Murder on High (26 page)

“To our surprise, really, she didn’t stop there,” Perkins continued. “She went on to implicate others, people whose names had never come up before. I remember it so clearly because it was such a coup for us.”

“Who were they?” asked Charlotte, who had never had much patience for this kind of game-playing.

He smiled again. “You know the answer already. That’s why you’re here. To confirm your suspicions.” He nodded slightly at her, signaling an affirmative reply. “Well, your suspicions are correct.”

What was he talking about? she wondered. She hadn’t even told him about Iris’ murder, much less about her theory that the murderer was someone who was out to avenge Iris’ testimony.

He shifted his attention from the show back to Charlotte, baffled by her puzzled reaction. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”

“Isn’t
what
why I’m here?”

“To confirm that she testified against you.”

“She testified against me!” she repeated dumbly.

“Yes. You, among others. But your name was the real coup for us. Her associate, Charlotte Graham—who would have thought that you were a Communist?”

“But I wasn’t a Communist!” she protested.

“Yes, but you associated with Communists, didn’t you? Iris O’Connor foremost among them.”

“Iris was my screenwriter for ten years. We did seventeen films together. Of
course
I associated with her.” She paused for a moment to calm herself; she was practically yelling at him. “But even she wasn’t a member of the Party. Not that I knew of, anyway.”

“The Screen Writers’ Guild was infested with Communists,” he said.

The logic was mind-boggling. Iris was a Communist because the Screen Writers’ Guild was infested with Communists. Charlotte was a Communist because she had known Iris. “Talk about guilt by association!” she said. It was almost as bad as the actor who had been at the same bullfight with Picasso.

Perkins merely shrugged.

And what about the effects of Iris’ testimony on her own career? she wondered. In one overpowering wave, it all became clear to her. The reason she hadn’t been able to get work wasn’t because she had been too old to play young women and too young to play old women, but because she had been blacklisted.

“I was blacklisted?” she asked.

But even as she spoke, she knew it didn’t make sense. People who were blacklisted knew it, and had the opportunity to salvage their careers by renouncing their Communist pasts. Ron Polito, for one, had made a career out of guiding blacklisted actors and screenwriters through the tricky waters of rehabilitation. But no one had ever told her that her name was on a list.

“A better term would be graylisted.”

“Ah! Graylisted,” she repeated. Graylisted explained it, she thought. Tarnished enough that no one would hire her, but not black enough to be rehabilitated. A gorge of bitterness rose in her throat. Iris must have known what she was doing. You didn’t name names to HUAC—even just as an associate—without recognizing what the consequences would be.

For a moment, she felt faint. How could she not have realized what was going on? All that time, she had thought the reason she wasn’t getting work lay with
her
. All those years she had felt guilty for not doing enough to help; when she had unwittingly been cheated out of ten years of her career.

“Who
else
did Iris list as her associate?” She spat out the last word.

“Let me think,” said Perkins, leaning his head back against the recliner again, his hands folded calmly over his bulging belly.

“Or, better put,” she said, “what other lives did she ruin?”

Perkins didn’t seem to take offense at the venom in her voice. She supposed that forty years of such questions had inured him to their sting.

“She named a lot of names. Well over fifty …”

Charlotte gasped. Where was Iris’ sense of morality, her self-respect? She hadn’t just sung the same old song, she had sung a whole repertoire.

“Almost all of them were people whose lives had already been ruined, to couch my reply in your terms,” he said amiably, “except for—” He raised a finger. “There
was
someone else.”

“Who?” she prompted.

“Linc Crawford.”

Charlotte leaned back as if the wind had been knocked out of her. She remembered that afternoon well—it had been at the Marmont, in fact, when Linc had been called away from the poolside for a phone call.

He had returned a few minutes later, his tanned, handsome face ashen. “Jesus!” he had said. “That was J. Edgar Hoover calling to tell me that my passport’s been revoked. He said it wasn’t in the best interests of the United States for me to travel abroad. I have to testify before HUAC.”

Unlike Charlotte, Linc had actually attended a few Communist Party meetings in his youth. Partly idealism, partly curiosity, he said. Partly stupidity, he said in retrospect. But he had also served with distinction in the Army during the war, and was about as loyal an American as they came.

After Hoover’s call, he had gone to Washington to testify. He had admitted attending a couple of Party meetings, but he denied that he was a Communist, and he refused to name anyone he had encountered at those meetings.

“War Hero Admits He’s a Commie!” the headlines had screamed. “Crawford Bares Commie Past”; “Crawford Confesses All”; “Screen Idol is Ex-Red.”

He had taken the honorable path. He wouldn’t even hire someone like Ron to stand by his side, much less stoop to signing on with one of the “smear and clear” organizations—if you named names, they’d get you cleared. Or even worse, buy a clearance, in the same way that medieval sinners bought indulgences from corrupt clerics to save themselves from perdition.

He had paid dearly for his scruples. He didn’t go to jail, but he didn’t get any work either. He slipped into a depression, started to drink. His wife sued for sole custody of their two sons, and won. Even his life insurance was canceled because his chances of living out a normal life were too slim. “On a par with a gangster or a steeplejack,” the insurance agent had told him.

Then, four years later, came
Red Rocks
. A talented, iconoclastic young director named William Ireland had been willing to thumb his nose at the studios, and take a chance on Linc. From the start, everyone involved knew that
Red Rocks
was going to be a classic. It was also going to be Linc’s comeback vehicle.

But by the time
Red Rocks
was released, he was dead. The insurance agent had been right about his chances of living out a normal life.

Charlotte had never quite gotten over Linc’s death. If she couldn’t punch Perkins in his fat, smug nose, she at least wanted to leave him with some stinging retort, but she was too stunned to say anything, and ended up stumbling blindly out of the antiseptic tract house and into the opaque sunshine of the late California afternoon.

She remembered nothing about the drive back to Hollywood, except a stupefying numbness. And the glare of the freeway: the harsh, disconnected light that reduced everything it touched to the flat, emotionless status of an object, that penetrated into every corner and ground down every projection. She had the feeling that the soft underside of her own life, and that of Linc’s as well, had just been exposed to such a light, a light that revealed secrets that had long been concealed, and that accentuated the deep wounds and the ugly scars. She wanted to just switch it off, and go back to that soft darkness, but now that she had seen what was there, there was no getting it out of her mind. With time, she hoped, the harsh glare would fade. The wounds and scars would still be there, of course; but they would be less disturbing if their ragged edges were allowed to recede back into the shadows.

Without even realizing it, she had driven back to the Marmont. She had been planning to stay at her co-op in West Hollywood, but now that she was here, she realized that she needed to go back to the place where she and Linc had spent so much time together. She also needed the comfort of being near a friend who had also lived through those crazy times.

A few minutes later, she was standing at the door of the bungalow.

“Oh, Ron!” she cried as he answered the door. Then she fell into his arms.

It was the next morning before she was even able to think. She had ended up spending the night in one of the two bedrooms at the bungalow, unable to forsake its cozy comfort. Awakening to the smell of roses and the chattering of the birds, she remembered why she was there. She sat up in bed, and went over again what she knew: someone was looking for Iris, probably because of her testimony before the HUAC inquisitors. Everyone Iris had named was a known Communist, and had nothing more to lose by being named yet again. Except for two: herself and Linc. She was out: her life hadn’t been ruined by Iris’ testimony. Or at least, not that she had been aware of until now. Which left Linc. Or rather, Linc’s sons. They were the only ones she could think of who might have wanted to avenge Linc’s ruined career. They had been small when she had known them; the elder, Brent, had been only eleven when Linc died, and the younger, Johnny, seven or eight. But they had loved their father. Linc’s being branded a Communist had given his ex-wife the ammunition she needed to prevent him from seeing them. According to Linc, she was a selfish, lazy, bitter woman, who only wanted the children to get back at him. Subject to outbursts of bizarre behavior, she had later been hospitalized for schizophrenia. Though Charlotte had seen the boys often on their frequent visits with Linc before the custody battle, she had lost touch with them after his death. What had become of them? she wondered. Then she remembered Linc’s sister. Maybe she would know. Charlotte and Linc had visited her several times in the New Jersey suburb where Linc had grown up. Could it be that she still lived there? Charlotte tried to remember her married name: Kelly, no; Kenney, no; Kinney, yes. Elaine Kinney. Her husband had been a Bill.

Picking up the phone on the bedside table, she called long distance information and asked for the Kinneys’ number. To her astonishment, the operator gave it to her right away. They still lived on the same street. Then she called Tracey and told him what Perkins had said about Iris’ testimony, and that she was planning to talk with Linc’s sister about the boys.

She left Los Angeles a day later, after a meeting at the Beverly Wilshire with her agent and a producer about a movie project that sounded as if it were about to die in development hell, as ninety percent of them seemed to do. Which left her back where she had been before: facing the twice-postponed deadline on her autobiography, a matter that she would rather not have thought about at the moment (though at least she now had something to say about the middle period of her life). On the plane ride back, she turned her thoughts instead to the case, remembering the feeling she had had at the beginning that the pieces of Iris’ life didn’t add up. Now she had the missing piece: the piece that was the link between Hollywood and Maine. Or maybe it was just
a
missing piece; she was sure there would be others. With an important piece now in hand, she lined up what she had in her head, the way a jigsaw puzzle player lines up the pieces he thinks will be needed for a particular section. After betraying her friends (just thinking about it made Charlotte want to spit), Iris had left Hollywood—not on account of being blacklisted, not even on account of world weariness or the desire for solitude—but out of self-loathing, and perhaps, fear of being considered a pariah by her friends. She retired to Hilltop Farm with her bottle, and developed the Thoreau connection. How, Charlotte still wasn’t sure—not that it was important. If she’d been a friendly witness, it wasn’t on account of
Civil Disobedience
. Maybe it was just on account of being in Old Town.

Reminded of that essay, Charlotte remembered a line that Thoreau had quoted to her character, Margaret Fuller, in
On Walden Pond:
“Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man’s real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death.” Iris had chosen to bleed to an everlasting death in Maine, by living a life of austerity and solitude. Perhaps she had adopted Thoreau’s philosophy not out of conviction, but as a form of self-recrimination, his words and his way of life being a penance for her sins. Why else would she have set up that secret altar to her past in the green-wallpapered room? Charlotte asked herself. If she had truly taken Thoreau’s philosophy to heart, she would simply have buried her past in the same way that that young vision quester had buried his past in the grave in the dingle next to Little Beaver Pond, and started over. But by keeping a light burning at the altar of her misdeeds, it seemed to Charlotte that she had in some sense been opening the door to the retribution of the fates. Instead of ignoring her dark side—or getting rid of it in any of the many ways one could—by burying it, laughing at it, rising above it—she had appeased it with offerings, and it had responded by coming back for more. Pamola had been her nemesis.

The idea that Iris may have been murdered by a specter out of her past was an intriguing one: it appealed to Charlotte’s dramatic sensibilities. But when she looked at it more rationally, it sounded quite fantastic. First there was the basic question: Would the forty-year-old ruin of a career be motive enough for murder? Then there were the more ordinary ones: How would one of Linc’s sons have ended up on a mountain in Maine with a pistol crossbow? How would he have known that Iris would be climbing the mountain that day? How would he have known of Coley’s camp? Her head spinning, she dismissed the premise of one of Linc’s sons being the murderer as being too farfetched. Keith was the far more likely suspect, especially when one considered that the probable weapon was a crossbow with an Indian charm on it. He had called Coley one of Black Elk’s Blue Men—a man driven by jealousy and greed—but maybe it was
he
who was the Blue Man. Keith had criticized Coley for being a self-appointed shaman, but it seemed to Charlotte that he was playing the same game, albeit more subtly and with more success. “Keith is a pipe-carrier,” Didias had informed her with the utmost solemnity. Which meant that he was the king of his own little spiritual realm. It seemed to Charlotte, as she came across reproductions of medicine shields and kachina dolls everywhere she went, that Native American spirituality was going to be to the nineties what Eastern spirituality had been to the sixties and seventies. How much better to be king of a bigger spiritual realm, by riding the crest of a wave of New Age fascination with Native-American ways?