by Tim Weaver
‘The moment?’
‘The moment when I saw the truth. I saw how much he cared about her. All the bullshit, all the trouble he got into, everything fell away in that second. He was a complicated kid, messed up, but he loved her. He wanted to know where she was, why Saul and I were acting the way we were. That was when I could see it coming apart at the seams in front of me. But, in the end, none of it mattered.’
‘Why not?’
‘About thirty seconds later, he dropped flat on his face like he’d been shot in the back. He went from standing to unconscious in about a second.’
The sleeping pills. ‘Zeller drugged his whisky.’
‘Yes.’ Cramer nodded. ‘The kid was lights out. Gone. Saul returns and – between us – we carry Martin back to Room 805, and we close the door and I just stand there and watch Saul work. It was terrifying. So methodical and thought-out. He had a whole box of pills, which he put into Elaine’s handbag, like it was hers and the kid had stolen some from her, and then he removed a bottle of whisky from his suite and poured some down the kid’s throat. The rest he emptied into the sink. He took off the kid’s shirt, soaked it in her blood and put it back on him again, then dragged the kid over and used her damn fingernails to make marks on his wrists. He wanted it to look like Martin attacked her and she tried to defend herself. But the worst thing was the hair.’ Cramer looked up at me, eyes glistening. ‘He ripped her hair out, big chunks of it. He laced them between Martin’s fingers. I said to Saul, “What are you doing?” and he looked at me, stone-cold sober, and said, “He attacked her. She fought back. He grabbed her hair and ripped it out.” ’
Neither of us spoke for a while.
‘We went back down to the bar,’ he said eventually, ‘like nothing had ever happened, and we made sure a whole bunch of people at the Pingrove saw us. Saul casually mentioned how we’d left Martin up there with his mother, how the kid was a bad egg, how he didn’t seem to respect her, but he didn’t overplay it. In the early hours of the morning, when everyone started drifting away, Saul made a big show of getting us a cab out to a nightclub on Sunset, chatting to the driver the whole way over so he’d remember us. Once the cab was gone, though, he told me to call Bobby at home so that the three of us could meet up.’
‘To get your stories straight.’
‘Right. We met at a spot near the duck pond in Franklin Canyon. It’s up in the hills, north of the Pingrove. Bobby was still a mess. I went to comfort him, to say something, but before I even opened my mouth, Zeller had started talking. He told Bobby that Elaine was dead before I ever got up to the room. He said, “You killed her when you threw her against that dresser, Bobby. You damaged her head.” I remember shooting a look at Zeller, this “What the hell …?” expression, but he just stared me down, and I could feel myself shrink away from him. There was something so callous about him. He put a hand on Bobby’s shoulder, and said, “If anyone finds out what you’ve done, you’re going to the gas chamber. But they won’t. We took care of it for you.” It was such a confident lie. So convincing.
‘Bobby was doubled over, hands on his knees, crying his eyes out, and Zeller had a hand on his back, talking softly to him. But you know something? Saul never took his eyes off me the whole time. Not once. It was a threat – almost a challenge. Just try and defy me. Just try and go against me. He was saying, This is how it is, so you’d better be on board with it. After that, I stood there in silence. I just watched as he said to Bobby, “What you need to do now is unfuck your head. It’s done. It’s over. It was a mistake and we’ve cleared it up for you. Someone else is going to take the heat for this.” And then he said, “Is there anything in your house that links you to Elaine?” Bobby had a think about it and then he said that she’d given him this ornament one time.’
I looked at him. An ornament. I took out my phone, found a photo of the wooden angel and held it up to him. ‘This ornament?’
Cramer stared at it. ‘Yeah. Yeah, that’s it.’
‘Kerekes gave this to Hosterlitz?’
‘Yeah, she made it for him out of a block of wood. She was clever like that. You showed me this picture at the house – where did you get it?’
I thought of Hosterlitz’s message to Korin on the back of the angel photo that Egan had taken from the album. I hope you can forgive me, Lynda. If Korin had found out the truth about Kerekes before she disappeared, if that had been one of the catalysts for her vanishing, then the message made absolute sense – it meant she’d surely found out about her husband’s part in the murder too.
‘David, where did you get that picture?’
‘I took it at Lynda Korin’s house,’ I said. ‘So did Hosterlitz hand the ornament over to Zeller?’
‘Yeah. He gave it to Saul, and Saul told me to get rid of it.’
‘But clearly you didn’t.’
‘I thought I did,’ he said.
‘Glen,’ I said, watching him closely, ‘what’s going on?’
Cramer looked out at the shadows of the baths.
Suddenly, there was a sharp breath of wind. It whistled through the holes in the walls closest to us, and then slowly began to fade again – and, as it did, something of it was left behind. The hint of a voice.
I backed up a step and looked along the edge of the pool, down towards the changing rooms. The building was silent now. When Cramer started talking again, my eyes were still on the doors into this place – the walls, its rifts and cavities.
‘At Franklin Canyon, Saul started saying to Bobby, “You go back to work so everything looks normal. You get back on the horse, you go back to making My Life is a Gun – and you shoot the best damn film you’ve ever made.” ’ I finally turned back to Cramer and found him grimacing, his head slightly bowed. ‘It was just business to Saul. Nothing else. Bobby gave him credibility, and he made him money, and that was all that mattered. That was all Zeller saw.’
Physically, Cramer had long ceased to be that man in the hotel room, age laying claim to his features, to the square jaw and dark hair. He’d become frail, his spine curving like a bow. He was old and grey and blanched. And yet a part of him remained there, caught for ever in a maze of terrible choices, six decades old.
‘So what happened after that was you sold Hosterlitz down the river with the National People story,’ I said, pressing him. ‘Is that it? You killed Kerekes in October 1953, and then you and Zeller planted the story the following May.’
It took him a second, but then he nodded.
‘Why?’
‘Bobby was starting to lose it. When he found out about Martin, how we framed him, he started drinking. He’d be drunk all the time. He was on pills and weed and who knows what else. He missed a deadline for delivering a first draft of the My Life is a Gun script, and then another, and then another, and then another. People started to notice. He’d already cast Lana Turner, and Lana and I would go to meetings at the lot and he’d never turn up, and Lana would ask me, “Where’s Bobby? What’s happening with Bobby?” Saul was starting to get pissed off too. He’d got Lana on a three-picture deal. She’d left MGM in 1954 to come to AKI, on a promise from Saul that her first movie would be a Hosterlitz film. But, after three months, there wasn’t even a finished script, so Saul had to release her from her contract. She went to Warner, and that was when he got really angry.’
He paused, but only briefly, his words coming fast now: ‘I tried to get Bobby to see sense, I swear. I’d go up to his place in Laurel Canyon, and when he wasn’t ripped on bourbon or weed I thought I was getting through to him. But then I’d go up there again and he wouldn’t answer, so I’d jump the gate and get into his yard, and I’d look through the windows at the back of his place and he’d be lying unconscious, surrounded by empty bottles.’
‘Did you blame him?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t blame him at all.’
‘But you ruined his life, anyway.’
‘It was Saul,’ Cramer replied instantly. ‘It was all Saul.’
That didn’t even deserve a response and he knew it.
He smiled, almost apologetically, and then began again, even quieter than before. ‘Seven months after Elaine was killed, Saul said we had to do something. Bobby got drunk at the Pingrove one night when we were all there, and someone overheard him talking about the woman who got killed on the eighth floor. At the time, Martin had already gone down for the murder, he was on death row up at San Quentin, and the cop who ran the case – Ray Callson, his name was – he’d interviewed Saul and me and given us the all-clear. But Bobby talking like that – it would get Callson interested again. It would be a one-way ticket for all of us.’ Cramer made a long, painful noise, halfway between a sigh and a cry for help. ‘The National People thing was Saul’s idea. You couldn’t just kill Robert Hosterlitz and hope no one noticed. He was a name people knew. But outing him as a secret communist – well, once you were tarred as a Red, you were finished. No one believed anything you said any more. Saul knew that Bobby wouldn’t stick around long enough to be dragged through committee hearings, whether he was drunk or not. He’d hate the exposure, the vitriol, the media assassination.’
‘So Zeller called the paper.’
‘Yes. When the story came out in May ’54, Saul said to Bobby, “Get on a plane, go to the UK, reinvent yourself – we’ll always have a space for you back at AKI when it blows over.” I don’t know if he really meant it or not, but even then he was pretending to Bobby that we were on his side. But we weren’t on his side. We were stabbing him in the back. We’d ruined a man’s career in order to save our own.’ Cramer looked at me, opening out his hands like he was waiting to be arrested. ‘But then, when he came back to the States in ’62, when he eventually shot The Ghost of the Plains and I saw him on the Paramount lot, it was like I told you at the house on Saturday. He was there with his script, making notes all over it, and he turned to me and smiled and said, “I was hoping I might run into you.” He was so genuine, it felt like the guilt might crush me. I invited him back to mine, that much was true, but what I didn’t tell you before was that, in the end, the guilt got too much for me to bear. I sat there and watched him recount everything that had happened to him in the time since Elaine had died, and it just became too much.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I told him Saul had lied to him.’
‘You mean, you told Hosterlitz that he hadn’t killed Kerekes?’
‘No, not that. I didn’t get as far as that.’
‘So what did you tell him?’
‘I said, “Saul lied to you.” Bobby just sat there in silence. When he didn’t react, when he didn’t leap out of his chair and grab me by the throat and start screaming “What are you talking about? What lie did he tell me?”, I started to panic. I had this sudden moment of clarity. I thought, “You’ve made a big mistake. You shouldn’t have said anything.” So I pretended it was a joke, an awful joke. I told him to forget it, that no one told anyone a lie, and – after that – I went straight to Saul and explained what I’d done, grovelling like a child. Saul went crazy, but what could he do? He couldn’t kill me. I was one of the world’s biggest movie stars. But the weird thing was, in the end nothing happened.’
‘Hosterlitz didn’t follow up on it?’
‘No. Nothing. He didn’t seem to process it when I told him at the time, and he did nothing about it afterwards either. He still believed he’d killed Elaine.’
But Cramer wasn’t finished.
‘There was something else too,’ he said. ‘Something I told Bobby but never admitted to Zeller.’
I took a step closer. ‘What?’
He looked at the phone, still in my hands.
‘The wooden angel,’ he said.
‘What about it?’
‘I told Bobby what I really did with it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, I did get rid of it after we killed Elaine, just as Saul asked me to – but not in the way I told him I did. He thought I’d dumped it in the ocean, or chopped it up, or thrown it into a fire. But I didn’t do that.’
‘So what did you do with it?’
‘I took it to a building in Van Nuys.’
Van Nuys was a neighbourhood twenty miles north of Venice.
‘What? Why did you take it up there?’
‘I took it to this building on Pierre Street, just off Van Nuys Boulevard. It’s closed now, but back then it was still open. It was on this long street full of three-storey houses that they knocked down at the end of the seventies.’
Three-storey houses.
Instantly, I thought of the footage that had played on the TV in Hosterlitz’s horror movies, the camera tilted to show the upper windows.
Was Pierre Street the road in the footage?
‘Why did you take it to that building?’ I asked.
‘It belonged there.’
‘Why?’
Cramer was just staring at the floor.
‘Glen. What was the building?’
Finally, haltingly, he looked up at me. ‘Ring of Roses,’ he said. ‘The building was called Ring of Roses.’
I stared at him. ‘Ring of Roses is the name of a building?’
‘Yes. Was the name of a building.’
‘Why take the angel there?’
Cramer went to reply – and then stopped.
From the silence of the shadows came another noise. It started quietly, but the longer it went on, the louder it got, like someone turning up the volume on a radio. When I looked at Cramer, it was obvious he had no idea what was going on. As he cowered in the shadows of the pillars, I stepped towards the changing rooms, the only way in and out of this place, and there was another sound: tiles crunching underfoot.
‘Perfect timing.’
A voice from the darkness.
It was Saul Zeller.
59
Zeller emerged from the gloom, sliding out of it like a crocodile from a river. He was in his late eighties and walked with surprising ease for a man of his age. He was straight, almost rigid, no hint of an arch to his posture like Cramer, no sense of fragility in his bones. He was dressed younger too, in a black designer suit, the lapels a dark grey silk, his white shirt unbuttoned, no tie. And yet his face was the opposite, his creased skin colourless, the dome of his hairless head mottled with liver spots and old scabs. It was odd, unsettling, as if the cold-blooded, devious young man that Cramer had described was now hiding inside this layer of decay.
Two people followed him in.
Alex Cavarno came first. She was dressed in a long black pencil skirt and a white ruffled blouse, her lipstick shining in the light escaping through the roof.
She couldn’t look at me.
The other was Billy Egan. He hadn’t attended the party, so he was dressed in jeans and a hooded top; the hood was up, in an attempt to disguise a face that carried the reminders of our last meeting. His nose was broken, one of his eyes had filled with blood, and his face was so bruised he looked like a grotesque oil painting. He was pointing a gun at me.
Over my shoulder, I heard Cramer start to sob.
‘Oh, Glen,’ Zeller said. ‘What have you done, old friend?’
His accent was soft and indistinct – American, but without a region.
‘I’m not sure what Glen has told you, Mr Raker, but I doubt it was anything good.’ He was talking to me, but his eyes hadn’t left Cramer. ‘You may have figured this out already, but the reason Glen isn’t doing another season of Royalty Park is because, this time next month, he’ll be six feet under the ground in Hollywood Forever.’
I just stared at Zeller.
‘Hollywood Forever is a cemetery,’ he said, as if he were talking to a child. I knew that part. It was next to Paramount in LA, and was the last resting place of actors like Valentino and Mansfield, and directors like DeMille and Huston.
What I didn’t know for sure was that Cramer was dying.
I’ve got to tell someone before it’s too late, he’d sai
d to me as we’d arrived here. It would have taken him too long to confess to the police. He needed to unburden himself, but he didn’t have enough time left to explain all the background. All the dates and names and locations and history and motivations – it would take days, maybe weeks, to define it all from scratch. What he wanted to do was confess – which is where I came in. Unlike the police, I knew enough already.
‘Liver cancer,’ Zeller said. There was a curl to his lips, but it was difficult to say whether the news pleased Zeller or made him sad. He had a starched, rigid aspect to his face, difficult to read, that reminded me of Cramer’s descriptions of him – the way he’d coldly, quietly dealt with Kerekes; the way he’d told Hosterlitz it was all his fault and had stared down Cramer, inviting him to challenge the lie.
I glanced at Cramer again. He was bloodless, his eyes wet with tears.
‘Anyway,’ Zeller said, ‘ever since I found out, I kept saying to my son, “Glen’s conscience is going to get the better of him.” All these years he saw the sense in keeping his mouth shut. He wouldn’t have built a career as the world’s biggest movie star without my help, without the things I did for him sixty years ago. He saw the logic in keeping our little secret. But gaining a sense of your own mortality, that can clear the head. All of a sudden, you start to worry about what comes next. So when Glen told me he was ill, I thought, “He’s got a lot to get off his chest. He’s got a whole shitload of guilt. He won’t want to carry that to his grave. He’ll want to get it out in the open and then go back to LA and die.” I suppose, in a lot of ways, he isn’t all that different from Bobby, God rest his soul.’