Broken Heart: David Raker #7

by Tim Weaver

  Callson joins his hands across his belly, his elbows on the arms of the chair, his eyes on the ground, as if pulling the memories out of the floor. ‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘doesn’t take long for Zeller Senior to notice she’s got talent, above and beyond what she’s doing as his secretary. Probably helps that she looks a million bucks. I mean, that sort of thing tended to get you noticed in a world like that, with all that testosterone kicking around.’ He stops and looks up, past the camera. ‘You ever heard of a movie called Tiger Goes to Town?’

  ‘It was an animated film.’

  ‘Right. You probably know that it was made in 1950 by AKI, then. I read up about it too. It was one of their first ever animated movies. They were trying to compete with Walt Disney at the time. Guess where the idea for it came from?’

  A pause. ‘Életke Kerekes?’

  ‘Right again,’ Callson says. ‘I don’t know if this is actually how it happened or some Hollywood-fabricated bullshit, but the way I heard it, Zeller Senior happens to be at her desk one day, going through his appointments, and he sees this story she’s written for her son. He reads some of it over her shoulder and thinks it’s brilliant. He asks to see more, and so she brings in a bunch of them from home for him, and he picks out Tiger Goes to Town. They give it to some screenwriter to adapt, they pay her a fee, and – voilà – a year later it’s up there onscreen.’

  ‘Did she make much money from it?’

  Callson shrugs. ‘She was still living in Venice, right up until she died, so I’m guessing not – or, at least, not enough to move her and her son out to somewhere better, and keep them fed and watered. But she got a “Story by Elaine Kinflower” in the credits, and Zeller Senior – and then Saul Zeller when he joined in 1951 – started using her to bounce ideas around, especially where their kids’ films were concerned. She understood kids. She had this flair for what they liked. As I said, she was smart.’

  ‘What happened after that?’

  ‘For a while she was still making the coffees, and typing up letters, but then, in 1952, the Zellers gave her this junior writing role, working under some of the guys they had on staff there. Didn’t pay much, but she could see it for what it was – a bridge to something better. This was the fifties, remember. Back then, you could count the number of female screenwriters on one hand. That’s another reason why I think the papers had such a thing for her. The Angel stuff – that all helped the, uh …’ He rotates the forefinger of his right hand, searching for the word. ‘The, uh … the …’

  ‘Narrative?’

  ‘Right. The narrative. “The Venice Angel” was a hell of a lot easier to process than “Életke Kerekes”. But, from what I’ve read, there was a lot of fascination with her too. Lot of jealousy, lot of criticism, but a lot of praise, approval and whatnot. The idea of an immigrant, a single mother, a widow, escaping the typing pool and trying to make it as a screenwriter.’ He shrugs. ‘That never happened then.’

  ‘Wait a second, you said a widow.’

  Callson nods.

  ‘Her husband died?’

  ‘The asshole who left her and their boy in 1948? He died a year later in New York. Got stabbed with a box cutter in a bar. But it’s not him I’m talking about.’

  ‘Are you saying she got remarried?’

  ‘Yeah. She met this guy, John Winslow. He came back from the Second World War and got a job as an investigator at an insurance firm. The two of them met at a party, I think. Anyway, they dated for a year and, November 1951, they got married. He moved in with her because his office was in Culver City, so Venice was closer than Echo Park, and by all accounts they were real happy. Eleven months later, he’s dead.’

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘Car accident. Old woman in a Studebaker. Mounted the sidewalk, hit him square on. Paramedics arrived at the scene and he was already dead.’ Callson falls into silence. ‘Year after that,’ he says quietly, ‘Életke Kerekes went the same way.’

  ‘You haven’t really talked about how she died.’

  Callson hesitates again, a flicker in his face. His eyes shift from the camera to the windows. Through the glass, the sky is a deep red.

  ‘Can you describe the scene you found in Room 805?’

  He shifts on his chair, straightening the jacket he’s wearing. ‘Sure,’ he says, after a long breath.

  ‘You told me you left your partner, Luis, out in the corridor with the hotel manager and you went in by yourself. What did you find?’

  ‘I found her killer, sitting on the edge of the bed.’

  ‘He was crying.’

  ‘Yeah. The tears had made trails through the blood on his face. Weird what you remember, but I remember that. He had blood all over his shirt, all over the front of his pants. He worked in the kitchen at a diner a couple of blocks from the hotel, this dive of a joint called Mulligans. Cleaned floors, washed dishes, whatever else. He was wearing this white shirt and it was just soaked through. But it was the hair that got to me.’

  ‘The hair he’d torn out of her head?’

  ‘Yeah. He’d ripped it right out. When we found her, her head was full of these bald patches. Just these spots where he’d grabbed and pulled. I mean, that’s one thing, right? That’s pretty messed up. But this kid never got rid of it. Never tried to wash her hair away. He just woke up, realized what he’d done, and then sat there on the edge of the bed, her hair stuck to his fingers, crying.’

  ‘Woke up?’

  ‘He’d been loaded the night before. He must have grabbed her hair when she fought back. He had scratches on his arms from where she’d obviously tried to defend herself – but he said he didn’t remember any of it. The moment I got the tox report back, I could see why. He’d sunk half a bottle of whisky. He’d taken enough sleeping pills to bring down a bull, and there were traces of amphetamines in his system too. You know much about speed?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘While you’re up, it’s great. You’re the life and soul. You got energy and you don’t get tired. You feel like the man. Come out the other side and you start to feel like shit. Low. Agitated. Irritated. Depressed. Some people, like him, they go full-on psychotic. That scene in there, what he’d done – that was psychotic. The kid was psychotic. There must have been a moment, some time before we got there, where he woke up and was lucid and was, like, “What the fuck have I done?”, and that was why he took those sleeping pills. He was trying to settle his nerves, his anxiety, whatever the hell else. But it was too late for Életke Kerekes by then. Way too late. The evidence of that was lying about ten feet from where the kid was crying his eyes out.’

  ‘That was where Kerekes was – ten feet away?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘She was on the bathroom floor – is that correct?’

  Callson starts shaking his head. ‘No, that’s not correct.’

  ‘Oh. I thought I read that she was lying –’

  ‘Her legs were on the floor.’

  There’s silence in the room.

  ‘Just her legs?’

  Callson nods again. ‘Just her legs. The rest of her was in the tub. He’d started trying to cut her up the night before.’

  ‘She was being dismembered.’

  It isn’t a question this time, and Callson doesn’t take it as such. He just looks into the camera. His expression could be mistaken for blank, except there’s a prickle of anger high up on his cheeks that seems to leak colour into his eyes.

  ‘We found a knife in the tub with her. The bathroom was …’ He fades out and shakes his head again. ‘There was blood everywhere.’

  ‘The knife was the murder weapon?’

  ‘One of them. She’d been stabbed in the throat. That’s what killed her. But she’d also been beaten before she was killed. There were bruises over her face, her chest, her arms. She was beaten and then she was hit across the back of the head with a bronze paperweight. That’s what actually put her down. Once she was down, he put the knife through the centre of her throat.’ Call
son pauses for a moment, jabbing the first two fingers of his right hand in towards his larynx. ‘It went in so deep, the point of the blade came out of the back of her neck.’

  Callson just stares into the camera, saying nothing for a long time. But then, finally, his eyes stray to the right of the lens. ‘You remember what I said earlier?’

  His voice is smaller, quieter, but hard.

  ‘You remember how I said something got all screwed up? I said it wasn’t what he’d done to her that had got to me, but who Életke Kerekes was to him. You remember I said that?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Well, now you understand why.’

  There’s silence from behind the camera.

  ‘He’d only just turned sixteen,’ Callson says, shaking his head. He reaches for his water again but doesn’t drink from it. ‘Sixteen years old and capable of that.’

  He stares down into the glass. The mood has changed.

  ‘Martin Nemeth,’ Callson mutters.

  ‘That was the name of her killer?’

  ‘Yeah.’ A single nod of the head. ‘He was Életke Kerekes’s son.’

  54

  I ordered another coffee and tried to process everything I’d just read. I watched cars pass the café, their brake lights blinking in the darkness, the noise of traffic like the perpetual growl of an animal, and thought about the Venice Angel. She’d been butchered at the Pingrove Hotel on 2 October 1953 by her own son. When police had entered the eighth-floor suite, they’d found him sitting on the edge of the bed, crying. Életke Kerekes’s body was in the bathroom, partially dismembered.

  At the time of the murder, her son, Martin Nemeth – who had retained his father’s surname – was drunk and quite possibly high. Sleeping pills were found in his mother’s handbag, which police believed he’d taken, presumably in an effort to try to counteract the effects of the speed.

  He told police officers he had no memory of killing her.

  His biography painted a picture of a troubled kid. He’d dropped out of high school at fifteen and, a month later, was arrested but not charged after getting into a fight outside a bar. Employees at Mulligans, the diner at which he’d been working, said that Nemeth was a heavy drinker, even at sixteen, and often talked about his mother in disparaging terms. Other times, he’d be quiet, or quick to anger, which seemed to tally with amphetamine use. Seven weeks prior to the murder, he was arrested by police again after pushing someone through a glass door. This time, he was charged with assault. His mother posted his bail.

  In April 1954, Martin Nemeth was tried as an adult, found guilty of both assault and first-degree murder, and given the death penalty for the killing of his mother. He never went to the gas chamber, but he never saw the outside of a prison wall either. He spent twenty-three years on death row at San Quentin, until he died of a heart attack in 1977. He was only thirty-nine at the time.

  I saw how that fitted with the true-crime book now: it was his death that was being referred to in the final lines of the missing chapter.

  From the various websites, and using a Google image search, I’d found and saved three separate photographs of Életke Kerekes. There was the shot I’d seen on Wikipedia, taken at some point during 1949 on the American Kingdom studio lot. There was one of her at the Pingrove, surrounded by golden age Hollywood stars. She was perched on the arm of a leather chair, in a black silk lace dress.

  It was the third photograph that I couldn’t rip my eyes away from, though. It was a shot of Robert Hosterlitz, waving to some crowds at the premiere of The Eyes of the Night. Behind him was a cinema somewhere in LA, a red carpet running like a strip of ribbon towards its doors. Flanking him were Saul Zeller and Glen Cramer, Zeller tanned and handsome, Cramer immaculate in a black suit. At the edge of the shot, next to Cramer, was Életke Kerekes. The men were laughing riotously about something – but while there was the hint of a smile at the corners of Kerekes’s mouth, as if she was being polite, it didn’t reach her eyes. Was it just unfortunate timing, or was there more to it than that?

  I looked at my watch. It was almost 10.30 p.m.

  Cramer would be leaving the Royalty Park party about now. I sank the rest of my coffee and then my eyes dropped again to the picture of Kerekes at the premiere. I looked at that tiny hint of a smile, at the stark contrast – in black and white – between the dark of her hair and the paleness of her skin – and then a memory formed.

  Axe Maniac.

  The terrible Hosterlitz horror film I’d watched in a hotel room three nights before. It was something to do with that. There was something in it. Something I’d seen but not really taken in. But what?

  Switching to the browser, I went to one of the best European horror movie sites I’d found when I’d been trying to gather background on Hosterlitz’s career in the 1970s and 1980s. Its awful design hid a comprehensive database of French, Spanish and Italian horror films, with screenshots of many of the most famous ones. Because Axe Maniac had been available in English, and to buy on DVD, the people who ran the site had been able to capture its cast in action, the gory deaths, and what they termed ‘key moments’.

  The screenshots were spread across three pages. On the first page, Korin was standing at a wardrobe naked, picking out a dress. I remembered watching it, but it wasn’t the scene itself that interested me this time, it was the fact that she’d dyed her blonde hair black for this film and had cut it short; and it was the dress she’d removed from the wardrobe. Dark grey, with a sequined pattern.

  Just like the one Kerekes wore to the premiere.

  My pulse quickened. I went to the next page. Korin was putting on the dress, and zipping it up at the back, and then standing in front of a mirror, looking at herself. In the next sequence of shots, the camera began to track around her in a graceful arc, again showcasing the way Hosterlitz made his wife’s scenes distinct.

  Then I clicked through to the third page.

  She finished styling her hair. She turned towards the camera. She was looking beyond it, beautiful in the sequined dress, her face as pale as snow. And the very corners of her mouth were turned up in the hint of a smile.

  I felt my whole body compress.

  He’s turned her into Életke Kerekes.

  In terms of their shape, they were completely different. Korin was fuller, curvier, bustier. She was taller too. Kerekes was more straight up and down – not boyish exactly, but smaller, slight, petite. Yet they shared something more than just the same dress, the same hair and the same smile.

  It’s their eyes.

  Except, maybe for Hosterlitz, it went even deeper than some minor physical similarity. Maybe he saw something in Korin, and was drawn to her, not because of the way she looked but because of the way she was – her demeanour, her nature. Maybe that was the reason he became so obsessed with her, why he treated her scenes with such reverence, why he might fill an entire album full of photographs of her. Which made the scene in Axe Maniac what exactly? A tribute to Kerekes? A love letter? Or some sort of confession?

  I desperately tried to dismiss it, coming at it from the other direction. I rewound to what Rafael Walker had told me, about the National People story being a plant. Now Glen Cramer had called me to confess to a secret he couldn’t keep any more. Could it have been Cramer who’d phoned the National People? Why would he have done that? It was hard to see straight, impossible to see the lines connecting one part of this to another.

  I looked at my watch again, knowing it was time to go – but still I couldn’t move. Because now all I could think about was whether Lynda Korin had finally found out some terrible truth about her husband, years after she’d buried him.

  I hope you can forgive me, Lynda.

  Maybe the discovery had set this whole thing in motion.

  Maybe it was the reason she’d disappeared.

  55

  Glen Cramer arrived late, but not by much.

  The taxi pulled up outside Limehouse station and an interior light came on. I could see Cramer
reaching forward, paying the taxi driver. The driver clearly recognized his passenger: he was talking to Cramer animatedly, laughing, and made the effort to get out and open his door for him. Cramer shuffled across the back seat, hauled himself out, and flipped up the hood on a thin raincoat he was wearing. The night was still enough for me to hear the driver asking him if he definitely wanted to be dropped off here, and then the taxi was gone and Cramer was alone, half covered by darkness, face hidden inside the hood.

  I was standing in the shadows of a doorway further down the street, but continued to watch him, looking for signs of a tail. He was on edge, anxious, but the more time that passed, the more certain I was that it was safe, so – after seven minutes of waiting around – I called him. He fumbled around in the pocket of his raincoat, a dinner jacket visible underneath, and answered his phone.

  ‘David?’ There was already mild panic in his voice.

  ‘I need you to listen, okay? Head south, turn right at the end on to Ratcliffe Lane, and then left on to Butcher Row. Two minutes further down, on the other side of the railway bridges, you’ll find a red-brick building. It says “Public Baths” on it. Are you getting this?’ I watched him nod, and then he told me he was. ‘The building’s empty, but there’s an arched entrance next to it that takes you around to the back, into a kind of courtyard. I’ll meet you in there.’

  I hung up, pocketed my phone and watched him. I knew caution was necessary, but it was hard not to feel a pang of guilt at the sluggishness of his movements: I was making a 91-year-old man walk half a mile in the dark.

  I followed him at a distance all the way there, and when Cramer finally reached the building, he paused, placing a hand on the wall, the arched entrance that led to the baths’ courtyard beside him. With a final look up at the front of the building – its windows boarded, its render chipped and gouged – he stepped through the arch and the night swallowed him up. I headed in after him.