Maddie Ellis and the Malibu Movie Colony is an old-fashioned mystery serial set during the end of the silent movie era. In chapter 18, Maddie Ellis is troubled by the unexplained intruder at her Malibu Colony home and also by her unsettling encounter with actor Johnny Roberts and ingenue Lulu Desmond at a Topanga speakeasy. Are the two things connected? Will the Malibu Topanga Sheriff’s Deputy take her concerns seriously? Join us as we travel back in time to February 1928.
Maddie woke feeling dull and headachy. It couldn’t have been from the gin at the grimy Topanga speakeasy—she had dumped most of it out. A cold shower and a pot of coffee revived her. It was too gray and drizzly for a swim, and cold enough to make her glad for the woolens she had brought with her from London. She dressed in a business-like tweed suit and matching cloche hat, and wrapped a rusty red wool scarf around her neck for a splash of color. She felt almost as gray as the weather, despite the coffee.
Maddie had not been making excuses when she told Lulu Desmond that she had a meeting. She thought about the former child star and her leading man as she drove past the entrance to Topanga Canyon and wondered if they, too, had headaches that morning. They ought to from the way they were guzzling bathtub gin by the cupful, Maddie thought, sourly.
Her meeting wasn’t a long one. She lingered afterward for coffee at the studio’s commissary and paused for a moment to watch the western being filmed on the sand dune set behind the big warehouses. The Desert of Afar had already been transformed into a corner of the American West, complete with cactuses and a scattering of bleached cow bones. Everything seemed to be going well at the studio. Maddie headed for home. She had a couple of errands to run on the way.
She stopped at Henshey’s Department Store on Fourth Street in Santa Monica, pausing for a long moment to admire the Beaux Arts facade of the huge, four-story building, before walking through the incongruously streamlined modern front door. Henshey’s was new since Maddie last lived in Los Angeles. It wasn’t as grand as the great London department stories, or the ones in New York, but it was impressive for Los Angeles, and like its grand but distant cousins, it offered everything from clothing and shoes, to furnishings and toys under one, four-story-high roof.
Maddie rode the elevator up to the top floor and ordered tea and sandwiches in the elegant lounge, enjoying the panorama of the city from the big windows. So much had changed in the five years she had been away. Santa Monica was a thriving city now. Henshey’s wasn’t the only new sight. Buildings were going up everywhere. The streets bustled below her. She wouldn’t have recognized it if not for the view of the ocean in the distance. Even the pier was different. The fanciful carousel was still there and the rickety roller coaster, but a floating pleasure palace had materialized at the end of it while she was away, with pennants and towers and minarets. That, however, brought her back down to earth. It reminded her of Sands of Afar, and the mysterious presence of the film’s leading man at that backroad speakeasy in Topanga the night before.
Ordinarily, Maddie would not have cared what Johnny Roberts did, provided, in the words of Frances Ethel Beddington,“he didn’t do it in the street and scare the horses,” but so much was riding on the success of the film, and she knew the troubled production might not survive another scandal or disaster.
Maddie finished her lunch and resisted the lure of the department store’s lending library, promising to come back and browse another day. She purchased a new pair of sand shoes for herself—the first pair served her well, but were already past repair—and replenished her depleted first aid supply. She then spent far too much time in the basement, which featured an enormous model train display and every kind of toy. How her brother and sister would have loved it when they were small, she thought.
She had a lovely time selecting a stuffed bear with a wistful expression for her young niece Alice, and a new book for her, too, by an author named A.A. Milne. Maddie had enjoyed reading Milne’s essays and columns during her time in Britain. This book was written for children but it was equally witty and clever. It was about a bear, very like the one she had just selected for Alice, and it was called The Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.
Maddie spent a delightful interlude reading about how Pooh and his friend Piglet tracked an ever increasing number of Woozles around the spinney until Christopher Robin pointed out that all of the footprints were the ones the two friends had made themselves.
“Is it a gift, Madam? Shall I wrap it for you?” the clerk enquired.
“No thank you,” Maddie said. “I want to finish reading it first myself,” she confided.
Grayness engulfed Maddie once she was away from the lights of town. A cold, wet fog had descended on the coast, muffling everything except the muted thunder of the waves. Maddie drove towards Malibu deep in thought. The lights she had seen the night before in the neighboring house still troubled her. She had seen Roberts and Lulu drive off up the mountain and it seemed extremely unlikely that they would have driven back to Roberts’ lonely beach house in the dark and the rain to look for something by the light of a flashlight. If Roberts’ performance on set was anything to go by, he would have thundered up the road, slammed the door open, turned on all of the lights in the house, and swept through like a tornado, until his missing cufflinks, cigarette case, or tie pin was found. Tiptoeing about in the dark was not his style. That was something the enigmatic housebreaker would do.
She decided to make another stop on the way home. The Malibu sheriff’s station was a little clapboard wooden building on the side of Roosevelt Highway just west of Las Flores Canyon. The sign above the door read:
Justice Court
Malibu Topanga
Constable’s Office
Maddie had thought about stopping ever since the first intruders broke into her house. This time, she did. In a strange way it was the story about the Woozles that helped her make up her mind. The footprints in that story were entirely real. The interpretation of who or what made them was the issue, and that was true here as well. Her house had been entered, twice, and the only thing she could find that was different afterward was the color of the cocoa tins. Were there really Woozles—something unknown and rather ominous—or was this just a case of one’s own footprints obscuring something more benign, or at least more mundane than smugglers or burglars? She needed a Christopher Robin of her own to make a determination.
The central part of the building resembled a classroom more than a courtroom, with the judge’s bench at one end and two rows of seats. The constable’s office was off to one side. It was just big enough for a couple of desks and chairs—the same plain wooden ones that were in the courtroom. At the back was a single jail cell.
It was warm inside and smelled of cigarettes, coffee, and woodsmoke from a small Franklin stove.
The constable, who was identified by the sign on his desk as Lieutenant McCay, was conversing with a man in the jail cell, while his deputy made coffee. He was a big man with keen eyes and graying hair. “Come in,” he boomed.
“How can we help you? “Come to report a crime? Henry, pretend you aren’t listening,” he told the man in the jail cell, who was elderly and clearly inebriated. “We can talk outside if what you would like to report is something you would prefer our guest not to hear.”
“I don’t mind,” Maddie said, entering the room and taking a seat in the chair the lieutenant waved her towards. “And it’s not a crime, exactly, just something odd and disconcerting.”
The deputy, a young man with a long face, silently offered her a mug of coffee. Maddie murmured her thanks. He brought coffee to the lieutenant, pushed a mug through the bars to the man in the cell, and poured some for himself.
“This will sound mad,” Maddie cautioned. “I’ve run it through in my head over and over trying to think how to report it, or even if I should, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I should just boldly tell it as it happened, just in case it turns out to be important later.”
She gave them her name and address, as requested, and told them about seeing the flashlight in the empty house the night before, and all about the intruders in her own house, and the pink and yellow tins of cocoa.
“I’m a writer, gentlemen, and I’ve been told I have an excess of imagination, but the kitchen of a beach house where the owners are only there on weekends, or may be out of town for months, seems an ideal place for a smuggler to exploit. I don’t know what one might transport in cocoa tins, but they are fairly large, and completely innocent looking. Who would ever suspect something so ubiquitous and wholesome?”
Instead of dismissing Maddie’s concerns as nonsense, which is what she had feared, the lieutenant had her go over the details twice, with a frown on his face.
“You’ve heard by now of the other burglaries at the Malibu Colony,” he said. “No one reported issues with cocoa tins at any of those.”
“Yes, but would they?” Maddie asked. “Many of the residents are extremely wealthy and have cooks and other servants who accompany them to their beach houses. The servants would know what was in the pantry, but would the homeowners know or even care, as long as the food they requested is prepared and served on time? And isn’t it possible that the two things aren’t related? A smuggler wouldn’t have a reason to take a piece of furniture.
“A burglar probably wouldn’t be hunting through the pantry for a hot drink. But the one thing that would enable both activities is the absence of the owners. And in my case, perhaps whoever broke in did not know that I was going to be there, and once they did, they seized the first opportunity when I was away to switch the tins. It may be nothing, lieutenant, a harmless prank, or maybe a dare—that is what several of my neighbors think the original burglaries were—but it happened, and I thought you ought to know.”
The lieutenant gave her a long hard look, taking in the level gaze behind the round glasses, and Maddie’s composed and serious demeanor. “Were you frightened?” he asked. “Did you feel you were in danger?”
“I was alarmed,” Maddie said, her voice was calm and serious. “I think almost anyone would be if they found a stranger in their house in the middle of the night. I don’t know if I was in danger. That depends on whether the interloper really was smuggling contraband or if they were a practical joker, but even a joke can turn dangerous or deadly, so yes, I did feel that I was in danger. I still do.”
“I don’t know what it means, Miss Ellis, but thank you for reporting it,” the lieutenant said. “We’ll check the Roberts’ place, and I’ll do some research into what one smuggles in cocoa tins and will be in touch if I come up with anything. If you observe anything else, please let us know. It breaks up the monotony.”
“I’ve written enough film scenarios where there wouldn’t have been a story at all if the person involved had simply gone to the authorities and explained what had happened,” Maddie told him. She thanked the two men. The man in the cell appeared to have gone to sleep.
“One other thing,” Maddie asked on her way out. “What’s the story with the speakeasy behind the filling station at Topanga?”
“Is there one?” the lieutenant asked, his tone bland. He had picked up his pen, looking as if he were busy writing. “It’s hard to keep track. We shut one down, and another pops up,” he said, without looking up.
“The gentleman who mentioned it said it was a dangerous place,” Maddie said.
“It is best to stay away from places like that,” McCay said, looking up from his paperwork. “Knife fights, brawls, and gin so raw the bathtub ring is still on it. No place for a lady.”
“If it’s as bad as all that, one can’t help wondering why it’s still there, if it is?” Maddie asked.
“If you know where the wasp nest is, you know where to find the wasps,” McCay told her. “If you poke it with a stick you won’t catch the wasps, but you will make them angry, and then they’ll make a new nest somewhere else.”
“And of course, it’s an excellent way to get stung,” Maddie said.
“Yes, it’s never a good idea to poke a wasp’s nest, Miss Ellis.”
After the stuffy warmth of the sheriff’s office the air outside felt cold and clammy. The fog enfolded her in a damp and chilly embrace. Maddie was glad to reach home. She bolted the door behind her and closed the heavy living room drapes, shutting out the fog and the dark and whatever it was that took place in the colony when no one was supposed to be watching.
