked to raise. That was its downside: his mother. So he had this place, too. As if he didn’t have a whole studio to get away from her in Edendale.

  Soon as he knocked, the door opened and Sennett filled the frame, six foot one with a broad barrel chest that seemed to cleave the air in front of him. His eyes were wide and steely, the sense of metal heightened by a shock of prematurely gray hair. The wide farm-boy face might have been handsome but for a fleshy upper lip that looked permanently wet. Standing there, in a blue plaid bathrobe that barely covered his union suit, feet bare and a five-cent cigar between his teeth, movieland’s king of comedy could easily have passed for a spud-sucker straight off the boat.

  ‘Where the hell you been, Tom? I was beginning to …’ Sennett’s booming basso trailed off, not so much for having Swann’s ass shoved in his face on the way through to the parlor as the half-naked girl in the corridor behind. He swung the door shut, loped over to where Tom was unloading Swann on to an overstuffed davenport. What the hell’s going on, Tom? Who’s the, uh …’ He stopped again, noticing the pallor of Swann’s face and the low moans he was emitting. ‘Jeez, what the hell’s wrong with him? Will he be OK like that?’

  Where other men took calm stock of a situation, Sennett fussed like an old maid. It never failed to get Tom mad. But he wasn’t going to make matters worse by snapping back at him. ‘He’ll be fine, Mack – in time.’

  ‘What’s the damn fool been drinking?’

  ‘It’s not booze. He’s graduated to more exotic pleasures. I found him in a fun palace up by Franklin. The old Bernheimer place, remember?’

  Didn’t so much find him as snuck in and dragged him out before the peddlers who laid out the dope could stop him. A risky business, especially when the girl insisted on getting out too.

  Sennett shrugged, no interest in the whys and wherefores. Swann groaned as Tom unbuttoned his vest and rearranged his limbs in more natural order.

  ‘Well, someone with a sense of humor must’ve bought the old place,’ Tom said. ‘Cos they’ve turned it into a Chinese-theme party house: liquor, girls, gambling and – guess what?

  ‘Hop?’ Sennett’s grimace had less to do with Swann’s delinquency than the threat exposure would have on the studio’s bottom line.

  ‘Stupid clown’s smoked enough opium to floor a mule.’

  ‘Anybody see him at it?’

  ‘Whoever peddled him the stuff, I guess. Nobody much saw me get him out, except for the girl. She was working there.’

  ‘Working?’ Sennett’s complexion, already blotched by the news that one of his best clowns was a dope fiend, went a vein-riddled purple. ‘And you brought her here? Have you taken leave of your senses? With Hank like this? What if she goes to the papers?’

  The newspapers were Sennett’s latest obsession, and with good reason. For six months the trial in San Francisco of comedy star Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle, over the death of Virginia Rappe had been exercising the imagination of every screaming headline writer in America. Holding Hollywood up for a beating by every God-bothering preacher and mothers’ union in the country. There wasn’t a producer in the business who wasn’t running scared of what a scandal might do to their prospects. And while Tom had reasons of his own to regret that turn of events, there was no denying it was also the one thing that had kept him in work for the last few months. He looked around. There was no sign of the girl, but Sennett was staring at the back of the door as though he could see right through it and wasn’t liking what he saw.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Mack, you could’ve asked her in. It’s freezing out there. She won’t say anything. I wouldn’t have got Hank out without her.’ He strode over and yanked the door open. She was standing there, shivering, eyes down, seemingly unconcerned. ‘Colleen, this is Mack. Mack, Colleen.’

  She came in, clutching the car coat tight around her waist, eyes wide now, never once taking them off Sennett.

  ‘I just told Mack here you were a big help to me and the least he could do is let you borrow some clothes.’ He turned to Sennett, enjoying his discomfort. ‘You must have some clothes lying around? Costumes? Something one of your girls left behind?’

  Sennett nearly choked on that one. ‘Not funny, Tom.’ He scow
led and flicked his eyes towards the girl again, gave her a gnarled approximation of a smile. ‘Would you excuse us a moment, my dear,’ he said to her and draped an arm around Tom’s shoulder, steering him to the far side of the room. ‘I don’t know what the hell you think you’re playing at, Tom,’ he whispered, angry. ‘But I want you to stop it, right now. Don’t you forget who pays who in this arrangement.’

  ‘Look, it’s been a long day, OK? I’m done in.’ With Sennett, the problem with overstepping the mark was never knowing where the mark was.

  ‘Yeah, well, get rid of the girl. We need to talk.’

  ‘Are you kidding me? Can’t it wait till morning? Hank won’t come to before then and my bed is crying out for me.’

  ‘I’m not kidding. And I’m not asking either,’ Sennett growled. ‘You’re going nowhere. Not yet. Didn’t you see the papers?’

  ‘I’ve been out chasing down that damn fool all day,’ Tom said, nodding towards Swann. He was running out of patience. Much as he needed the work, the whole point of his ‘arrangement’ with Sennett was that it was freelance. That way, Sennett, notorious penny-pincher that he was, didn’t have to bear the cost of Tom’s idler moments. And Tom didn’t have to take any of his claptrap.

  ‘Goddamn!’ Sennett’s face was turning a deeper shade of plum, on the verge of popping a whole new batch of blood vessels. It had to be something bad to get him so worked up.

  ‘Look, I said I didn’t see any papers today.’ Tom’s tone was more conciliatory now. ‘If you’re so desperate to talk, I’ll stay. But I promised the girl I’d take her home. I won’t go back on that. Why don’t you go dig out some clothes for her? We can talk private as you like while she’s dressing.’

  TWO

  ‘You pay if she steals anything,’ Sennett muttered as he emerged from the bedroom, a thumb jerk indicating Tom should follow him into the kitchen. Copper pots, cast-iron pans and fish kettles, every imaginable culinary vessel hung from racks and sat on shelves, unused, probably shipped in wholesale from one of his sets.