Lone Star (13 page)

I stood at the top of the landing, with a skittish Mercy poised halfway up the stairs. Vega and Mrs. Sanchez, more sensible souls, remained in the apartment below.

The cops and Cotton led very boisterous and aggressive Max Kohl into the hallway. At least I assumed the muscular, hirsute man, then struggling with the cops, was the elusive biker. “I got a right to be here, dammit,” he was yelling. “I got a key.” He tried to show the officers the key in his pocket, but they held his hands pinned behind him.

“You broke into a crime scene.”

“I thought you just forgot to take it down.”

“What were you after?”

“I left some cash there, and it’s mine.” Kohl twisted and threw one cop off. Grappling and struggling with him, they managed to handcuff him, pushing him against a wall.

Cotton, perspiring and reaching for a handkerchief, turned and suddenly discovered me standing there. He looked astounded. “Oh my God. What?”

“What?”

Cotton looked from Kohl to me to Mercy, who’d inched up the stairs. “Do you all know each other?”

“I never met him before,” I announced.

“Did you come here together?”

“Of course not,” I said, indignant. “Do I look like his accomplice?”

“Last time you two looked like prom queens at a hooker convention.”

“Sir, you are…”

He cut me off. “And you’re in the hallway for what reason?” Perplexed, head shaking. He was not happy.

“We were talking to Mr. Vega about the murder.”

“You were what?”

“Unlike you, I’m convinced James Dean did not kill Carisa Krausse, and I’m convinced you’d like to see him charged, so…”

“So you’re doing my job?”

“No, only you can do that. Clearly.” I looked at the dumbfounded Max Kohl and back at Cotton, who was wiping his brow. “I’m just helping a friend.”

“Twice I come upon you,” he looked at Mercy now, “and
you
at a murder scene.”

I spoke sharply. “Only one murder scene. Mr. Kohl, if that is who I assume this young man is, still looks very much alive—though angry.”

Kohl narrowed his eyes. “Who are you? How do you know me?”

“I thought you arrested Mr. Kohl when he tried to escape questioning.”

“Bail, lady, bail,” he said. “It wasn’t a felony.”

“Perhaps it should be.”

“Write your congressman.”

“Aren’t you compounding your problems, Mr. Kohl, by breaking into a crime scene?” I asked. He stared at me, open-mouthed.

“Miss Ferber,” Cotton said, “I don’t need your help.”

“I’m curious.”

“Save it for another time.”

“I need my money,” Kohl thundered.

“For what, more bail?” I asked.

Detective Cotton looked at me. “Ma’am, it’s not a good idea coming around places like this. Do you know what goes on in this neighborhood? Tourists don’t come here.”

“I’m not a tourist. I’m a novelist.”

“You might end up a dead one.”

“Well, Fannie Hurst would be tremendously pleased, then.”

“What?” He threw his hands up into the air. “You could get yourself murdered.”

“Then you’d have two homicides to solve.”

Cotton shook his head, smiled in spite of himself, which caught me by surprise. “Why do you want to make my life difficult, Miss Ferber?”

“I’m just asking questions to help a friend.”

“Go home,” he said. “Now.”

“Detective Cotton…”

“Did you hear me? Go home.”

“I happen to live in New York City.”

“Perfect. American Airlines has a midnight red-eye.”

“Sir.”

“I’ll even drive you to the airport.”

Chapter 11

I sat in Mercy’s dressing room in Burbank, the two of us sipping tea, my elbows resting on a small table, with Mercy reclining in an easy chair, draping herself over it, legs up on a small wobbly ottoman. She looked serene, eyes dreamy. “Edna, when I travel with you these days, the police tend to show up moments later.” She chuckled, almost to herself. “I haven’t had this much excitement since Marfa, the night Jane Withers beat me at Monopoly, and, crowing like a strangulated hen, walked into a wall.”

I laughed. “Only two times, Mercy. The gods work in mysterious ways.”

There was a knock on the door, and Detective Xavier Cotton walked in. Mercy looked at me, eyes bright, and sat up. “Make that three times.”

“Ah, Miss Ferber, you’re here, too. As I expected, since the two of you seem intent on becoming the Dolly Sisters of Hollywood crime.”

“Detective Cotton, I explained why we were there.”

He spoke to Mercy. “The studio has given consent,” he said it sarcastically, “to have a number of Carisa Krausse’s acquaintances fingerprinted. We’ve lifted some good prints from the crime scene. Sometime this afternoon, if you can make it downtown…”

Mercy nodded. “Gladly.”

I smiled. “Me, too?”

He tucked his tongue into the corner of his cheek. “Not yet.”

Both Mercy and I laughed. He didn’t.

“I’ve been fingerprinted before,” I commented, still smiling.

“Why am I not surprised?” Again, without humor. Cotton said lines that should be accompanied by bursts of hilarity—or at least a smile. Did he have a light side, a moment when he let go, held his sides, rolled from side to side, laughing? I wondered about his home life—marriage, children, mistresses? Hookers? Dogs and cats? Ferret? Something that looked like him? “We’ve had most of the principals down to the station this morning, quietly, unannounced, but of course you were otherwise engaged.”

“Have you spoken to Jimmy?” I asked, curious. “I understand he’s shooting today.”

“Which is why he can’t be disturbed. And no one can see him fingerprinted at the station. We have to come to him, carrying our little kit and talking happy like we’re itinerant preachers saving his soul.”

“Very funny,” I said.

“I’m never funny.”

“Sit down, Detective.” Mercy pointed to a chair. Surprisingly, he sat. He pulled at the cuffs of his shirt until the edges showed under the sleeves of his sports jacket. He evened them up, flicked a piece of lint from the sleeve, then sat there nodding his head, watching us.

“What?” From me.

“Two nosy women.”

“We try.”

A sliver of smile, forced, “And what have you learned?”

“Are we sharing information?” I asked.

“You’re trying to save James Dean’s skin. I’m trying to shore up the evidence against him.” He reached into his pocket and extracted copies of Carisa’s letters. He fanned them, dramatically. “I’ve never seen such a fascination with letter writing. You know, Carisa had a bunch of letters on her desk. But some were missing.”

“How do you know that?” I probed.

He watched me, eyes narrow. “I suspect you noticed that yourself, Miss Ferber. You were alone in the apartment for some time—you and the body.” He glanced at Mercy. “In reconstructing the scene, I surmised that you, Miss Ferber, were alone there for what? Ten minutes? Fifteen? Twenty? What did you do?”

I smiled. “I touched nothing. No prints of mine.”

“But I’m supposing you noticed the scattered letters on the table.”

“I did.”

“What else?”

“Well,” I said, “I saw a syringe.”

He smiled. “Good. Me, too. Do you know what was in the bag?”

“No.”

“Heroin.”

“As is rumored,” I said.

“In fact, the autopsy showed she had just ingested some into her fragile body. She may have been a little loopy when she let in the murderer.”

“Or,” I surmised, “she shot up with the murderer who took his own syringe with him.”

“Interesting. Maybe. Maybe not. What else did you see? I mean, besides the things you outlined in the thorough statement you’ve already given us.” His tone was sarcastic.

“A neat woman, though a packrat. She saved every scrap of paper.”

“True.” He nodded. “And what does that mean to you?”

I glanced at Mercy. “Well, it suggests that she might have
saved
something the murderer wanted back, probably a note of some sort. Because…because the only things in disarray were the batch of letters extracted from one of the drawers.”

“Exactly. Somebody took a letter or letters.”

“And you don’t know what letter or letters?” Mercy asked.

“Hard to say,” he said. “The letters left behind were family notes, a mother in San Francisco, birthday cards, Christmas cards, junk. She saved everything.”

I nodded. “And someone knew that.”

“Maybe. Or realized it once he was there with her. She may have mentioned something about it—which led to the murder.”

“So,” I continued, “if the murderer took a letter, then we have trouble knowing the motive for the killing.”

“We?” He raised his eyebrows and frowned. “You mean me—
me
.”

“I was using the royal
we
.”

He frowned. “In your wanderings have you two ladies found anyone who likes to write letters?”

“All literate people write letters,” I noted. “The telephone is for luncheon engagements and to berate shopkeepers.”

“Can you imagine Max Kohl writing a letter? Or, say, Josh MacDowell?” He paused. “Maybe James Dean scribbles letters?”

“I can imagine Max Kohl pasting a letter together with words cut from
Coronet
magazine.”

Cotton laughed a hearty fake laugh. “Good one.”

“I’m being serious.”

“You’d like to pin the murder on him.”

“I just want to clear Jimmy,” I said. “You know, I’d have thought the epistolary tradition had died in an earlier century, but, I gather, it lives abundantly, if absurdly, in modern Hollywood.”

He narrowed his eyes. “What?”

“Nothing.” I waited. “Did you get anything out of Max Kohl this morning?”

He smirked. “Not that it’s any of your business, but no. He’s a slippery one. The problem is that he seems to have an alibi for the time Carisa was killed. Or at least he’s lined up folks who lie for him. We’ve learned he knew Carisa a while back, dated her, maybe, and then disappeared. Seems he was in jail in New Jersey for a couple months, a bad check charge, but drifted back here and back into her life about the time James Dean dumped her. A troublemaker, muscle for a local boss for a time, got into a numbers racket, and, I suppose, the source for Carisa’s drugs. Biker fanatic. How he met Dean, I understand.” He stopped.

“Why are you sharing this information with us?” I asked, finally.

“I suspect you know much of it already. And I’m hoping some of it—something I say—will trigger something in you, something you stumbled on. Either of you.”

“I don’t stumble onto things,” I said emphatically. “I uncover truth.”

His tongue rolled over his upper lip, then disappeared back into his mouth. “Manuel Vega says you ask very good questions.”

“Well, thank him for me.”

Again, the tongue, a wary gesture. “Maybe you’ll
hear
something.”

“And share it with you?”

“You’re a law-abiding citizen. And, so far, the only one here I can say with any certainly is
not
the murderer.”

“What about me?” asked Mercy. Cotton didn’t answer her.

“Did the autopsy show anything else besides her being pregnant?” I wondered.

He hesitated. “Well, yes. Seems she’d been killed some time just before you gals sauntered in. The M.E. says between seven and eight. You arrived at eight-thirty, just on the heels of the murder.”

“Good God,” said Mercy.

“Indeed, Miss McCambridge. The body was still warm.”

“And was she killed with that statue?” I asked.

He smiled. “Oh, that’s right. You were alone in the apartment. You noticed it before the cops got there.”

“It’s hard not to notice a body and a statue…”

“Lying right nearby. And did you note the kind of statue?”

“It looked like a fertility goddess.”

“That’s right. Aztlan, in fact. Aztec. Piece of chiseled stone. Weighty. Big bellied woman.”

“A good murder weapon.”

“But not what killed her, it seems.” He stopped, seemed to be waiting for me to say something.

“But…”

“Autopsy shows she died from smashing her head on the metal edge of a table. Looks like, so far’s we can reconstruct it, someone hit her with the statue, but it just grazed her shoulder, she fell, hit her head, bled to death in minutes. Being stoned didn’t help her. Traces of liquor and heroin in the bloodstream.”

“So it may not have been a premeditated murder,” I mused.

“Bingo. A fight, tempers flare. Suddenly she’s dead.” He paused. “And the interesting thing I learned from your favorite boy is that the statue was a gift from Mr. Dean himself. Strange.”

“Why is that strange?”

“A fertility statue to a pregnant unwed girl? Very Ellery Queen, no?”

I said nothing.

Cotton went on. “Someone threw the statue that was conveniently there. Then rifled through the drawers for a letter.”

“And took it away,” said Mercy. “The evidence.”

“So,” I concluded, “you need to find out which letters were removed.”

Cotton took a long time answering. “Or, to make my life easy, which letter was
not
removed by the murderer.”

“Meaning?”

Again, the deliberate wait, the calculated staring from me to Mercy. “It seems Carisa did hide
one
letter. One letter she did not, for some reason, keep in that drawer with the others. A letter Carisa Krausse hid under a pillow.”

I held my breath. “From?”

“Well.” He paused, stretching out the word, and then melodramatically removed a copy from a breast pocket. “From your boy Jimmy. Who, when asked right after the murder, said he
never
wrote any letters to her. None. Zippo. Nada. Who, me? Who, when he finishes shooting, is going to be shown this copy, which seems to contradict his statement to the police. Unless, of course, someone else forged his signature.”

Mercy and I stared, uncomfortable. I was tempted to snatch the letter from him, annoyed with his roundabout conversation, his purposeful leading up the revelation of the new letter. Silent now, I waited. After all, this was Cotton’s grandiose moment, and he wanted to work it his way. Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, American style. The debonair Rathbone in pinstriped suit, with carnation in buttonhole. Well, Cotton’s sliver of a moustache was in need of a barber’s trim: one corner was higher than the other.

“Well…” I began.

“Exactly.” He unfolded the sheet of paper. “And let me quote you a line from the newly discovered letter.” He skimmed what looked to be a neatly typed copy. “Oh, here it is. ‘You know this is a lot of crap from you and no one is going to take your crap seriously, you know.’” He paused. “No, that’s not exactly the line I wanted to read to you ladies. Oh, here it is. ‘You know, people can get hurt if they get in my way.’” He looked up, made eye contact with me. He echoed. “‘Hurt.’”

“I heard you,” I said, icily.

***

A half-hour later, sitting alone in the commissary, nursing coffee—Mercy left for an interview with Louella Parsons whom she deemed “that bastion of bathos”—I was in no mood for Tansi’s intense, excited assault.

“Edna,” she sputtered, pulling up a chair. “I’ve been looking for you. Detective Cotton is all over the lot. He’s mad because he just found some letter, but Jake won’t tell me what’s it about.” She drew in her breath. “Edna, they fingerprinted me this morning.”

I was not in the mood for Nancy Drew. “So?”

Tansi paused for an imperceptible second. “It was so
Public Enemy
or something. James Cagney.”

I was still fuming from Cotton’s surprise information; more so, his smug delivery, his toying with me.

“I mean, in my lifetime I would not have expected it,” Tansi continued. “We all had to go, of course. Warner sent a memo. Now
that
memo will be omitted from the
Giant
archives, I’m sure. Jake protested, said it was impossible. He hadn’t gone to Princeton to be treated like a common criminal. I went with him, but he fussed and fumed. On the way back he kept showing me his stained fingertips until I exploded and said he wasn’t Christ revealing some stigmata. You know what he said? ‘I’m not made for skullduggery.’ I loved it. Then he said: ‘All the hugger-mugger stuff is bad for my digestion.’”

I held up a hand to stop the flood. “Tansi, did Jake say anything about the murder investigation?”

“No, why?”

“Just wondering.”

“Jake has decided—I guess Warner, too—to ignore me. Everything goes through Jake. The fewer people who know, the fewer the leaks to gossip sheets. Jake did say that some writer at
Confidential
phoned Warner, started asking questions. That threw Warner into a panic.”

“Tansi, I just asked you if you’d heard anything, and you said no. And then you share the Jake story and
Confidential
.”

“But,” Tansi defended herself, “I thought you meant evidence.”

I was tired. “Whom did you see at the precinct?”

“Lydia Plummer was leaving, and not happy. She was with Nell Meyers, but they didn’t leave there together.”

“How do you know?”

“They were both leaving when we arrived. Lydia called a cab and Nell waited at the bus stop. Jake and I watched Lydia get in the cab, and I tell you, she looked like death itself: pale, fluttery, and nervous. Nell’s avoiding Lydia now. Afterward, I asked Nell about it. You know, by the way, she’s finally listening to me. She’s leaving the Studio Club—and Lydia. Since Carisa’s death, Lydia is often hysterical, crying jags, whispered nonsense, and imagined horrors. I guess she’s told Nell some things about dating Jimmy—but she said she still plans on marrying him. Other girls are the problem, she said. It’s crazy, no?”

“Why?”

“Jimmy has already told Lydia to get lost.” A pause. “Nell told me she thinks Lydia killed Carisa in an argument.”