Stranger in the Dark

by Nielsen, Helen

Or it might be because she had married Harry Avery, and Harry Avery was the biggest rat east of the Vietcong.

  Most lives get nowhere at all, but everybody’s life starts somewhere. Brad’s life (nobody but his mother ever dared call him Omar) had started in Marshalltown, Iowa, on the twenty-fifth of October, 1944. It was his mother who had bestowed the heroic name. His father, whom Brad knew only as a rather pleasant face on a wedding picture and a few yellowed snapshots, was, at the time, working fourteen hours a day at a local defence plant to ease his soul of the pain of being classified 4F. The pulmonary condition which caused this classification ended his life almost half a year later, just as the victorious allies were closing in on Berlin and the entire nation, even the stubborn conservatives of Iowa, were mourning the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt and wondering how an obscure little politician named Harry S. Truman would make out in the toughest job on earth.

  The little man from Missouri did all right, and so did Brad Smith. Eighteen years later he graduated from high school in the possession of three letters for athletics: basketball, football and track. He stood six feet three inches, weighed one hundred and eighty pounds and had inherited his mother’s lungs. In lieu of a father image, Mother Smith had over-compensated, by feeding young Brad a steady diet of heroes, all through his impressionable years. The result was that Iowa, in spite of proffered athletic scholarships from several mid-western universities, held no allure for Brad, once the diploma was in his hand. Neither did the prospect of brawling on the football field or basketball court for the glory of old Alma Mater. Life was adventure. Life was short. It was time to get moving.

  Two weeks after reaching this conclusion, Brad Smith drove west on Hollywood Boulevard in a seven-year-old Ford convertible, made a left-hand turn and, with one eye on the address in the classified ad. circled in red ink, continued approximately two and a half blocks and parked in front of an unimpressive stucco bungalow court with a sign in the front window proclaiming the availability of a single apartment—furnished. Unimpressive as the building was, the view was still exciting. The view was definitely feminine: 110 pounds, 36 in.—24 in.—36 in. She wore a blue polka-dot bikini, a wrist watch and a white painter’s cap partially covering unbelievably blonde curls. The cap was generously splattered with orange enamel paint and a dripping from the paint brush, that was poised over a half-painted shutter, was sliding tantalizingly down one sun-tanned thigh. It was difficult to be certain, since her eyes were guarded by large, round, blue sunglasses, but Brad guessed that she might be a well-preserved twenty-one.

  It was a picture that stayed clear. Now, so many years later, crawling out of the bed he had finally learned to sleep in, because all that time in Vietnam seemed to reform the spine and make an innerspring mattress tortuous, he could recall exactly the way Rhoda Brandt looked as he climbed out of the Ford and walked towards her.

  “Hello,” Brad said. It seemed a logical beginning.

  The girl stopped painting and stared at him through the large round lenses.

  “I came about the apartment,” Brad continued. “Do you live here?”

  The girl replaced the paint brush in the can of enamel paint and looked past him at the Ford. It was dirty and the body-work was in bad condition. The top was down and Brad’s suitcase and bedroll were in the back seat.

  “Do you have a job?” she asked.

  “Not yet. I just drove in from Iowa.”

  “The apartment is seventy-five a month—first and last month in advance. And I live here. I own the place.”

  The prospect of having such a landlady was impossible to resist. Brad took the apartment, leaky shower, sagging mattress and all. He didn’t worry about the rent because he was going to become very rich very soon. It was almost a month before Brad became intimate with Rhoda. She was the aloof type. And then it wasn’t the unsatisfying, just-for-laughs kind of intimacy like most relationships of the region. It was unpremeditated, occurring after he had found her crying. What she had been crying about was long forgotten, but not that first night together in her tiny apartment at the end of the court, when she confided that Brandt was her maiden name which she had taken back after the divorce, that she had married at sixteen, chiefly to get away from a small town in Arizona, and that Charley (she never referred to her ex-husband by any other name) was a wholesale shoe salesman, who took her to Los Angeles, where they were happy for six months, until he started bringing his girls home for the night.

  “Charley was a dynamic businessman,” she confided. “He used to boast that he had a new woman and a new idea every day. I’m sure he was right about the woman, but it was always the same idea. I stood it as long as I could, and then I met this lawyer, who said I could get a divorce and a property settlement, so I did and bought this bungalow court. It’s almost paid for and I net three hundred a month. I also do small parts in TV. I was rehearsing when you came in a while ago.”

  “Is that why you were crying—rehearsing?” Brad asked.

  “No. But I cry easily. It’s stopping that’s hard. I know Charley was a heel, and he was nearly forty, but he was something that belonged to me. Have you ever wanted to belong to anyone, Brad?”

  “Not exactly,” Brad said.

  “I don’t mean really belong. I mean just feel that you belong. Feel comfortable.”

  As long as she wasn’t thinking of marriage, Brad decided to get comfortable. They spent that first night in her apartment. Afterwards, she usually came up to his. She helped him get a job as a TV cowboy and later, at a studio crowd party, introduced him to Harry Avery, who was an assistant director on the series and serious about making big money.

  “You’ve got to make it before you’re forty or you’re dead,” Harry declared. “I’m going to produce my own series as soon as I line up a few good writers.”

  “Brad can write,” Rhoda said. “He wrote that last script he starred in.”

  It wasn’t true. In the first place, Brad hadn’t starred; he had exactly four lines and one close-up, and all he had written was the condensation of one speech that had to be cut to leave time for the commercial. But Rhoda said there was nothing wrong with lying as long as you were straightforward about it. Madison Avenue did it all the time, and look at all the money Madison Avenue made.

  “And Brad has a terrific idea for a series with a part in it for me,” Rhoda added.

  “Great!” Harry said. “Give me a shout when it’s ready to shoot.”

  There was this about Rhoda: she was ruthless with a delinquent tenant, but she made Brad feel needed and seemed confident that he could accomplish anything he set out to do. He continued to pick up bits in the bang-bangs, but now he studied the scripts carefully and hung around the sets when he wasn’t working to pick up camera and directorial techniques. He watched the shows when they were screened, absorbing every nuance, and at night he visited actors’ labs and writers’ workshops. One day he bought a portable typewriter at a second-hand store and started to work. A month later he had a set of characters, including a rôle for Rhoda, a story line and one completely finished script of El Bandito, a western with a light touch. Harry Avery was a hard man to contact even then. It was several months before Brad nailed him at a party and told him about the script. Harry was enthusiastic. He told Brad to deliver it to his office and he would read it over the week-end. Three months later, after a severe case of telephone nerves, Brad decided to forget the whole project and took Rhoda to dinner to celebrate the anniversary of his first year in Hollywood. They went to a small supper club in Santa Monica where fresh, new talent tried out for the ever-vigilant scouts, and there he encountered Harry once more.

  The script, Harry reported, was fine, but he couldn’t sell it upstairs with so little plot development. “If you could work up two or three more episodes,” he said, “I think we might get it off the ground.”

  Brad went back to the typewriter, turned in three more scripts within three weeks, and then went on location in Arizona and tried not to think about the s
eries because thinking about it was a good way to develop ulcers at an early age. All things considered, he was doing well—making enough to send something back to his mother every month, keep up the payments on the two-year-old replacement for the seven-year-old Ford, and build up a bank account to three thousand dollars. The only real problem was convincing the draft board that he was the sole support of his mother, and hoping they wouldn’t find out about her job at the Country Club back in Iowa. The situation in Vietnam was getting worse, and Brad preferred being a paid supernumerary on the screen than an unpaid hero in the jungle. Rhoda, ever the advocate of survival over integrity, suggested that he move into one of the larger units and share it with a queer as civilian status insurance, but Brad had his limitations.

  When Harry finally reported that he couldn’t get backing for the series, but that he believed in it enough to film a pilot himself if he could raise the scratch, Brad volunteered his three thousand dollars for a starter and got an I.O.U. from Harry scrawled on his personal office memo paper. Even if lying was the name of the game, nobody could live without believing something, and Brad believed Harry Avery and was willing to sweat out the wait with him, however long it took.

  And then it was late November and President Kennedy made a fence-mending visit to Dallas, after which nothing was the same for anyone anywhere. Brad wrote a long Christmas letter to his mother and enlisted in the army, which seemed the logical thing for an all-American boy named Omar Bradley Smith to do. He signed over the Ford to Rhoda, who was making enough now to keep up the payments, and left his meagre possessions stashed in her garage. “It will be all over in a few months,” he said, which is what every man has always said about every war, and then he was flown to Vietnam and reality set in.

  Two years later Brad was sent to a Rest and Relaxation centre and saw a crowd of soldiers laughing it up in front of the TV set. He grabbed a beer and sat down to watch the fun and quickly lost his sense of humour. Rhoda was on the screen—Rhoda playing the lady rancher harassed and romanced by a trio of renegade cowboys known as The Bandits. It was his story line and his characters, and he spent the next two weeks catching up on what had been happening back in the States. The Bandits was produced by Harry Avery and starred a new personality, Rhona Brent. It was the top rated show of the season for two years, and Rhona Brent had received an Emmy for her role as Prudence. During the next long months, until his discharge, he caught the show whenever possible. Halfway through the third season Prudence was killed by a fall from a horse, and the gossips speculated that she had retired to raise a family, because she was now Mrs. Harry Avery. They had to be wrong because, early in their relationship, Rhona had confided that she had an abortion the year before she met Charley, and was butchered inside in a way that made it impossible for her to conceive. He said nothing to anyone about the series, but he did write to Harry and never received an answer.

  Brad’s mother died while Brad was still overseas. Finally, he was returned Stateside and discharged from the army. He had gone in a buck private and come out a P.F.C. He had a few battle ribbons, one slight scar over his right eyebrow where he had been grazed by a Vietcong sniper, and his termination pay. He was a hero at last, in a world that had stopped believing in heroes.

  As soon as his discharge was final, Brad returned to the site of Rhona’s bungalow court and found that it had been replaced by a hi-rise apartment complex where rents started at 300 dollars and went higher than the penthouse. He located Harry’s new office on the Strip and never got beyond the pleasant but evasive receptionist. Mr. Avery was in Europe. Mrs. Avery was in Europe. Nobody knew when they would return. Brad then contacted a lawyer who examined the I.O.U., noted that it was neither dated nor witnessed and quoted a retainer’s fee which made Brad decide to shelve the matter until he could meet Harry face to face. By that time his termination pay was almost gone and his old studio contacts were lost. Through the U.S.E.S. he got a job parking cars at a Beverly Hills office complex and there he met Estelle Vance, who was an extremely smart fifty, traded her Cadillacs at twenty thousand miles and operated a highly successful real estate business. She needed a salesman and Brad needed a job. She coached him through the licencing period and practically gave him his first sale, with enough commission to buy some suits that didn’t look like 1964, pay cash for a used Mustang and take a furnished bachelor flat in a stylish new Mediterranean type apartment building in West Hollywood. It was a much better life than parking cars or picking up bit parts in TV westerns, but Brad was restless. Immobilization didn’t come with a piece of paper. He picked up a passport and toyed with the idea of taking a construction job abroad. The army had taught him a lot about machinery and communications, and he had a low tolerance for being charming with people like the retired Wittenbergs from Kenosha, who had already consumed two weeks of his young life trying to decide if a fifty-unit apartment building in Santa Monica was the investment they really wanted for the golden years. Entertaining the Wittenbergs in the notable spas on the Strip, a sales approach recommended by Estelle Vance, had left him exhausted and awakening with Rhona on his mind was like rubbing salt in an old wound. He had once calculated that Harry was now a millionaire several times over, and that it had all started with his own idea so that at least a quarter of that amount should be in the bank account of Omar Bradley Smith. It was a depressing calculation that he tried to keep out of his mind, but the subconscious wasn’t easy to boss around.

  He went into the bathroom, took a bromide and changed into bathing trunks. Outside the sliding glass doors, that led to the private patio of his apartment, was a huge swimming pool usually unoccupied at 9 a.m. He vaulted the wrought-iron guard rail, sprinted across the decking and plunged into the pool. It was one of those rare clear days in the city. The sky above was almost as blue as the pool, and the caress of the water and the warmth of the sun reminded him that his body was whole: he had two strong arms, two good legs and firm flesh that hadn’t been blasted away by bomb fragments or so seered by napalm that, unlike many of the once young men who had come back from Vietnam, he wasn’t prepared to spend the rest of his life hiding in a veterans’ hospital because he was too ashamed to go home with a featureless face. He had his health and his youth. He was poor but he was alive. He swam with sure, strong strokes to the opposite side of the pool and emerged on to the decking. A Mr. Atlas he was not. In his celluloid cowboy days, one director had referred to him as the poor man’s Jimmy Stewart, which wasn’t too flattering when all he wanted was to be the rich man’s Brad Smith. But he was reasonably attractive, and the pounds he had added in Vietnam, all muscle, gave him the confident feeling that he had nothing to fear from appearing in public wearing only swimming trunks and a smile.

  He had been alone in the pool, but he wasn’t alone on the decking. Two of the distaff occupants of the complex were sunning themselves poolside. One was blonde—slightly reminiscent of Rhona—who wore a tiny pink bikini and stretched voluptuously, full length on a foam rubber pad. The other, a brunette, wore a white chenille jacket over her suit and was studying a formidable looking text. Brad had noticed the pair on other mornings, and made a mental note to cultivate the bookish one. The blonde might be more fun, but it would be nice to have the company of a woman with whom he could talk. A bright beach towel was spread on the vacant chair beside her. He picked it up and swabbed his face and shoulders.

  The girl on the foam rubber pad raised her head. “Hey,” she protested, “that’s my towel!”

  “Thanks,” Brad said, and tossed it back on the chair.

  It was all right for an opener. The brunette had looked up from the book and smiled at him. He would get back to that later. Now he crossed the pool decking to the glass doors leading into the lobby of the complex, ignored the “No Bare Feet” sign and went inside. A pleasant red-head of about thirty-five was on duty at the reception desk. He asked for his mail. She gave it to him and he asked for a dime for the paper-vending machine.

  “You owe me for three papers a
lready this week,” she chided, “and I’m all out of dimes. All I have are quarters—”

  “And that’s exactly what I need,” Brad said. “Thanks. Put it on my bill.”

  He plucked the quarter from her hesitating hand and stepped into the recreation room, where a coffee machine dispensed a cup of hot black and a dime in change. The dime went into the paper vender and he was then ready to return to the pool area and a chair far enough away from the two girls to avoid overhearing the blonde’s description of her latest session in nude group therapy and close enough to keep the brunette in view. He glanced at his mail: two throwaways and a credit card billing and an unexpected windfall—a reproduction fee from a long forgotten script he had written for a now defunct radio series. The cheque was for almost six hundred dollars. It gave a bright sparkle to the morning, and he thought of asking the brunette to have dinner with him, at the Century Plaza, because a first impression was always important. He tucked the letter with the cheque and the bill under the belt of his trunks and picked up the newspaper to look at the obituary columns. It wasn’t a morbid act. It was one of the tricks of the trade that Estelle had taught him.

  “People die and leave estates to be settled. Check out the obits every day. You’ll be surprised how many leads you pick up.”

  And so this was breakfast: a cup of coffee and the obituary column—but Brad didn’t get that far this morning, because a late bulletin on the front page magnetized his attention and sent time spinning backwards again.

  LOCAL PRODUCER IN MISSING GREEK PLANE—ATHENS (AP) Harry Avery, Hollywood film and television producer, was reported to be a passenger on a chartered sports plane which failed to return to its base on the Greek island of Corfu last night. A brief radio message believed sent from the plane late yesterday afternoon indicated some unspecified trouble in flight.

  Greek authorities have ordered a search of the mountainous area where the plane was apparently downed.