by Tim Weaver
Under foot was a floor of concrete, cracked and uneven, plants crawling out of the rifts and fissures, vines climbing the walls. Cramer was standing right at the back, at the edge of the shadows, his hands in his pockets. He looked frail and grey, the mix of darkness and light emphasizing the folds and creases of his face. I saw a shimmer in his eyes as I approached, a moment of fear. The closer I got to him, the more he seemed to shrink, as if losing weight in front of me.
Next to him was a set of doors. A rusting chain had been looped around the handles, and a padlock attached, giving the impression there was no way in.
It was all a lie.
Just like everything else in this case.
There was no mechanism inside the padlock, so while the shackle looked like it was secured into the body of the lock, it was all show. I pulled the shackle out, removed the padlock from the chains and began unravelling them from the door handles. Twenty seconds later, they were in a pile on the floor at my feet.
‘I need to check your phone,’ I said.
He seemed reluctant, but he did as I asked. I checked his Recent Calls, texts, emails – and found nothing – then checked for any sign of a trace; any apps that set off alarm bells, any additions to the phone itself. When I was done, I removed the SIM card and battery and left them on a window ledge. Maybe I was being paranoid. Maybe I hadn’t thought any of this through properly.
My head started thumping again.
‘Follow me,’ I said.
Using a penlight I’d found in Egan’s car, I led us deeper into the bowels of the building. It smelled damp, stagnant. Cramer followed close behind me as I wove a path through the decayed corridors, into the male changing rooms, past a shower block that smelled brackish and stale, and out into the main pool area.
The empty pool ran at a slant from one end to the other and, above us, there were chunky glass panels built into the curve of the ceiling. A lot were cracked or missing altogether, moss and vines twisted around the vacant frames.
I stopped about halfway along the pool, where a weak shaft of moonlight broke through the gaps in the roof and erupted against an alcove between two pillars. There was a slab of stone inside, a natural bench, and I gestured for Cramer to sit. As he shuffled in, a moment of unease struck me. I scanned the room, looking hard at the shadows that painted so much of it. The space was large, maybe three hundred and fifty feet from one end to the other, and most of it was dark, or barely lit. I should have gone somewhere smaller. Somewhere more manageable. I looked down at the pool, at the place where people had once swum. It was a bed of bronzed mulch; the evidence of a thousand fallen leaves.
Cramer collapsed on to the bench with a heavy breath, joints popping, his entire body seeming to sigh. He looked pale under the moonlight, old and tired, every day of his ninety-one years. Mostly, though, he just looked scared.
‘You said you had something to tell me, Mr Cramer?’
‘Glen,’ he said softly, eyes on the floor. He was at the edge of the bench, his legs perfectly adjacent to one another, a veined hand on either knee.
‘Glen. What is it you want to say?’
He swallowed. ‘I did something.’
Életke Kerekes. It had to be her.
‘What did you do?’
He looked up at me, his eyes flashing in the half-light. ‘When you came to the house on Saturday, asking about Bobby, you asked questions that made me think you might know more than you were letting on. As soon as you left, I started to panic. I started to think, “He knows …” That was why I ended up calling you on Sunday, and when I couldn’t get through, why I called again this afternoon. I did it both times from a phone booth because I didn’t want them to find out.’
‘Who? Zeller and Egan?’
He nodded and took a long, crackling breath. ‘I’ve got to tell someone before it’s too late. I can’t go to the grave with this on my conscience.’
‘Why haven’t you gone to the police?’
He shook his head. ‘There’s no time for that. Filling them in on who’s who, on the background to everything, on years and dates and all that bullshit – it’ll take weeks. That’s time I don’t have any more.’
I eyed him. ‘Time you don’t have?’
‘My life is measured in days now, David.’
‘Do you mean you’re sick?’
He just shook his head. ‘None of that matters. All that matters is what we did. All that matters is that we did something terrible.’
56
I looked at him, a pale sliver of a man set inside two stone pillars, and thought of the picture of Hosterlitz, Zeller and Cramer at The Eyes of the Night premiere, Kerekes off to the side.
‘Are you saying you killed Életke Kerekes?’
Cramer’s eyes were on the empty swimming pool, the cracks in its base. Softly, he said, ‘We all had different parts to play.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘We didn’t all brandish the knife, but we all did our part. Bobby, Saul, me – we all played a role.’ His hands had been on his knees, but finally he moved them, lacing his thin, pale fingers together on his lap. ‘American Kingdom – it’s a lie. Every picture Saul green-lit in the time since that woman died is a lie, because he should never have been there to do it. Every film I did for them is the same. We should have been in prison. We should have been going to the gas chamber, not walking around doing this.’ He gestured to the space above our heads, but I got his meaning. This freedom. This success. This career. This money.
‘Tell me what happened,’ I said.
Somewhere above us, a bird took flight, flapping its wings in the shadows. Cramer tried looking for it, his wet eyes searching, and when he didn’t find it, he started nodding, as if he’d been waiting a long time for the question to land.
‘Elaine,’ he said quietly. ‘We never knew her as Életke. I never even knew that was her actual name until the papers ran stories about her. But I guessed she wasn’t American, because she had this beautiful accent, like Sophia Loren.’
‘When did you first meet her?’
‘We used to go to this club on Sunset Strip called the Blue Orchid, before the Pingrove became the place to be seen. This must have been 1951, because I’d just done Connor O’Hare and I was starting to get a bit of attention.’ He paused; a flicker of a smile. ‘As hard as it is to believe now, I used to get quite a lot of female attention. Most nights at the Orchid, I went home with someone.’
‘Did you go home with Kerekes?’
‘Oh no. No, she was engaged to John Winslow by then. Elaine wasn’t some floozy. She had class. She was intelligent. She took her commitments seriously.’
‘So you just got talking to her?’
‘Saul introduced us.’
‘This was before she was employed as a screenwriter?’
‘Yeah. The year before. Officially, she was still working for old man Zeller and Saul, running around doing their bidding. But they were starting to use her for more than just typing up letters. She had this …’ He paused, his eyes squeezing shut as if he couldn’t think of the word. ‘This gift, I guess. She wrote these stories for kids, but it was more than that. These days, studios pay a fortune for someone like her, someone with that kind of intuition, who understands the audience. And Elaine, she understood kids’ films. She got how kids were wired, and back then – when Disney were making millions from animated pictures – Elaine gave the Zellers an edge none of Disney’s other competitors had. Did you know that most of the cartoons that AKI made in the fifties were based on her ideas? Saul was still mining her stories even after she was murdered. It was disgraceful.’ His head dropped.
‘So did she come with Zeller to the Blue Orchid that night?’
‘She came with a bunch of guys from AKI. I was there with a date. Bobby was there too. He didn’t bring anyone. He never did. I said to you when you came to my house that Bobby was a lonely soul. That part wasn’t a lie. I loved him like a brother, but he had no interest in …’ He wa
ved a hand through the air, back and forth, to signify sex, or maybe love, or maybe both. ‘Zeller used to call him a fag all the time – only half joking, I think – but at least if Bobby had been gay, he would have felt something. It was more like he was … I don’t know …’
‘Asexual.’
‘Exactly, yeah.’ He stopped again, rubbing at one of his eyes. ‘Anyway, Saul brought Elaine over and – wow. I thought she was incredible. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I had to pretend I was interested in my date, but it was really Elaine I was interested in. A little way into the evening, I watched as she went off to the bathroom, and saw my chance. I made an excuse and waited for her outside the restrooms, and when she came out, I stopped her and said, “Would you let me buy you a drink?” She smiled at me – this killer smile – and replied, “Thank you, Mr Cramer, I’d love a drink with you and your date. It’ll fill the hour before my fiancé picks me up.” ’ Cramer stopped, the hint of a smile. ‘Like I said, she took her commitments seriously. Her work. Her family. Relationships. It all mattered.’
‘But after her second husband died?’
Cramer shrugged. ‘Saul and I, we both had a thing for her. I’d like to believe my feelings were more profound than his, because Saul’s were simply lust. He just wanted to sleep with her, no more, no less. I think she spent most of her working day fending off advances from him, and I’m sure he tried to use that against her – “Put out, or you’re finished at AKI”, that sort of thing. But it was all bullshit and both of them knew it. Saul loved two things more than he loved women: money and power. Talent like Elaine had, like Bobby had – like I had, I guess – gave him those things. Saul surrounded himself with talent. It was smart and pragmatic.’
‘So did you ask her out?’
He nodded. ‘I waited, obviously. She was grieving for John Winslow and she was a mother. Kids should always be the priority. I never had any myself, but I know that. I think Winslow died in October 1952, so I called her and offered to help in any way I could, and then bought her lunch a couple of times a little while later, and gradually, over the course of five or six months, I got to know her better and it felt like we grew close.’ He swallowed, rubbing his fingers at a dry spot on his face. ‘I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t physically attracted to her, because I was. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t think about what it would be like to sleep with her, because I did. But I never tried anything with her – not for a long, long time. I just enjoyed her company, enjoyed getting to know her, enjoyed trying to make her laugh. In that time, I never went to her place, never met her son – she never invited me, and I never pushed it. I thought she was probably embarrassed about where she lived and that she wasn’t ready to introduce a new man into her home life, and I understood that. So we’d just meet up somewhere and share a coffee, or go to a diner for lunch, or take a walk in Griffith Park. That was what it was, all it was, until, I don’t know, May or June.’
‘That was when you asked her out officially?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And what did she say?’
‘She said no.’ Cramer halted, clearing his throat. It was a soft, gluey sound, a mix of phlegm and emotion. ‘I was shocked. I’d read the situation, gone over it in my head. I’d spent months waiting for the right moment. I thought it was what she wanted, just the same as me – and then she said no. But do you know what was worse? It wasn’t because she didn’t feel ready to date someone. It was me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It was me – or, at least, what I did for a living. She didn’t want to date a movie star. She didn’t want to be snapped every time she went out for dinner, or down to the grocery store. She didn’t want the pond life from the National People slithering all over the steps of her house, where a kid might be playing one day in the future, or trying to catch her with her blouse off through the bedroom window. Basically, she didn’t want to be known as some woman in the background of Glen Cramer’s life. She had bigger plans than that. She had her own life, her own ambitions.’ He swallowed again, but this time it seemed harder for him. ‘In hindsight, I can see all of that. I admire it. Why would she settle for being Glen Cramer’s new squeeze when she could be Elaine Kinflower, screenwriter? I understand that now, I do.’
‘But you didn’t back then?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I didn’t understand it at all. In fact, I got angry with her. I swore at her, spoke to her in a terrible way, and accused her of leading me on. She told me she never believed she’d done that, and if she had she never intended to, and that we should have some time apart from one another, so that I could calm down. She said, “I hope we can still be friends,” and I told her, “Fuck you.” ’ Cramer looked crushed by the memory, his eyes watery and red. He let out a long breath. ‘If I could take it all back, I would. I would do it in a heartbeat.’
‘What happened then?’
‘I spent a month screwing half the women in LA, trying to get Elaine out of my system. I got drunk most nights. But, whatever I did, I couldn’t stop thinking about her – and, in my head, it was the same question, over and over: “If not me, then who?” ’ He glanced at me; wiped at an eye. ‘I was infatuated with her. If I couldn’t have her, I didn’t want anyone else to. I’d lie there at night, with some woman next to me whose name I didn’t even know, and all I’d be thinking about was Elaine. I hated the idea of her with another man. It was eating me up.’ His words fell away, laced with embarrassment. ‘Then I saw her with Bobby Hosterlitz.’
I looked at Cramer. ‘But you said he was never –’
‘Interested in women. Right. He wasn’t. But then suddenly he was. He was interested in her.’ He shrugged. ‘You ever heard of the picture My Life is a Gun?’
I’d read about it. It was the follow-up to The Eyes of the Night, the film that Hosterlitz had been prepping for AKI before he was forced to flee the country.
‘I’d been talking to Bobby about taking the lead in it,’ Cramer continued. ‘I’d basically agreed to it. I’d read the treatment. It was dynamite. Absolute dynamite. It was better than The Eyes of the Night. Anyway, I was at his office on the lot – I guess this must have been September 1953 – and we were talking, then he says he has to go, he’s got to meet someone. So I said to him, “Let me drop you.” I had this new Buick Dynaflow and I wanted to show it off. But he gets all sheepish about it and tells me not to worry. I tell him it’s no hassle and he says to forget it – almost gets uppity about it. So I let him go. Except I didn’t. I followed him.’
‘He was going to meet Kerekes.’
‘Yeah,’ Cramer said. ‘Yeah, that’s right. I didn’t know it at the time, I was just taken aback by how he’d been with me. He seemed different, agitated. I’d known him a while by then – four years or so – and I’d never seen him react like that. I swear to you, I didn’t follow him because I even remotely suspected he was meeting Elaine. Hell, I didn’t think he’d be meeting a woman of any description. That just wasn’t Bob. I went after him because I thought, “If he’s losing his grip, if something’s wrong, if he’s sick in the head, or an alcoholic, or suddenly addicted to drugs, I don’t want to sign up to doing a picture with him and ruin my career.” That was my thinking. It was purely selfish.’ Cramer looked up at me. ‘But then we ended up in Venice.’
His eyes had dropped to the floor and his hands were back on his knees. ‘I parked a block away and let Bobby go in,’ he continued, ‘and then I got out and walked to the house. By the time I got there, Bobby was outside with Elaine, sitting on the front steps of that place she had. They were having lemonade, just sitting, chatting. They weren’t doing anything – holding hands or kissing. None of that. In fact, Bobby was sitting apart from her. All they were doing was talking.’
‘Because he wasn’t trying to date her,’ I said.
Cramer nodded. ‘Right.’
‘They’d become friends.’
‘Yeah. Bobby shunned the spotlight, that’s the thing. That’s why it worked.
He hated celebrity. If he had to do promotion, he would, but even after The Eyes of the Night went big, he kept a low profile. He directed a picture that won seven Oscars, and a lot of people – even internally at AKI – still didn’t know what he looked like. That was the way he preferred it. That was the way Elaine preferred it.’
‘That was why she let him in.’
‘She let him come to her house. I spent six months paying for coffees and lunches and organizing picnics in the park, and she never once asked me back to her place. Not once. And yet I stood there that day and watched Bobby hitting balls to her boy in the yard, like he was his fucking dad or something. She’d spent six months with me and never as much as told me the kid’s name.’
‘Martin.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, almost a whisper. ‘Martin.’ There was a heaviness to his naming of Életke Kerekes’s son, as if his guilt and shame were moored to it. ‘Thing is, I think Elaine loved Bobby. Not in the traditional way, maybe. I’m not sure she loved anyone in that way at that time. Maybe she wouldn’t have again. But I kept following him back there, day after day, watching them together, and I could see they had something. There was no lust, nothing physical. It was pure.’ Cramer flattened his lips together, the tiny blood vessels in his cheeks colouring. ‘Bobby was a part of it.’
‘A part of their family.’
‘A part of their family,’ he repeated.
As Cramer fell silent, something else clicked into place. The photograph of Kerekes on the steps of her house, the one inserted into Kill! – I’d wondered where Hosterlitz had got it, years after her death. He must have taken it himself.
‘I did something terrible after that,’ Cramer said.
I looked at him.
It was obvious where we were headed now.
‘You killed her,’ I said.
He started at the sound of my voice, as if he’d forgotten he wasn’t alone in this place, and then his eyes moved back to the broken curves of the empty swimming pool.