Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 49, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2004

Mickey leaned down to retrieve his travel-pocked attaché case, its lid lost under destination stickers of various sizes, shapes, and countries. Settled it on the desk. Snapped open the lid and extracted a large manila envelope. From it he removed a series of smaller envelopes, checking notations until he found the two he wanted and offered them to the lawyer. He closed the case and returned it to the floor while Coopersmith checked them both for contents.

One envelope held five thousand-dollar bills.

The other contained a certified check made out to cash in the amount of one hundred thousand dollars.

Coopersmith blew out enough air to sail the QE2 across the Atlantic.

He decided finally, “I must say I’m surprised beyond words, Mickey.”

“What I’d like to hear you say, Mr. Coopersmith, is the one word: deal. Exclusive rights across the board, overseas as well as here in the States.”

Coopersmith stretched his hand over the desk, smiled for real this time, and said, “Call me Smitty.”

Mickey waited until he was back at his suite at the Plaza to phone his father in Los Angeles. Murray Barnum layered some asthmatic breath in the air and said, “So we only had to go the hundred G on top of the five?”

“Right, Pop. He was a total goner on the yarn you fed him about me dangling from the crest of Mount Disaster by my short hairs. Otherwise, he and I would probably still be doing battle somewhere north of five hundred thou. When he saw the bills and the certified check, he didn’t pause to consider how much might be in the other envelopes. We had him.”

Murray chuckled for both of them and fell into a reprise of the call he’d made yesterday to Coopersmith, dropping his voice an octave and assuming an accent from a country existing solely in his imagination:

“Stars on Stage, my company, is ready to spare no expense to bring a show about our beloved Diana Demarest to the stage, sir. Fifty thousand is all we ever offer to secure the rights, not a penny more, or we have problems with favored nations. But at least you know you will be paid, unlike promises you get from our piddling competition, Mr. Mickey Barnum, who is so broke not even all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could ever put him together...”

Turning serious again, Murray said, “You think her heirs, Diana Demarest’s, will ever see any of that hundred thou?”

“Pop, that’s between Coopersmith and his ethics. Lets hope we’re on a flight path to landing Diana Demarest alive. The headlines. The box office. The whole shooting match.” Mickey shook his head in disbelief.

“You get any sense of it from him?”

“Every reference was in the past tense, Pop. The starting point will have to be with her sister after I get back to L.A. He’s arranging for me to meet with her.”

“She has a sister living here?”

“An address over in the Atwater district.”

“Atwater, huh?” Murray Barnum grunted. “If I’d’ve known a neighborhood like that, I’d have urged you to cap the game at twenty-five. Maybe even the original five.”

Mickey said, “If it turns out Diana’s been alive all these years, we’ll make back our hundred on the sale of her story to one of the tabloids. The how and why of her disappearance. Not quite the same as discovering a living, breathing Elvis, but—”

“It turns out Diana Demarest is still dead?” Murray said, overriding his son, his voice begging the question.

“Then, Pop, we’ll still have the question of how she came to sign an autograph from the grave. Unless you want to change your mind and decide what you saw was a forgery.”

“Whatever else it was, Mickey, it was no forgery.”

If anyone knew, Murray Barnum knew.

That, Mickey Barnum knew.

Murray owned the M. Berman Gallery of Greatness, a modest shop on Little Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills, within walking distance of the Friars Club, where he specialized in the purchase and sale of celebrity autographs. His business grew out of the hobby he’d pursued since boyhood and over the years he’d come to be acknowledged as the matchless dean of authentication.

He was a grand master of the Collectors Society of America, having won the CSA’s highest honor, the “Siggy” (for Signature) more times than any other ranking authority, and of course, he was the first member to be voted into the CSA Hall of Fame.