Playland (10 page)

Fame once experienced is a narcotic. In the theater of her dreams Melba Mae Toolate was still the famous Blue Tyler, and like so many famous people, she accepted the kindness of strangers as natural acts of fealty, no more than what she was due. At Cosmopolitan’s Little Red Schoolhouse (so called because studio art directors had built it on a soundstage and dressed it to resemble a prairie school, which it often was, in Cosmo’s low-budget program Westerns), it had been drilled into her that the toughest audience of all was that soundstage dress circle of hardened grips, gaffers, best boys, makeup men, and wardrobe mistresses, those who even in her adversity she still regarded as “the little people.” As I was a writer, and therefore
fore in her hierarchical scale a little person, I could never be immunized against her magic; in her mind her wish must always be my command. If she was to be rediscovered, if that was what the fates had ordained, then the denouement must be playable in a Blue Tyler vehicle. Little Sister Susan and Lily of the Valley transmogrified by the ravages of time into Apple Annie, a comeback vehicle she might consider if the billing and the money were right, and if the shitbirds in charge did not try to bring her to heel, harness her spirit, as they had always tried to do when she was on top. (Fuck them, she would say, suddenly, venomously, eyes aflame, like sulphur matches, the old memories like fishhooks caught in her gills, and fuck them again!) Admittedly a risky bet, a long shot, but if it worked, what a payoff.

M
aury Ahearne’s watch commander said he was in court testifying. I found him in the cafeteria during a recess. He did not seem surprised to see me. Nor curious about what might have happened after he threw me out of his car the previous day. To me a century before. “Say hello to Jerome Highsmith,” he said, waving in the general direction of a huge black man standing in front of the cafeteria’s bank of vending machines.

Jerome Highsmith kicked a candy machine with the toe of a steel-plated industrial work shoe. It teetered until I thought it was going to topple over on him before rocking back into place. A second kick, and a third. Still no coins in the coin return, no candy bar in the tray. Jerome Highsmith stepped back, taking the measure of the machine, then removed his moth-eaten brown sweater. Deliberately he wrapped it over his right hand and made a fist, clenching and unclenching it. Suddenly glass shattered as Jerome Highsmith smashed his covered fist through the vending machine’s display window. I started as if a gun had gone off. Jerome Highsmith stared belligerently at me, daring me to object, then reached through the shards of glass and removed a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. He stripped away
the foil, licking his fingers for any chocolate that might have stuck to them, then pushed the whole bar into his mouth, closing his eyes as he chewed, a dreamy look on his face.

“I would have thought that was against the law.”

Maury Ahearne scratched a scab on his scalp and examined the residue in his fingernails. “So make a citizen’s arrest.” More scratching, more scab. “I bust him, then he doesn’t testify when we go back inside. He doesn’t testify, there’s no case, and this guy Emmett that’s on trial walks. It’s a question of who you want on the bricks. Emmett or Jerome.” He smiled. One of those smiles designed to show how ignorant I was in the ways of his world. “Doesn’t mean a shit to me. Jerome took out a guy for a pack of cigarettes once, he’s such a solid citizen. Emmett’s up because he did a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. The reason he did him is he’s got this new gun, a Glock he stole from some white guy shoots at a target range, you know, with the earmuffs so the noise don’t hurt his ears.” In his world guns were supposed to make noise, and the noise was supposed to scare people, and people who wore earmuffs not to hear the noise were pussy hairs. “He wanted to see if it worked, Emmett.” Another smile. “It did.” The inevitability of the result seemed to satisfy him. “So Emmett stole his wallet and nine Hoovers while he was at it. A Cuban guy, the salesman. Ignorant fuck, thinking he was going to sell a vacuum cleaner to those people, you ever look at the shitholes they live in? But ‘Cuban’ means ‘white’ to the D.A. Killing white, can’t have that, he says. Waste of time. He’s going to walk, Emmett, Jerome or no Jerome.” It was like listening to an oral historian of urban carnage and anthropology. “Twelve jurors, two alternates, and ten of the fourteen are wearing shades, cool as shit. Judge loses his car keys yesterday, he was pissing and moaning about it to the court reporter, and one of the jurors raises his hand and says, ‘Your Holiness,’ I swear to Christ, that’s what he says, ‘Your Holiness,’ and then he proceeds to tell His Holiness how to hot-wire his fucking car. So I ran a check on him. What he does is work in a chop shop. Naturally. And draw unemployment.
Naturally.” The detective detecting. “Forget the judge’s car, this guy could hot-wire an F-16. Then break it down and sell the spare parts to Saddam whatever the fuck that A-rab’s last name is. Bet the fucking house Emmett’s going to walk.”

I looked around the cafeteria. On the walls were shadowy outlines of oversized graffiti cocks and cunts that custodial scrubbing had not quite succeeded in erasing.

“So.” Another Maury Ahearne smile. “You survived.”

No thanks to you, I thought. Perhaps he had been standing by the day before after all, ready to move in if the situation did get out of hand. I was not going to give him the satisfaction of asking. He would have answered that my murder was not worth the paperwork or the overtime. I had also bought a new tape recorder. Two, in fact. A spare in case Maury Ahearne destroyed another one. “I need some information.”

He showed no interest.

“I was coming back to the hotel last night …”

“From where …”

“Someplace out near Grosse Pointe.”

“What were you doing out there?”

“Getting laid.” I was learning. It was exactly the kind of answer I knew would satisfy him. “Anyway. I was in a cab, the driver got lost, the cab hit a dog, the lady that owned the dog, some kind of bag lady, she got all twisted out of shape, and the long and the short of it is she gave a cop some lip and got herself a citation.”

“So.”

“I’d like to know something about her. Help her out if I can. In some way.” It sounded fraudulent even to me, as I knew it must to him, suspicion being the coin of his realm.

“You’re yanking my chain.”

I was suddenly very sick of Maury Ahearne. “Yes, I am.” Why not admit it? It had the virtue of honesty, a virtue that had not exactly informed our relationship. “I’m curious about her. If that’s not good enough for you, go fuck yourself.”

It was a tone he was used to, one he would work with. “So
what’s in it for me?” He held up five fingers. I held up two. “Two now, three later,” he said. It seemed safer not to bargain. Five hundred for everything he could get on Melba Mae Too-late. A name I had not even known until it appeared in Walter Scott’s
Personality Parade
along with mine the day Lizzie was killed.

Maury Ahearne could not resist the last word. “You’re still jerking me around. That’s okay. When I find out why, and I will, we’ll play some more.”

Maury Ahearne had the information by the next afternoon. Melba Mae Toolate lived in the Autumn Breeze RV camp near Hamtramck, Slot 123, Forsythia Lane. She had been married eleven times, according to the records kept by the domestic relations court, she had been arrested seven times for disturbing the peace, usually for fighting with her neighbors in various RV camps over the number of dogs and cats, sometimes twenty or more, she let live in her trailer of the moment. The courts finally made her give all her animals save one to the pound. At various times she had used the names Mae Tyler and Melba Blue. In 1979 there had been a drug bust in Ypsilanti, but the charges were reduced to disorderly conduct and were subsequently dropped, without a hearing, for insufficient evidence. She was currently unemployed, and there was no record of recent employment, nor any record of taxes of any kind having been withheld.

“That’s the funny part,” Maury Ahearne said.

“Why?”

“She’s not on welfare. No public assistance of any kind. I checked all the way to Lansing.”

“Which means?”

“Well, it’s not exactly pig heaven she’s living in out there, but she’s not on the streets either. She seems to survive without a tin cup.”

I considered his silence. “So someone must be kicking in something.”

The awful smile. “Unless she’s got one of those trust funds rich people like you got.”

I vertically creased three one-hundred-dollar bills and handed them to him. “Thanks, Maury.”

“I’ll be in touch.”

On that I should have made book.

I
magine it:

The Autumn Breeze trailer park and recreational-vehicle encampment, with its RVs and house trailers neatly lined up like a military armored column, tanks and APCs on parade, each mobile home with corrugated aluminum awnings, some with metal window boxes filled with plastic flowers that had long since lost whatever color they might once have had. The streets in the trailer park had been carefully laid out into lanes, and every lane was named after a flower, Camellia Lane, Poinsettia Lane, Forsythia Lane. Every RV and trailer had its own slot, with a sidewalk and a mailbox and a tiny patch of sad brown lawn that could be crossed in a stride and a half.

Slot 123 Forsythia Lane then: The trailer was pale blue and an even paler bleached yellow. The name on the mailbox was “Occupant,” an attempt at humor that antedated the current tenant, although she said she was perfectly comfortable with the designation, an assertion one could hardly doubt, as she had by choice (as well as by circumstance) been one of the world’s missing for over thirty years. She claimed not to know the names of her neighbors, and could identify them only by their
physical ailments, the randy old fart with the prostate cancer in Slot 122, I give him a semi, she said, and the old prune with Alzheimer’s in 124, and there was one in 210 over on Poinsettia that died in her sleep, and no one knew she’d gone until the smell got so bad, the mailman complained, what happened was her cat had chewed up her nose and sucked out her eyeballs, can’t blame the kitty, nothing else to eat. She said her neighbors called her Mrs. Toolate, pronouncing it Too-Late, which suits me fine.

When the item about Blue Tyler had appeared in Walter Scott’s
Personality Parade
, Melba Mae Toolate said, she was living in Pontiac then, and she had said no, she was not the one, she was Melba, not Myrna Marie, like Walter said, and she was alive and here to tell about it, not like that Myrna Marie, dead and buried in Kalamazoo, anyway she was only a Toolate by marriage, but she had always heard tell that her husband’s second cousin once or twice removed had once been in show business,
Your Show of Shows
she thought was the program the second cousin by marriage had been on, then she had a mastectomy and retired, she had heard, singers with one boob not being much in demand, what with the strapless gowns they all wear, and their titties all pushed up, that was all she knew about it, and anyway that branch of the family pronounced it fancy, Too-lah-tee, la-di-da. The explanation seemed to satisfy, but she moved from that RV camp near Pontiac a week or so later, so she could be closer to her daughter, she said at the time, a daughter she had never before mentioned, come to think of it, and moved to Hamtramck.

There was foil crimped in the windows of the trailer, a precaution against the summer heat, and a skirt of heavy fabric wrapped around the undercarriage, insulation against the winter cold, and there was a fake wrought-iron fence leading to the two rickety metal steps outside the front door, and on the top step there was a worn hemp doormat on which could be made out the word welcome.

Well, hell, yes, she said, I know who you are, you were in Walter Scott’s
Personality Parade
the same day I was, and if that’s not a pisser, I don’t know what is, we’re in the same newspaper column and then, what is it now, six, seven months later, you hit my dog, then you turn up the next day at Number 123 Forsythia Lane, Ms. Toolate, you say, get that,
Ms
., in Hamtramck, Michigan, you don’t say
Ms
., asshole, then the fancy-Dan Too-lah-tee, my name is Jack Broderick, shit, honey, you are big rich, richer than Mr. French and Arthur put together, of course I know who Jack Broderick is, Bro Broderick’s brother, Hugh Broderick’s son, I think I might’ve even fucked your dad one time, or it could’ve been one of those Rockefellers, maybe it was Bill Paley or Jock Whitney, whoever it was he painted his pecker with gentian violet, because he was afraid of the clap, or was that my driver on
Freedom Belle
, anyway, I would have gone to Mr. French and complained if some writer came up with a coincidence like that, you and me meeting the way we did when we were both in Walter Scott’s
Personality Parade
, and Mr. French would have said, Arthur, that was his son Arthur, Arthur was my fiancé in those days, Arthur, go get Lamar Trotti or Nunnally Johnson or Reilly Holt or one of them to smooth out the story line, Reilly Holt was Chuckie O’Hara’s boyfriend, I bet you didn’t know that, he was a big-time Commie, but you got to admit it needs work, the way we met, and there’s one thing I was always good at, that was structure, you can ask Arthur, he’ll tell you, I was the best on the lot, and it’s cold out there, isn’t it, come on in here and take a load off your feet, do I have a story to tell you, and one more thing, now that I think of it, maybe I do like that coincidence, it has a certain je ne sais quoi, and I bet you never thought you’d hear any of that French shit in some RV camp in Hamtramck, Michigan, the reason is I took French at the studio school and I always had a French governess all those years I was at Cosmo, the number-one box office star in the country, that was Mr. French’s idea, Mr. French’s French idea, that’s cute, it’s a fairy tale is what it is, the way we met, and fairy tales was what the Industry was all about in my time, before
you got all this
Raging Bull
shit, with the dirty words, they only make pictures about fat people today, and Italians, and whatever happened to tall actors, Randy Scott was tall, Cary, too, and Clark, but every one of them around today is a Singer midget, Richard Dreyfuss, Dustin What’s-his-face, Pacino, none of them any taller than an agent, that Dustin’s got a face like a dirt road, you ask me, and you out there in 124, stop listening, she’s loony, and what’s-his-face in 122, he wants to get in my pants, and I want to tell you, if he ever knew whose pants he wanted to get into, he would cream in those polyester jeans he wears, he probably beat off in the balcony when he saw me in
Little Sister Susan
, and you know something, I didn’t know this at the time, because the publicity department handled all my mail, I never saw it except when President Roosevelt wrote me, or someone like that Chiang Kai whatever his last name was, the Chinaman, but some of my fan mail had come in it, Arthur told me that.
Jism
, can you believe it?