Playland (61 page)

It is compelling to read the minutiae of a homicide investigation, and to see the number of lives touched by that investigation, and how often, in the course of the digging and detecting, a mosaic of petty treasons, moral misdemeanors, quiet desperation, and even evil as an abstraction is uncovered having nothing to do with the crime in question, only with the permutations of life itself. I wish I could tell you that my own examination of the evidence, when I was armed with information unavailable to Lieutenant Spellacy, helped solve the murder of Meta Dierdorf, as it would in a tidier narrative, and that her killer was one of my principals, or in some way connected to them, but in fact she will probably rest in eternity with her murderer undiscovered. In one of his private notes, remember, Lieutenant Spellacy had wondered if she was “just unlucky,” and just unlucky seems a perfect description of this beautiful, spoiled, unloved, wanton, larcenous, and not-overly-bright child. Meta Dierdorf is, however, not simply a digression, the kind English departments tell you occur so often in what they call the “baggy monster” novels of the great Victorians—
Vanity Fair
, say, or
Bleak House
, or
Middlemarch
. As you may have intuited, I did ultimately learn the identity of “V,” “Vida,” or “Vide,” and while the knowledge was eminently helpful in driving my narrative toward its conclusion, it was just another salacious sidebar to the unseemly and unlucky life of Meta Dierdorf.

Beautiful, spoiled, unloved, wanton, larcenous, and not overly bright—words that might also have described Blue Tyler.

Who was lucky.

Or perhaps just unlucky in other ways.

I
t was Chuckie who cleared up the identity of “V.” I had let him see the forensic photographs and some of the more lewd and lubricious passages of the crime book—the confession of Captain Benedict that he was responsible for two but not three of the used rubbers in Meta Dierdorf’s bedroom, and that the semen in her mouth was not his, particularly titillated him, as did Dorothy Estrella’s comment on the size of Harold Eustis’s organ—and it was after he had read it that I happened to mention to him the mysterious Vida.

He shook his head.

Sometimes referred to as “V,” other times as “Vida,” and still other times as “Vide.”

Vide? he said suddenly.

You know?

It was Blue. That was her nickname at that stupid studio school. I haven’t heard it in fifty years.

Why Vide?

French. For her initials.

B.T., I said incredulously.

No, Jack. M.T. For Melba Toolate.

I don’t get it, Chuckie, I said with some irritation.

Just listen. She hated being called Melba. But for some bureaucratic reason, her name was never legally changed until she was in her teens. So she was registered as Melba Toolate with the Los Angeles County department of whatever it was that had oversight at the school. Anyway, all the students took a beginners’ French course. Her initials were M.T. M.T. as in “empty glass.”
Empty
in French is—

Vide
, I said.

And that’s what they called her at the school. Vide. She didn’t mind that. As long as no one called her Melba. She was always spouting her ludicrous French on the set.

It has a certain je ne sais quoi
, she had said that first day at the Autumn Breeze trailer park, 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
.

And her schoolmate Meta:

V demain—$$$$$ … Vide—ici avec Monsieur Pepe La Moko, ooo la la, peut-être cinquante dollars … beaucoup l’argent pour ma silence …

If I had to make an educated guess, Chuckie O’Hara said, I would bet that apartment was where Walker Franklin was boning her. I mean, he couldn’t just check into a hotel with her, it was simply not done, even if she was of age, and she couldn’t do it at home, because the staff was all on Moe’s payroll, and she certainly wasn’t going to go down to Central Avenue, that was for a cruiser with a taste for danger.

Like you, I said.

Like me, Chuckie said, smiling as if remembering days of youth and thunder and a perpetual bone. They had to have a place to meet, a place they could get in and out of without anyone seeing them, and I think Miss Dierdorf might have provided it, and if anyone asked questions, they were just two little girls doing their homework together. The father was never
around much, he was always one step ahead of the law, from what you tell me, and this kid was essentially on her own. For Blue, a dream setup.

When did she begin sleeping with Walker Franklin?

Right after Carole Lombard died. I was supposed to direct her in
Cotton Candy
, but the Marines called me up, and Alan Shay was assigned to the picture. The night before I reported to Camp Pendleton, this was in February 1942, maybe March, there was a party for me. That’s when she hinted about it. A few years before, it was at the wrap party for
Lily of the Valley
, I think, she’d caught me in the kitchen doing something naughty with the butler, and after that she told Aunty Charlton everything.

Her way of paying back Moe, I said.

Can you blame her?

Then she gets knocked up and goes to Lou Lerner, the studio doctor, and he takes care of it.

He was a sleaze, Lou, Chuckie said. He was going to get arrested for selling morphine one time, then Lilo made some calls, and after that he was in Lilo’s pocket. You went to get a blood test, and Lilo knew the results before you did.

What about Blue and the girl then?

A little teenage muff-diving, I’d assume, Jack. Nothing serious.

Chuckie, she’s kept her photograph ever since. Had dozens of postcards made. She still carries them around with her.

First love and other sorrows, Chuckie said.

But she was blackmailing her.

No, not really. It gave Blue a place she could go fuck without anyone really knowing about it. She had the money, and the other girl was broke. Teenagers don’t think in terms of blackmail. She was helping her friend out.

You think Lilo knew?

Lilo knew everything, Chuckie said. I used to think it was Lilo who counted out the thirty pieces of silver for Judas Iscariot. Or at least negotiated the price.

And then Moe picked up on the girl, I said.

Kismet, Chuckie said.

Did Lilo fill Moe in?

I wouldn’t think so. It was Lilo’s card to play. Why fill in Moe until he had to?

The way he kept what he knew about Blue and Walker Franklin for a rainy day, I said.

Exactly.

One thing bothers me, Chuckie.

You want to know why Arthur just volunteered it to you about Meta and his father?

Right.

Because Arthur didn’t know what and how much you knew, Chuckie O’Hara said. You were being just as cagey as he was, Jack, Arthur knew that, and he was just trying to buy time.

Bad dreams.

Too many questions. Where had Arthur been the night Meta Dierdorf was killed?

In San Francisco, it turned out, with Blue and Lilo Kusack, showing a propaganda film he had made about women war workers to President Truman, there with Mrs. Truman, who was christening the aircraft carrier
Manila Bay
at the Mare Island shipyard.

As alibis go, not bad.

And where was Melba Mae Toolate?

No sightings, Maury Ahearne reported in his nocturnal check-ins. But the word was out. He had friends. The friends owed him.

Maury was suffused with a sense of self-importance.

And Meta Dierdorf had just been unlucky.

Y
ou got a fax machine?” It was nearly four in the morning, and it took a moment to shake myself awake and recognize Maury Ahearne’s voice. I muttered yes, and gave him the number. I knew enough not to ask him what it was. It would be on the fax, which began coming through almost immediately. It appeared to be a letter. The childish script was unmistakably that of Melba Mae Toolate. “Happy birthday, baby, wherever you are now,” the letter began. “You’d be 42 this year, twice as old as I was when I had you, and if you’ve learned one thing by now you’ve learned that all men are snakes …”

The letter went no further.

The telephone was ringing. “Where’d you get this?” I said as soon as I picked up, wide awake now.

“The guy who runs the trailer park where she was,” Maury Ahearne said. “August Johnson. There’s a new couple in that RV she was in, and the wife found a whole bunch of these in a folder wedged behind the medicine cabinet. All dated the same day back through the years, twenty years or more, none more than a page or two long, some just a few lines, all beginning the same way. The one you got was the last one.”

“The date was the day before she skipped.”

“That’s it,” Maury Ahearne said. “This lady, the one that rents Slot 123 now, she gives the folder to August Johnson, and he gets in touch with me. Like I told him to …”

“… when you busted into her RV, and told him it was police business and scared the shit out of him.”

“Oh,” Maury Ahearne said. “And I just thought he was a citizen doing his duty.”

I had no tolerance for his jokes anymore. “Can you send them to me?”

“I’ll have copies made.” Meaning he would keep the originals. The originals might have monetary value. “You know she had a kid?”

“No.”

“The kid is where the money is,” Maury Ahearne said.

Even after reading the letter Maury Ahearne faxed, I was still not entirely convinced Blue Tyler actually had a daughter. I had of course read about one in the clips, and about its putative fathers, but I thought it more than likely she had concocted a daughter the way a child invents an imaginary friend. It seemed to me a cri de coeur from a lonely, aging, perhaps periodically mad woman in Slot 123, Forsythia Lane, at the Autumn Breeze trailer park and recreational vehicle encampment, a woman whose only real family life after she was abandoned by Cosmopolitan Pictures was with the shut-ins she visited in her position as chairperson of the Shut-in Committee at St. Anton the Magyar’s Church, in Hamtramck, Michigan 48212.

But after reading the entire packet of letters, I was not so sure.

The letters were all handwritten, on lined notebook paper (from the kind of spiral notebook I had seen her buy at Farmer Dell’s what now seemed a century ago), every one dated, but without the year included. I rechecked the date Jacob King was assassinated; the anniversary of his death was eight months less nine days before the date on each of these letters, meaning that
if indeed the child did exist, Blue was pregnant the night Jacob was murdered. Jacob King was sleeping with her in the appropriate time frame, and Arthur French would not deny that he was also. Not that they were the only candidates. She had a history of sport- and grudge-fucking, and her capacity for holding a grudge for some slight, real or imagined, from one of her equals or betters, was bottomless; her method of payback was to favor social inferiors with her favors—gofers and chauffeurs, grips and gaffers. It was a pointless promiscuity, the kind of revenge a child indulges in, but of course a child was what she was, even unto her exile at the Autumn Breeze in Hamtramck, Michigan.