by John Kaye
After Bonnie finished speaking, Burk stared at her for what seemed like thirty seconds. The silence was broken by a telephone that started to ring in the apartment next door. It rang six times before it stopped.
“Pretty late to call someone,” Burk said.
“Maybe someone’s trying to call you at your house, Ray.”
“Maybe.”
The phone rang again, but this time just once.
“Ray?”
“Yeah?”
“I made up that story.”
Burk’s head was resting on Bonnie’s stomach. He kept quiet for a while, letting her words echo in the darkness, before he said, “Everything?”
“Just the dream part. That was mine. Not my mom’s.”
“But everything else—”
“Was true. Okay?”
“Okay,” Burk said, and he slid his tongue along the thick scar that bisected her lower abdomen. “Finish your story.”
“On the final day of shooting, Rheingold arrived on location in a long white limousine. I was sitting under a tree, holding a stray cat, when he called Dolittle over to discuss the final scene, a complicated sequence that would require split-second timing if they went for one take. ‘Don’t blow it,’ I heard Rheingold say to Dolittle. ‘Get it the first time.’ And then he glanced at me and said, ‘I want it to look real, so don’t double the girl.’ Dolittle told him there was no point in taking chances on the last day, that he could get everything he needed in close-ups, but Rheingold just shook his head and said, ‘Do it my way.’”
An alarm clock went off somewhere in the apartment building, and Burk started to hear a morning deejay begin to yak over the radio.
He closed his eyes, trying hard to concentrate on Bonnie’s story, even though he knew she was going to tell him something that he didn’t want to hear.
“In the script Mom was playing Elizabeth Springer, a young housewife who gets kidnapped during a small-town bank robbery. After the police show up and surround the cabin where the robbers are hiding, they were supposed to lob a tear-gas canister through a window to flush them out. The special-effects guy had rigged up this harmless smoke bomb, which was Mom’s cue to come running outside—followed, of course, by the bad guys. And that’s the way it was rehearsed all afternoon.
“But later that evening, when they did it for real, when the smoke bomb went off, the cabin roof exploded into the air and the sky turned as red as blood. Mom was not the first one out, but the last. I heard her screams before I saw the flames shooting up from her hair like ruby flares. The stuntmen all rushed forward, but when they ripped off her burning dress, charred strips of skin fell to the ground like pieces of dead bark . . . and she lay there burning to death right in front of my eyes.”
A week later, on the Sunday after her mother’s funeral, a man named Jack Rose drove Bonnie downtown to Union Station. Once more she had a ticket on the Union Pacific, but this time she was not riding home to Michigan. She was on her way to another city in the Midwest, Omaha, a city in Nebraska where her child would be born, in room 706 in the Hotel Sherwood.
“I had a boy,” she told Burk, “and I named him Bobby.”
Burk did not remember falling asleep, but when he opened his eyes there was a patch of cheerful midmorning sunlight where Bonnie’s tangled hair should have been. After a few moments—enough time to find his Marlboros and notice that her clothes were gone—he realized he was alone.
It was impossible for Burk to believe that Bonnie had suddenly disappeared forever, that he would never again touch her skin or feel her tongue fill his mouth. From the very first moment he saw her on the street, he felt connected to her in a way he didn’t understand. There was something in her wholesome but troubled features—the way she looked so deeply into his face, the chaos and pain buried behind her frantic eyes—that overpowered his mind and made his heart do a mad little dance.
“She probably went out for some groceries,” Burk decided, saying the words out loud to the four bare walls, but he was already feeling that awful ache of loneliness as he lit up the first of the ten cigarettes he would chain-smoke during the next two hours.
Later that afternoon, when he stepped outside the Argyle Manor, Burk was approached by two determined-looking men with thick chests and dark, quick eyes.
“Freeze,” one of the men said, cutting Burk off as he started toward his car. “Police. Put your hands in the air.”
In local news, an unidentified armed woman was shot and critically wounded this afternoon in Brentwood, outside the luxurious home of movie producer Max Rheingold. Although details at this time are sketchy, apparently the woman was riding a Starline Fantasy Tours bus when she suddenly pulled a .22-caliber pistol and ordered the driver to stop. She tried to force her way onto Mr. Rheingold’s property, which is located across the street from the estate owned by actor Henry Fonda.
Burk was listening to KNX All News 1070 as he drove west on the Ventura Freeway. He was on his way home after the police had questioned him for three hours.
“Tell them everything you know about this broad,” Gene had told Burk when he finally got through to him at the station. “These guys are good guys; I used to work with them. Tell them the truth and they’ll cut you loose.”
“I told them everything,” Burk said.
“They don’t believe you, Ray.”
“Then that’s too bad.”
Burk heard his brother take a deep breath on the other end of the phone. “Ray?” he said in a calm voice.
“Yeah?”
“They know you. Okay? They work undercover east of Vine and they see you around. Other people see you too. And they tell the cops.”
“They see me driving. That’s all I do.”
“Day after day? Hour after hour? What the fuck’s going on with you?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I just drive, Gene.”
“Is that it, Ray? You just drive. Is that why your ol’ lady is in the hospital with a broken jaw, your ass is in jail, and Louie cries himself to sleep—”
“’Bye, Gene.” Burk hung up the phone, and he told the police everything they wanted to know about Bonnie Simpson. He told them how they first met, and he described the sweet smell of her perfume and the slope of her shoulders as she leaned under the hood of his car. He even told them how her bones and muscles felt underneath his hands when her long, smooth legs were wrapped around his waist. He told them she was raped as a child, about the scar on her lower abdomen and the possibility of a child somewhere. He told them about her dream. About the stars and the sounds they made.
Burk told them everything. But he didn’t tell them that he loved her.
Louie’s Big Wheel was sitting in front of the garage as Burk pulled into his driveway. When he switched off the ignition he heard the phone ringing inside his house, but he waited outside, breathing in the crisp cool air, until it stopped.
Before he went to sleep, he turned on the radio. On KMPC, Radio Ray Moore was speaking to a man with an angry voice.
“I struck my boy today,” the caller told Radio Ray. “Not with my fist. I slapped him. But I slapped him hard enough to flame up his cheek.”
“Why did you do that?”
“I caught him in the garage. He had the top off the paint thinner and his nose stuck inside the can. Those fumes can turn your brain goofy. I told him that before, but he don’t listen to me.”
“How old is he?”
“Twelve.”
“Pretty young for that kind of stuff.”
“Too young. That’s why I had to draw the line. The next time I catch him in there he’s gonna get a real beating.”
“I’d think twice about that.”
“I didn’t call you for advice, Radio Ray.”
“Why did you call me?”
“I wanted to get it off my chest.”
“What are you hiding in the garage?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’
t know. You sound like there’s something in there you don’t want him to see.”
“What’re you talkin’ about? All I got in there is my camping gear, a lawn mower, and my tools.”
“You got a tackle box?”
“Hell, yes. Of course I got a tackle box.”
“The tray on top, that’s where you keep all your lures and flies. Right? And maybe some hooks. What do you have underneath?”
“Nothin’.”
“Nothing? Really?”
“I got some leader and a deck of playing cards.”
“That’s it?”
“And some insect repellent.”
“What else?”
“Nothin’.”
“You got something else down below, don’t you? Something you’re ashamed of. What is it, dope? Dirty pictures? Condoms? What do you have in there?”
“Nothin’! I got nothin’! Stop pushing me!”
There was a long pause. Radio Ray waited but the caller didn’t speak.
“Apologize to your boy,” Radio Ray said, breaking the silence. “Go in now and tell him you’re sorry.”
“He’s asleep.”
“Wake him up. Tell him you love him. Do the right thing.”
“I don’t know.”
“Do it.”
“But—”
“Do it. Now.”
The next morning, when Burk saw the picture in the Los Angeles Times, he knew right away that something was wrong. Two paramedics were loading Bonnie’s body into the rear of the ambulance, but in the right-hand corner of the picture, in the gutter, Burk saw something that looked like a shoe. “Move aside,” Burk said out loud to the cop in the picture, who was blocking his view. “Move aside or pick up her shoe. That’s her loafer, you dumb shit! Pick it up! Pick up her fucking shoe!”
Gene called later that afternoon. He said, “I just spoke to my guys down at headquarters. It’s all bullshit. They checked with the Screen Actors Guild, and they have no record of an actress with the name Grace Simpson. Ellen, Faith, Heather, Helen, yes. No Grace. No one close to that. Zip.”
“Maybe she changed her last name. Actors do that all the time.”
“Ray, listen to me. This chick—”
“Forget it, Gene. I’m not interested.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“You don’t want to hear the truth? What’re you, fuckin’ crazy?”
No one spoke for at least a minute. Finally, Burk said, “P-Five.”
“What?” Gene said.
“‘Dream Lover.’ P-Five on the jukebox at Ernie’s Stardust Lounge. That’s where it all started.”
“I’m not following you, Ray.”
“‘Dream Lover,’ Gene.”
“I know the tune. Bobby Darin. B side—”
“P-Five. Palm Springs. The desert. Darin. A lavender sky. Laurel. The chick in the trophy case. It’s all right there.”
“Where?”
“Behind my eyes, Gene. The movie. I just have to splice it together, and you’ll see how all this is connected. All of it. The whine in my power steering, Dr. Cyclops, James Earl Ray, Rheingold, Ricky Furlong—”
“Ricky Furlong?”
“And Clay Tomlinson too. I can’t leave them out, Gene. Clay and Ricky changed our lives. I’ll put them right next to those guys muff-diving at the Bat Cave. What do you think?”
“I don’t know, man.”
“You don’t know, Gene? You’re my brother. How the fuck could you not know?”
Three
Gene and Clay: Throwing Down
From shortly before Christmas in 1941 until he suffered a mild heart attack in the spring of 1972, Burk’s father Nate owned and operated Hollywood’s busiest newsstand. Located eight blocks west of Vine, on the corner of Las Palmas and Hollywood Boulevard, the racks at Nate’s News stretched south for nearly an entire city block.
Nathan Burk sold all the major dailies and newspapers of record, both foreign and domestic, but it was really his wide selection of oddball magazines (some stashed under the counter) that kept the sidewalk on Las Palmas crowded with customers twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Along with the familiar newsweeklies like Time and Life, Nate’s was the only newsstand in the city to stock such maverick journals as, Naked Church Choirs, Amputee Love, and Coffin & Tombstone, the monthly trade magazine for the mortuary industry.
But unlike other news dealers, Burk’s father rarely returned his unsold magazines. Instead, every Saturday morning Burk and his older brother, Gene, would box the leftovers and hand-dolly them over to Yesterday’s Pages, the used book and magazine store that their father owned on the corner of Cherokee and Selma. Yesterday’s Pages was managed by Nathan Burk’s cousin Aaron Levine, an ex-prizefighter and occasional movie extra who grew up next door to gangster Buggsy Siegel on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Aaron was also an alcoholic, the kind of blackout drinker who would disappear for days or sometimes even weeks at a time, ending up hospitalized or incarcerated in cities as far away as Galveston, Texas, or Tacoma, Washington, with absolutely no memory of how he got there. After these binges, Nathan Burk would always pay for Aaron’s transportation back to Los Angeles, sometimes even hopping on a plane himself to serve as his personal escort. But whenever he demanded that his cousin stop drinking, threatening to fire him if he didn’t comply, Aaron would just shake his head and stubbornly say the same thing: “I’m just a punch-drunk drunk and that’s all I plan to be, so if you don’t like me the way I am, Nate, you can just tell me to get lost.”
But that was something Nathan Burk could never do.
“Because he’s your cousin, Dad. Right?”
“No, Ray. Not because he’s my cousin,” Nathan Burk told his younger son on a muggy Saturday afternoon during the summer of 1949.
They were sitting at a window table in Mike Lyman’s Vine Street Delicatessen, eating corned beef and chopped liver sandwiches. A block away was the Hollywood Pantages Theatre, where Burk had spent the morning watching cartoons and a Western serial starring Hopalong Cassidy and Buster Crabbe.
“Because he saved my life.”
“He saved your life?” Burk’s eyes opened wide and his lips were poised over the straw inside his bottle of Brown’s Cream Soda. “Really?” Burk’s father nodded. “How?”
Nathan Burk took a bite out of his sandwich and followed that with a fork piled high with cole slaw. “There was this big dumb Irish kid in our neighborhood,” he said, speaking around the food in his mouth. “Jack Moriarty was his name. He was a bully, the kind of bully who used to beat up on kids for no reason. He just liked to hurt you. If you fought back he hurt you worse. Of course, he would never mess with me if I was with Aaron. But if he caught me alone on the street, he would either pinch my nipples or knuckle-punch me in the small of the back. I hated that boy,” Burk’s father said sharply. “I used to pray every night that he would die.”
Nathan Burk paused for a moment and let his eyes travel around the restaurant. His narrow lips were working silently, and Burk could see a tiny speck of mustard in the corner of his mouth.
“One Saturday morning,” he went on, pushing aside his plate and shifting his attention back to his son, “I was sitting in the subway station waiting for the train up to the Polo Grounds. I was on my way to see the Dodgers play the Giants. When I heard the subway I stood up, and that’s when Moriarty grabbed me from behind in a bear hug. ‘Look what I got,’ he yelled. ‘I got Big Nose Burk, the Jewish Jerk.’ Then he began to laugh like a madman while he carried me over to the tracks. I screamed for help, but everyone ignored us or figured we were just a couple of kids horsing around. I’m absolutely certain he would’ve thrown me in front of the train if Aaron hadn’t shown up right at that very moment. A split-second later, and I would’ve been dead.”
Burk’s father stopped speaking and glanced at his reflection in the delicatessen window. Outside, a gray-bearded man dressed in a hooded black r
obe walked up the sidewalk, carrying a white owl in a cage. Across Vine Street, movie producer Max Rheingold was standing in front of the Brown Derby smoking a long black cigar. With him was a woman wearing skin-tight red toreador pants and six-inch red spiked heels. A large red leather purse hung from her shoulder, and when she stepped to the curb and ducked inside the waiting limousine, Nathan Burk realized it was the aging ingenue who regularly came by his newsstand each week to pick up her hometown newspaper, the Buchanan (Michigan) Bugle. Her name was Grace Elliot, and he first saw her one evening in the spring of 1942.
She was remarkably fresh and innocent looking then, her face round and glass-smooth, and her long, very auburn hair was tied behind her head in a ponytail. But now her once-clear face had a rough and unfinished look, and there was purplish eye shadow on her eyelids and carmine lipstick slashed across her shapely mouth.
“What happened, Dad?”
Burk’s father turned away from the window and stared at his son, puzzled. “Where?”
“At the subway station. What happened at the subway station with the bully?”
“Oh, there,” Burk’s father said, closing his eyes, straining to bring that part of the past back into focus. “Well,” he said, “Aaron was going to the ball game that day too. And he brought along his favorite bat, figuring that afterwards, if he was lucky, he would get one of the Giants to sign it. But when he got to the subway station and he saw what was going on, he—”