Bandbox (30 page)

They’d kept him locked up in the garage for two nights, until another two men, different from any he’d yet seen, drove him out of the city on the first leg of a long, long trip. Before it was over, he’d felt as if he’d crossed the whole country. By now, so many weeks after, he realized that he had. The journey had included stretches inside private train compartments and hundreds of miles, usually at night, in the backseats of cars. He’d been able to follow where they were going from the license plates outside the window. The guys transporting him gave him plenty to read, and that was a good thing, since their conversation was worse than anything he could remember hearing back in January from those salesmen on the train between Indianapolis and Cleveland.

He came to understand that all the men minding and chauffeuring him—the dozen shifts and relays that took over from one another at small-town intersections or the end of dirt roads—had at least one thing in common: none of them seemed to know who he was or why they were moving him around in the first place. You could see some of them trying to figure out whether he’d done something wrong or was maybe someone important. Since it might be the latter, they tended to treat him pretty well. He’d felt a gun at his back only once or twice, though a couple of times he had heard one fellow in the front seat ask the other if it seemed likely they’d be asked, at some point, to kill their cargo. This speculation occurred when the drivers were leaning to the theory that he’d done something wrong. They would also wonder out loud—as if he
were
cargo instead of a passenger—why no one had killed him before now, or just let him go after they’d scared him silly. This last possibility would have been swell by John, but his minders clearly lacked the standing to implement any alternative plan. And so, even now, he remained like a product they couldn’t sell and couldn’t quite afford to discontinue.

After all these weeks, he still couldn’t say for sure where he was, except that it looked like a real ranch, overseen by the men in suits and worked by the cowboys. He’d long since settled into a daily routine: mornings began with
huevos rancheros
and buttermilk pancakes, followed by a long hike through the groves of sycamores and cottonwoods, under the eyes of the cowboys, who sometimes allowed him to ride along with them and the cattle. Animals were everywhere: not just the horses and bulls, but deer and bobcats and even bears. Whoever actually owned the ranch had set up a wild-animal preserve, a sort of open-air zoo, on the other side of its highest ridge. John hadn’t been there but he’d heard the men in suits joking about it.

He had never been more brown and fit in his life, but he felt like one of the horses—not exactly ill-treated, but not recognized as having any needs of his own. When he asked if he could write to his mother and father and sister, without a return address, he’d been refused. He’d begun to wonder if he’d grow old here, and sometimes, out of anyone’s sight, he cried. He remembered reading, years ago, “The Ransom of Red Chief,” but he knew it wasn’t in him—he was too scared and too well-mannered—to secure his release through sheer obnoxiousness.

The noise beyond the door was dying down. The card game had broken up and somebody was switching off the radio. John pulled the Navajo blanket up to his chin and looked at the designs painted on the ceiling. Lately he needed to convince himself that he hadn’t just dreamed those thirty hours he’d spent in Manhattan. In fact, most nights now he
did
dream them, like a wonderful movie he was seeing for the thirtieth or fortieth time. It would probably happen again tonight, but in the event he couldn’t sleep, he decided he would reread, once more, an eight-month-old
Bandbox
that he’d found, his first week here, in the main room of the ranch house.

“Miss LaRoche?”

“Am-scray,” said the movie star from behind her giant menu in the Roosevelt’s dining room. “Keep bothering me and I’ll have you put out on your caboose.”

“Miss LaRoche,” Becky persisted, “I believe I’m the person you came here to see.”

“Well,
I
believe—and believe you
me
—that you’re nothing
like
what I came to see.” She raised her fingers over the menu and snapped them for the maître d’.

“You’re hoping to see Stuart Newman, aren’t you?”

Rosemary lowered the menu a tentative two inches. “And how the hell would you know that?”

“Because I sent that note to the set,” said Becky. “I mean
his
note, about you.”

“Siddown,” said Rosemary, closing the menu at last, but refusing to look her new lunch partner in the face.

“I’m his colleague,” said Becky.

Rosemary guffawed. “Is
that
what they’re callin’ it these days?” More encouragingly, she waved off the just-summoned maître d’.

Becky pressed forward. “I’m hoping that you’ll accept me in his place.”

Rosemary hated being puzzled.
In his place?
As in “alongside” him? Had ’Phat Harris so misunderstood the nature of her hint about a “third party” that he’d sent this moist little
frail
out here instead of Newman and another gentleman?

“Listen, honey, you’re a little confused. If you’re lookin’ to play
field hockey with the girls, I can give you Miss Garbo’s phone number. Now where’s Mr. Newman?”

“He’s in New York,” said Becky, who nervously munched a roll while trying to explain just how she came to be here.

Rosemary waited for her to finish the story before saying, quietly, “You took all this upon yourself?”

Becky nodded, hoping the star would admire her moxie, maybe see her as the kind of girl Dorothy Gish often played.

“Of all the goddamned stupid nerve! Take your mitts off that roll! You’re not gettin’ so much as a cup of coffee here!” Only when she saw that other diners were turning around did the star replace the roar with a hiss. “Exactly
what
did you expect to accomplish?”

It was a question Becky almost hadn’t dared ask herself, so new was the thrill of ambition—and accomplishment—that had been filling her. Over the past two weeks she had played the Ouija board with Blanche Sweet, gone for drives in the desert with Dorothy Gish, and pried several damning admissions about the actresses’ censorship problems from a man in Will Hays’s office. The article she was trying to write needed to be a grand slam if she didn’t want to get knocked back to doing squibs on
Nelson’s Loose-Leaf Encyclopaedia
. Her confidence had been rising with each longhand draft composed in her room upstairs; she reminded herself that even the
Spirit of St. Louis
had bumped the runway three times before lifting off.

But right now, face-to-face with this implacable siren, she could feel her propeller starting to sputter. Her hopes of turning a little miracle for Harris were headed into the drink, and she had no maneuvers left to execute. She had even considered calling Howard Kenyon, but Dorothy had assured her that the star’s ex had “no more pull than he used to have push” with Rosemary.

Looking into the actress’s eyes, Becky knew she’d better give up. Back in New York she’d simply have to take a deep breath and tell
Harris she’d done her best; then she’d go shopping for an Easter dress, something less
jeune fille
than the
Pinafore
loaner she had on now.

Rosemary was back behind her menu, snarling once again. “I’ll count to three and you’d better be lost.”

Becky could feel her right foot lifting, getting ready to beat the first step of a retreat. “You know,” she said, “Stuart’s job depends on your doing this story.”

“Four, five,
six
,” said Rosemary.

“He’s more handsome than ever,” Becky added, as she finally stood up.

Rosemary’s knuckles tightened to an extreme whiteness against the menu—out of desire or impatience, Becky couldn’t tell. But when nothing further happened, she had no choice other than to leave the dining room.

Back up in her room, she began to pack, laying a program from Grauman’s Chinese beneath several writing tablets and a straw hat. Tomorrow she would start the long journey home aboard the
Chief
to Chicago, passing through all that western territory she still had trouble imagining as the scene of Cuddles’ boyhood. On the trip out she’d tried to picture his younger self as a merry little fossil, not so much petrified as suspended, awaiting reanimation, inside one of the rocky canyons’ geologic layers. She had written him twice and cabled once from out here, all to no response. Daniel, by contrast, had written every other day. She now put the rubber-banded stash of his letters under the straw hat, remembering as she did how one of them contained a list of things she should be sure to see at the Huntington Library. Between all her outings with Blanche and Dorothy, she’d never got around to going.

The Roosevelt kept a big Kelvinator at the end of each hall. At 3:00
P.M
. Becky was taking some fresh pineapple from it and thinking about how hard she’d find going back to her leaky icebox on Seventeenth
Street. It was then she heard the telephone ringing in her room. She hurried back down the hall, assuming the front desk had just received her tickets from the Oldcastle travel agent.

“Amazing what they can do with electricity these days,” said the voice on the other end.

“Cuddles!” It was the clearest long-distance connection she’d ever been on.

“Ah, those crystal-clear sibilants. Norman must have pulled a few strings with his old pals at AT&T. Got our lines routed under nothing but widows’ porches from Midtown to Malibu. Pretty quiet, no? So how are you? It’s almost quitting time here.”

“You sound—” said Becky, hesitantly.

“Sober?”

“I didn’t want to use the word.”

“It’s the war footing we’re on. Concentrates the mind. ‘Don’t give up the Shep’—that’s our slogan. He’s the Rosetta corncob at this point.”

“I’ve seen the papers.” The
Los Angeles Examiner
had picked up the story, and even run news of Gianni’s conviction in a sidebar summary of
Bandbox
’s woes. “Any more news?”

“Yeah, actually,” said Cuddles. “From a surprising source.”

“What is it? Who from?” Becky was surprised by the avidity of her own questions.

“It’ll take too long to tell on the horn. ’Phat says we’ve got to act like we’re down to the budget’s last nickel. I’ll wait and give it to you in person. When I get there.”

“When you get here?”

“Book yourself another week in that pleasure palace.”

“Cuddles.” She tried, with a stern tone, to snuff whatever desperate romantic gesture he might be planning.

“This is business,” he informed her. “I won’t even stay on the same floor.”

“On what basis am I supposed to extend my stay here? I’m done with Blanche and Dorothy, and I struck out completely with that hateful LaRoche.”

“Well, I guess she’s not a lez.”

“She thinks
I’m
a lez.”

“If you are, you’re lez majesté.”

“Lez change the subject.”

“Lez misbehave. No, scratch that. We have business. Expect me by the nineteenth at the latest.”

Becky sighed. “That’s a long way to travel just to read my Blanche-and-Dorothy piece. Which may actually be good. Oh, gosh, Cuddles, it’s
got
to be good.”

“We can edit out by the pool.”

“Will you
stop
? Listen, I’m happy to hear your voice, even with the practical joke. And I
will
see you by the nineteenth. At the latest. Since that’s when I’ll be back in the office.”

“No. You’ve got to stay put.”

“You’re beginning to exasperate me, Mr. H. I’m going to say toodle-oo now.”

“No, you’re going to find Shep. Next week. With me. Stay where you are, because you’re already getting warm.”

He went on to reveal just enough to make Becky realize he wasn’t kidding, that he’d be coming out on a train headed in the opposite direction from the one Oldcastle’s travel agent was still booking her on. In the end, she could only say okay.

After he’d hung up, she stared out her window of the Roosevelt into the blazing sun. And then she went downstairs to extend her reservation. Cuddles’ word had always been his bond. Sometimes the bond turned out to be Confederate—worth only its weight in sentiment—but she couldn’t say no to whatever long shot he was trying to play, not when for so many months she’d been urging him to play any shot at all.

Three thousand miles away, Cuddles, too, was staring out the window, not into the sun, which in New York had gone down, but at the steel shell of the Chanin Building, now risen past the top of the Commodore Hotel and visible from even the Graybar. Its rapid ascent seemed a reminder to make haste, and after another moment Cuddles got himself down to Grand Central to make his reservations for Los Angeles. He’d take the
Twentieth Century
to Chicago and, from there, a
Chief
to L.A. His departure from here a couple of days from now would occasion no collegial sendoff; he was determined to keep absolutely mum about what he’d learned.

Which was this: Max had told him, when he asked what Rothstein tended to do with bystanders who’d stumbled into his more delicate business affairs, about several places where the gang kept people on ice before returning them to New York or sending them to a more permanent nowhere. He’d mentioned a farmhouse in New England and a ranch in California—“There’s corpses under the copse, stiffs beneath the sand”—while Cuddles tried to seem no more than moderately interested, withholding what he’d learned from the judge about their little pitcher and his possibly big ears. If he sent Max down the wrong path in search of Shep, that would truly be the end of Harris & Houlihan. But if his secrecy led to a surprise heroic payoff in the eyes of BW? Well, then, Shep really might be the Rosetta cob.

Late Friday afternoon, joining half the staff inside ’Phat’s office to toast the absent, just-convicted Gianni at a wake that felt more mick than mama mia, Cuddles had gone back to his best source. Whisking Daisy aside—who ever was more whiskable?—Cuddles asked if any of those “messengers” had ever said anything about a New England farmhouse or a California ranch. Maybe the judge himself had been threatened with a sojourn at one of them?