Make Believe

by Ed Ifkovic

  Give you pain. I repeated the words to myself.

  Give you murder, I thought.

  And then I found what I wanted. A scribbled account on one page, Max’s summing up of a brief but troubling talk he’d endured. A spitfire exchange, Max acknowledging that he’d lost his temper. I smiled at that: if I jotted in my own journal the times I flew off the handle, usually for trivial matters best ignored, the collected volumes would outnumber the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. Battles royale, Edna Ferber style. High dudgeon, my only gear shift.

  Max had responded to a cheap yet vicious accusation, and he wasn’t happy with his own anger. That didn’t matter to me. What did was the fury hurled at him. Not death threats, nor some intractable ultimatum, not even a cruel personal jibe. Nothing the police would latch onto as motive for murder. But the dreadful words, illuminated as they were on that yellow page, especially filtered through my early-morning suspicion, told me that my hunch was on target.

  I slammed shut the journal and sat there, my fingers intertwined, my knuckles white. Yes, I thought. Yes.

  Alice watched me as I walked into the living room where she sat, tense, her face rigid. “Edna, did you find anything?”

  “We’ll see,” I muttered.

  Alice stood. “You did, Edna. I can tell.”

  “We’ll see,” I repeated. “I have to go, Alice.” My mind was elsewhere. “Could you call me a taxi?”

  While we waited, standing in the doorway, she touched my shoulder. “Edna.”

  I looked at her and attempted a smile. “I’ll call you, Alice. I promise.”

  “Edna, I’m worried now. You seem so…determined.”

  “Alice, I know what I’m doing.”

  As I stepped outside, walking the pathway toward the approaching taxicab, I started to tremble. The projectionist was running the last reel of a sad movie, and I was now the unwitting protagonist.

  ***

  The taxi scrambled to an abrupt stop in front of Hair Today on Hollywood Boulevard, and I lurched forward, banging my shoulder. “Am I to believe the state of California actually gave you a license?” I asked. The cabbie was obviously a movieland hopeful, a sandy-haired fresh-scrubbed lad with hooded hazel eyes and a pile of headshots on his passenger seat. When he thanked me for the meager tip, I heard a Midwestern twang. Iowa, I thought, or Kansas. Flat and nasal, reminding me of an enamel pan dragged across a sidewalk. Welcome to Hollywood.

  Hair Today was a glitzy salon with black-and-green art deco stenciling on the plate-glass windows. An overly large neon sign announced the preposterous name and, though it was broad daylight, still blinked and hummed, the red letters popping on and off. Inside, I spotted a row of bubble-head helmets, under which women idly browsed through movie magazines.

  Liz Grable stopped what she was doing, a comb in one hand, scissors in the other. She froze, ignoring the remarks her client was making, and nodded toward me. A woman in a frilly blue blouse with a name tag sewn on approached me and asked whether I had an appointment, but I was already moving past her. Liz, mumbling to another woman to finish up the disgruntled customer, walked toward me, a slow-motion walk, the comb and scissors held before her like weapons. Two western gunslingers pacing each other at high noon.

  “What happened?” A voice hollow, strained.

  “May I talk to you a moment, Liz?”

  She spun around and bumped into a small table, which teetered. “I’m working.”

  “A minute of your time.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “It has to be now.” I raised my voice.

  She looked over her shoulder as a catlike squeak escaped from her throat. “Follow me.” She yelled to the woman up front. “I’m on a break.”

  “You’re not on a break, Liz. Not until…”

  Liz cut her off. “I’m on a break now.”

  I followed her into a back room, a tiny space where cardboard boxes were stacked to the ceiling, shelves lined with hair products. For a moment I was overcome with the heady scent of lotions, cloying tropical fragrances. A face buried in a bouquet of gardenias. Fainting time at the funeral parlor. But near the back door there was a small table with two folding chairs, empty coffee cups bunched and stacked together in the center. Liz motioned for me to sit down.

  “What?” she said, breathless.

  “I need your help.”

  “Tony…” she faltered.

  “I want you to tell me what you remember about the night you went to see Max at his home.”

  She looked puzzled. “I already did. I told you everything.”

  “Yes, indeed. But I didn’t get to ask you the right questions.”

  “Miss Ferber, please. I don’t want any trouble. Last night I threw Tony out of my place and he was…”

  “That’s a good move, Liz. I applaud that. You need to start making the right decisions for your own life. But I have to insist now—tell me about that night. Every little detail.”

  She looked helpless. “I don’t know…”

  Hotly, “Of course you do. Now start at the beginning. What time did you go to Max’s?”

  She started to cry. “I can’t help you. I can’t think…”

  “You can, Liz. Stop crying and talk to me. Let’s create the scene. You were sick of Tony, you wanted to get back into Max’s good graces, and you decided to see him. What time?”

  She thought about it. “Early. I don’t know. It was light out.” She brightened. “Max said Alice had just left—gone to see you and Lorena at the Paradise. Just left.”

  “Good. Now imagine everything you did—saw that night.” Slowly, methodically, prodded by me, Liz reconstructed the events of that awful night. Step by step, her voice tentative but then assuming confidence, Liz told me her story, but this time, prompted by me, she added details she’d previously omitted. I could tell, as she stammered through her memory, she had no idea the impact of what she was telling me. She paused after each sentence, trying to weigh its significance herself, but she was thinking only of one person: Tony.

  She told me what I wanted to hear. “Thank you, Liz.” I stood.

  “It doesn’t matter, Miss Ferber. I mean, I don’t got nothing to do with anybody any more.” She stood, smoothed her dress. “I got to get back to work.” A moment’s hesitation. “This is about Tony, isn’t it?” She waited, her lower lip trembling.

  “Thank you, Liz. You’ve been a big help.”

  “Tell me, please.”

  “There’s nothing to tell you yet,” I insisted. “I’m just asking people some questions.”

  A flash of fire in her eyes, the words spat out. “I don’t believe you, Miss Ferber.”

  ***

  No one was home at Sophie Barnes’ shabby apartment complex on Santa Monica Boulevard in the flats, a third-floor walk-up over a hardware store and a green grocer. I’d taken the address from Max’s files. I expected her to be sitting at home, quiet in a small apartment, listening to Mary Noble, Backstage Wife on the radio. No one answered the doorbell upstairs and I tottered back down to the lobby. My eyes scanned the rows of mailboxes. I turned to face a tiny sunburnt man holding a broom and dustpan, a glint in his eye, amused at something, rocking on his heels.

  “You seem a happy man,” I observed.

  He chuckled. “You got some look on your face, lady.”

  “Which communicates what?” I began to push past him.

  “It says how dare Sophie not be at home.”

  That gave me pause. “How do you know I’m here to see her?”

  “Well, the other four apartments got lost souls inside them, including the one across the hall from Miss Sophie’s. Young folks from Nebraska or Ohio who work in diners and department stores, strutting around like they already are up there in the movies, and at night they prowl the streets hoping for dreams to come true.”

  “And Sophie has no dreams?”

  He didn’t answer, tucking the broom and dustpan into a small closet under a stairwell. As he straightene
d his body, he rubbed his lower back, groaned, stretched. “Getting old, ma’am.” He glanced up the empty staircase. “She’s got little old ladies complaining about them flights of stairs.”

  “No other visitors?”

  “No one as I can see.”

  “I thought she’d be at home.”

  “Well, ma’am, some folks gotta have themselves a job.”

  That surprised me. I just assumed Sophie, leaving Max’s employment in a huff, had resigned herself to a life lived with early suppers and genteel canasta and Arthur Godfrey.

  “And who are you?”

  “The superintendent.” He nodded toward a closed door. “That’s my apartment right there. The wife is probably pinned against the door eavesdropping on us now. She’s got less of a life than me.” He chortled, his head bouncing up and down.

  “Can you tell me where she works?”

  Sophie, he volunteered, worked part-time a couple days a week in a real estate office around the corner. “Pays the rent,” the man muttered. “Barely.” Leading me outside, he pointed me in the right direction, though when I glanced back, he was still standing on the sidewalk, that same bemused look on his face.

  The real estate office was a cubbyhole occupying the corner of a flat-roofed stucco building, the anteroom the size of a closet, where Sophie Barnes now sat leafing through a movie magazine—Movieland, I could see from the doorway. There was an office behind it, the door shut, a brass plate announcing Private. She scarcely looked up when I walked in, engrossed in her fan magazine, and she mumbled something about Mr. Janssen being gone for the day. Then, recognizing my face, she sucked in her breath and dropped the magazine on the top of others. Photoplay, Modern Screen. “Miss Ferber.”

  “Hello, Sophie.” I moved closer and smiled. “You recognize me? We spoke on the phone years ago and…”

  Abruptly, glancing back at the closed door, “I know you. You were at the Paradise with Alice and Lorena that night. Someone pointed you out to me.”

  “That’s right. You were there with friends.”

  “Yes, I was.” Brusque, unfriendly.

  “Is something the matter, Sophie?”

  She shuffled the movie magazines on her desk, and then neatened the pile slowly. Her fingertips drummed on the top one. Betty Grable smiled at the camera, leaning against a white pillar.

  “I don’t want to be bothered.” She looked away.

  “I’m here for Max.”

  At the mention of his name, she flinched, and her right hand flew to her cheek. “Max.” She said his name softly. “He’s dead.”

  “Sophie, someone murdered him.”

  Her eyes got wet, and she rubbed them with the backs of her hands. Her words were whispered. “Who would do that to Max?”

  I slid into a chair in front of her desk. “I have some ideas, Sophie.” I waited patiently. Her eyes were hard, but there was something else there now: curiosity.

  “What do you want from me?” Her fingers drummed Betty Grable’s face.

  “I think you can help me.”

  She gasped, threw back her head. Red blotches on her neck. A hand gripped the edge of the desk. When she looked back at me, her eyes betrayed fear. “I warned him.” She swallowed her words.

  “How?”

  “He was playing with fire. That support of those men. Max talked a blue streak about politics, but he just…talked. I’d know if he was a Communist. I knew all his business.”

  Flat out, “Of course, he wasn’t a Communist.”

  “I know. He wasn’t. But he had to get involved in that brouhaha, him and Sol yammering all day long. So angry at the way the country was going. And now he’s dead.” She blinked wildly. “And…Sol.”

  “Why did you leave him, Sophie?”

  A long silence. She fiddled with the copy of Movieland. She held a pencil in one hand and idly doodled on the cover, black lines drawn across Betty Grable’s pristine and glossy complexion. Finally, nervous, she picked up all the magazines and dropped them into a drawer. She smiled thinly. “Mr. Janssen gets angry when I read them. He says they’re trashy. But when he’s out of the office…” She flipped her hands in the air, a devil-may-care gesture. “I spent a lifetime with Max and with movie stars.” She chuckled. “That is, people who wanted to be movie stars. So it sort of got into my blood. It’s a bad habit to break.” She rolled her eyes.

  “There are worse habits, Sophie.”

  She nodded. “Now I set up appointments for newcomers to L.A. to look at cheap apartments. Not quite the same thing, is it?” She stared into my face. “With Max, I felt a heartbeat away from the world of the movies.”

  She lapsed into silence while I waited. “Miss Ferber, I was a very foolish woman. I’m certain you’ve heard the stories about me. I’m sure I was the laughing stock of that crowd. Ava and Frank and…Alice.”

  “No, not true,” I told her. “Max worried about you, as did the others.”

  “Well, I made a fool of myself. I let myself believe that he and I had closeness—but we did. We spent years as a team. But when he got married, it knocked me off balance. I felt—betrayed. I was a foolish, foolish woman. So I got bitter and I made things worse. I walked away. I’ll show him. The bastard. He’ll miss me. He’ll beg…” She waved a hand in the air dismissively. “Sometimes you do something that you know is all wrong, like you can see yourself outside of yourself and you say, stop, stop, stop, but you can’t.” Her voice was strained and weary, almost a whisper.

  “You miss him. Sophie.” An epitaph for both of us.

  Suddenly she was crying. “What do you think? He was such a good man. He gave me a life I thought I’d never have. On the outside it was nothing—the old maid in the front office. But we laughed and told stories and…” She closed her eyes. “He never made me any promises he didn’t keep.” She reached into a drawer and took out a tissue, dabbed at her eyes. The crumpled tissue dropped into her lap, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  “You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself, Sophie. You’re not the first woman who’s tumbled like that. You were a woman who…”

  “But foolish, foolish.” She seemed surprised the tissue was not clutched in her hand.

  “I need you to help me now,” I said, and she sat up, a puzzled look on her face.

  “How?”

  “That night at the Paradise. You were there with friends and…”

  “And I had a fit, stormed out of there. A birthday party I ruined.”

  “But why?”

  She sighed. “Those are my friends, those three women. My only friends. We play cards together, see movies, travel to places for the day, shop and gab. But mostly we get on one another’s nerves.” Her laugh was brittle. “We’re the only friends we got. Well, that night Mina, one of them, the most annoying, spotted Alice at your table, so, of course, she had to tease me about it. I took a little of it. After all, I’m used to the cruelty of other people who get something out of hurting others. But I simmered. A slow burn, let me tell you. The party went on, but I sat there quietly, nursing this one drink I always allow myself when I go out.”

  “Then you exploded.”

  She shook her head back and forth. “A class act, no? You three ladies had left there by then, and my mood was getting darker and darker. Ethan was in the booth with a drunk Tony, and he sent over a bottle of wine for the birthday girl. I’d been ready to head out of there, but that wine meant I’d have to stay longer. Nobody was ready to light the damn candles. After a half bottle of free wine, Mina chided me again about Alice—chubby Alice, not even a pretty starlet to intoxicate Max. And a murdering widow, a mob wife. It was getting late. I’d wanted to leave an hour earlier. When they lit the candles on the cake, I exploded and”—she laughed out loud—“ruined the evening for everyone.”

  “Well, it sounds to me like you enjoyed yourself. At the end.”

  A twinkle in her eye. “It did feel good to see frosting on that beastly woman. She hasn’t talked to me since. Candles in her b
lue hair.” Her voice got low. “Then I learned the following day that Max was shot to death, and…and I didn’t know what to do.”

  “Could I ask you some questions?”

  She shrugged. “I guess so.”

  “Did you see Liz Grable walk in?”

  She looked perplexed. “The actress?”

  I beamed. “She’ll be happy hearing you call her that.”

  She grinned. “I’ll bet. A first time for everything. She used to drop by at the office to pester Max. She was seeing…Tony Pannis.”

  “Not any more.”

  Sophie’s face fell. “Yes, I did see her. Later in the evening, though. I was ready to get out of there. She walked in and stood in the doorway. Just stood there. We all looked up. She caught me looking at her and she backed up. She looked…I don’t know…hurt. I figured she was there to see Tony, but I know she didn’t like going to the Paradise because that’s where Tony drank and got nasty and weepy and stupid.”

  “So she left?”

  “I guess so. I turned back to my friends and when I looked back at the doorway, she wasn’t there. Gone. What does she have to do with this?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Well, you don’t think that she killed Max, do you?”

  I didn’t answer her.

  “Well?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She harrumphed, and then seemed to think better of it. “I’d be surprised. She always struck me as sort of pathetic.” Then her eyes widened, frightened. “You don’t think that I killed Max, do you?”

  “No.”

  But her eyes were wary as she twisted in her seat, staring over my shoulders. “I stormed out of there but I didn’t go to see him. I swear. I told the police that.”

  “Could you answer one more question, Sophie?”

  That stopped her. A small voice, nervous. “What?”

  She gave me the answer I expected.

  ***

  Late afternoon, refreshed from a pot of coffee at a diner across the street from Sophie’s office, I sat by the window and watched Sophie hang a CLOSED sign in the door, lock up, and slowly walk down the sidewalk, headed in the direction of her apartment. A half hour later, a taxi dropped me off at Culver City where I mentioned Ava’s name. As promised, she’d left my name at security, but the guard at first seemed hesitant to call her. I raised my voice. “She’s expecting me, young man.”