In the Beginning ... Umberto Tosi

  Metropolis' Maria Futura comes to life, 1927

... was the word. As I posted earlier, I'm amidst
a third rewrite of my latest Frank Ritz noir Hollywood murder mystery. I had run into a wall about halfway through the novel, that draft the product of numerous revisions itself.  No matter. It dawned on me that my roadblock didn't originate ahead of me but back at the beginning of the process. I had gone with the big idea - the case of a famous, missing Hollywood prop that had led to murder - but had neglected Frank Ritz and his complicated personal life. I had made the assumption that readers knew him as well as did I. In the process, I neglected what is turning out to be the novel's most compelling stuff - not the case, nor a high-profile murder, nor the movie-biz clients, but a crisis in Frank's personal life involving his daughter Annie and his on-off lover and dogged reporter, Phyllis.

So here goes. I offer this sample for your consideration: 

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  Ava, Ex-Machina

CHAPTER ONE: Phyllis flared her fluty, faintly freckled nostrils ever so slightly – her tell. She had the cards or thought she had them. Filled an inside straight, did she? I was tempted to bet into the wind and swell the pot for her, but that would have been silent condescension –or something you’d do for your kid. 

          My daughter Annie was more on my mind than poker at that moment. Why had she quit school and shown up at my door a week ago, pale and sullen? 

“Talk to her!” My mother decreed by phone in her unmistakably grave, yet still Munchkin-like voice. 

  Gizmodo

“She’s not a child anymore, Ma.” Truth was I didn’t want to deal with whatever it was. I suspected romantic trouble, egregiously off the mark as it turned out. The reality would lead me down a murderous path, but later for that. It was complicated. 

Ludicrous of me to play the avenging father at that point. Annie had her own life for some years now – and I had not been that consistent a dad to start with, much less a conventional one. 

“What do you expect?” Vera, my mother put it bluntly. “Annie was half-grown when you finally showed up in her life. On top of that the kid’s mother was bat shit half the time.” Vera didn’t mince words. Just under four-foot tall, she could cut Paul Bunyon down to size. 

 I Robot

“I went to war. Didn’t even know that I had a daughter for years.” Playing the war hero card backed people off, but not Vera. I knew better than to remind her of the bullet fragment in my head, my one good eye, or my postwar years of brawling, drinking and drifting. She wasn’t much for excuses.

Phyllis was like Vera in that way too. I had spotted Phyllis’ tell by dint of our relationship – presently on hold –  not out of any special skill at poker. Using it would have felt like cheating, like using a mirror to peek at her cards. 

On the other hand, maybe Phyllis was faking her tell to bluff me out of play. She was capable. She counted on being underestimated, in games of risk, anyway. 

  Alice Krige: the Star Trek Borg Queen

Love is a game of risk. Phyllis and I were supposed to be out of love at the moment – no more overnights. It might have helped for me to share my family distress with Phyllis, but I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of being “friends” so soon after our sort-of breakup. We were   “taking a break” for “comfort” and other foggy reasons. 

I covered the bet to keep the game going. I wanted no drama in front of the Thursday night poker quorum underway at Mason Chaing’s messy bungalow off of Hyperion and Sunset. 

His place looked like my life felt at the time, like the flat boxes of crusts that remained of the pizzas we had ordered. The air was stale with beer and bourbon, smokes and a skunk lurking somewhere in the brush – that, or Chaing’s teenage son doing weed in the dark of his porch. 

Mason was a rim rat on the Los Angeles Times copy desk. His eyes were conveniently masked by the same green eyeshade that he wore on the copy desk. He was round in every way, with full pink lips, a milk-white complexion, straight black hair and a poker face that would have served him in Las Vegas were he a gambler instead of an encyclopedic keeper of odd facts. 

He was divorced and off on Thursday nights, hence our host. He knew Phyllis as a freelancer at the paper. He had invited her to the game that night. This spared me the awkwardness of explaining that she and I were no longer an item. We arrived in different cars. Not that any of this bunch would have asked questions. 

Phyllis raised my bet. “I’m out!’ I threw down my cards and leaned back, wishing I hadn’t quit smoking again. 

The other three ink-stained wretches in our Thursday circle had folded. That left Phyllis and Mason, who called and took the pot. Damn. Phyllis had been bluffing all along, It wasn’t just in the cards. You can’t bluff a cold-fingered rim rat like Mason, unless you dealt from the bottom or could time travel, like the robots in the unlikely manuscript I had been skimming on the Zenith case. 

I was about to fold more than my hand. I wanted out of what felt like a shit life at that juncture. I hadn’t told Phyllis, much less Vera, or Annie. 

I wanted out of the sleuthing game. At least I wanted out of washing other people’s laundry, out of getting sapped and being a sap too often. I’d hit the road, or go back to school, I was thinking. I still had my GI Bill. I’d maybe study law at UCLA, or, fuck it all, play my out-of-tune piano that kept calling me. 

I told myself that I would give notice to Zenith’s execs tomorrow, first thing.  Let them track down the Kozmol robot - the legendary Maschinenmensch (Machine-Person). 

Before our semi-breakup, Phyllis and I had advanced to the stage of sharing intimate memories, including my boyhood fixation with science fiction. I had been one of those geeky boys who subscribed to all the pulp magazines. I consumed Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury and their ilk avidly. I hated what Hollywood had distorted the genre into cheap serials and monster movies. 

I had only known Kozmol by film legend until I saw an excerpted restoration of it at a UCLA showing.  But the best-laid plans … as they say. Life is a game of risk, and when you don’t get the cards ... Sometimes you bluff. 

Before our semi-breakup, Phyllis and I had advanced to the stage of sharing intimate memories, including my boyhood fixation with science fiction. I had been one of those geeky boys who subscribed to all the pulp magazines. I consumed Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury and their ilk avidly. I hated what Hollywood had distorted the genre into cheap serials and monster movies. I had only known Kozmol by film legend until I saw an excerpted restoration of it at a UCLA showing.  But the best-laid plans … as they say. Life is a game of risk, and when you don’t get the cards ... Sometimes you bluff. 

On second thought, I’d wait a few more days to quit after the Saturday night gala that I had already promised to attend and keep an eye out for trouble, as it were, at least until they figured out how to answer the anonymous ransom note for that damn film prop. Burning bridges is never smart. 

I’m a curious cat. Most of all I wanted to finish the Kozmol manuscript  - if that pile of handwritten papers could be called anything so literary. I wondered what clues to the robot-prop’s theft and the movie director’s murder it might offer. I was in up to my eyeballs in the case now, like it or not, and every clue seemed to complicate rather than clarify the mystery. 

It had started with the theft of a prop - almost a prank, except that the Kozmol robot had fascinated film buffs, old-time scifi aficionados and the so-called intelligentsia for decades. It embodied the lost hopes radical aspirations of high-art during the last days of Germany’s decadent, creative Weimar Republic, before Nazism’s bloody deluge. 

Like a lot of eggheads I knew I often wondered where the world would be if Nazism had not crush those Weimar dreams in its waves of militant mediocrity. They had already invented TV and antibiotics, discovered the secrets of the atom, telecommunications, and cosmology. Weimar’s brightest, shimmering stars saw the darkness coming, but also thought that we’d have colonies on Mars by the midcentury that Phyllis and I inhabited, cures for cancer, flying cars and had put an end to war.  

The Kozmol’s iconic robot – made famous in its posters and previews – Zenith’s evoked all of that and more. I doubted that Zenith Picture’s forthcoming remake of the Wiemar robot epoch would capture even a fraction of it’s era’s zeitgeist. But I hoped just enough to be hooked by the prospect of meeting the famous movie robot on film, or better yet, in person. 

The PR people at Zenith recognized the robot’s magic too. Maybe that was why the front office didn’t mind raising the stakes with it’s abductors, and neither, apparently, did our adversaries. Phyllis had caught the scent of a sensational story. 

Hollywood wouldn’t have cast Phyllis as a femme fatale, maybe as sidekick, or the kid sister. I had sworn off glamorous after my adventure with Dolores anyway. Phyllis got to me. I didn’t want to believe that she was playing me. 

I had promised her a pass to the Kozmol gala reception a few nights after our poker game. It wasn’t a date. George Kruger, The Times. Entertainment editor, has assigned her cover it, without promising her lineage. 

“Thanks, Ritzy. Being on your arm puts me a step ahead of the paparazzi,” she confessed in her usually disarming way. “Plus you’re a handy source of color and scifi tidbits.”

It’s tougher when you get cards just good enough to keep you in the game – at your own peril. I would have left the table then and there had my phantom eye warned me about death peering over my shoulder. If it had, I ignored it.

-- Death and the Droid, by Umberto Tosi

[Copyright © 2023 by Umberto Tosi, all rights reserved ]

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Umberto Tosi's novels include his highly praised, Frank Ritz, Hollywood noir detective mysteries The Phantom Eye, and Oddly Dead. the forthcoming Death and the Droid, plus his story collection, Sometimes Ridiculous, plus his epic historical novel Ophelia Rising.  His nonfiction books include High Treason (Ballentine/Putnam), and Sports Psyching.  His short stories have appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader and Chicago Quarterly Review where he is contributing editor. His stories, essays and articles have been published widely in print and online since the 1970s.

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Enjoy Umberto Tosi's Hollywood noir detective thrillers: The Phantom Eye  and Oddly Dead.

 "Tosi writes with tremendous style and a pitch perfect ear for everything that makes the classic noir detective story irresistible. Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer, make room for Frank Ritz!" - Elizabeth McKenzie, best-selling author of The Dog of the North, The Portable Veblen and managing editor of Chicago Quarterly Review.