“Maybe it’s just me, babe. It’s true, I haven’t told you a lot about what’s been going on—because I didn’t want to alarm you. But a lotta shit’s piling up around my door just now and if I involve you, I’d be endangering you unnecessarily.”
She looked intensely into my eyes. “You mean it, don’t you? You’re in big trouble, Cable. What can I do?”
“Stay clear for a while. I’ve got to deliver this golden capsule, the Fen de Fuqin, the Chinese call it. And everybody and their uncle wants it—and they’re all playing for keeps. Actually, I’m lucky to still be alive. And please….that’s all I can say for now. The less you know, the better….”
“Gees, Cable…I don’t know about you…one minute you’re a bored flatfoot, the next thing I hear is that you’re mixed up in some bloody mess with some treasure and a bunch of violent people!”
“It just happened that way, doll. I didn’t ask for it.”
“Yes, you did, Cable. Your restless spirit had to find a way out of the police world. So you found this. And it turned out to be a hell of a lot more than you can chew now, didn’t it, Mister?”
“Maybe…just trust me…and oh, by the way—some Mafia consigliere that I met at Ardizzone’s funeral made a strange request of me today.”
“Yes—what’s that?”
“He wanted to meet you and said he had something he needed to talk to you about…in person.”
“Consigliere? What’s that and what’s his name?”
“He’s a kind of spokesman and attorney for the mob. His name is Lorena. Joe Lorena. Actually, I kind of like the guy. It puzzles me that he’s mixed up in the middle of organized crime. Something just doesn’t fit.”
“And he wants to see me?”
“Yep. So he says. How do you feel about that?”
“I don’t know. I guess so…if you’re around when we meet.”
We got to the front driveway of Honey’s place. I noticed a man standing in the shadows. As soon as he saw us, he put out his cigarette and approached. “Cable…I apologize for showing up unannounced, but what I have to say can’t wait.” Then he looked at Honey. He extended his hand. Without hesitation and looking up into his eyes, Honey took it. “I’m Joe Lorena. I know you are Honey Combes, also known as actress Lana Loren, right?”
“Right, but what do we have in common, Mr. Lorena? Cable tells me you’re one of the local syndicate’s kingpins. You know, at the Bella Notte I deal with the mob all the time—the drooling henchmen, the snake-eyed little dons, the backroom meetings filled with smoke and violent intentions—so what’s your racket?”
“All of that is true. But I’ll explain. If we can go to a private place, the three of us, I would be very grateful. If in ten minutes you don’t think I’m telling you the truth or what I have to say doesn’t make sense, please tell me and I’ll leave and never bother you again. Is it a deal?”
I looked at Honey. She seemed okay with this man. I couldn’t figure it. After all, this guy was a complete stranger who she wouldn’t even be talking to without me along. Yet she was comfortable and relaxed around him. “Cable? Are you okay with that? It’s fine with me.”
I nodded my head in the affirmative and we walked up the stairs to the back of the main house to Honey’s little cottage with the berserk vines growing all over it. It was very late and Honey told us to go into the kitchen nook so we wouldn’t wake up Zelda. Honey made us a cup of tea. I put a little gin in mine, but Joe Lorena declined, saying water was fine for him. There the three of us sat, looking at each other. “So…ah…my role here is to shut up and listen, right? So just pretend I’m a paid-off cop eavesdropping on one of those secret
meetings, okay?”
Joe Lorena was a little nervous and had to stand while he spoke. He looked down at Honey who sat quietly with her cup of tea. “The only way to do this is to start at the beginning. Now, I will say some very strange things to you, Miss Combes. Please try to be open minded. This isn’t easy for me.” He took a deep breath. “Now…first of all, I wasn’t born on this planet—or dimension. Believe it or not, there are many alien life forms here on your planet. Of course, one must also realize that there are millions of kinds of humanoid-like beings that exist throughout the universe. It doesn’t matter where I come from. What does matter is my relationship to you.” He checked both of us out. So far, we sat there looking like we were a riveted audience watching a science fiction movie, but wouldn’t believe any of it after we came out of the movie house into the night air. “One thing my species discovered, when we arrived a long time ago, was that we couldn’t interbreed with your kind…your species. So we devised a way. Why? Because our intentions were good. We wanted to infuse some of our advanced knowledge into your bloodlines so your kind would stop being so primitive and warring with each other, dividing yourselves by political, ethnic, religious and personal prejudice. We found a way by gene-splicing the chromosomes, but we realized that any offspring as a result of that pairing would create a hybrid child who cannot reproduce. Humans do it when they cross a horse with a donkey, for example—the resulting mule is a fine, healthy and good-sized animal, but cannot reproduce.”
Honey looked at me. But something had changed. She studied Joe Lorena’s face and seemed to find no fault. “So, what you are saying, Mr. Lorena, is that I am one of those beings—and that’s why I can’t have children.”
Joe Lorena looked at me. I shrugged. “Yes! Thank you for understanding that! It will save a lot of anxiety as to what I have to say next.”
“Oh, do go on, Lorena. I haven’t been this entertained in ages,” I said a bit facetiously. “I’m certainly no Doubting Thomas here, but aren’t you stretching things a bit and—”
“—Cable!” Honey cut me off. “You promised to keep quiet.” I shut up.
“Almost twenty-three years ago I fell in love with a highly intelligent and beautiful human woman. Her name was Lorena Brockmore and she came from a very successful family and fortune. You’ll notice, my own birth name would not suffice—Ilt Kneklp—so I eventually adopted an everyday American Joe first name and used Lorena’s first name as my last. So there I was, in love with Lorena Brockmore—and she with me. Our love tryst was wonderful and I wanted to integrate into her family by marriage. But I was secretly an alien, not even human by the customary definition of the word and I was a no one with no traceable background, so I was rejected. However, Lorena wanted to have my child once I told her who I truly was. She was an adventuresome woman, full of wit, bright-minded, slim, dark-haired and beautiful like you, Honey. With her senses slightly dulled—and with her consent—I took her to one of our under-the-mountain clinics and she was artificially inseminated with my seed.” He stopped and then smiled at Honey. “You are the living product of the joining of that seed and your mother’s ovum. All during her pregnancy your mother sang and sang and sang until she nearly passed out singing operettas and popular songs of the day. But something went terribly wrong.” By now Honey’s eyes had welled with tears and I knew she knew, she had already guessed the rest of the story, but let Joe Lorena finish. “Some human women become poisoned with the half of the chromosome that is vibrationally so different than the more slowly evolved human chromosomatic makeup that they become deathly ill—and perish…” Joe Lorena’s own eyes misted. “You were born perfect—the ideal success story of millions of years of evolution crossed into one being. But your mother paid the greatest price of all. She died two weeks after your birth. At least she was able to enjoy you that long, holding you in her arms, cuddling you, kissing your fat little cheeks.”
Honey could hold it no longer and burst into tears. “Please! Stop! I can’t take anymore—I know what you say is true—I’ve—I’ve known it all my life but couldn’t tell anyone! I didn’t even know how I knew. Now you—”
Joe Lorena came over to Honey and extended his arms to her. “—I’m all you have left, Honey. I always dreamed a little dream of you, trying to imagine what you�
��d look like now. And here you are, as stunning as your lovely, intelligent mother. I realize it’s a dismal legacy, and if it weren’t for me, she would be alive today.” He paused and sniffed in his own tears.
Honey sucked in the tears. “Yeah, but I wouldn’t be around, would I? And I must have enough of you in me to know there’s—there’s more to everything then we can imagine.” She took Lorena’s hand and clutched it. “I don’t blame you. Love is love, Joe, anyplace.”
Lorena bent down and she grabbed his head and cried into it. He embraced his daughter. “Thank you—thank you, Honey, for understanding! I’ve lived so long with it, this secret—and the pain! Can you accept me? I know you were raised by your adoptive parents and you love them and they love you very much. They chose to keep the adoption a secret from you. Please don’t blame them.”
Honey began to dry her tears. “I won’t…I can’t…they’ve been so good to me.” Then she let go of Joe Lorena’s hand and looked up at him. “But you are my father, the one who truly sired me, and that blood is in me, I can feel you, read you, know your truth as you speak.”
Joe Lorena didn’t know what to do next. “Well,” I said, totally out to lunch by now on some planet of my own. “Why don’t we have another cup of tea and maybe we’ve said enough for one night. Might I suggest that the two of you meet privately for lunch or dinner sometime?”
Honey stood up and went over to the little stove to boil more water. “There is one question I have…”
“Anything, Honey…anything I can answer that’ll help you…”
“How did you get mixed up with crime…I mean…Jack Dragna and those horrible low-life men who rob and kill and steal beautiful young women for export, never to be seen again?”
“I needed to make a lot of money to help support our alien cause here on your planet. In that respect, crime pays. I know it sounds terrible, but I don’t have the same moral codes as you do. Not that I approve of taking life, kidnapping and extortion. It’s that my cause is greater than the sum total of the parts that my business life takes me into.”
We were all exhausted from the emotional roller coaster and the incredulous content of Joe Lorena’s tale. Honey and I escorted him to the door to say good-night. I liked the man—or being, or alien—or whatever or whoever he was. It really didn’t matter to that part of myself that took individuals as I found them and made a character analysis based on that perspective. Nothing else…if I liked them I did, if I didn’t, I didn’t. My brave Honey hugged the humble man at the door. I couldn’t imagine how he held all that inside of him all those years. “Don’t be a stranger, Mister,” she said. “I may not approve of what you do for a living, but I think I kind of like you anyway,” she said with a wry smile.
Joe Lorena left and we fell into bed together. “You know, Cable, he had a lot of nerve,” Honey was saying just before she drifted off into a restless sleep. “Using my mother’s name. Lorena…just think of it, my real mother’s name was Lorena. And, Cable…?”
“Yeah?”
“My Dad’s an alien…” I drew her into my arms and we slept.
Pulitzer Me That Prize, Billy Boy!
Chaplin had ordered two black Packard limousines and we started off very late on a Friday night in late December. We were to celebrate New Year’s Eve at the famous ranch in the middle of nowhere on the central coast of California. Again, somehow strings were pulled at police headquarters and I was given “protective assignment” for a week. Mario was pissed at me for being absent so much, but I told him I’d level with him when all this crap blew over.
William Randolph Hearst was a reclusive man who nevertheless found time to pitter patter around the Hollywood set by trying to control Louis B. Mayer at Metro-Goldwyn Studios. Although married to an ex-vaudeville entertainer who bore him five sons, Hearst philandered with a lovely young blonde actress named Marion Davies. Hearst was so enamored with the young lady seventeen years his junior, that when he was rebuffed by United Artists, he went and started his own studio, working in conjunction with Paramount, called Cosmopolitan Pictures. In 1923 there was a falling out with Paramount and he teamed up with Goldwyn Pictures, which a year later became part of MGM. Working closely with Louis B. Mayer proved to be a mutually advantageous venture. The bloodline Hearst had come from was started by a guy named George Hearst who at forty married an eighteen year-old girl, one Phoebe Apperson. Old George was born in 1830 and got gold fever in the 1850’s…he made a killing and never worried about money again. William Randolph Hearst was an only child and had a penchant toward newspaper publishing. He took over the San Francisco Examiner in 1887 and built his empire. In 1895 his mother financed his purchase of the failing New York Morning Journal and Hearst soon entered into a heated rivalry with Joseph Pulitzer, a feisty Hungarian and his newspaper, the New York World. Both Hearst and Pulitzer had mastered the style of sensationalism soon called ‘yellow journalism’…in glaring contrast, in 1897 the owner of the New York Times created the motto “All the news that’s fit to print”.
The buzz was that Marion Davies was already at the La Cuesta Encantada for our holiday and was an ideal hostess. According to Honey, rumor also had it that Chaplin and Davies had a secret thing going now and then, an affair the jealous and protective old Billy boy probably didn’t know about. But that was life and people did what people did, based partly on their instincts of lust and desire, insecurity and curiosity, and partly on the boredom the rich enjoyed until with nothing to do, they played with fire in a paper house.
We had driven all night. Honey and I were in the back seat with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford was up front with the chauffer. Fairbanks drank a lot those days and his swashbuckling days were pretty much over. Ten years before he was Hollywood’s most popular silent film star. It was his son, an equally dashing Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., who was the new star on the block. He had done some silent films with Loretta Young and Joan Crawford, was dating the latter and they were going to do a picture together soon called, Our Modern Maidens. It looked like the handsome bloke could pick out any maidens he chose with those connections! Chaplin, Virginia Cherrill and another very rich and famous comedian, Harold Lloyd traveled in the lead Packard.
It was damp and the little two-lane highway was fogged in with mists from the sea. But as the sun began to break through from the east and we approached the tiny hamlet of San Simeon, Honey awakened me to behold something none of us may ever live to see again. As if in a fairy tale movie, the thick banks of fog began to part at the top of the ridge above us. Suddenly as the curtain of fog drew away, an enchanted castle loomed out of the mists into the sunshine. Even Doug Fairbanks looked through blurry eyes and said he’d never seen the likes of it. The white castle with the two Moorish towers and palm trees scattered about, contrasted against the green slopes and pine dotted mountains of the Santa Lucia. We were all awe struck by the time we reached the summit and through the last gate in full sunshine. A few miles below, the blue Pacific Ocean shimmered in the morning light as the fog bank pulled back out to sea. For a minute it seemed like I was coming home to something I couldn’t quite remember. But I wouldn’t forget what we saw that day.
The castle was massive with the most spectacular outdoor swimming pool I’d ever seen. Scaffolding told one the castle was an ongoing project and some areas were as yet not completed. As one walked through the gigantic main doors, a fireplace big enough to have a picnic in stood directly across from us. To our right was a huge dining hall where there were flags from all countries of the world. Old paintings and tapestries hung from the walls. Of course, what I was looking for was my knight in shining armor, probably lurking somewhere in a dark hallway in this gothic potpourri of a building.
William Randolph Hearst, Sr., was a fairly tall man, a little paunchy with a rather austere face. He greeted us all with an enthusiastic smile and told us right up front, that all smoking was to be done outside the castle, it was obligatory to attend feeding at the trough at 8:00 p.
m. and there was no alcohol served in his castle except one drink per person at dinner—nor was any to be found at any of the three wet bars. Prohibition was an absolute with the old boy. The blonde and friendly Marion Davies came down from the second floor and spoke to a couple of servants before she approached us. When she came closer, I could see blue-eyes on a nice face and she had a pleasant voice. She was probably the quintessential flapper who was commanded by her lover boy to perform costume dramas before the motion picture camera. I saw her as light-hearted, positive, intelligent and could understand where a lover other than the newspaper magnet was in order. She had a deep need to love and be loved…it appeared to me.
We were led up a flight of stairs while our luggage was traipsed up to the second floor by the many castle employees. If folks were not married, each got a separate room. So Honey and I had to live under that pretense, as did Charlie and Virginia Cherrill. Doug Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were married, so they got one communal room. One could see how easy it was to play musical beds in this joint, with all 172 rooms playing a slightly different role.
Almost immediately I began a self-guided tour, looking down corridors for my knight. Standing in front of the main library entrance stood a wonderful specimen, one that Lei-tao must have shape-shifted and gained access to when she hid the Fen de Fuqin. The armor was a brilliantly shining silver-gold and at its base there was an inscription that read, “Augsberg Tilt Knight, c.1580.” Tilt and eighty were two of the clues that Crazy Jack had given me as he departed that night onboard the streetcar! That guy was hooked in to something—but what?
I knew I’d have to wait until very late to do my prowling without alerting any of the other guests, including Honey. That’d be a trick since she insisted that I sleep with her once dinner was over and we were ready to call it a night. Honey and I were very tired and so as soon as the coast was clear, I sneaked into her room with the afternoon sun lighting up the green hills to the east. In the distance I saw a small herd of African zebra and then remembered that Fairbanks had told us Hearst had created a complete zoo, with animals from around the world. What money can’t buy! I thought to myself.
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