The Hollywood Trilogy (37 page)

Jody hung up and got information again and asked for the telephone number of a cab company, and then called for a taxi. The dispatcher told her it would be twenty minutes. Jody hung up and went back into the bedroom.

“I called a doctor,” she said. “Do you have any money?” But even as she spoke she could see that Lindy was already dead. She went out and sat in the living room, waiting for the taxi to come. When the driver came she told him, “My sister's dead. I don't know what to do.”

The driver was a young man with a sprig of daphne tucked into his hat. When he heard Jody's words he backed out and closed the door. Jody went back in and sat down. She really did not know what to do. She did not want to cry. She felt totally empty of emotion. One smart thing would be to walk
out of that place and pretend she had never been there, but that would be deserting Lindy. Finally, she got on the telephone again and called the police.

They asked her a lot of questions, and finally they took her down to the police station and turned her over to a woman in the Juvenile Division. The woman took her into a small room furnished with only two chairs and a desk.

The woman said, “Are you going to be all right?”

Jody said, “Yes. I'm okay.”

“The officers tell me the girl who passed away is your sister.”

“That's right,” Jody said.

“Do you have any idea what happened to her?”

“No, I don't.”

“How did you happen to be there in her apartment? Isn't this a school day for you?”

“Yes. I cut school. I do it all the time.”

“Then, as you told the officers, you simply came down to visit your sister and found her dead.”

“No. I came and found her sick. She asked me to call for a doctor and I tried to but nobody would come. Then she died, so I called the police.”

The woman was silent for a few moments, looking at Jody. Jody looked at the floor. Then the woman said, “Jody, listen to me. Your sister was killed. Somebody tried to perform an abortion on her and killed her. If you know anything about this, it's your duty and obligation to your sister to tell us, so that we can catch these people and keep them from killing other young girls. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” Jody said.

“Do you know anything about who did this to her?”

“No,” Jody said.

The woman waited a few moments and then said, “Did you love your sister? Were you girls close?”

“Yes,” Jody said.

“Then why won't you tell me what I want to know?”

“Because I don't know anything to tell you,” Jody said.

After another pause, the woman said, “All right. I'm sorry about all this. But we want to find out who these people are and stop them. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Jody said.

“I didn't mean to be harsh or cruel.”

Jody looked up at the woman. “I know it,” she said.

The woman stood up. “Someone will take you to your mother,” she said. “I'll leave you alone now.”

Jody did not look forward to seeing her mother.

THIRTEEN

JODY DID not want to go to the funeral, but she could not think of any way out of it. She could not tell her mother that both she and Lindy believed funerals were a crock, that once you died you were dead and that was that. She did not know how to talk to her mother at all. Eleanor was playing the role that Jody could not: for three days she wept and thrashed and cried out, inconsolable and half insane with grief, watched over day and night by her cousin Annie who was a registered nurse and looked like a shorter version of Elaine Benedict; then on the fourth day Eleanor calmed down, and the day after that they had the funeral at a small funeral parlor on Tacoma Street, not two blocks from where they lived.

In the private curtained-off room to the right of the casket, Jody sat in her new navy-blue suit, sweating and uncomfortable. She was on a couch with her mother and her mother's cousin. In an overstuffed chair next to the couch sat poor old Burt McKeegan, looking sixty, his face and neck red and covered with hundreds of little criss-crossing blood vessels. Burt had obviously not had anything to drink that morning, and his whole body would shake from time to time. Jody wondered if part of it wasn't grief. Burt had always been nice enough to them when he had been around, and Jody felt sorry for him. It must have cost him a great deal to attend this funeral.

The chair and the couch were angled so that members of the immediate family could sit in scrimmed seclusion and yet still see both the casket surrounded by flowers and the more public seating—what Jody thought of to herself as the audience. There were quite a few people out in the audience, a lot more than Jody had expected. Most of them were a hard-looking crew of young people that Jody guessed were Lindy's Broadway friends, all of them sitting stiffly, looking forward, as if they were under obligation to attend but not to show any emotion, and Jody immediately felt a kinship
with them. Jody looked in vain for Quentin Corby. He had been telephoned right away by a distraught Eleanor, but she was only on the phone with him for a few minutes. He was nowhere in sight now, and hadn't been for the entire five days.

Patsy Wambaugh and her mother were also in the audience, although Mrs. Wambaugh had never met Lindy. She was probably there because Patsy had been invited and she wanted to keep her company. Patsy looked very serious, but every once in a while she would covertly look around at the somewhat loudly dressed young people from downtown. Jody wondered if Patsy could see her, and once when Patsy seemed to be looking in her direction Jody made a discreet wave, but got no response.

After a while the music stopped and a man dressed in black whom Jody had never seen in her life came out and started talking about Rosalind. Jody did not like his skinny pinched face, and she did not like what he was saying about her sister. According to him, Lindy had been a sweet little girl, loved by all who knew her, full of spirits and the love of God. The speech was obviously a standard one used for girls of a certain age, padded out with the few fragments of Lindy's real life that were clean and decent enough for inclusion.

On he droned about her sister, and Jody, who thought she had her emotions under control, suddenly found that her head was bursting and that she could not stand to listen to another word of this.

“What a bunch of shit!” she said in a voice that could be heard all over the room, and stood up and walked out the back door. The preacher didn't miss a beat. Jody walked down a long corridor lined with ferns on white wicker stands and out into the lobby, where a member of the staff dressed in a black suit stood with his hands together over his crotch looking bored. He pretended not to notice Jody as she walked past him and out into the delicious air.

PART TWO

FOURTEEN

WHEN SHE was thirty-five Jody McKeegan lived with an out-of-work actor in a large one-room house behind a row of old wooden garages in Hollywood, a couple of blocks north of the Boulevard. The actor's name was Glenn Duveen, and he spent most of his time lying on their queen-sized bed smoking marijuana and listening to tapes from his collection of old radio shows. Duveen had been around Hollywood long enough to know that there is nothing an actor can do after a certain point except wait for the telephone to ring. It was through Glenn Duveen that Jody met the producer who was finally after all these years to put her into a movie.

One winter evening they went to a small party at the house of a record producer, well up into the hills above Laurel Canyon. The place was noisy with people, mostly in their twenties or thirties and dressed in expensive-looking eccentric clothes. Lots of cocaine was being passed around, and after Jody had gotten a noseful she drifted outside to the garden, which was separated from the house by a high privet hedge with an iron gate in its middle. Jody went through the gate to a narrow lawn surrounded on three sides by trees and shrubbery. At the far end there was a white wrought-iron love seat, placed so that when Jody sat down she could see the lights of Los Angeles below, between two cuts of canyon. She felt rich and powerful, as she nearly always did when she had some cocaine in her. This was a nice place to sit. She could only barely hear the music from the house, and there weren't any rock superstars or groupies or any of the other scum who hung around musicians. The house was full of them, and Jody was eternally tired of their company, so that when a man came out of the shadows and asked her for a match she thought he was one of them, and said coldly, “I don't smoke.”

The man looked out at the view for a moment, seeming to ignore Jody, and she glanced up at him. He was older than most of them, and better dressed.
Perhaps forty, with lightish hair and thick dark eyebrows. He seemed to be a nice enough person, so she relented and gave him her cigarette lighter, taking out her package of Salems and letting him light her cigarette.

“Thank you,” he said to her, and the two of them puffed on their cigarettes silently and looked out at the view. It was one of those clear cold nights, when the wind from the east had cleared the smog and mist away, and the lights of the city shone brightly, even more brightly for Jody, full of cocaine and marijuana. After a few minutes the man went away. Some time later Jody went back into the house and found a pillow to sit on in the living room, while people eddied around and talked. A couple of young men tried to hit on her, but she simply turned away from them. When somebody passed her a half-gallon of red wine she kept it, and over the next hour or two drank most of it before falling asleep on the couch. She did not see the man from the garden again, although he saw her, when Duveen woke her up and tried to get her to stand on her feet. Jody did not feel like standing up. Harry told her later, “I was walking through to get my coat when I heard you yell, ‘Pigfucker! Get your goddamn hands off me!' I laughed to myself and went on out. I remember thinking how serene and deep in thought you had looked out in the yard, and then to see you with your eyes all bugged out and your mouth twisted up in rage, well . . .”

To Jody it did not matter whether she got drunk and made a fool of herself or not. These were not movie people, and so they did not matter. Jody only had to keep a tight control over herself if there was a chance for her to get into the movies. She did not know at the time that Harry Lexington was a producer, or she would definitely have given him a light the first time he asked, and she would have made room for him on the iron love seat, and she would have turned her eyes on him in a concentrated effort to get him to need her. She had learned years ago that many men are utterly helpless when reasonably beautiful women actively try to seduce them.

As it was, Glenn Duveen finally got her up off the couch and half-carried her out and down the path to where his car was parked with the other cars, hugging the clifflike roadway. Jody lay across the hood while he unlocked the car, and then slipped to the ground, giggling, while he cursed and tried to get her into the passenger door.

“I have to pee-pee,” she said. “Can't I just get behind the car and take a
little pee-pee?” While she was laughing at him he managed to stuff her into the car, and they drove home in silence.

The next time Harry Lexington and Jody saw each other was at the Hamburger Hamlet in Westwood. Jody and Duveen had been to the movies, and were sitting with their backs to the windows, having hot apple pie with ice cream on it. They were both very stoned and eating quietly when Harry Lexington came in with a fairly well-known actress named Susanne Hardardt and set the room to murmuring. Jody looked up and recognized Harry as they walked past and were seated in the middle of the room, where Jody could still see their heads and shoulders.

“Who's that?” she asked.

“Susanne Hardardt,” Glenn Duveen said. “You've seen her before.”

“I mean him.”

“I don't know. Boyfriend? Agent? Pimp?”

“He was at that party we went to.”

“Which party?”

“At the you-know, record business.”

But it turned out that Glenn Duveen did not know the man at all, and so Jody gave up. She was interested in the man now. He had spoken to her, and now she was seeing him with a well-known actress. That meant to Jody that he was possibly in the movie business, possibly important, and possibly approachable. In a few minutes she said, “Give me the roach,” and went into the women's room, being sure to walk past Harry's table. Jody knew how to walk. She did not wave her ass around like an amateur but walked with her head high, as if nobody in the room existed except herself. On her way back she was careful not to look in Harry's direction as she passed his table, but profiled him instead, making sure that if he
was
looking, he was seeing her at her best. Then, back at the table finishing her coffee, she waited for Harry to turn and make eye-contact. It took only a few minutes, and when their eyes met, she looked at him expressionlessly for a long moment and then turned and whispered something to Glenn Duveen. That was enough. She knew by now not to go further.

Then, one afternoon a few weeks later, Jody was sitting alone in one of the semicircular booths in the back room at the Cock 'n Bull, drinking a glass of white wine and waiting for Glenn Duveen. He was across the street
in the highrise building that housed the International Famous Agency, where he was a sort of client, left over from the old Ashley-Famous days. Duveen had gotten up that morning in short temper and begun grousing about the way Jody kept house, although she was a good housekeeper and when she had moved in with him a few months before, he had been living in chaos and grime; then he had gone down to the Boulevard as usual for morning coffee, the L.A.
Times
and
Daily Variety
. When he came back he was furious. According to the papers, men of his approximate age, size and style were being cast in pictures and television shows, and he was not. He had been patient long enough, and it was time to raise hell with his agent, or maybe even change agencies. The rest of the morning went badly, and then when the mail came there was nothing, not a residual, not a bill, nothing.