Hollywood and Levine (10 page)

The tears went on for a while, maybe five minutes. A woman in a maid's outfit poked her head out from the kitchen. I gave her a reassuring nod and she withdrew from the room.

“Why am I criticizing Walter?” wailed Mrs. Adrian. “There was so much pressure on the guy. And now he's dead and I'm carping and bitching …” She couldn't continue, but went down in the surf again.

“You're the one who's under pressure now, Mrs. A.” I held her and let her cry. It is not easy to hold someone who looks like Helen Adrian without feeling emotions and physical sensations somewhat stronger than pity and consolation, but I reined myself in. She was a confusing woman, and confusing women have always been my weakness, my Achilles' gland.

Mrs. Adrian's cry left her refreshed and enlivened, as if she had taken a shower. She retired to the bathroom to blot out and cosmeticize her grief, returning with the well-brushed and high-cheekboned poise of a fashion model. In a way, Helen was very much like Walter: her changes in mood were mercurial and quirky, her switches in tempo deceptive and frequent. But Walter's tempers and humors were transparent, rooted in his need for respect. His wife was surer in her footing; the shifts in mood seemed to have their basis in changing frequencies that only she could receive. She could make you crazy.

We sat down to a relaxed and delicious dinner, prepared by the maid, who was introduced to me as Mrs. Billy, a German woman in her fifties who cooked and cleaned for the Adrians three times a week. The menu consisted of a vichyssoise, pot roast with green beans and baked potatoes, and a green salad. I did most of the eating. Dessert followed: lemon cream, very strong coffee, and a story about a detective who got shot at while looking at a gallows. Mrs. Adrian was neither alarmed nor surprised by my tale; she nodded gravely and helped herself to cream and sugar.

“Jack, it confirms that Walter was murdered.” She accepted my Lucky and gentlemanly light.

“Undoubtedly, Mrs. Adrian, but where do we go from here? It has to be your decision: do we keep on investigating or get out before we get hurt?”

She clasped my wrist with long, strong fingers. “We must see it through, Jack, for all kinds of reasons. If someone could kill Walter and attempt to kill you, it leaves me as the next target. As long as I have suspicions, I'm a threat to the killer, isn't that so?”

“Not necessarily. If I go back to New York, he'll know that you've called it off.”

She shook her head. “That's out of the question.”

She did not want to hear differently and I couldn't blame her. Personal fear wasn't the motive, it was something simple, ancient and biblical: revenge. And you can't argue against revenge.

“There's something else, Jack,” she continued. “Walter's associates in his work …”

“You mean his political associates, the crowd that was here last night?”

She hesitated. “I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing.”

“Mrs. Adrian, I am aware of the fact that Walter was a Communist, and that the people who gathered here last night are also. Am I correct?”

“Yes, you are.”

“What about you?”

She cocked her head, as if thinking about the question and then as if thinking about something else, pre-Walter, pre-Hollywood. Helen Adrian floated from the room at that moment, sailing out of 1947 and into an earlier, easier time and place. She was so beautiful then, so serene, that it almost scared me. Me, a tough guy.

Helen Adrian finally said that no, she had never joined up. “I was sympathetic, but I'm no joiner.”

“Did you feel pressure to join?”

“A little.”

“From Walter?”

“No, Walter never pressured me to join, never. In fact, I think he was actually getting tired of the Party, not the politics, I think, so much as the meetings and the backbiting and suspicions, particularly recently.”

“Who did pressure you?”

She sifted through the blue haze that screened her face, as if trying to spell out an answer in smoke.

“I didn't mean pressure like anyone giving me ultimatums, Jack. It was more in the nature of suggestion.”

“By whom?”

She smiled.

“You're a persistent s.o.b.”

“I'm not doing it for abstract reasons, Mrs. Adrian, believe me.”

“Call me Helen, please.”

“Fine, Helen. I'm asking about these people because I'm undertaking the investigation of a first-degree murder that everyone thinks was a suicide and I'm undertaking it almost completely without information or leads, three thousand miles from my home base. That is to say, three thousand miles from any cops or reporters that I know, or any hatcheck girl or hotel dick or barber who I can depend on to tell me things on the level and on time. Out here, I can only trust you and the palm trees. So I've got to press you, Helen. Even if my questions seem pointless, give me an answer if you've got one or part of one.”

Mrs. Adrian sat up in her chair and stared down at the tablecloth, pushing some crumbs around.

“You're a hundred percent right, Jack. Forgive the coy remarks. Pressure.” She thought it over and furrowed her brow into soft wrinkles. “The Wohls, Milton and Rachel. Henry, Henry Perillo. He's the most organization-minded of the group, the most disciplined. He felt it compromised a member's effectiveness not to have his spouse in with him. We had arguments about it, friendly ones. He's not a bad egg.”

“Did Walter talk openly about his tiring of the Party?”

“No, at least not to me. But I could see it in his face, in his expression after a meeting, in little remarks he made.”

“Did he ever talk to the others about leaving?”

“In the group? I'd be surprised if he had. It would have been out of character for him to be that open about it. Besides which, Party discipline really discourages that kind of faltering and egoism.” Her smile was that of the disinterested observer. “They're all in such a bind. They sit in their offices writing bilge for the big screen, bilge indistinguishable from that written by the right-wingers across the hall, except that once in a while they work into the speech of some minor character a pitch for democracy or brotherhood or working-class rights—and then they think they've really advanced the cause. And they're making these incredible amounts of money, but when they meet as progressives, they see themselves merely as ants in the anthill of Party unity, workers just like the men who bring their lunch pails to the factory everyday and make eighty cents an hour. Kind of contemptible, when you think about it. I tried not to. None of them saw the irony.”

“Did Walter?”

“No. He sometimes pretended that he did, but in his gut he didn't. He wanted his status and parking space and hundred-fifty grand like everyone else. I never knew anyone who worried about money as much as Walter did.”

Her eyes got a little wet and then the maid came in to clear the dishes. We got up and started for the living room, but Mrs. Adrian suddenly turned and told me to follow her. We went up the stairs.

The master bedroom was across from the top of the stairs. Mrs. Adrian walked past it and down a hallway that went back to the front of the house. We came to a study, a small, cozy room containing a couch, desk, typewriter and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Above the desk were framed, glossy photographs inscribed to Walter: from Mervyn LeRoy, the director, from Edward G. Robinson (“To Walter, a great writer. With affection, Eddie”), from Claudette Colbert, Humphrey Bogart, Joan Blondell, and John Garfield, dressed as a boxer. (“To Walter, a real fighter. Your dear pal, Julie.”)

“I want you to stay here with me,” Mrs. Adrian said very softly.

I turned to face her. Her cheeks were slightly flushed.

“In this room, I meant, Jack.” She pointed to the couch. “That folds out. It's really more comfortable than the bed in the guest room. Walter slept here sometimes, when he had to work late and didn't want to disturb me coming into the bedroom. In the morning I'd find him curled on the couch in his underwear, his clothes piled up on the typewriter.” She smiled, really glowed, I thought, for the first time in discussing her husband. It was as if her fondest memory of Walter was of his sleeping in another room, down a long hallway from her.

“Why do you want me to stay here?” I asked.

“It's cheaper than the hotel and mainly I'm too frightened right now to stay here alone. You're a detective, you know your way around guns, you're familiar with danger. That's true, isn't it? It's not just from the radio. You have faced danger, I assume?”

“Once in a while. Not daily, but enough. Too much.”

She was satisfied.

“Good, then. You'll stay.”

We looked at each other for a long moment. I could hear the leaves hissing in the full trees outside.

“You'll stay,” Helen Adrian said, “until we learn what really happened to Walter.”

“And then?”

“And then I suppose you will return to New York and I will figure out what to do with the rest of my life.” She nodded abruptly and started acting the busy housekeeper, the decision made. “But first things first. I'll put fresh linen on the bed here and you can go back to the Real and get your belongings. You know how to get there from here? Want me to go with you?”

“That's okay,” I said. “I'll find it.”

“Fine.”

I stood there looking more than a little ridiculous. This was not the kind of thing I handled well. Helen Adrian knew it. She smiled mischievously.

“Jack, no one will talk. They know you're a detective. If they do talk, the hell with them. Now get your stuff. Mrs. Billy will stay till you come back.”

I stood a bit more, searching for excuses not to stay, excuses motivated by guilt at having the hots for my dead friend's wife and fear that we were both in serious danger and sitting ducks in this big rich house. Then Mrs. Adrian stepped forward and kissed me, an ambiguous peck that landed at a point equidistant to my sensual wet lips and my scratchy cheek. Then she walked out and headed for a hall closet, probably the linen closet, calling “See you later” over her shoulder.

I retrieved my gear from the Real and returned to the Adrian house about eleven. Mrs. Billy opened up and informed me that Mrs. Adrian had retired for the night.

I went upstairs and checked into the study. The bed had been made. There was a note on the pillow reading “Jack—You'll never know how much I appreciate this. You're a wonderful man. H. A.” I folded the note and put it into my suitcase, beneath the shirts. Don't say I'm not sentimental. Then I undressed and got into bed, pulling a bound script of Walter's from one of the shelves. It was
Boy From Brooklyn
. After a few pages, I got tired and doused the light, then lay there listening for the telltale squeak of a hall floorboard. A part of me, a ridiculous part, said that Helen Adrian was going to rap softly on my door and float in, a dim figure in a sheer negligee, her body's shadows a mystery of the night. An imperceptible hitch of her shoulders and the gown would billow to the floor. Naked, oiled, perfumed, she would slip into bed to straddle me and drive us both through a midnight of slow pleasures.

I stood sentinel by my hopes for an hour or two, wondering all the time if I should be the aggressor and go creeping into her tent. Perhaps she was keeping watch also.

My waking grew choppy, with blind spots of time that must have been sleep. I yielded and turned over, bothered by something I had to do tomorrow but could not locate. Finally I found it.

At ten o'clock I had to be at Walter's funeral.

7

I
t was an interesting funeral. Five hundred mourners filled Temple B'nai Sholom in Beverly Hills, a ritzy edifice to a sun-tanned God who knew how to look the other way. I say “mourners” in a purely descriptive sense, for there was very little weeping or wailing. The dominant emotion was uneasiness.

From my seat in the last row I could barely see Helen. Her features were veiled and indecipherable. Walter's sister and brother-in-law had come in from Chicago and sat looking pale, rumpled, and out of place amid the expensively tailored Californians, craning their necks to spot celebrities. Walter's mother had decided to remain in New York and was spending the day bent over double in a storefront synagogue in Brooklyn. And that was where Walter's funeral was really taking place today, in the back row of a freezing shul.

The God who presided over Beverly Hills—Our Father Who Art in Technicolor—couldn't be bothered with old ladies. This God mingled with the great and blessed their tennis courts and kidney-shaped pools. Among his worshippers today were John Garfield, Barbara Stanwyck, Humphrey Bogart, Karen Morley, Edward G. Robinson, and Lloyd Nolan. Jack Warner was there, wearing a red skullcap, seated next to Johnny Parker, whose eyes darted continuously about the room, alighting always on his watch. When Parker stood, he swayed from foot to foot. He was nervous, he wanted out, and I guessed he had an appointment. Parker's discomfiture intrigued me, and having nothing better to do, I decided to follow him after the services. I would tail him, and tail him good, until I was satisfied that he either was or wasn't a major player in this case.

The funeral proceeded apace. A young rabbi named Zalman Winkler presided and spoke of Walter as a “heroic Jewish artist, of imagination and conscience,” one who “brought his imagination to the celluloid universe of film.” He managed to get in a plug for Walter's last picture,
Alias Pete Costa
, saying that it was “due for release at that sacred time when we celebrate another release, that of the Jews from Egypt, that is to say, Pesach.” Jack Warner nodded solemnly at the rabbi's words. After working in a few more parallels between the picture business and the flight of the Hebrews, all of which led to the inescapable conclusion that Moses had shepherded his people directly to the Brown Derby, Rabbi Winkler mercifully stopped and introduced Dale Carpenter.