by Tim Weaver
‘Glen,’ I said, ‘is that when you killed her?’
‘No,’ he replied. ‘No, I think I did something even worse.’
57
The baths were quiet and still, except for leaves fluttering downwards from the glass panels, like the broken rotors of a helicopter.
‘I temporarily lost my mind,’ Cramer said softly. His eyes were haunted. ‘I became this person I didn’t recognize. I was insanely jealous of what they had together – the innocence of it, the simplicity, the integrity. It was untainted. He knew I wanted to be with Elaine, because I’d told him. He pretty much knew I was infatuated with her at that point, which is why I think he didn’t want to admit to what they had. It was an act of kindness on his part, but I never saw it like that. I saw it as a betrayal.’ A shrug. ‘So I told him a lie.’
‘What lie?’
‘I told him she’d started making fun of him in front of me. I told Bobby she said he was weak and pathetic, that she found him creepy and isolated, and she didn’t like him hanging around her family. It just …’ He faded out, glancing at me. ‘It just poured out of me. I made it sound like I was doing him a favour, made him promise that he wouldn’t tell her because she’d made me promise not to tell him – but I could see he was devastated. He had tears in his eyes. I took what they had and I ruined it. I took the purity of their relationship and I ripped it to bits.
‘After that, I drove him to the Pingrove. Saul was having this huge house built at the eastern end of Mulholland, and while it was going up, he was staying in an apartment on the top floor of the hotel. During that time, he conducted a lot of meetings in one of the penthouse suites there, mostly because he was lazy and didn’t want to have to drive back and forth to the lot in Burbank. Anyway, I knew that, on a Tuesday, they had a regular 5 p.m. meeting with the animation people in there. That included Elaine.’ He looked at me, but not for long. It was hard for him to maintain eye contact. ‘She was always last out. She had to write up all the notes from the meeting because she was still playing part-time secretary for the men there, even then. Bobby went up there, angry and hurt, embarrassed. He’d been belittled by her. Or, at least, I’d made him think he had. So he checked to make sure she was definitely alone, and then he confronted her.’
‘Where were you?’
‘I was downstairs in the bar. But, the day after, Bobby told me everything that happened up there.’
The heaviness of his words seemed to hang there in the darkness.
‘Did Hosterlitz kill her?’
‘No,’ Cramer said. ‘But he knocked her out.’
As he paused again, sections of what I’d read about the case online came back to me; how detectives had found bruising on Kerekes’s face, chest, arms. It had been Hosterlitz who had put them there. Or maybe not just him.
‘He lost his head,’ Cramer continued. ‘He said they had this huge fight. He accused her of belittling him, of calling him weird, and she was screaming, telling him none of it was true. And then … and then he pushed her face-first into an oak dresser and knocked her out. He tried to wake her up, and when he couldn’t, he went into a tailspin. He thought he’d killed her. A few minutes later, he finds me in the bar. He has to put on this act in front of everybody as if everything’s fine, and he asks if he can talk to me. I thought he was going to tell me that he’d found out the truth – that she’d told him it was all a lie. But I follow him into the elevator and the operator takes us up, and as soon as we’re out, Bobby bursts into tears.’
‘And then?’
‘And then I went into the suite. Elaine was starting to come around, so I told him to go back down to the bar and wait for me.’
A breeze picked up, the old building groaning.
‘It was shameful,’ Cramer moaned. ‘I didn’t see a woman lying there on the floor with bruises on her face, I saw an opportunity to replace Bobby. I know this sounds insane, but I saw a chance to be what Bobby had been to her. I saw a chance to sit with her on the front steps of her house and play baseball with her boy. So I picked her up off the floor, not because she was injured, but because I was insecure and lonely. I see that now. I didn’t spend a single second thinking about her, really – it was all about what she could give me. But it all went wrong.’
‘How?’
‘When she’d gathered herself, she started telling me it was all my fault. She said, “I know it was you who put those ideas in his head.” She saw right through everything. She’d figured it all out before I’d even arrived.’
As he breathed out, his chest wheezed like a tyre losing pressure. ‘I’d never seen her so angry. She was in the bathroom, washing a cut on her face, telling me exactly what she thought of me. She didn’t seem to blame Bobby at all – that was the thing. He’d put her on the floor, lights out, and everything was about me. I’d hoped to destroy everything they had, to step into the space left behind, but I started to realize I’d done the opposite. She just kept shouting at me, telling me what an asshole I was, and the fuzz in my head’ – he lifted a hand to his face, to the dome of his skull – ‘it just got louder and louder, until I found myself grabbing her. She shook me off, so I grabbed her again, but harder, and she pushed me against the wall. And that was when I just … flipped.’
Cramer paused and squeezed his eyes shut.
‘I slapped her. She said, “I’m calling the cops! You’re going to pay for this. No one lays a hand on me!” I slapped her again, harder, but she just kept screaming at me, and when she went for the door, I panicked and … and I punched her. I went for her face, but I caught her in the throat instead. I winded her. She doubled over, was struggling to breathe, and the whole time it was just a haze behind my eyes. I was seething. Everything had gone wrong. Even then, she was still trying to speak, and though I could barely hear her, I could hear enough: she was telling me she’d ruin me, my reputation. I’d be arrested. I’d be destroyed in the press. So I picked up the paperweight – it was the nearest thing to me; I did it without thinking – and, while she was still bent over, telling me what she thought of me, I hit her on the back of the head with it.’
His eyes opened again, finding me instantly. ‘I still remember the sound,’ he said. ‘It was like an egg cracking. She went down, just completely folded, but it was weird: she didn’t black out this time. She just sort of lay there, bleeding into her hair, her eyes all misty, and then began trying to crawl in the direction of the bed – under it. She was moving in slow motion. It was as if she was trying to get away from me but she couldn’t remember how to coordinate her arms and her legs. It was awful. She kept making these sounds in her throat, like she was gagging. I’ll never forget it.’
I took a breath. ‘But you’re saying you didn’t kill her?’
He shook his head.
‘So who finished her off?’
Very quietly: ‘Saul Zeller did.’
‘How?’
‘He runs into Bobby downstairs. Bobby’s on his way home. Saul asks him for a drink and Bobby says no, and Saul can tell something is up. “What’s going on?” he says. And Bobby tells him, “Why don’t you go and ask Cramer?” So Saul gets the elevator up. He knocks on the door, tells me it’s him, and I open up and say, “Go away, Saul. This isn’t anything to do with you.” But he doesn’t go away. He looks over my shoulder and he sees Elaine on the floor, and he says to me, “What the fuck have you done, Glen?” And then a second later, it was like his brain switched, like he was a different person. He was suddenly seeing what damage it could do to us. I’m not saying he felt nothing for her, but … but he …’ Cramer shifted slightly on the bench, his joints clicking. He looked at me, a pained expression on his face. I wasn’t sure if it was his bones or his conscience. ‘He had all he needed from her.’
I felt myself tense. ‘Meaning what?’
‘She’d handed him her stories already.’ Cramer swallowed. ‘She’d written hundreds of them and she’d handed them all over. At that time, AKI were putting out one animated film a
year. Saul had enough material to last decades. It was the ideas. What he needed was her ideas. He already had writers to do the scripts.’
It was so unbelievably callous, it felt like I’d misheard him.
‘I’m just telling you how Zeller saw it,’ he said, seeing my reaction.
‘But you were indispensable?’
He could hear the contempt in my voice but all he did in return was shrug. ‘I’d won one Oscar and was tipped to win another, and I wasn’t even thirty. My picture was on magazine covers and in newspapers. I was on film posters all over the city, all over the country, all over the world. I had screaming women hunting me in packs when I went out to get smokes. I’d just signed a five-picture deal with AKI. And they needed me – they really needed me – because AKI back then, it was some pissant studio that Warner Brothers and Paramount and MGM used to snigger at. What had started to turn it all around was the Oscar win for Connor O’Hare. In a way, Bobby and I, we were the bedrock on which everything has been built since. Connor, The Eyes of the Night – they were what kick-started the good times for Saul Zeller. So if you want to know what Zeller saw that day when he looked at her and he looked at me, that was it. That was what he saw. A man on the verge of becoming the biggest movie star in the world – and then a woman no one knew, whose best ideas he already had.’
The temperature in the room seemed to drop.
‘How can you have just gone along with it?’
He shook his head, as if I didn’t get it. ‘You’ve got to understand something. Saul needed Bobby and me, because we were making him money and winning him awards and turning AKI into serious players. Bobby needed Saul because Saul indulged him. He let him concentrate on making one film a year, which was unheard of back then. And Bobby and I needed each other because his scripts, his movies, they were the best – there was no one better. Bobby hated having to explain decisions he’d made in the script, or justify direction he was giving. He hated having to deal with actors who didn’t share his vision. He never had to do that with me. I understood him, he understood me. We just …’ Cramer’s words fell away, and he leaned forward, eyes flashing in the light coming through the roof. ‘I guess what I’m saying is, if one of us went down, we all went down.’
Beads of sweat had formed on his lip, glistening like dew.
‘So Saul stepped into the suite,’ he said, ‘and I expected him to look at her in horror, to flip out. But he didn’t. He just watched her crawling towards the bed and said, “We need to fix this.” She kept turning her head and trying to look at me, kept trying to say my name, but whatever damage I’d done to the back of her head, it was bad. Her words were just choking sounds.’ He wiped an eye. ‘There was a knife in the room. It had come up with some food they’d ordered for the meeting. Saul flipped her over on to her back and he … he just … just pushed it through her throat.’
His words stalled.
‘He just kept going and going. Every time he hit resistance he would push it even harder. It was horrible. He ended her life like it meant nothing, and then – before she could bleed out – he grabbed her and dragged her to the bathroom. I stood there, frozen to the spot, and he turned to me and said, “Clean any blood off the carpet.” It was like looking at an alien, a form of life that felt absolutely nothing for anyone. I don’t think he even broke a sweat.’
I watched him for a moment, his eyes wet, facing the floor. There was a fine layer of dust on the toes of his brogues, and I found myself turning my attention to that, then to the cracks in the floor, then to the grimy, discoloured pillars and the vines laying claim to everything. I turned everywhere but to Cramer because, in that moment, I couldn’t stomach looking at him.
‘You don’t understand what Saul was like in there, David,’ he said, seeing my reaction. ‘It was like he was taking care of a chore. He took over. He never seemed remotely scared. I said to him, “How can you do this? Why aren’t you shitting yourself?” and he said, “I shot one hundred and twenty-seven Krauts in the war. I think I can deal with one dead woman.” I mean, when I turned eighteen in 1942, I went to Europe too, but I was in the combat engineers and spent most of my time building bridges. I didn’t see a lot of death, and not this sort of death. Not someone I knew and actually cared about.’ He glanced at me. ‘But Saul was different. He was almost subhuman.’
‘Why did you leave her like you did?’
‘The cops,’ he said.
‘The cops?’
‘An hour after it happened, they suddenly pulled up outside the hotel. We thought they’d come for us. So we left her like that, part of her in the tub, part of her on the floor, and went to Saul’s room. We showered and changed, we cut our clothes up into tiny pieces and flushed them down the can – but by the time we got downstairs to the bar, the cops were leaving again. They weren’t there for us at all.’ He shook his head, a humourless smile stretching his face. ‘We’d panicked about nothing. They’d arrived to break up a fight in the lobby.’
‘So why not go back up to the room and finish what you started?’
‘Martin,’ Cramer said. He seemed to fold in on himself, as if the mention of the boy’s name was like a poison taking hold of him. ‘Martin turned up in the lobby.’
58
‘Martin turned up at the Pingrove?’
Cramer nodded. ‘And Saul recognized him straight away.’
‘How did Zeller know him?’
‘Elaine hardly told me anything about Martin. I didn’t know his name. I wasn’t even sure how old he was, although I had a rough idea. One time we were out for lunch and she mentioned that he wasn’t in high school any more and that he was working at a restaurant. I could see that hurt her. She tried to disguise it, but I could tell they’d fought about it. I picked up on other things. Not much, but enough. Martin never saw eye to eye with Winslow, her second husband – in fact, I think they plain hated each other – so I don’t imagine the kid spent much time grieving when Winslow got hit by that car. That probably hurt Elaine a lot too. I think Martin was rebelling as well – more than a regular teenager, I mean – although Elaine never talked about it. I really only put it together when I spoke to Saul a few months after I’d tried asking Elaine out. I enquired how she was doing and – indiscreetly, as Saul could sometimes be – he told me she’d asked him to advance her four weeks’ wages. When he’d asked her why, she told him it was a personal matter. Saul being Saul, he couldn’t let that go – so he started digging around. That was just who he was. He always had to know.’
‘She needed it for Martin’s bail money.’
‘Right. For his assault charge. It was a tricky time in the kid’s life, I guess. No father. A mom whose focus wasn’t entirely on him any more. He got in with the wrong crowd, started drinking, got into drugs …’ Cramer trailed off. He had no business talking about any of this, and he knew it. Martin would have got six months for assault. Instead, thanks to Cramer and Zeller, he got sent to death row.
‘So Zeller recognized Martin from the snooping around he did on Kerekes. Martin turned up at Pingrove. Then what happened?’
Cramer’s Adam’s apple shifted beneath the skin of his throat. ‘Saul was at the bar, waiting for the last of the cops to leave before we headed back up to the room. Bobby had already left for the night, and I was in the restroom with my head in the can. I felt like I wanted to puke for ever. I could still smell her on me …’
His voice hitched like an old record.
‘Martin came looking for his mom. It turned out she’d promised him a ride back to Venice after his shift ended. She’d told him she’d wait outside the diner, but she never turned up, and she always turned up when she said she would. As soon as the kid entered the hotel, we were in the shit. He’d be asking around about his mom inside two seconds, trying to find out where she was. Saul had Room 805 on a permanent booking, so no one was going to come and check on it. There was no maid service, at least until the morning. But it was an AKI room. The people at the hotel knew who was us
ing it, so if Martin asked about AKI, about a meeting his mom was in, the staff would direct him upstairs. It was Saul’s meeting room.’
‘So he intercepted Martin?’
‘Yeah. He went and got him and brought him back to the bar. I was coming out of the bathroom by then, so Saul waved me over and introduced the two of us. He was stalling for time at this point, trying to come up with something. Maybe he thought the kid would be impressed by being introduced to Glen Cramer. But he wasn’t. There were other actors and producers in there, renowned Hollywood people, and this kid didn’t give a shit about any of them. I don’t know what the opposite of star-struck is, but he was that. He just looked at Saul and said, “Where’s my mom?” It was like he knew we were trying to divert his attention somehow.’ Cramer flattened his lips, pressing them together so hard they blanched. ‘He had her eyes. I looked at him and saw his mother staring back at me. I saw the way she used to study me sometimes, like she was crawling inside my head. He’d already been on the booze that night, we could smell it on him – but he was smart. He was like her.’
He ran a tongue along the top of his gums, as if his mouth had gone sour. ‘I’m starting to panic at that stage but trying not to show it. Saul, though, he’s like the Sphinx. There’s nothing. He doesn’t seem fazed at all. He just turns to the kid, and he says, “Your mom’s upstairs, finishing something off. Why don’t we go up?” I know what he’s going to do. I’m looking at him over the kid’s shoulder and I’m begging him not to do it.’ Cramer halted. ‘I’m begging him,’ he repeated softly.
‘But you let him do it anyway.’
‘Yes,’ he said, and his voice tremored. ‘Yes, I did. We took him up, making conversation with him like we were all the best of pals, and then Saul led him past the room and down to his own suite. He opened the door and she was obviously not in there, but he made a big show of it, like, “Oh, where has Elaine got to?” We went into Saul’s suite and sat down and he handed out some tumblers of whisky, and then he told the kid he’d go and find Elaine, and left the two of us alone. I felt sick, looking at him. I had no idea what to say to him. I could act all day, every day, in front of the cameras, but there, in that room, I couldn’t put on a show. He knew something was up and I couldn’t think what to do, what lie to tell him, to persuade him otherwise – so he got up, sank the rest of his whisky, and started to say, “Where the hell’s my mom? Why isn’t she here?” That was the moment.’