“There you are!” Charlotte wore a peeved expression but otherwise looked adorable in a black suit with a white blouse covered in festive red dots, jaunty red beret decorated with a Christmas wreath pin tilted toward one ear. “A fine way to treat your hostess. Leaving me forsaken amidst utter madness without so much as a prompter.”
Donald wedged another few boxes under the tree. “Must keep these clear of trafficked areas. Otherwise it’s a liability.” He smiled, and the voice of Rory Dillon saying “four seventeen” sounded in my head. I ignored it.
“How bad was it?” I asked them. “Be honest.”
“Well, once the boys finally untied Deanna Durbin…” Charlotte trailed off.
I gripped a chair to steady myself.
“Oh, Lord, Lillian, I was joking!”
“This is why you aren’t cast in comedies,” Donald scolded.
“Mack Sennett thought I was plenty funny, once upon a time.” Charlotte patted my arm. “Addison must have painted a dire picture. The boys got rambunctious is all. I got Deanna to lead a round of carols until the baseball gloves and fire engines were distributed, then it was all smiles. Aside from the single miscue, it was a lovely event. Wasn’t it, Donald?”
“Absolutely. Nobody’s going to sue and now that we know what Addy and Maude got us, we can top them.” He wrapped his arm around Charlotte. I heard Rory telling me the time again, a daft Irish cuckoo clock.
Charlotte took my hand. “Now what happened to you?”
I couldn’t talk to them. I couldn’t face anyone until I’d repaired the damage I hadn’t meant to cause. “I delivered an early gift to the LAPD. It’ll be in the papers tomorrow. Would you excuse me? I’ve got a lot to take care of.”
Charlotte embraced me so tightly her pin almost embedded itself in my temple. “You did nothing wrong, kiddo,” she said. “Remember that.”
When the front door shut behind the Humes, I might as well have had Addison’s immense home to myself. A voice in my head suggested that, after the morning’s events, I might want to take one last look around.
* * *
ADDISON REMAINED IN seclusion for the afternoon. I stayed busy, pitching in on cleaning duty, telephoning the Brentwood Boys Brigade to offer my apologies, drafting thank-you letters to our special guests. The activity didn’t prevent me from whipsawing between despair and indignation. On one hand, I couldn’t keep a children’s party on the rails, so what business did I have organizing bashes for world-renowned adults? On the other, there was nothing I would have done differently. I deserved some of the blame but none of the hostility. So a charity function became a modest fiasco. Big deal. Nobody had died.
The silent treatment finally did in my nerves. I decided to refill Addison’s stationery order in person. The store wasn’t far from Paramount, and I needed cheering up. Rogers devised ways to say nothing louder than before on the drive over. A harried Edith had the gate guards admit me.
On my way through the wardrobe building’s tumult, I ran into Adele Balkan, the lively sketch artist who’d shared an office with Edith before her promotion. We paused to catch up.
“Christmas better hurry and get here,” she said.
Mere mention of the holiday made me flinch. It would be a long December. “Do you have plans?”
“I need the break. It’s tough sledding with Edith in charge.” She hesitated. “I know you two are friends.”
“What’s wrong?”
“She’s back to her schoolmarm ways. No singing, no chewing gum. She also changed how we do sketches. If an actress is cast, we draw her as well as the costume. ‘A more complete depiction,’ she says, but directors hate the idea. Roles are recast all the time, and they only want to see the clothes. Edith’s making changes just to make changes, and I don’t care if you tell her that. I’d better run.”
The day’s frenzied feeling penetrated Edith’s normally tranquil office. She greeted me with the most fleeting of smiles. “Sorry, dear, but today’s an absolute misery. The studio’s delaying production of Jack Benny’s next picture because he insists on going to trial, so down goes my department’s schedule like so many dominos. I’ll be here all weekend making adjustments. But enough of my woes.”
I gave Edith a condensed account of my night at Club Fathom and my morning at the police station. To my dismay, she didn’t provide the ready ear I’d hoped for.
“Detective Morrow’s point is well taken,” she declared. “The investigation of Mrs. Auerbach must run its course.”
“But she had nothing to do with Jens’s blackmail operation.”
“You don’t know that for certain. In any case, an organization like the police department must be permitted to follow its processes. Trust in Detective Morrow. He’s a good man.” She adjusted her glasses. “If you’ll permit a personal aside, I’m distressed you spent time with Simon again given the questions about him.”
“My other plan fell through. I had no choice.” I sounded petulant even to me.
Edith’s ringing telephone interrupted. She uttered one “yes,” three increasingly emphatic “no”s, and a resigned “very well” before hanging up. “Horses appear to be escaping from every barn today. We’ll have to cut this short. Perhaps lunch over the weekend?”
As Edith walked me out, an assistant showed Dorothy Lamour in. The brunette actress was a vision in an ivory suit and spectator pumps, her features more exotic in proximity.
“That hairstyle is you,” she told Edith as they embraced.
“I keep hearing that.” Edith introduced me then said, “Thank you so much for rescheduling your fitting for the reshoot.”
“More sarongs. At least we’re poking fun at them in this picture.”
“One last wink to your fans before we put you in some contemporary fashions to dazzle them.”
“I saw the gown,” I chimed in. “It’s a knockout.” I’d stolen a glimpse of the dress Edith had designed for St. Louis Blues, a white number with a pattern of stars cascading down organza ruffles. Dorothy Lamour would look better in that dress than half naked in one of her trademark sarongs. To the women in the audience, anyway.
“Worth four whistles at the least,” Edith said. “Maybe five.”
“I’m on to your secrets.” Dorothy laughed. “You bribe the electricians to whistle when you think I don’t like a dress.”
“You don’t like my dresses?” Edith clutched her agate necklace. “Let’s get you in and out as quickly as possible.”
“Could you? I’m so far behind on my Christmas shopping and I’ve got a friend coming from back east to prepare for.” As Edith led Dorothy into the salon, the actress said, “And now they’re delaying my picture with Jack! Something about smuggling. You always have your ear to the ground, Edie. What have you heard?”
I dallied in the outer office. It had been a trying day. I had nowhere to be. What I wanted was to talk to someone who thought as I did, who saw the world my way. Someone who believed I was right. Edith hadn’t come through on that score, and it was because of her I’d unintentionally imperiled a job I loved.
But I had other options. I telephoned Simon at Lodestar. Doing so from Edith’s office made it seem positively sinful.
24
SIMON, I LEARNED, had run out to Union Station to fetch a passenger arriving on the Super Chief. No one important, I figured; the big names knew to disembark in Pasadena to avoid the hurly-burly. Gretchen, my other errand on the Lodestar lot, was all too eager to arrange a pass at the gate.
She sat at her desk outside Sol Huritz’s office leafing through Variety. She wore a dress the color of gingerbread I normally would have coveted, but after Addison’s botched holiday bash anything reminiscent of Christmas roused my inner Scrooge.
“Where’s Mr. Huritz?” I asked.
“His standing Friday meeting at Musso & Frank. What’s doing?”
“I wanted to bring you the news myself. Marthe Auerbach turned herself in. First to me, then the police.”
“Turn
ed herself in?” Gretchen went pale. “She killed Jens?”
“That’s what she says.”
Gretchen’s collapse was abrupt, from hushed stillness to furious tears in a heartbeat. She wrenched open a desk drawer for a tissue. Behind her purse rattled a photograph of Jens, in an elegant silver frame meant for display. I wondered if she’d hidden it away after he’d died, or if it had always supplied secret solace.
“I knew it was her. I knew it. I never liked that … bitch.” She feasted on the word as if it were a five-dollar steak. “Keeping her distance at Salka’s. Clinging to her so-called genius husband while toying with Jens. She deserves whatever she gets.”
Hardly the time to explicate my theory that Marthe was being deceptive and Jens’s criminal endeavors had sown the seeds of his demise. Not with that photo stashed in her desk.
Gretchen rose and hugged me. “I can’t thank you enough. For finding out the truth, for coming here to tell me.”
“I also wanted to see Simon Fischer, who drove me the other day. He’s been a tremendous help.”
“The man of mystery. Some of the girls on the lot would set their caps for him if he was a few years younger.”
“It was a lucky break we met. If anyone else had taken me to Felix’s apartment, this would have gone so differently.”
“That was no accident.”
The sudden chill made me grip my shoulders. “What do you mean?”
“You were almost guaranteed to get Simon. Pretty much any time Felix goes somewhere or someone goes to see him, Simon gets the call. He’s Felix’s unofficial driver. They have a relationship.”
Did they? That came as news to me.
* * *
SITTING UNINVITED ON the stoop of a man’s building, waiting for him to come home. What would the sisters at Saint Mary’s back in Flushing think? Lillian. We had such hopes for you.
I’d found Simon’s address in the telephone directory. He lived close enough to Lodestar to walk to work. Time to surprise him the way he’d surprised me. All I needed was a flask.
He turned the corner, the sight of me not producing a hitch in his stride. Unflappable, our Simon. He planted one foot on the stairs, towering over me. “Hello, little girl. You lost?”
“I had a big day.”
“Care to come in and tell me about it?”
I said yes, certain an entire convent of nuns had wailed in agony.
We entered his sprawling, undistinguished apartment building. The hallways, reeking of cabbage, seemed to double back on themselves as we climbed to the third floor. I lamented not bringing a ball of thread, one end of which I could have tied to the front door like Theseus when he braved the Minotaur in the labyrinth.
Making Simon the monster within the maze, I thought, a notion I swept under the broadloom carpet of my mind.
I told Simon about my surprise encounter with Marthe Auerbach. “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t buy Marthe’s story, either. Last night’s incident with your pal Peter and Malcolm Drewe’s boys has to be tied in.”
“That’s why you don’t believe Marthe? Not because of anything she said to you?”
He peered at me from the corner of his eye. “As I said, I don’t really know her.”
“Right. You know Felix.”
He openly stared at me now. “No. I drive him occasionally.”
That didn’t square with Gretchen’s Lodestar gossip. Then again, perhaps Simon didn’t volunteer information to anyone, not just the authorities. I’d have to phrase my question more directly.
As Simon slipped his key into a lock, the door opposite his swung open. A wizened gnome of a man emerged, his few remaining wisps of hair erect on his scalp, suspenders straddling the hump on his back. “Thought that was you, Simon,” the man said in a rasp tinged with desperation, as if he were afraid of not being heard. He saw me and stopped short, the magazine in his hands only partly extended toward his neighbor. “Didn’t realize you had company. Wanted to give this back to you.”
“Thanks, Clifford.” Simon took the proffered periodical and folded it under his arm.
“Thanks for loaning it to me. That fellow sure knows his onions. Has the whole world situation figured out. I should start taking that magazine again. Didja read it when he ran those Protocols? Explains how the Jews have always—”
“Excuse us, Clifford. Can’t leave my guest standing in the hall.” Clifford, well versed in being interrupted, offered Simon a wave and me a leer before retreating into his cave. With a tight smile of apology, Simon opened his door.
The room beyond was not clogged with appointments. Some thirdhand furniture, a lopsided Murphy bed bulging out of one wall. Piano music drifted in through a window.
“I’d give you the tour, but you just had it,” Simon said. “I’ve a couple of beers on ice, but not much in the larder other than a tin of sardines.”
“I’ve dined many times on sardines. My uncle Danny loves them.”
“The painter from Paramount. Why don’t I lay things on?” He stepped toward the kitchen door, pausing to toss the magazine Clifford had returned to him in the drawer of a salvaged end table.
I didn’t know why I eased that drawer open the instant Simon vanished into the kitchen. Scratch that. I knew exactly why. He’d hidden the magazine from me, casually but noticeably. And maybe I wanted an excuse to second-guess myself, to follow that phantom thread to the front door and freedom.
The drawer contained a few bills, a pair of reading glasses, and some sheet music in addition to the folded magazine. Social Justice was bannered across the top. Founded 1936 by Father Coughlin. That would be Father Charles Coughlin, the fulminating priest of the airwaves. The man my uncle Danny sometimes listened to and took comfort from. He’s not always right, pet, he’d say, but he’s one of our own, with our interests at heart.
I appraised some of those interests now. AMERICA’S INSIDIOUS FOES, the cover teased. “ANTI-SEMITISM” IS A SHIELD. I flipped to Father Coughlin’s column, headlined BACKGROUND OF PERSECUTION. Happening upon the phrase “Without attempting to defend Herr Hitler or Naziism,” I closed my eyes.
A soft clatter informed me it was too late to cover my tracks. Simon carried a tray with two beers, and I was happy neither had been opened; at least the second wouldn’t go flat while he drank the first. He’d borne presentation in mind, fanning crescents of crackers around the open tin of sardines. But it was the single violet in a tiny vase at the edge of the tray that broke my heart.
His genial expression didn’t change when he spotted the magazine in my hands. “Ah. Found some reading material.”
“Do you believe this?”
“I don’t know what I believe. The world’s a complicated place. I try to learn things.”
“You won’t learn anything from Father Coughlin. He’s spreading poison and lies.”
Simon deposited the tray on the end table, taking pains to point the violet toward me. “It’s a free country. There are a lot of people out there with interesting ideas. I’m the first to admit I don’t know everything.”
The apartment’s walls seemed close, the tinkling piano downstairs preying on my nerves. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I feel a terrific headache coming on.”
“We don’t have to talk to about this now.” Simon took the magazine from me and replaced it in the drawer. “I’d prefer not to talk about it at all.”
“So would I. I think it’s best if I go home.”
“Very well. Let me drive you.”
“I can walk to the streetcar. The air will clear my head.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Lillian. I’m a driver. It’s what I do.”
“You’ve already done enough.” I intended it as an acknowledgment of his willingness to accompany me to Club Fathom, but it came out more like a dismissal.
That was how Simon apparently took it, dropping into a chair and cracking a beer open. “Suit yourself. Good night.”
I stumbled through a thank you as I stumbled out. I onl
y got turned around once on my way to the building’s front door, all the while pondering a new question about simple Simon, helpful Simon, always ready with a hand Simon. Why would a Father Coughlin acolyte buddy up to a Jewish composer?
San Bernardino Lamplighter
December 10, 1938
KATHERINE DAMBACH’S
SLIVERS OF THE SILVER SCREEN
John Barrymore and wife, Elaine, are winging to the Big Apple to star in a new play. But some say the lure of the Great White Way isn’t the reason for the trip. They blame Hollywood’s lack of faith in the beauteous Mrs. B’s acting abilities.
Life in Los Angeles’s loftier climes isn’t always a bed of roses. Take yesterday, when neighbors of retired radio tycoon Addison Rice had to endure the whooping and hollering of a busload of boys on loan from less fortunate homes, wreaking havoc at the millionaire’s mansion. One eyewitness reports the lads had reason to rampage. Instead of promised gifts from Santa Claus the tots were handed bottles of the stuff Carrie Nation would never ax for.
The tykes understandably stampeded, hurling candy and pie in a frenzy that would have made Mack Sennett proud while filmland’s famous faces watched in horror. Perhaps that rotund rascal Rice should stick to grown-up gatherings?
25
MY FRIEND VI exhibited an unseemly amount of pep for any human at the crack of a Saturday morn, much less one who’d sung two shows the night before. I clung pajama-clad to my door frame as I made this observation.
“Had some of Mrs. Q’s coffee downstairs. Her joe’s the best.” She handed me a newspaper. “You should see this.”
Kay’s column dispersed my early A.M. fog. “Nuts. Addison swore he’d put the kibosh on this story. Kay only ran the item to needle me.”
“Don’t worry. No one reads her stuff.”
“She could at least be accurate. We didn’t serve candy and pie at a breakfast.”
“And that Carrie Nation gag! Wheeler & Woolsey wouldn’t have touched it. Everything okay? You look down in the mouth.”
“Right now I’m down everywhere.” I told her about my trip to Simon’s and my fear he’d been using me.
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