Playland (67 page)

There was only one problem.

No one could find Blue Tyler.

In the end, she called Arthur.

She had been on the road ever since she left Hamtramck, always heading west, however haphazardly, traveling by bus and Amtrak, sometimes hitchhiking, a week here, three weeks there, traveling light, with just the one old suitcase still held together by a piece of rope. Twice a month she would go to the Western Union office in whatever town or city she had stopped, call the number Jimmy Riordan’s legitimate people had given her years before, and wait for her semimonthly check to be telegraphed to her. She stayed in motels and RV camps, always paid cash in advance, and discouraged overtures of friendship. When the stories about her began to break and her photograph seemed to appear simultaneously on all the nation’s newsstands and television channels, she knew it was only a matter of time before she was discovered, and not in the studio-controlled way she would have chosen if she still had script approval of her own life.

It was when this realization finally struck home that she telephoned Arthur in Nogales, only the second time she had called him in forty-two years, and the first since her arrest in Ypsilanti in 1979. The Mexican maid said Arthur was still in Los Angeles
recuperating from knee surgery, she could not give out the number, but if there was a message it would be relayed to him.

You tell him Wanda Nash called, Melba Mae Toolate said, you tell him it’s important, and she gave the maid the number of a pay phone in Cortez, Colorado, where she could be reached at six o’clock that afternoon, local time.

I’m at the end of my rope, Arthur, Blue Tyler said when she picked up the pay telephone on the first ring. Everyplace I go, people look at me. It’s like when I was a star. People say you look just like … and I just say my name is Wanda Nash, a lot of people say I look like her. I need a place to hide, Arthur, it’s like my life’s been taken away from me, maybe I’ve been alone too long, I didn’t think it’d be like this …

Here’s what I want you to do, Arthur French said.

I was surprised when Arthur called me, since I knew that he blamed me for all that had happened since the story broke. My error was finding Blue; in Arthur’s scheme this was a willful act, one that negated the possibility of Blue living out her days, more or less contentedly, as Melba Mae Toolate, with Arthur as her faraway provider and guardian angel, a role that was, of course, his
me absolvo
. To find her, in this interpretation, was to take advantage of her. Needless to say, it was self-serving for him to think this, as everyone, not excluding Arthur or myself, had in some way been taking advantage of Blue Tyler from the time she was four years old. But if Arthur was to help Blue, I was the one person he could call, because he was a sick, reclusive old man and I was his only friend, however strained that friendship had become, as well as his only contact with Melba Mae Toolate. He had also requested that I bring Chuckie along with me to Willingham, a considerable concession, because he knew Chuckie detested him, but Chuckie had known Blue Tyler as well as anyone ever had, he had been the keeper of her secrets, and there was no one else still alive who shared that kind of intimacy with her.

Arthur told us about the call.

“Where the hell is Cortez?” Chuckie said.

“Colorado,” Arthur said. He was still confined to his wheelchair and seemed to be in some pain. “On the way to Monument Valley.”

“Monument Valley?” Chuckie said incredulously, and when Arthur nodded, Chuckie turned to me and said, “Jack Ford country, Jack must’ve shot half dozen pictures there.”

“That’s why she wanted to see it,” Arthur said. “Remember
Fort Apache
? Well, she’s convinced herself Jack wanted her to play Philadelphia …”

“… the part Shirley Temple played,” Chuckie explained to me. I had never seen him so in his element. It was as if he was in preproduction, attending to casting. “Blue could never stand Shirley. She called her Lollipop, and she used to swear Shirley was a midget.”

Arthur smiled. “In drag.” He tried to readjust his legs on the ottoman, and the effort made him suddenly wince. “Now she says that after she got into her trouble, it was the studio that forced Jack to give the part to Shirley. She thinks if she had played Philadelphia, things would’ve turned out better for her.”

“And that’s what brought her to Cortez?” Chuckie said, shaking his head. “Jack Ford never would’ve let her play that part.” It had been years since he had been on a set, but he still understood the chemistry of film. “She’s living in a dream world.” He hesitated. “Is she …” He could not finish the sentence, but we knew that he meant was she crazy.

“She occasionally”—I sought the most mitigating phrase—“wanders from reality.”

Arthur nodded. The weeks of recuperation had cost him his range tan, and his skin looked gray and slack.

“I’d like you to go get her, Jack,” Arthur said.

“All right,” I said, surprised. “But how does she feel about it?”

“Okay. You made an impression. Mainly by not saying anything to anybody.” Speaking was an effort for Arthur, and he
paused to catch his breath every few sentences. “You fly to Denver. I’ve chartered a plane that’ll take you from there to Cortez, it’s a tiny little airport, no jet traffic. Pick her up and bring her to Nogales.”

“I’ll go with you,” Chuckie said.

“No,” Arthur said. “You and I’ll go down to Nogales together, Chuckie. We knew her in the old days. Jack’s the only one who knows her as Melba. I think we should keep the two lives separate for a while.

“I booked her into a Days Inn as Wanda Nash,” Arthur said to me after a moment. “Prepaid. I told her not to move until you get there. Get her down to the ranch quick. It’s only an hour’s flight. They’re expecting Mr. Broderick and a guest.”

I rose and shook Arthur’s hand. It was strange seeing him and Chuckie together, each well over seventy-five, embarking on a new adventure, the director and the head of the studio, Arthur being commanding, Chuckie being subversive, as it was in the old days.

“Jack,” Arthur said, a smile crinkling the corners of his mouth. “When we get this behind us, we should get back to work on our transplant picture. What were we going to call it?”

“
To an Athlete Dying Young
, Arthur,” I said.

There was no answer in Wanda Nash’s room.

“You know who she looks like?” the woman at the Days Inn desk said. Her plastic nametag identified her as Patia, and there was a rash of tiny, angry pimples on her chin.

“Blue Tyler,” I said, cocking a forefinger and pointing it at her. “Everyone says that. Especially since all this stuff started happening. I think she’s getting a little sick of it, you want the truth.”

“Live your own life, that’s what I always say,” Patia said, nodding vigorously in agreement.

“Absolutely,” I said.

I waited for an hour. The sun was beginning to go down, and the small airfield did not have night lights.

“You know Wanda?” Patia said, picking at her chin sores.

“She was a friend of my dad’s.” As indeed she might have been in her prior incarnation.

“Is that right?”

“Listen, I just want to make sure she’s okay. Is there any way you can let me take a look at her room. She’s not as young as she used to be, and I want to make sure she’s okay.”

“We’re not supposed to.”

“You can come with me.”

“Maybe she went shopping.”

“Any place to shop here?”

“Not really.” Patia tapped her pencil on the counter. “She into Indians? There’s a lot of reservations around here, Utes, Navajos. Maybe she went on a tour.”

“No, I don’t think so. She knew I was coming …”

“Well …”

“I’d really appreciate it …”

“You the police?”

“If I was a cop, I’d’ve been in there by now, wouldn’t I?”

“You’re the media, aren’t you?”

“No.”

Patia slapped the counter. “I knew she was that Blue Tyler, I just knew it.” She took a key from a box and I cursed myself for being so easy to read. “That could be a lot of money coming my way, and I saw her first, I’m not going to split it with you.”

We raced down the corridor. I knocked on Number 47. No answer. Patia elbowed me aside and unlocked the door. The room was empty. The bed had not been slept in. There was nothing in the drawers, nothing in the closet, nothing in the medicine cabinet. The paper covering on one of the bathroom glasses had been removed, a toilet seat cover was crumbled in a wastebasket, and the triangular fold in the toilet paper had been removed, but those were the only indications that anyone had ever been in the room.

We went back to the desk. A couple in shorts and backpacks were impatiently banging the bell at the desk. For a moment,
Patia hesitated, unsure whether to register the new guests or to follow me. “We’re full up,” she said.

“The sign outside said Rooms Available,” the woman backpacker said.

“Been so busy, haven’t had time to change it,” Patia said, following me out the door.

“You got a car?” she said outside.

I had rented one at the airport. The sun was down, there was no way I was going to get out on the plane that night, and I had to shed this virago. “Will you give me a lift?”

I got the answer I expected. “Not in your lifetime, buddy.”

I watched Patia as she roared out of the parking lot. I had no idea where she was going. Nor, I expect, did she. Greed with no destination. I went back to the pay phone in the lobby and dialed the general aviation hangar at the airport. My pilot was a short, bowlegged man named Neal whose only answer to anything I asked was “Okay by me.” The copilot was his son, Neal, Jr., who was so taciturn he hadn’t said a word since I picked up the plane in Denver. “We’re not going to get out tonight, Neal, so I’ll get us a couple of rooms here in town, we’ll have some dinner, a couple of drinks, and I’ll figure what I’m going to do next.”

“Okay by me, Mr. Broderick, it’s your tab.”

“I’ll come out, pick you up. There’s a Ramada we can stay at, and a steak place I noticed on the way in.”

“Okay by me,” Neal said. “You’re going to run into a real traffic jam, though.”