SILENT (a psychological thriller, combining mystery, crime and suspense) Read online

  SILENT

  A novel by D. M. Mitchell

  Copyright © D. M. Mitchell 2013

  The right of Daniel M. Mitchell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.

  All characters and situations in this publication are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

  Agamemnon Independent Publishing

  Cover illustration, Castle Dragutin, painted by D. M. Mitchell

  By D. M. Mitchell

  Novels:

  Max

  Silent

  Mouse

  Blackdown

  After the Fall

  The Soul Fixer

  Flinder’s Field

  Latimer’s Demon

  The Domino Boys

  The King of Terrors

  Armageddon Heights

  Archangel Hawthorne

  The House of the Wicked

  The Woman from the Blue Lias

  Pressure Cooker

  The First D. M. Mitchell Thriller Omnibus

  The Second D. M. Mitchell Thriller Omnibus

  The D.M. Mitchell Supernatural Double Bill

  Short Stories:

  Rabbits

  Mulligan’s Map

  The Pen of Manderby Pincher

  Visit the official D. M. Mitchell website at www.dm-mitchell.com for more information on books and author biographies

  You can also join D. M. Mitchell on Facebook, and on Twitter at D M Mitchell @dmtheauthor for details of his latest releases and free book offers

  All things are sold. The very light of heaven

  Is venal; the earth’s unsparing gifts of love,

  The smallest and most despicable things

  That lurk in the abysses of the deep,

  All objects of our life, even life itself,

  And the poor pittance which the laws allow

  Of liberty – the fellowship of man,

  Those duties which his heart of human love

  Should urge him to perform instinctively –

  Are bought and sold as in a public mart

  Of undisguising Selfishness, that sets

  On each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign.

  Even love is sold.

  Queen Mab

  Shelley.

  CHAPTERS

  Part One: Hollywood 1927

  1: Meat

  2: Luke Dillon

  3: Betsy Bellamy

  4: Aim High, Sink Low

  5: A Bowl of Cherries

  6: A Man of Property

  7: A Century and Five

  8: Here’s to Horror

  9: Dump the Past

  Part two: Dragutin

  10: A Friendly, Generous People

  11: Castle Dragutin

  12: The Hanged Man

  13: A Living Soul

  14: The Mask of Antinous

  15: The Breath of the Dead

  16: An Inescapable Truth

  17: A Step Too Far

  18: The Curse Lives On

  19: The Edge of Reason

  20: Our Davey

  Part Three: The Devil Rises

  21: Long-Time Friends

  22: You Can Never Escape

  23: Bunny Foster

  24: A Horrible Day

  25: Justice

  26: The Devil Rises

  27: Flaming Hell

  28: Monster-Guy

  29: A Short Memory

  30: Poor Kid

  31: The Sacrifice

  32: A Black Rage

  33: A Creature of the Night

  34: Never to Move Again

  35: Silent

  Part One

  Hollywood 1927

  1

  Meat

  He reckoned his days fell into two basic categories. Some are good. Some are bad. Today was definitely a bad day. As bad as it gets. It started out bad, it had a bad middle section and it sure as hell was going to end bad. So bad, in fact, he felt the stink of it would drive away any good days for a long time to come.

  He also knew from experience that bad days always started with a phone call, a telegram or a letter. Three harbingers of doom, like the witches in Macbeth, and to make matters worse it was just his luck to get two out of the three of them that morning. The first was a letter from the studio. Cutting out the corporate lawyer bullshit, he summarised it thus:

  Dear Mr Mason,

  Latest release shit. No way are we renewing your contract. You’re screwed. Have a nice day.

  Frank Gibson

  Managing Director

  Prima Motion Picture Company.

  Rick Mason sank down heavily onto the flimsy, moth-eaten mattress of his pull-down bed, the springs groaning in sympathy. He read and re-read the letter. He had to concede there was no way he could make its contents look any better, no matter which way he read it.

  He ran a hand through his hair, glossy and black with hair oil.

  They can’t really mean this, he concluded. Someone’s made a mistake. Some goddamn secretary or something had screwed up big time. They can’t throw Rick Mason out onto the scrapheap by letter, without warning, without even so much as a face-to-face discussion, discard him like so much unwanted trash. By fucking letter! Hell, that cuts a man up real bad.

  As if his agent had been reading his mind the phone rang.

  ‘What the hell’s going on, Victor?’ Mason bawled into the mouthpiece.

  ‘You’ve heard, then?’

  ‘You knew about this, Victor?’ he said. ‘You damn well knew about this?’ Mason thumped the hollow wall on which the phone hung and it vibrated.

  ‘To tell you the truth, Rick, I’ve been fighting your corner for a few weeks.’

  ‘Weeks? This has been going on for weeks and you never thought to mention it to me? You’re my agent, for God’s sake; you’re supposed to have my interests at heart!’

  ‘You’re like a son to me…’ said Victor Wallace, looking aimlessly out of his poky little office in West Los Angeles. The view was a brick wall. The room was sweltering. The window was open, the fan blowing on high, but the sweat still streamed down his back. He mopped his brow on a handkerchief.

  ‘And you haven’t seen your real son in ten years, Victor, so don’t give me that line again. What’s going on? I’ve got another eight months left to run on my contract with Prima. That asshole Frank Gibson is threatening to ditch me.’

  ‘It’s not a threat, Rick. I’ll tell you what’s wrong, Dust of the Sahara, that’s what’s wrong. It’s an unmitigated flop, and you know what, I can’t argue with them, because I’ve seen it. Tag on the other two flops and we end up in the current situation.’

  ‘So they’re blaming me for Dust?’ said Mason. ‘The plot was abysmal, the direction appalling, the editing shoddy and the amount of money they threw at this motion picture was too small even to call peanuts. They’re blaming me for all that?’

  ‘You’re the movie’s lead, Rick, remember? They don’t think you have what it takes to draw them in. Not enough charisma, maybe even too short. Hell, Fairbanks could stick his name on a two-minute short advertising hair cream and he’d pack the theatres out.’

  ‘Douglas Fairbanks? Want to know something about Douglas Fairbanks? He’s short. He’s not a six-footer like he looks up on screen. He’s only a couple of inches taller than Chaplin, that’s how short he really is. It’s the slick camera work that makes him look tall, something they sure don’t have at Prima. Anyhow, I’m not short! I�
��m taller than both Chaplin and Fairbanks!’

  ‘Forget the short, Rick. Wished I hadn’t brought the damn thing up. You gotta face it, Rick, they don’t know where to pitch you. You’re not as pretty as Valentino, and there’s no way you can make it as a heavy. You’re like an ornament they know deep down is good but can’t find a shelf for.’

  ‘An ornament?’ He thumped the wall again and someone on the other side thumped back and hollered for him to can it or get a fist in the face. ‘I can do a Fairbanks,’ he protested. ‘He’s nothing special. Get on the phone to Gibson, plead my case, do what agents are supposed to do.’

  He sighed. ‘Plead? I’ve practically been on my knees to the man asking for one more chance for you. He was on the phone to me for an hour last night. I gave him all I had, Rick. He said he’d think it over. Guess he’d already made up his mind.’

  ‘I’ve got another eight months left to run on my contract…’ he opined.

  ‘You’ve got two options, Rick; you either sit out the eight months with no picture to work on, or you take the money he’s offering you, cash your chips in on the contract and walk away from Prima Motion Picture Company.’

  ‘So what’s he offering by means of a severance?’

  ‘Three-hundred bucks, minus my cut.’

  ‘What?’ he burst. ‘Three-hundred measly bucks? He’s having a laugh!’

  ‘We both know Frank Gibson doesn’t have a sense of humour,’ said Wallace. ‘It’s a dead end, Rick. Trust me, I’ve been down a few in my time. My advice is to take the money and we’ll try to land you another contact, somewhere.’ The way he said it didn’t sound too hopeful.

  ‘Call yourself an agent?’

  ‘I got it upped from two-hundred!’ he retorted indignantly. ‘You’d better watch your mouth. I’ve worked my balls off running around this town on your behalf. Who agreed to take you on when every other agent slammed the door in your face? Victor Wallace. Who landed a contract for you at Prima when all the other studios didn’t want to know anything about you? Victor Wallace. Who managed to get you an extra hundred bucks?’

  Rick Mason rubbed his eyes and took a settling breath. ‘Yeah, I’m sorry, Victor. I know you’ve been good. It’s not your fault. But Frank Gibson can ram his three-hundred where the Sun don’t shine!’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’d sleep on that, Rick. Think it over carefully.’

  ‘I’ve done my thinking, Victor; I’m heading straight on down to Prima studios and I’m going to tell Mr high-and-mighty Gibson to his face what I think!’

  ‘That’s not wise, Rick,’ he said. ‘Tell you what, why don’t you come over to my office instead and we’ll talk things over? Plan where we go from here.’

  So that was a good example of a bad start to a bad day. And from where Rick Mason was standing he could see where he was going from here and it wasn’t anywhere scenic. All you had to do was take to the streets of Hollywood to see what the future held for a nobody. Douglas Fairbanks? There were so many people thinking they were the next Fairbanks a producer could walk all the way from his office to the bank stepping on them and not touch the ground once. The place was teeming with young hopefuls washed in on one tide and swept away disappointed and dejected on the next. Like him they’d read their well-thumbed copies of Variety, or Moving Picture World, pored over articles on Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, and a hundred other such movie stars, and hankered for a taste of the rhinestone glamour their touched-up photos exuded.

  Rick Mason wasn’t his real name. It was Stjepan Gjalski. He came over from Europe with his mother some fifteen years ago, still had a strong accent, though it was becoming softer now. That had been changed to Steven Gallis at Ellis Island, to make it easier to pronounce by those who processed him, and to Americanise it somewhat. But even that had been changed following Victor Wallace’s advice.

  ‘Nobody uses their real name in Hollywood, kid,’ he’d said. ‘Everyone here is pretending they’re someone else and looking to land a career where they get paid big bucks pretending to be someone else. It’s all baloney and bullshit – that’s the first thing you gotta remember, kid. Never ever forget that. It’s like a meat grinder. I’ve seen what it can do to people who don’t make it – and also to a few that have – and for every hopeful that lands a contract there are a thousand who’ll never be anything bigger than waitresses and waiters. So, first thing I’ll do it work my ass off to help you because I know you’ve got talent; the second is never to bite the hand that feeds it; the third is to ditch that God-awful name, get yourself something more swanky, and take some kinda lesson to smooth out that European accent. America is the fastest-growing breadbasket in the world but those at the back of the queue tend to have a foreign accent; the fourth, you keep your nose clean, stay clear of the bottle and the broads and maybe you’ll stand half a chance, because the first time you land yourself in trouble with the law Victor Wallace is walking away from you. You got all that, kid?’

  He got it OK. He knew the ropes. Rick Mason had been doing the rounds in vaudeville for ten years or more, since he was aged about fifteen. He didn’t have a father, just his mother. They’d come over to America from Slavonia before the war, to escape the grinding poverty and the Austro-Hungarian oppression that kept them there, so his mother used to rant when she was angry, which was most always. Millions of other immigrants flooding into America had similar stories, every one of them hoping to find a better life, and millions like him and his mother exchanging rural rat infested hovels for urban rat infested tenement blocks.

  His mother, however, could sing beautifully. Sad songs usually, of a faraway home; songs that squeezed tears from her; songs that made her want to be alone. Mason had been able to play the fiddle, so they took to the stage and scraped a living that way, till drink got the better of her and he had to support them both, change his act to accommodate. She went into a fast decline, her attitude towards him aggressive, abrupt, hurtful, claiming she wanted nothing to do with him, that he was a burden she had had to bear for far too long. She wanted to go back home and it was his fault she could not.

  She died of cancer of the throat, ending her days angry and bitter, and was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave. Mason was left to make his own way. Like thousands of others, if he had a spare dime he’d go to the nickelodeons and it became clear to him early on that film was his future, not strutting about a stage for an audience of five. He wanted to be a part of the new motion picture industry, so he packed his case and tossed a coin to see whether it was to be New York or Los Angeles and Hollywood. Los Angeles was the lucky winner, so he got a job swinging a broom in whichever studio wanted him and tried to force his big break, but no one was interested. At night he’d tread the boards to earn enough to keep him out of the soup kitchens, and up on stage that’s where Victor Wallace first saw him. Saw something in the young man that nobody else had, and eventually his new agent managed to land him a contract with Prima Motion Picture Company.

  Prima was headed by the formidable brother partnership of Luke and Carl Dillon. Prima had been one of the first studios to open in Hollywood, on the northwest corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street, and had been building up a successful motion picture business for the past ten years or so. They were looking to move away from the one-reel shorts they’d been churning out every week and into the lucrative feature market where there were huge profits being made. As early as 1915, when Prima was only two years old, The Birth of a Nation had grossed a staggering $10 million, and there’d been a succession of big hits like Ben-Hur and The Gold Rush, which confirmed to the Dillons that’s where the main direction lay.

  Except Prima’s ambition didn’t match its ability to raise the massive investments needed, so they aped their betters by doing it on the cheap. They couldn’t attract big names, for one thing, and investors saw them only as a factory turning out inconsequential shorts, so they had little money to splash around on their features.

  As far
as Rick Mason was concerned, from the very beginning Dust of the Sahara had all the hallmarks of someone dressing a hobo in top hat and tails whilst failing to hide the smell. And he’d finally paid the price for what he considered to be the studio’s cheapskate shortcomings and cutbacks.

  Well Rick Mason didn’t consider himself to be meat in anyone’s grinder, no matter what Victor Wallace said. Ignoring his advice he drove straight on down to Prima studios and pulled up outside the huge twin gates of stout wrought iron painted in glistening white, each bearing the name Prima in gold letters. There were two uniformed men standing in front.

  Rick dropped the side window of the old Ford. A smell of gasoline fumes wafted in.

  ‘Hi, Jake,’ he said to one of the guards, who ducked down to the car’s window. ‘Let me in, will you?’

  ‘Sorry, Mr Mason, no can do.’

  ‘C’mon, Jake; you know me – let me in. I gotta see Frank Gibson.’

  ‘You got an appointment?’

  ‘Yeah, sure I’ve got an appointment. Just let me in, huh?’

  Jake’s sun-baked face, brown as a creased leather armchair, cracked a smile, but all the same he told Rick to wait. He went over to a box on the wall, cranked a call and spoke into the mouthpiece. He nodded a couple of times, hung up the phone and shut up the box. He ambled across to the car, hitching up his pants as he did so. He bent to the window again.

  ‘Sorry, Mr Mason, you ain’t got an appointment.’

  ‘Then let me in and I’ll make one at the office.’

  ‘Can’t do that either.’

  ‘You’ve known me two years and more, Jake. I gave you birthday cards. Let me in. I’ve got to see Gibson. It’s urgent.’