by Guy Bolton
“After Celia died, I didn’t make it right. I let her down.”
“You know that isn’t true.”
But it was true. Craine had helped M.G.M. frame Celia’s suicide to look like an accident. Like he had for far too long, he’d simply followed the studio line. He’d been afraid of standing up to Peterson and Mayer. Afraid of losing his livelihood. He hadn’t even had the courage to tell his only son about the truth behind his mother’s death.
“Maybe not.” He stepped away, embarrassed, and walked back into the bedroom. “I’m sorry, it doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter,” she said, following him. “You should talk about these things.”
“It got me thinking.”
“You can tell me. I can’t help you if you won’t tell me.”
Craine sat on the edge of the bed. He flattened the sheets with an open palm.
“What is it? Tell me what’s on your mind. It can’t only be Celia.”
“It’s not just Celia.” He closed his eyes.
“Is it work? I know there are things you see that must be hard. But you can talk to me about it. You can try.”
Did he want to talk about it? He needed to talk to someone about what was in his head. “It’s Campbell,” he said after a brief silence. “The Loew House night.”
“The shooting?”
He nodded.
Gale frowned. He felt her pull away. “But he’s dead. He died.”
“I’m not sure that was Campbell.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I saw his file this afternoon. It was late, should have arrived months ago. Campbell’s photograph was inside. He didn’t look the same.”
“Didn’t look the same as who?”
“The man in the car. The shooter. He wasn’t the same person. He wasn’t James Campbell. Patrick O’Neill was onto something. But I was too shortsighted to believe him.”
“So what are you saying?”
“That I think someone else is involved in this. Someone wanted this whole thing forgotten about.”
“You really believe that?”
He took a moment to reply. “Yes.”
“What are you going to do now?”
Craine leaned back on the bed. “I don’t know. Nothing, probably. Maybe I’m wrong. Being paranoid.”
Gale kissed him on the shoulder and wrapped her arms around him. He kissed her wrist. Having her here made him feel better.
“I’m sorry. It’s just on my mind.”
“You look tired. Sleep on it. I’m sure everything was fine.” She kissed him on the cheek. “You were a hero, remember.”
Chapter 28
July 8th
Denny Bergen lived in an apartment complex somewhere in the southern recesses of the San Fernando Valley.
Craine parked his car across the road and checked the address. Blossom Springs, no apartment number. The building was like all those around it: whitewashed concrete on all sides, small, square windows, the walls cracked and hemorrhaging at the base where recent tremors had loosened the foundations.
He shouldn’t be here. He had a sense that as his assistant at the barbershop, Denny might be able to tell him more about Rochelle and maybe more about Campbell too. Maybe even shed some light on Stanley’s suicide, if he wanted to venture that far. But did he really want to? I’m developing a conscience, he thought, and it’s going to get me in trouble.
The Valley was sweltering in July, and Craine felt his shirt peel away from his back as he stepped out of the car. Thick, leaden heat pressed hard against his skin, barely a gust of wind or the hint of a breeze to lift the sweat from his face. It must be a hundred degrees, maybe more.
Craine walked through the gates into an open courtyard. The complex was designed like a motel, with a square central area bordered on three sides by two stories of apartment rooms. He passed a door with a foot-sized hole in the bottom half. Most of the other doors were the same, all the windows cracked or boarded over. He could hear music playing but he wasn’t sure where from. In a corner, four boys were playing with a piece of broken glass, holding it over the cement flooring.
“Do you boys know Denny?” he called out to them when he couldn’t see anyone else. “You know where Denny Bergen lives?”
They stared at Craine without expression, then went back to whatever it was they were doing. He saw the glass catch the light and the boys cheered: they were burning ants. He wondered what they dreamed of being when they grew up.
A wire cage against one wall acted as a postbox. It was stacked with envelopes, sealed and untouched. They all looked like bills. He reached inside and found one with BERGEN printed across the front. It was from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and it said Dennis Bergen lived in apartment 2-D.
Craine took off his hat to wipe his brow and looked around. There were four doors alongside each wall, all beginning with 1. Denny must live upstairs. He took a wrought iron staircase up to the second floor, and followed the black tar paint on the wall directing him to apartment 2-D.
A little girl sat on the concrete up ahead, legs straddling the railings, feet dangling over the edge. She leaned forward and spat, watching as her phlegm fell into the courtyard below. He saw her face when she heard him coming. Her cheeks were dark and sunburned, the palm held above her eyes filthy and blistered. She might have been nine or ten years old. He thought of Michael.
“Hey mister, you got a cigarette?”
“No.”
He expected her to say something else but she didn’t. One of the boys in the courtyard laughed and called her a slut so she spat at him through the rails, missing him by less than a foot. The other boys fell about laughing.
Craine reached Denny’s door and knocked twice. From a few doors down he heard a woman screaming obscenities then a man shouting back then silence. God, I hate this city, he thought, this ever-expanding desert of lost souls. He felt fortunate, which was a rare sensation for Craine. I should be more thankful for the way I live, he said to himself, but I’m not.
The door opened and Denny’s long, thin face hovered over a door chain.
“Denny? Denny Bergen?”
“Yeah.”
Denny frowned, looking Craine up and down as he tried to place him somewhere in his ragged timeline of wet-shaves and hair pomade.
“You remember me? From the studio lot?”
“Oh yeah,” he smiled.
“My name’s Craine.”
“You’re the guy who came—”
“I came to see Jack Rochelle. That’s right.”
“He died.”
“I know.”
“But I got you chicken soup.”
“I remember. Can I come in?”
“Sure,” he said, seemingly surprised by the very notion that anyone would wish to come inside. “Sorry it’s a little messy. I haven’t been up long.”
The apartment consisted of one main room with a single door in the corner: a bathroom or bedroom, he presumed, maybe one leading on to the other. It was sparsely furnished and strangely dark. The blinds were pulled down and there were no lights on inside and no light switches, only holes in the wall with bare wires coiled inside. The room smelt of feces and urine and sweat and God only knew what else. I could vomit, Craine thought. Might even make it smell better. He noticed a cutthroat razor on a round dinner table and felt so strangely angry that he wanted to pick it up and slide it across his own neck. What is wrong with me? It’s the heat. It’s the heat and the sleep deprivation.
“Denny?” a shrill voice hollered from the behind the door. “Who is it?”
“It’s okay! It’s a friend of mine.”
“Which friend? Since when have you got a friend?”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll be in in five minutes!”
“I’m hungry!”
“I know!” he shouted. “Five minutes.”
Denny led them into the center of the room, then with nowhere else to go, offered Craine a seat on the couc
h. There was a featherless pillow and a stained sheet on the couch, both covered in small red insects. Bed bugs. Most houses had them. This place looked to be infested.
“My ma,” he mumbled, taking a seat when Craine didn’t. “She’s sick. She stays in bed mostly.”
On a small table by the armrest was a picture of an obese woman wearing glasses and a skinny boy on a beach. The boy was Denny.
“You take care of her?”
He could tell from his frown that Denny hadn’t really considered that before. As if he’d always thought of it in terms of his mother taking care of him.
“Yeah,” he said, almost proudly. “I take care of her.”
“You still working at the barbershop?”
“I cut people’s hair now,” he beamed. “We don’t do wet-shaves no more.”
Possibly a good thing, thought Craine, looking at Denny’s fingers as they clumsily picked at his nose.
“People still coming in?”
“Mostly. Bit quieter I guess, since Mr. Jack died. Not so many of the regulars.”
“You know most of the regulars?”
“Most of them.”
“Know them by name?”
“I guess. Depends how often they come by.”
“Did you ever meet anyone called James Campbell? Maybe you knew him as Jimmy. Did he ever come by?”
Denny shrugged.
“Your police report taken the very night Rochelle died states you said that they knew each other. That they were friends.”
“He came round a few times. Before Mr. Jack got shot . . . I mean, before he shot Mr. Jack.”
“You were there for that?”
“I was at the party. In that big house? But I didn’t see Jimmy there.”
“And do you think you could tell me what Campbell looked like?”
“What do you mean? Looked like everybody else.”
“Well, was he tall? Dark hair?”
There was a long pause before Denny nodded and stated confidently, “He was tall.”
“What about any distinguishing features?”
“Well he wasn’t a Negro, if that’s what you mean. Looked pretty much like you.”
“Anything else? Did he wear glasses? Did he have bad teeth? A mustache?”
“No, he didn’t have a mustache.” Denny’s eyes suddenly brightened in triumph. “Big ears,” he spurted out, “he had big ears. Yes, I remember now. He had these great big cauliflower ears. Couldn’t help looking at them.”
“If you don’t mind, I’m going to show you a picture.” Craine reached into his jacket pocket and passed Denny the police booking shots from Chicago. “Can you tell me if this is the man you met?”
Denny squinted. “Yes, that’s him.”
There it was. The blow was softer now, less a realization that the shooter wasn’t Campbell than an acceptance of that fact.
“Looks friendlier in person, mind,” Denny added, as if he’d caused offense.
“Anything else about him?”
“He always had a briefcase with him. Not much else to say. He was nice to me. I liked him.”
“Do you think he killed Jack Rochelle?”
Denny looked confused, his opinion unexpectedly called into action. “Maybe. Who knows?”
“What did he and Jack Rochelle talk about when he came by?”
“I don’t know. They whispered, or Mr. Jack asked me to go outside. Sometimes they would go in the back room.”
“The room at the back of the barbershop?”
“Yeah.”
“You’ve been inside?”
“Not supposed to go inside. Mr. Jack’s orders.”
“Denny, you’re aware that Jack Rochelle used to do business on the side, aren’t you? You’re aware that he would sell things, things not to do with haircuts?”
“He didn’t tell me much. I never asked.”
“But you’re smart, aren’t you, Denny? You knew. You knew what was going on in the back room.”
Denny pulled himself up in his seat. He scratched at the small red welts dotted across his arms. “Yeah, I knew,” he whispered, glancing at the door in the corner. “People came and they talked. Mr. Jack said ‘Denny, shut your ears,’ but you can’t really shut your ears. Or if you can, I don’t know how.”
“I have to ask you, Denny, what happened to the contents of the back room?”
“I wasn’t supposed to go inside.”
“But do you know what was in there? Denny, I bet there was drink in there. I also think there were drugs. Pills, powder, marijuana plants. Did you see anything like that in there after Jack died?”
“After Mr. Jack died the studio police came and they took everything. That room is empty now.”
For a brief second Craine thought about bringing Denny in for official questioning, but there was no point. Evidently, Denny hadn’t been working for Rochelle long enough to be privy to Rochelle’s business dealings.
“Take care of yourself, Denny. I hope things work out well for you.”
Craine crossed back over to the door. He slipped his cuff over his wrist and used it like a glove to turn the doorknob. He was about to open the door when Denny said, “I wasn’t supposed to go inside. But I did once.”
Craine turned. “You’ve been inside?”
“Please don’t tell anyone,” he said nervously. “I have to keep my job. Mr. Jack would have been upset if he knew.”
“What did you see?”
“There were bottles, as you said. Cases of liquor. Jars of powder and pills.”
“You took some?”
“I didn’t want any of those things.”
“What, then?”
Hesitant, Denny looked back at the door in the corner.
“What did you take, Denny?”
Denny stood up slowly and removed the cushions from the couch. He lifted up the padded seat, where, through a tear in the material, Craine could see a brown package taped to the springs. “I took these,” Denny said without looking at Craine, confiding instead to the floor. “They were in a big book. These ones were at the back. I thought they were pretty and I thought Mr. Jack wouldn’t notice.”
Denny took out an envelope, folded over at one end and tied tightly with string so it couldn’t be opened by idle hands.
“Give me the envelope, Denny.”
Denny sighed, perhaps almost grateful to share his burden. He looked again at the bedroom door and pleaded in a heavy whisper, “Please, don’t tell my ma.”
Chapter 29
July 14th
Patrick O’Neill took a call from the San Bernardino county sheriff’s department early on a Friday morning requesting a homicide detective from the Los Angeles department—a body had been found in the forests surrounding the Cajon Pass, not far from an abandoned vehicle with a Los Angeles registration.
San Bernardino was a sixty-mile drive on Route 66, the first half through traffic, and it took O’Neill most of three hours to get there in his battered gray Plymouth. He was met by a state trooper in beige khakis at the town’s courthouse offices who he then followed up past Devil Canyon toward the southernmost tip of the San Gabriel mountain range.
He was thinking about his date the other week. First dates were always tricky. Although it could be their last date too, considering O’Neill hadn’t seen or heard from Gracie since he’d put her in a taxi back to her apartment. “I had a good time,” was all he mumbled to her, for some stupid reason, meaning to say that he had loved meeting her and wanted to see her again. He had tried calling Gracie’s office a few days later to see if she wanted to meet up again for the July 4th weekend, but she wasn’t available and hadn’t returned his calls. He guessed that was the end of it.
The highway south of the pass was littered with scree and silt where the roads had flooded and O’Neill had to drive slowly until they’d passed the rockslide. He followed the patrol car as it pulled off onto a dirt track and parked beside a group of local police trucks at the edge of the forest. One of
the trucks had a large cargo space with black tarpaulin folded over it. To take the body away, he reasoned.
His escort came over to tell him the chief deputy would be along shortly, then joined a circle of state troopers standing under a tall black locust tree chewing tobacco and smoking cigarettes. One of them had a coffee flask and they were passing round a tin cup, talking among themselves. They gave O’Neill a nod and a weak smile as he stepped out of the car, but he knew at once that he couldn’t stand among them. He was a city boy, unwelcome in these parts.
The sun had risen fast; it was a hot, crisp morning and he felt his hair damp beneath his hat. He propped himself up on the hood of his car, took off his jacket and smoked a cigarette he didn’t much enjoy. Ten minutes passed and he was starting to wonder why he’d been asked to venture so far away from the city when a middle-aged man in a beige shirt and a white, wide-brimmed hat strolled over toward O’Neill and introduced himself as Chief Deputy Corwin Weddle.
“You from Los Angeles Central?”
“Detective O’Neill.”
Weddle tilted his chin but his hands remained by his side. He had a military bearing about him. “Good of you to come out,” he said, nodding his head toward the slope. “It’s a little further down through the trees there.”
O’Neill followed the chief deputy through the forest, stumbling over dead branches and desert plants where the roots tangled among the rocks. After fifteen minutes of walking silently, O’Neill stopped and fanned his face with his hat. Sweat was running down his back and his cuffs had turned brown at the wrist.
He waved his hand toward the rough trail below. “The corpse,” he said breathlessly. “What makes you so sure it’s one of ours?”
Weddle took the opportunity to take out a pack of cigarettes, shaking one loose then pushing it roughly into his mouth. “Car was abandoned on the side of the road up by our trucks. Burned throughout, but the plates were registered to Los Angeles.”
“Where is it now?”
“Scrap heap, probably. The body was only spotted this morning; the car was found six or so weeks ago.”