FIFTEEN
THE BASEMENT
Saturday morning, after unpacking all his clothes and dishes, Kendall went next door to borrow a crowbar. Torrance led him into the garage where he had a wall of tools and a woodworking shop. Two brand new scratch-built Adirondacks sat on a carpet scrap. Tommy’s drum kit occupied the space for the third car. Torrance pulled a crowbar from a home made wooden box.
“What’s it for?”
“The basement door’s jammed shut.”
“Didn’t you inspect the furnace before you bought?”
“They assured me everything was in working order. I saw a fresh receipt from a furnace company.”
Torrance stroked his beard. “Well, they can’t sell a high-end property like that without everything working. Have you used the furnace?”
Kendall hefted the bar in his hand. He could brain someone with it. “Of course not. It’s been in the eighties since I arrived.”
“What about the AC?”
“House doesn’t have AC. Smith never used it. He designed his houses to be naturally cooled. The high, thick walls, the trees. It’s been pretty pleasant.”
Torrance picked up a sheet of sandpaper and went to work on one of his chairs. “Smith was a weird guy. Read a book about him once. Welsh by birth. Some people believe he was a druid wizard whose houses were surrogate temples.”
Kendall chuckled. “You should hear the rumors in Wisconsin. Satanism, orgies, tripping on mushrooms. It’s a fact he grew psilocybin mushrooms at Darien. That was his studio in Wisconsin. Been there a buncha times. Well, thanks. I’ll bring this back when I’m finished.”
“No rush,” Torrance said choosing a CD from the stack next to his boom box. Def Leppard followed Kendall down the long driveway. The sound disappeared when he reached the street. He climbed the steep stairs to his own hidden entrance. It was just past eleven. He went into the kitchen and tried the basement door with his hands, bracing one foot against the frame. Even gripping the pistol-style handle with both hands, he couldn’t budge it. He wondered if some prankster had epoxied it shut.
Kendall inserted the flat end of the bar between the door and the frame and levered it open. The door sprang out with an electric crack and slammed into the rubber-tipped stopper affixed to the wall. An odor of fried electrics, old film, ancient newspapers, and a hint of rot issued from the dark opening. Kendall felt along the inside and found a switch, illuminating wooden stairs descending into the gloom. Crowbar in hand he descended.
The basement mirrored the house above in that it was in the shape of a rectangle, but only the frame. The center of the rectangle was solid earth except for the pool. Kendall found himself in a long, windowless corridor, all the doors opening toward the perimeter. Light came from bare bulbs mounted in hemispherical indentations in the concrete ceiling, uncomfortably like a prison. He tried the door directly across from the base of the stairs. It fought back, but he forced it open with the bar. Inside was a storeroom lined with steel shelving on which sat thousands and thousands of periodicals, some neatly tied in bundles. Variety, The Los Angeles Times, Billboard, Playboy, Hustler, National Geographic. And that was just on the first shelf he looked. One shelf held hundreds of VHS tapes, mostly homemade. One shelf held an ancient 8-millimeter camera and a machine for transferring film to video tape.
Some of those old skin rags might be worth something if he could find the proper venue. Forget eBay. They forbade more things than they allowed. Maybe he could hire Tommy to catalog, list, and ship the shit. Give him a percentage. He could always use them to get off. Kendall shut the door and moved down the hall to the next door. It was a double door set into a concrete arch similar to those upstairs, with a quasi-Mayan finial. The double door was painted red and had gilt handles like those in a theater. He pulled the doors open and felt a big open space. A cave. He found the switch and turned it on. Inlaid lamps in the floor illuminated the steep little theater with the loge to his left and the screen to his right. The ground had been excavated to subbasement level to include the theater, whose lavish cushioned chairs had come from some ancient Hollywood palace. There were five levels of seating for three dozen. He found a rheostat on the wall and turned up the ceiling lights, revealing a curved ceiling of stamped tin in one of Smith’s hexagonal designs.
Kendall entered the room. It was like entering a temple of film. He sat in one of the lush chairs replete with cup holder inhaling the rich aroma of the theater.There was a hint of buttered popcorn in the air. The ashtray at his wrist contained a butt. He picked it up. Kent. The screen was framed by Smith’s unique stonework proscenium. The stones were a mismatched bunch, varying shades of beige and gray, some with bas relief, some with cuneiforms or hieroglyphs. Certainly, they were not the uniform texture used in the design upstairs. There had to be a reason for that.
Kendall leaned back, the seat tilting with him. It was so comfortable he could have fallen asleep. Maybe he should sleep there.
Kendall heaved himself out of the deep seat and climbed the broad, shallow steps to the rear of the theater where a door led to an old-fashioned projection booth. A digital projector also hung from the ceiling just outside the booth. Kendall went inside and flicked on the lights. There was an ancient control panel with lever lighting not just for the theater, but the entire house. There were four fat cathode-ray closed-circuit television sets. Kendall turned them on one by one. Each showed a grainy black and white live view of different sections of the property: the front alcove, the courtyard, the kitchen, the dining room. Kendall found he could switch from camera to camera and even affect a split screen getting four feeds at once.
Peculiar. Why build a communications center in the basement unless you were a military installation or expecting to be bombed? Maybe Wallanda had been an early zombie-adapter. Geek heaven. Who didn’t want their own home theater? The room contained both 35 and 8 mm projectors, VHS players, and a DVD player.
No computers. Wallanda had died before the boom.
Kendall knew quite a few comic creators in the LA area. It would be a blast to invite them to a night at the movies. Galaxy Quest or Mystery Men. Geek heaven.
Exiting the theater, he followed the corridor counter clockwise. The next room lay beneath the entrance foyer and contained the furnace and the water heater. Both were in good condition. He pulled out the furnace filter. Brand new. Someone was on the ball. A sticker stated that the furnace had been serviced one month prior to Kendall’s arrival. He shut the door and moved on. He was now on the west side of the building, beneath the master bedroom and the den, now his office.
The first door opened on a cedar-lined wine cellar, two walls of racks, every slot filled. Dim light poured in from one of the window wells. Just inside the door were controls for temperature and humidity. He pulled a bottle out. Château Mouton-Rothschild.
Ho. Ly. Shit.
Kendall didn’t know wine. H was a beer drinker. But the profit potential was not lost on him. There had to be several hundred bottles. If they were intact, they might bring a fortune at auction. Who would know about such things? Nate? Possibly. Being a movie exec required extensive knowledge of wine, guns, and polo. He tucked the bottle under his arm.
The next room was fourteen by twenty, cedar-lined, and filled with costumes from every era. It too had a window well. Kendall spotted a Star Wars uniform on a dummy, a red shirt, and a costume from The Age of Innocence. He wandered among them, inhaling the rich scent of cedar, sawdust, makeup, and wool, touching the garments. Two layers of shelf—above the racks—contained hat after hat: trilbies, fedoras, bowlers, pork pies, ladies’ sun bonnets, Revolutionary tri-corns. A stack of two large plastic boxes with translucent sides interrupted the march of hats.
Standing on a foot stool, Kendall wrestled the top box out and set it on the concrete floor. He opened it up. It was jammed with photographs. He picked up a pale Polaroid from the seventies: a tall, dapper man posing next to his E-type Jag convertible. Frank Wallanda. Other photos showed Wallanda with various stars and personalities: Wyrick, John Wayne, Gina Lollobrigida, Peter Sellers, Elizabeth Taylor, MC Hammer. Other photos showed him posing with a fixed smile with his wife and daughter, the latter a coltish gamin with a goofy grin and silver filigree earrings. The box was a jumble. Digging down, his hands fell on smooth metal. He pulled out an Academy Award. Best Picture for Dagnabbit Hits the Comeback Trail. Kendall couldn’t believe it. He set the Oscar on the concrete, carefully pressed the lid back on the box, and slid it back on top of the other box on the shelf.
Had Wallanda left a will? Why hadn’t his wife, who was still alive, retrieved these precious family mementos?
Why had no one auctioned the contents? Surely Wallanda had heirs, had left a will. Kendall didn’t know law, but he had friends who did. He’d heard possession was nine tenths of the law.
On to the next room. Steel door locked shut with an enormous Schrage with a barrel keyhole. Kendall searched among his keys knowing he didn’t have it. Who knew what lay beyond? He’d have to get a bolt cutter.
Finally, he came to the garage door. No wonder he couldn’t get it open. An ancient roll top desk had been shoved against the door. Kendall could barely budge it. He’d have to get help. He thought of Tommy.
He completed his loop and went upstairs gripping the Oscar and thinking how best to market the wine.