Lone Star (10 page)

“Tansi?”

“I believe you.” She emphatically nodded her head.

“Miss Edna?”

“Prove to me that you’re innocent.”

He laughed. “Somehow I knew you’d say that. So how do I do that?”

“By telling the truth, every bit of it.”

“I’ve told you…” He hesitated. “I didn’t want Carisa to die. She was making my life hell, but I didn’t want her to die.”

“So who do you think did it?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “That neighborhood? A robber, maybe. I don’t know. She hung out with some bad types lately. Folks on drugs.” Another pause. “Help me, then, Miss Edna. You and Madama and Tansi. Help me.”

“Jimmy, I don’t think the police want our help.”

“The police want to railroad me. I could see it in that Cotton’s eyes.”

We talked more, in circles, the hour getting late, and there seemed nothing left to say. But he lingered, stretched out on the floor, eyes half closed. Then, looking like he was ready to leave, he stood, walked around the room, inches from each of us, almost slow motion. He poured himself a glass of wine and quietly slipped back onto the floor, at the edge of the love seat where Tansi and I sat. He sat there, Buddha-like, swaying back and forth.

“I’ve never been good solving problems, you know.” He half smiled. “Just creating them. Obviously. You know, I can’t get away from my mother,” he began. I looked at Mercy, who was shaking her head. “When I was nine,” Jimmy continued, “she died out here in California. She was my only friend, really, not my father, never my father, and she wanted me to dance, to sing, to talk out loud to people. To be something. She told me I was special—one of a kind. Imagine a mother saying that to a little boy. Not famous or good or rich. But
special
. I felt a glow all over me, like my mother had blessed me. Like I was touched on the head by a hand made of gold. And then she died on me, just left me like that. That cancer eating her away until I had nothing left to hold onto, without a road map. What did she expect, me to do it all by myself? And my father, numbed into silence, sent me back on that long train ride to Fairmount, alone on the Silver Challenger Express, just me. Alone. An orphan now. Me and my mother’s coffin. At each station I jumped off and ran up the platform to see that the coffin was still there—to make sure she was safe. I had to protect her, get her home. Me in my little wrinkled suit, running up and down the platform, out of breath, and then back to my seat. Over and over, till I got home. And then I sat there at the depot, me and the coffin, waiting. I was nine years old. Nine. With a cardboard suitcase and a dead mother.”

“Jimmy,” Mercy whispered.

I sucked in my breath. Was this performance? Or was this real, this bittersweet, sentimental monologue? Rehearsed, said so often, the mother story, Mercy had told me about. Real or not, this moment stopped me, brought me to tears. Either way, I was captivated.

Long silence now. Three women stared down at him, waiting.

Jimmy withdrew a recorder from his back pocket, waved it at us with a sheepish grin, and then, as we watched, began to play a reedy, high-pitched ballad: Sweet Molly Malone.
She wheels her wheelbarrow through streets wide and narrow,
c
rying cockles and mussels alive alive-o!
Plaintive, haunting, utterly perfect. The notes hung in the air, sweet and thin, floated, fell back upon him. Eyes closed, head inclined, he breathed into the instrument, and the song was exact, smooth and seamless. But near the end, inhaling, he missed a note, and the sour note broke the melodic flow. He paused, shook his head angrily, started over. Again the same wrong note. Quietly, he dropped the recorder into his lap, opened his eyes, and started to sob, his body rolling back and forth, his face wet with tears.

Chapter 8

At the Smoke House the next morning, just outside the studio gates, Mercy and I barely spoke. Jimmy’s late-night appearance and the melodramatic air he played on the recorder, and the awful, sloppy breakdown, lingered about us like a fog you couldn’t escape. Mercy looked tired. Jimmy, I learned, had stayed at the apartment long after Tansi drove me to the Ambassador. I stared into Mercy’s face. I sensed what she was thinking. Jimmy and the dead Carisa. Jimmy and the movie. Jimmy and the bone-marrow-deep sadness. Jimmy and the mother who left him. Jimmy and the unexpected late-night knock on the door. Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy. God, how quickly and emphatically that man-boy managed to insinuate himself into all our lives.

“Well,” I began, “I gave my statement to Detective Cotton earlier, and he kept saying: Is that it? I finally told him he was getting on my nerves, and he pouted like a brat. What’s the requisite for becoming detective in L.A.—imbecility? When I say I’ve said my say, I assume others will believe me.”

Mercy smiled. “Others don’t know you, Edna.”

“They do now. Or, at least, one quivering soul does. Cotton likes to project a hard edge, a role he’s doubtless learned from Edward G. Robinson pictures. Cell block melodramas. Beneath it all, he’s a mediocre actor playing a part. It’s just that he can’t remember the lines.”

“That’s because he has none. He’s an extra.” Mercy sounded weary.

We drifted into silence. Gazing out the window at the sunny landscape, I asked when it was going to rain, and Mercy said, “Next year, maybe.”

I pointed outside. “Hollywood manufactures everything else. Can’t they fabricate rain to break the monotony of endless, clear, and boring days?”

“I don’t think you should move here, Edna.”

“There’d have to be some climate changes first. I’d have to speak with someone.”

We lingered, dawdled, drank more coffee. A lunch crowd was filing in, and I noticed Sal Mineo walking in with another young man. Mercy followed my gaze. “A little boy, no?” she remarked.

“Another Jimmy acolyte, that boy with Sal?”

Mercy flicked her head toward Mineo’s friend. “That’s Josh MacDowell. He was Jimmy’s drinking buddy, but one of the souls discarded along the way.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, we’ll have to find out, won’t we?” I insisted. “Do you know him?”

“To nod to. He works in wardrobe. He’s not an actor. He knew Carisa, too. I remember she mentioned him to me. Or maybe Jimmy told me something. I can’t remember.”

The two men were walking by, but I raised my voice: “Hello.” Said too loudly, I realized too late, some heads turning. An old lady requesting the popular Mineo’s autograph?

Sal stopped. “Miss Ferber,” he greeted me. Respectful, nodding; the dutiful polite boy. Nice New York boy, transplanted west. But he seemed ready to keep walking.

Mercy, following my glance, took over. “Hello, Josh.”

The young man looked at her, without recognition. Sal glanced at her, then at Josh.

“I was Carisa’s friend,” Mercy continued. And the young man went ashen, his shoulders sagging. “I remember she mentioned you.”

I looked at him. Nearly six feet tall, perhaps, but pencil-thin, raw-limbed, with prominent Adam’s apple, high cheekbones and deep-set eye sockets, a cadaver-like face, fairly macabre, with an oversized jutting Roman nose. So fair of skin, parchment-toned, he easily reddened. He mumbled something back, but I couldn’t catch the words.

“What?” From Mercy.

He cleared his throat. “I still cannot believe it. When Sal called me…” He looked at Sal who seemed to be picking his nose, absent-mindedly, unhappy to be stopped there.

He reminded me of someone, this loping, giraffe-like young man, with the ladder neck and the exaggerated parts. When he turned to look behind him—for no reason that I discerned—I suddenly thought: Aubrey Beardsley, some
fin de siècle
aesthete. I’d known so many in another world: Paris, Berlin, Vienna, before the war. Not
that
war but the first one, the big one, with the Kaiser. That war.

“Would you like to join us?” I asked.

Sal rushed his words: “No, thank you.”

But Josh was already sinking into a chair, his body seeming to unbuckle itself, the joints giving way. Something, indeed, to watch. Sort of like an unglued Houdini.

“I’m Edna Ferber.” I held out my hand. He shook it.

“I know. I’m pleased to meet you. I once acted in a high school production of
Dinner at Eight
.” He smiled thinly. “A walk on.”

“A bit player?”

“Sort of.”

“I’m not surprised.” He narrowed his eyes, not catching my meaning, but I hadn’t intended that he do so.

“You’re part of Jimmy Dean’s circle?” I asked.

A long pause, Josh frowning. “I didn’t know he had a circle. I just know him from, you know, around. I met him when he did some television—the Kraft Playhouse. I was working wardrobe. We’d go out to the clubs. A bunch of us.”

“How did you all know Carisa Krausse?”

He cleared his throat, looked at Sal, who was shuffling from one foot to the other but finally sat down. “Well, strangely, I introduced
her
to Jimmy. You see, I went to high school in San Francisco with Carisa. She was Jessica in those days. We drifted down to Hollywood right after high school. She wanted to be in the movies. I just wanted to escape my family. She was escaping into escape.” He must have thought his own words clever because he stopped, widened his eyes, and grinned. But then, probably remembering the context, he sobered. “We were best friends for a long time.”

“Were you still friends?”

“No. I mean, I stopped in now and then. We’d lived together for a while, but not in that hell hole she moved to a few months back. We sort of drifted apart. But she’d be in for a fitting, and I was in wardrobe and we’d catch up on things.”

“So you introduced her to Jimmy?” I said.

“Yes, I told you that,” He looked peeved. “I mean, that probably wasn’t the best thing I could have done.” He looked at his nails, and I noted they were bitten to the quick: a thin line of dried blood on each fingertip.

“Why not?”

“Well, it’s hard to talk about. I mean, she’s dead and all. I mean, well, Carisa started getting—odd. Frantic, sort of. Jobs not coming her way. No rent money. She was always a little eccentric. You know, saying outlandish things. But then I think she couldn’t help herself. Like madness came into her. And she met some bad apples. Drugs and all. That’s when I kept away.”

“What kind of drugs?”

He looked at Sal. “I don’t know much about drugs. Just what people tell me. Like heroin, I guess. I’m not saying for
sure
she did it, but it was
around
the apartment. I saw it. She said it was nothing. It scared me. One night, I bumped into her and Lydia, when they were still talking, and then Jimmy came along. She liked him. He liked her. Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

Josh waited a while before he spoke. When he did, his voice was hard. “Miss Ferber, Jimmy likes to play people. Experiment. See what they’re about. Push people. He’ll do things just to get people to, you know, go to the edge. He fools with their lives. If they fall apart, that can’t be helped.” The more he spoke the more bitter he sounded.

Mercy said, “That sounds cruel.”

“Well, he’s a bastard.”

“To you?” I asked.

“Yeah, for one.”

Sal was edgy. “Josh, this is Jimmy we’re talking about.”

Josh sneered. “Sal moons over Jimmy. Doesn’t know he’s in
love
with him.” He spat out the word. Sal frowned, looked around, his face becoming flushed, and he seemed ready to bolt. But Josh continued, “I’d seen Jimmy a few times, with his friends. Even at one or two parties. We drank together in bars. But then he started to avoid me. Was rude to me.”

“Why?”

Josh groaned. “You wanna know? I’ll tell you. I’m too girlish, he said. He actually said that. He’s uncomfortable around guys like me.” Josh bit his lip. “It’s not my being a male that bothers him. It’s the kind of male I am.”

“I’m not following this,” I said, exasperated.

“Jimmy likes more masculine men.”

“What are you saying?”

Nasty, his voice purposely loud, “I already told you Jimmy likes to experiment.”

Sal jumped up, twisted around. “Josh, please.” He looked down at Josh. “I’m sorry.” He backed up. “Come on, Josh.” Pleading.

Josh seemed hesitant. “You see, I don’t
like
Jimmy Dean.
He
does.” He pointed to Sal. “I’ve seen the beast in him, so I regretted that he got involved with Carisa, because I still liked her.”

Bluntly, I probed, as Josh stood, “Do you think Jimmy killed her?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me.”

“That’s quite an accusation.”

“Well,” Josh said, “he once beat her up so bad she hid away for days, black and blue.”

I sat up. “Jimmy?” I turned to Mercy. “Do you think that’s possible?”

Mercy didn’t look surprised. Quietly, “He told me he hit Pier Angeli so hard she passed out.”

I slumped back into the seat. “Mercy, what?” Fury, like a wind through me; a knife. “God, no.”

“It’s what he told me, Edna. He told me he wasn’t proud of his temper.”

“That’s barbaric.” I drummed a finger on the table. “Barbaric.”

Josh, standing, “No, Miss Ferber, that’s James Dean.”

***

When Josh and Sal left, an annoyed Sal muttering into Josh’s side and Josh looking oddly triumphant, I spotted Tommy Dwyer sitting by himself at a table, his back to me. I wondered when he’d arrived, and wondered, too, if he’d overheard the conversation with Josh. He seemed
purposely
turned away. I nudged Mercy, who shook her head. “Hard to miss that red jacket and manicured pompadour.” As we watched, Tommy scribbled onto a pad, bent over the page intently. Now and then he looked up, drank from a cup, and then resumed writing. “His memoirs?” quipped Mercy.

I mumbled. “My Life as a Shadow Puppet.”

While we watched, Tommy’s girlfriend Polly walked in, glanced around, spotted him, and rushed over. She looked angry, and he tapped the pad. Don’t disturb me, his gesture said. But Polly spotted Mercy and me and, mumbling in his ear, they both turned. Caught watching them, we waved, self-consciously. I motioned them over. Join us, I mouthed. They didn’t move. I waved some more. Reluctantly, the couple walked over.

Tommy sat, Polly didn’t. The tall redhead was wearing a crimson-colored gingham smock that accented her hair, very Victorian maiden. “Polly, sit,” I said. She didn’t budge.

“I saw you two when I came in, but I’m working,” Tommy said.

“Writing?”

“My screenplay.”

Oh Lord, I thought. The dumbbell as diarist. Alphabet soup for the grammar school crowd. Rebel without a dependent clause. I dared
not
ask about it. He might tell me, and I’d have to take to my bed.

“We’re concerned about Jimmy,” Mercy started.

“Why?” Polly asked.

That remark struck me as unusual. “Well, because of Carisa’s death.”

“We don’t know anything about
that
,” Polly said, harshly. Reluctantly, she slipped into a seat.

“You know about the letters she wrote.”

Tommy nodded. “Of course. Everybody does.”

Polly’s voice heavy with anger. “Jimmy was foolish, going out with that nut case.”

“You knew her?”

Sarcastic: “We all knew her. No one liked her. Jimmy has his fling, he always has to have his fling, and the rest of us have to dance around the story.”

“What does that mean, Polly?”

“I mean, Jimmy
knew
she was crazy. He just liked to see how crazy she was.”

Tommy interrupted. “Polly, no. Jimmy liked her. He told me he did.”

“She is a pretty girl who made herself available to men. Any man. Of course, he liked her.
You
said she was pretty.”

“She was Jimmy’s girlfriend.” Tommy looked at her. Shut up, his look told her.

“Not girlfriend, Tommy. Quickie partner, tryst, tumble in bed. I’m
your
girlfriend. You’re my boyfriend. There’s a difference.”

“You didn’t like her?” I stared into her slender face.

“She ignored me. She saw me as a rival. Not for men, but for
parts
. I’m young, good looking, and ambitious.”

“Do you think Jimmy killed her?” I asked Polly.

Tommy answered quickly, nervously. “No, never. Not Jimmy. He’s…”

Polly interrupted, matter-of-fact. “Anything is possible, but I’d say no.”

“Why not?”

“Jimmy isn’t into drugs. One of
those
friends did her in. Everyone is saying that. I know about the letters, but that was stupid stuff. Her drug friends—that’s where to look. Miss Ferber, Jimmy’s a coward at heart. Talk to Lydia, Jimmy’s pre-Ursula Andress, post-Pier Angeli fling. Talk to her when she’s not stoned on the ladies room floor. Ask her what she thinks. If anyone knows that crowd, it’s Lydia.” She sat back.

“Do you think Lydia’s connected to the murder?”

Polly opened her mouth to speak, stopped. Then, slowly, “I can’t say. I don’t like either woman.”

Tommy kept looking at her, shaking his head. “Christ, Polly.”

I baited her. “It’s considered bad taste to speak ill of the dead.”

Polly made a fake laugh. “I’ve never been accused of being society’s good girl. Speak ill of the dead? I didn’t
like
her. I don’t like most people.”

Tommy, unhappy, “You’re giving Miss Ferber the wrong impression.”

“I don’t really care, Tommy.”

Tommy leaned into me. “Is Jimmy in trouble?”

“Maybe.”

He shook his head. “Damn.”

I stared from one to the other. Polly, the deliberate harridan, angry, moving the conversation her way; Tommy, meek, Jimmy’s slavish lapdog. The two like discordant bookends—almost a vaudeville routine. What was going on here?

Suddenly, I heard Tansi’s voice from the entrance. “Edna.” She rushed over. “I heard you were here.”

“From whom?”

“Sal Mineo. He’s not happy.”

“He’s a sissy,” Tommy noted.

Tansi glared at him.

“What is it, Tansi?”

She drew in her breath. “Jimmy told Warner he wants to issue a statement to the press, professing his innocence, and Warner blew a gasket. It seems Sheila Graham called and said
she’d
heard that Jimmy had dated Carisa. Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons were dealt with, but Graham is another story. But that’s not the real news.” She stared at me. “Some reporter found out that Carisa had been picked up for prostitution when she first came to Hollywood, a couple years back. Cotton told Jake the police already knew of it. So Warner’s not happy. Some heads will roll.” She paused. “And that’s not all. Even though Jimmy is still Cotton’s prime subject, he told Warner that when they went to question Max Kohl, he ran from the cops. Can you imagine battling the cops?”