The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “I’ll be there.”

  As soon as he hung up Kinlaw decided he must have been a lunatic to listen to Corcoran and his dames. He was just going to waste a day’s pay on pricey drinks in a restaurant he couldn’t afford. Then again, though Hollywood people kept funny hours, as he well knew from his marriage to Emily, what was a big-time director doing home in the middle of the day?

  He spent the rest of the afternoon following up on missing persons. The sailor from Long Beach, it turned out, had no ring finger on his left hand. He finally got through to Mrs. Potter and discovered that Mr. Potter had turned up Sunday night after a drunken weekend in Palm Springs. He talked to Sapienza about recent mob activity and asked a snitch named Bunny Witcover to keep his ears open.

  At four-thirty, Kinlaw called back down to the morgue. “Corcoran, do you remember when you saw that article? The one about the director?”

  “I don’t know. It was an old issue, at the dentist’s office.”

  “Great.” Kinlaw checked out of the office and headed down to the public library.

  It was a Monday and the place was not busy. The mural that surrounded the rotunda, jam-packed with padres, Indians, Indian babies, gold miners, sheep, a mule, dancing señoritas, conquistadores, ships, and flags, was busier than the room itself.

  A librarian showed him to an index: The January 7, 1946, issue of Life listed a feature on Preston Sturges beginning on page 85. Kinlaw rummaged through the heaps of old magazines and finally tracked it down. He flipped to page 85 and sat there, hand resting on the large photograph. The man in the photograph, reclining on a soundstage, wearing a rumpled tan suit, was a dead ringer for the man lying on Corcoran’s slab in the morgue.

  * * *

  Kinlaw’s apartment stood on West Marathon at North Manhattan Place. The building, a four-story reinforced-concrete box, had been considered a futuristic landmark when it was constructed in 1927, but its earnest European grimness, the regularity and density of the kid’s-block structure, made it seem more like a penitentiary than a work of art. Kinlaw pulled the mail out of his box: an electric bill, a flyer from the PBA, and a letter from Emily. He unlocked the door to his apartment and, standing in the entry, tore open the envelope.

  It was just a note, conversational, guarded. Her brother was out of the army. She was working for Metro on the makeup for a new Dana Andrews movie. And oh, by the way, did he know what happened to the photo album with all the pictures of Lucy? She didn’t have a single one.

  Kinlaw dropped the note on the coffee table, took off his jacket, and got the watering can, sprayer, and plant food. First he sprayed the hanging fern in front of the kitchen window, then moved through the plants in the living room: the African violets, ficus, and four varieties of coleus. Emily had never cared for plants, but he could tell she liked it that he did. It reassured her, told her something about his character that was not evident from looking at him. On the balcony he fed the big rhododendron and the planter full of day lilies. Then he put the sprayer back under the kitchen sink, poured himself a drink, and sat in the living room. He watched the late-afternoon sun throw triangular shadows against the wall.

  The Life article had painted Sturges as an eccentric genius, a man whose life had been a series of lucky accidents. His mother, a Europe-traipsing culture vulture, had been Isadora Duncan’s best friend, his stepfather a prominent Chicago businessman. After their divorce Sturges’s mother had dragged her son from opera in Bayreuth to dance recital in Vienna to private school in Paris. He came back to the U.S. and spent the twenties trying to make a go of it in her cosmetics business. In 1928 he almost died from a burst appendix; while recovering he wrote his first play; his Strictly Dishonorable was a smash Broadway hit in 1929. By the early thirties he had squandered the play’s earnings and come to Hollywood, where he became Paramount’s top screenwriter, and then the first writer-director of sound pictures. In four years he made eight movies, several of them big hits, before he quit to start a new film company with millionaire Howard Hughes. Besides writing and directing, Sturges owned an engineering company that manufactured diesel engines, and The Players, one of the most famous restaurants in the city.

  Kinlaw noted the ruptured appendix, but there was little to set off his instincts except a passing reference to Sturges being “one of the most controversial figures in Hollywood.” And the closing line of the article: “As for himself, he contemplates death constantly and finds it a soothing subject.”

  He fell asleep in his chair, woke up with his heart racing and his neck sweaty. It was seven o’clock. He washed and shaved, then put on a clean shirt.

  The Players was an eccentric three-story building on the side of a hill at 8225 Sunset Boulevard, across Marmont Lane from the neo-Gothic Château Marmont hotel. Above the ground-level entrance a big neon sign spelled out The Players in easy script. At the bottom level, drive-in girls in green caps and jumpers waited on you in your car. Kinlaw had never been upstairs in the formal rooms. It was growing dark when he turned off Sunset onto Marmont and pulled his Hudson up the hill to the terrace-level lot. An attendant in a white coat with his name stitched in green on the pocket took the car.

  Kinlaw loitered outside and finished his cigarette while he admired the lights of the houses spread across the hillside above the restaurant. Looking up at them, Kinlaw knew that he would never live in a house like those. There was a wall between some people and some ways of life. A lefty—like the twenty-four-year-old YCL member he had been in 1938—would have called it money that kept him from affording such a home, and class that kept the people up there from wanting somebody like him for a neighbor, and principle that kept him from wanting to live there. But the thirty-five-year-old he was now knew it was something other than class, or money, or principle. It was something inside you. Maybe it was character. Maybe it was luck. Kinlaw laughed. You ought to be able to tell the difference between luck and character, for pity’s sake. He ground out the butt in the lot and went inside.

  At the dimly lit bar on the second floor he ordered a gin and tonic and inspected the room. The place was mostly empty. At one of the tables Kinlaw watched a man and a woman whisper at each other as they peered around the room, hoping, no doubt, to catch a glimpse of Van Johnson or Lisabeth Scott. The man wore a white shirt with big collar and a white Panama hat with a pink hatband, the woman a yellow print dress. On the table they held two prudent drinks neatly in the center of prudent cocktail napkins, beside them a map of Beverly Hills folded open with bright red stars to indicate the homes of the famous. A couple of spaces down the bar a man was trying to pick up a blonde doing her best Lana Turner. She was mostly ignoring him but the man didn’t seem to mind.

  “So what do you think will happen in the next ten years?” he asked her.

  “I expect I’ll get some better parts. Eventually I want at least second leads.”

  “And you’ll deserve them. But what happens when the Communists invade?”

  “Communists schmommunists. That’s the bunk.”

  “You’re very prescient. The State Department should hire you, but they won’t.”

  This was some of the more original pickup talk Kinlaw had ever heard. The man was a handsome fellow with an honest face, but his light brown hair and sideburns were too long. Maybe he was an actor working on some historical pic. He had a trace of an accent.

  “You know, I think we should discuss the future in more detail. What do you say?”

  “I say you should go away. I don’t mean to be rude.”

  “Let me write this down for you, so if you change your mind.” The man took a coaster and wrote something on it. He pushed the coaster toward her with his index finger.

  Good luck, buddy. Kinlaw scanned the room. Most of the clientele seemed to be tourists. At one end of the room, on the bandstand, a jazz quintet was playing a smoky version of “Stardust.” When the bartender came back to ask about a refill, Kinlaw asked him if Sturges was in.

  “Not yet. He usually shows up
around nine or after.”

  “Will you point him out to me when he gets here?”

  The bartender looked suspicious. “Who are you?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “You look like you might be from a collection agency.”

  “I thought this place was a hangout for movie stars.”

  “You’re four years late, pal. Now it’s a hangout for bill collectors.”

  “I’m not after money.”

  “That’s good. Because just between you and me, I don’t think Mr. Sturges has much.”

  “I thought he was one of the richest men in Hollywood.”

  “Was, past tense.”

  Kinlaw slid a five-dollar bill across the bar. “Do you know what he was doing yesterday afternoon?”

  The bartender took the five note, folded it twice, and stuck it into the breast pocket of his shirt. “Most of the afternoon he was sitting at that table over there looking for answers in the bottom of a glass of Black Label scotch.”

  “You’re a mighty talkative employee.”

  “Manager’s got us reusing the coasters to try to save a buck.” He straightened a glass of swizzle sticks. “I paid for the privilege of talking. Mr. Sturges is into me for five hundred in back pay.”

  Down the end of the bar the blonde left. The man with the sideburns waved at the bartender, who went down to refill his drink.

  Kinlaw decided he could afford a second gin and tonic. Midway through the third the bartender nodded toward a table on the mezzanine; there was Sturges, looking a lot healthier than the morning’s dead man. He saw the bartender gesture and waved Kinlaw over to his table. Sturges stood as Kinlaw approached. He had thick, unkempt brown hair with a gray streak in the front, a square face, jug ears, and narrow eyes that would have given him a nasty look were it not for his quirky smile. A big, soft body. His resemblance to the dead man was uncanny. Next to him sat a dark-haired, attractive woman in her late thirties, in a blue silk dress.

  “Detective Kinlaw. This is my wife, Louise.”

  “How do you do?”

  As Kinlaw was sitting down, the waiter appeared and slid a fresh gin and tonic onto the table in front of him.

  “You’ve eaten?” Sturges asked.

  “No.”

  “Robert, a menu for Mr. Kinlaw.”

  “Mr. Sturges, I’m not sure we need to spend much time on this. Clearly, unless you have a twin, the identification we had was mistaken.”

  “That’s all right. There are more than a few people in Hollywood who will be disappointed it wasn’t me.”

  Louise Sturges watched her husband warily, as if she weren’t too sure what he was going to say next, and wanted pretty hard to figure it out.

  “When were you last on your boat?”

  “Yesterday. On Saturday I went out to Catalina on the Island Belle with my friends, Dr. Bertrand Woolford and his wife. We stayed at anchor in a cove there over Saturday night, then sailed back Sunday. We must have got back around one P.M. I was back at home by three.”

  “You were with them, Mrs. Sturges?”

  Louise looked from her husband to Kinlaw. “No.”

  “But you remember Mr. Sturges getting back when he says?”

  “No. That is, I wasn’t at home when he got there. I—”

  “Louise and I haven’t been living together for some time,” Sturges said.

  Kinlaw waited. Louise looked down at her hands. Sturges laughed.

  “Come on, Louise, there’s nothing for you to be ashamed of. I’m the one who was acting like a fool. Detective Kinlaw, we’ve been separated for more than a year. The divorce was final last November.”

  “One of those friendly Hollywood divorces.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. But when I called her this morning, Louise was gracious enough to meet with me.” He put his hand on his wife’s. “I’m hoping she will give me the chance to prove to her I know what a huge mistake I made.”

  “Did anyone see you after you returned Sunday afternoon?”

  “As I recall, I came by the restaurant and was here for some time. You can talk to Dominique, the bartender.”

  Eventually the dinner came and they ate. Or Kinlaw and Louise ate; Sturges regaled them with stories about how his mother had given Isadora the scarf that killed her, about his marriage to the heiress Eleanor Post Hutton, about an argument he’d seen between Sam Goldwyn and a Hungarian choreographer, in which he played both parts and put on elaborate accents.

  Kinlaw couldn’t help but like him. He had a sense of absurdity, and if he had a high opinion of his own genius, he seemed to be able to back it up. Louise watched Sturges affectionately, as if he were her son as much as her ex-husband. In the middle of one of his stories he stopped to glance at her for her reaction, then reached impulsively over to squeeze her hand, after which he launched off into another tale, about the time, at a pool, he boasted he was going to “dive into the water like an arrow,” and his secretary said, “Yes, a Pierce-Arrow.”

  After a while Sturges wound down, and he and Louise left. At the cloakroom Sturges offered to help her on with her jacket, and Kinlaw noticed a moment’s skepticism cross Louise’s face before she let him. Kinlaw went back over to talk with the bartender.

  “I’ve got a couple more questions.”

  The bartender shrugged. “Getting late.”

  “This place won’t close for hours.”

  “It’s time for me to go home.”

  Kinlaw showed him his badge. “Do I have to get official, Dominique?”

  Dominique got serious. “Robert heard you talking to Sturges. Why didn’t you let on earlier you were a cop? What’s this about?”

  “Nothing you have to worry about, if you answer my questions.” Kinlaw asked him about Sturges’s actions the day before.

  “I can’t tell you about the morning, but the rest is pretty much like he says,” Dominique told him. “He came by here about six. He was already drinking, and looked terrible. ‘Look at this,’ he says to me, waving the L.A. Times in my face. They’d panned his new movie. ‘The studio dumps me and they still hang this millstone around my neck.’ He sat there, ordered dinner but didn’t eat anything. Tossing back one scotch after another. His girlfriend must have heard something, she came in and tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t talk.”

  “His girlfriend?”

  “Frances Ramsden, the model. They’ve been together since he broke with Louise. He just sat there like a stone, and eventually she left. Later, when business began to pick up, he got in his car and drove away. I remember thinking, I hope he doesn’t get in a wreck. He was three sheets to the wind, and already had some accidents.”

  “What time was that?”

  “About seven-thirty, eight. I thought that was the last I’d see of him, but then he came back later.”

  “What time?”

  “After midnight. Look, can you tell me what this is about?”

  Kinlaw watched him. “Somebody’s dead.”

  “Dead?” Dominique looked a little shaken, nothing more.

  “I think Sturges might know something. Anything you remember about when he came back? How was he acting?”

  “Funny. He comes in and I almost don’t recognize him. The place was clearing out then. Instead of the suit he’d had on earlier he was wearing slacks and a sweatshirt, deck shoes. He was completely sober. His eyes were clear, his hands didn’t shake—he looked like a new man. They sat there and talked all night.”

  “They?”

  “Mr. Sturges and this other guy he came in with. Friendly looking, light hair. He had a kind of accent—German, maybe? I figure he must be some Hollywood expatriate—they used to all hang out here—this was little Europe. Mr. Sturges would talk French with them. He loved to show off.”

  “Had you seen this man before?”

  “Never. But Mr. Sturges seemed completely familiar with him. Here’s the funny thing—he kept looking around as if he’d never seen the place.”

  “Y
ou just said he’d never been here before.”

  “Not the German. It was Sturges looked as if he hadn’t seen The Players. ‘Dominique,’ he said to me. ‘How have you been?’ ‘I’ve been fine,’ I said.

  “They sat up at Mr. Sturges’s table there and talked all night. Sturges was full of energy. The bad review might as well have happened to somebody else. The German guy didn’t say much, but he was drinking as hard as Mr. Sturges was earlier. It was like they’d changed places. Mr. Sturges stood him to an ocean of scotch. When we closed up they were still here.”

  “Have you seen this man since then?”

  The bartender looked down the bar. “Didn’t you see him? He was right here when you came in, trying to pick up some blonde.”

  “The guy with the funny haircut?”

  “That’s the one. Mr. Sturges said to let him run a tab. Guess he must’ve left. Wonder if he made her.”

  * * *

  It was a woozy drive home with nothing to show for the evening except the prospect of a Tuesday-morning hangover. He might as well do the thing right: Back in the apartment Kinlaw got out the bottle of scotch, poured a glass, and sat in the dark listening to a couple of blues records. Scotch after gin, a deadly combination. After a while he gave up and went to bed. He was almost asleep when the phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Lee? This is Emily.” Her voice was brittle.

  “Hello,” he said. “It’s late.” He remembered the nights near the end when he’d find her sitting in the kitchen after midnight with the lights out, the tip of her cigarette trembling in the dark.

  “Did you get my letter?”

  “What letter?”

  “Lee, I’ve been looking for the photo album with the pictures of Lucy,” she said. “I can’t find it anywhere. Then I realized you must have taken it when you moved out.”

  “Don’t blame me if you can’t find it, Emily.”

  “You know, I used to be impressed by your decency.”

  “We both figured out I wasn’t as strong as you thought I was, didn’t we? Let’s not stir all that up again.”