Hector held up the cardboard carton containing the four large, travel cups of piping black coffee. Hector said, “As promised.”
Orson took the container of coffee. “Fabulous. Did you get some for yourself?”
Hector eyed the four large cups of coffee. He’d figured one for himself, another for Orson, and the remaining two javas for Welles’ “helpers.” Hector said, “Uh, I’ve had my fill this morning.”
Orson said, “Suppose this will be a good enough start for me.” He squinted at Hector again, eyeing the marks on the crime writer’s neck. Orson said, “What, Hector, did you shag a bobby-soxer?” With his free hand, Orson tugged Hector’s collar back from his neck for a closer look. He said, “Haven’t seen the likes of those since grade school.”
“Actually, I passed on the bobby-soxer,” Hector said. “These were given me by her mother.”
“Some mother,” Orson said. He smiled wickedly. “You want to see the set?”
“Of course,” Hector said. “I’d love to. But I thought it wouldn’t be done for at least two more days. That’s what you said last night.”
“Funniest thing...you dropped me off last night, and my helper, the real painter, Rhonda, she and me started talking about you, and how you collect paintings and what not. She’s a reader of yours and was fascinated. Asked all about you. You probably could have bedded her. Anyway, we just got on a roll. Got inspired. The set is wonderfully dark and surreal. We finished it all up about an hour ago.”
“Great,” Hector said. “This puts you ahead of schedule for filming, right? That should please Harry Cohn, shouldn’t it?”
“Fuck Harry,” Orson grumbled. “Fuck all producers. And Rita is ill again.”
Hector smiled. “Right. So am I going to get to meet these helpers of yours?”
“I would have liked for you to meet Rhonda...Rhonda Horton is her name. Unfortunately, she just couldn’t function any longer. Just exhausted to the point of a breakdown, I think. I put her in a cab an hour ago. Given those marks on your neck, it’s probably just as well you didn’t meet her this morning. Betty is still here, but sleeping. She’s actually been practically living here at the set the past few days. I think she has boyfriend problems or something. This is like a sanctuary for her. A hiding place. So, as we move through the set, keep your voice low. It was an intense night...Betty needs the sleep.”
Orson suddenly stumbled, like he’d lost his balance...perhaps overcome briefly by vertigo. Hector took his arm, steadying him. “Maybe we should delay the tour.”
“No, I’m all right now,” Orson said. “Just stay close...the pills, the coffee...the too-little sleep. And I think I have sinusitis, too. My God, the headache I have got now is indescribable.”
Turning and holding the door open with a foot for Hector to step through, Orson sat his carton of coffee down along the wall just inside the door. He took a cup of coffee in each hand. Rising, his tired eyes twinkling, he said, “Let’s explore, Hector.”
Hector followed Orson into the dimly lit soundstage, letting the door close softly behind them. They took a few steps in, and Hector was seized by the sense of being surrounded on all sides by a crowd of strangers. Startled, Hector then heard the slurp of hot coffee being sipped and realized the dimly-visible crowd around them simultaneously appeared to be drinking coffee with Orson — right arms crooked and heads tipped back. And they all looked just like Orson.
They were in a hall of mirrors. “I should say at this point, we’re moving backward through the funhouse set, or the ‘Crazy House’ as I call it,” Orson said. “Well, we’re sort of moving backward. The slide is just off a ways over there...that’s really closer to the beginning of the maze that I — I mean, Michael — must explore at the climax. The slide is the way that I — Michael — gets into the Crazy House.”
As his eyes adjusted to the light, Hector could just make out the dim outlines of the zigzagging slide. It was nearly 130-feet long. Orson saw Hector examining the slide and said, “It had to be built extra wide because I want to get some subjective camera shots on the thing. I have to send the cameraman and his rig down the slide to get my — Michael’s — point of view, going down the bastard.”
Orson — all the Orsons — drank more coffee and waved at the mirrors. “This is the big thing...here for the finale. We’ll have the final shootout between Rita and me right here,” Orson growled, clearly delighted with the prospect. “Eighty mirrors, Hector, and sixty grand to build,” Orson said. “I told you this was a big picture, Hector. We’ll break every one of these mirrors.”
“Sounds like a lot of bad luck,” Hector said, smiling. “But how will you use a camera in here with all the reflections?”
“That’s what will make it so striking and so wonderful...bravura, even. It will perhaps be my greatest scene, ever. And that’s where the magic comes in.” Orson handed one of his coffees to Hector to hold and then produced a coin from behind the writer’s ear, then another. “Magic, like I said.”
“Always with the magic,” Hector said, handing the coffee cup back to Orson. Welles was as an avid amateur magician, though calling him an amateur was understating it quite a bit. Orson maintained a collection of full-scale magic tricks and illusions and props. He had famously sawn in half Marlene Dietrich and wife Rita, among other pretty stars. He sometimes did so in Asian make-up, billed as “Orson the Great.” A couple of years back, he had even mounted a full-scale magical review called The Mercury Wonder Show to entertain troops — a magic show-cum-carnival set up in a lot on Cahuenga.
Orson, coffee cup clutched in either hand, again said, “Follow me.”
They left the mirror maze and moved into a room filled with skeletons severed at the waist. The severed arms of hundreds of mannequins projected from the walls.
And those walls — some were curved, others crooked or set at jagged angles. Spirals and crazed designs covered the walls. Hector was irresistibly reminded of Alva Taurino’s painting, Barcelona, 1937.
Orson stumbled again. Sleep-deprived as he was, Hector couldn’t see how Orson was keeping upright in the disorienting room. He took Orson’s arm again. “Surreal, you said, Orson. You weren’t blowing smoke.”
“Never,” Orson said. “But it is a little much for me in my present state, maybe. I mean, I’m getting catnaps here and there, but when I do, I just dream about filming or about tackling some logistical problem tied to the film. My day-to-day duties and my dreams have become almost one. It’s hard, now and then, to distinguish between what I do and what I dream that I do.”
Hector squeezed his arm. “Congratulations — what you’ve achieved would be bliss for some I’ve known. I mean, isn’t that the surrealist ideal — dissolving the membrane between our world and that of our imagination?”
“A worthy ambition for a shaman perhaps,” Orson said, “but I have a big budget film to bring in, on time and under-budget, if I can.”
Hector frowned as they walked by numerous mannequins, many cut in half, all of them with their arms positioned above their heads, a la Man Ray’s Minotaure. “This is playing with my head, Orson,” Hector heard himself say in a funny voice he almost didn’t recognize. “I really need to get out of here.”
“That’s terrific,” Orson said. “I mean, terrific it’s working on you. “I’m delighted — it’s supposed to do that.”
“I don’t mean just like that,” Hector said. “I come to this set with some unusual baggage.”
“What baggage?”
“Tell you outside,” Hector said, then, reacting again, he said, “Whoa!” He pointed at a steer’s skull, or the skull of a bull, hanging on the wall. He said, “This piece here, Orson, this bull’s bones — this your touch?”
“I like to think I’d have thought of it,” Orson said, “But Rhonda, my budding surrealist, she scrounged it up from some Western prop room. It’s perfect, really. It will be one of the first things the viewer sees in the final film as Michael enters the Crazy House. It’s perfect in th
at I was going for that surrealist-nightmare feel and the bull — el toro or le Minotaure — is the prime surrealist symbol. But all this,” he waved his coffee cups at the surrounding funhouse, “all of this is also really the labyrinth, and Rita will be the Minotaur at its center that I — that Michael — must vanquish. So the bull’s skull is the perfect touch, yes?”
Hector looked around. “Right.” Then he found himself startled again. The figure of a pale-skinned, black-haired woman was laying on her back on an altar. She had a longish face and high cheekbones. Her arms were stretched above her head in the pose of the Minotaure, and her legs were stretched out straight and slightly apart. But unlike the other mannequins or statues, she was clothed and not cut in half at the waist. Her hands and black hair were flecked with paint. Her toenails were painted pink.
Hector pointed at her and said, “Very realistic.”
Orson winked. “She should be. That’s my other helper, Betty. I told you, she sleeps — practically lives — here at the set. Or she has for several days.” Orson said softly, “We’ll let her sleep.” He jerked his head for Hector to follow. They stepped up to a giant web filled with severed arms that looked like some enormous spider’s leftovers. Suspended in the web were the words, “Stand Up Or Give Up.”
They both squinted and stepped into the California sun.
“This is how the picture will end,” Orson said in normal speaking voice once the door of the soundstage closed behind them. He tossed aside his empty coffee cup and started in on the other. “At the climax, I — I mean, Michael — will step out of the ruined mirror maze, out through a turnstile and onto the boardwalk in San Francisco. I’ll wander toward the ocean, and in voice-over — I’m adopting an Irish accent, by the way — I’ll say, ‘Maybe I’ll live so long that I forget her — maybe I’ll die trying.’”
“Great stuff,” Hector said. He shook loose his day’s first cigarette and lit up. “Betty back there — is it a good thing for her to wake up alone in there?” Hector frowned. “I know that I’d hate to come to in that place.”
“She’s exhausted,” Orson said. “She’ll sleep until late afternoon, probably, as is her custom. As I’ve said, I think she might be hiding from a boyfriend. She wants to be an actress, but it won’t happen...not with that voice. And her teeth are quite bad. She plugs the holes with candle wax.”
Hector winced. “How in God’s name do you know that?”
“She told me,” Orson said. “She confides everything to me, and to Rhonda. Such stories. Bum a cigarette?”
Nodding, Hector passed Orson a cigarette and lit it. Orson held Hector’s hand so he could read the engraving on his Zippo. “You and Papa still not speaking?”
“No. You and Hem on speaking terms again yet?”
Orson and Ernest had had a falling out over the narration of The Spanish Earth. Orson had criticized Hemingway’s script; Hemingway had mocked Orson’s delivery. In the final cut of the film, Hem had narrated from his own script.
“We’re still on the outs, too,” Orson said. He nodded back at the warehouse. “We were speaking of Betty’s bad teeth. That’s the least of what she tells me. She tells me everything. About lost husbands and babies...about engagements with vets and entanglements with mobsters. I can’t tell most times if they are lies, dreams or dearest wishes, but I sense they have no foundation in our reality.”
“If that’s true, she’s a surrealist’s dream...like she walked right out of central casting for your movie.”
Orson smiled, blew smoke. “You know, I should give her a walk-on. Can’t trust her with dialogue, poor thing, but we’ll give the folks back home in Medford a little thrill by getting Betty up there on the big screen. Maybe that will take her own mind off things — her fingernails are chewed to the quick.”
“That would be a real nice thing to do,” Hector said.
“What day is it, Hector,” Orson suddenly said. “Is it the weekend?”
“No. It’s Tuesday, January 14,” Hector said, frowning. “You look like hell, pal. Let me take you to a hotel.”
“No, we resume filming tomorrow. I have a lot to do.” Orson paused. “You said my Crazy House unsettled you for a particular reason. You were going to tell me about all that.”
“Make you a deal,” Hector said. “Ride back to my bungalow with me. I’ll tell you about all of that on the drive there. Then you sack out at my place for a few hours. I’ve got to call on someone. I’ll wake you when you I get back. We’ll grab some healthy food and I’ll have you back here by four. Hell, that’s an early start for a night-owl like you.”
“I could use the sleep,” Orson said. “Don’t know how I’ll function tomorrow without some. Yes, let’s go.”
“What about Betty?”
“She’s slept here the past few days,” Orson said. “I’ve gotten her a commissary food ticket. She’ll be fine.”
“After all, crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavor.”— John Huston
SHUTTERBUG
32
“It’s a fantastic story, “ Orson said. They were still sitting in Hector’s Chevy, parked under the carport roof attached to Hector’s rented bungalow. “We could do the hell of a story-treatment, you and me. It’s like something Ben Hecht would concoct. Phantasmagoric. We’ll do it as a Mercury Theatre production. Joe Cotton will play you, of course.”
“I wouldn’t turn this into a novel,” Hector said, “let alone a film.”
“Forget about token naps,” Orson said. “We’ll talk about the screenplay later. I want to come along with you to confront the father of these two women. I want to be there.”
“I’ll be fine,” Hector said.
“It’s not that,” Orson said. “I’m afraid you’ll kill the son of a bitch. Deservedly, but still...”
“I’m not going to murder the old bastard.”
“Maybe not,” Orson said, “but you might go right up to the edge. And I really want to hear this wicked old man’s story.”
“I promise to give you the full account, Orson. Now get your ass inside and turn in. We’re neither of us kids anymore. Heart attacks, nervous breakdowns — you’re a candidate for either one, pushing yourself like you are.”
Hector let Orson into his bungalow. “Treat the place like your own, pal,” he said. “I’ll see you in a few hours.”
As Hector stepped back out onto the front porch to lock up behind himself — effectively locking Orson in — he caught sight of a black Ford sitting across the street. It was an older model — a ’36 or ’37 sedan. The driver was female — blond, or so it appeared. Hector couldn’t make out much beyond that. She wore a black hat with an attached black mesh veil that obscured her face. She wore a big-shouldered black dress and matching black gloves. She appeared to be studying a map.
Hector climbed into his Chevy and twisted his mirror around to where he could watch her. She was still fiddling with a street map, struggling to fold it. It all seemed innocent enough.
Yet there was something almost familiar in her movements. Before he had gotten in his own car, he might have just walked over and offered her directions. But he’d squandered his chance for that pretext: hauling himself back out of the Chevy to head her way now would telegraph the fact he was suspicious of her.
Hector started up his car, backed it out onto the street, shifted gears and rolled slowly past the black car. He figured he might smile at the woman, get a better look at her face. But now she was twisted around in her seat, like she was rooting around in her purse or a bag, the back of her head facing Hector.
Even as he rolled by, picking up speed, Hector couldn’t let it go. He turned right, and then made a sequence of further right turns, essentially circling the block. When he drove past his bungalow again, the old black Ford was gone.
Not yet satisfied, Hector took a longer lap around the neighborhood, but the car still wasn’t there when he passed by his rental again.
Hector turned on the radio — “Strange Fruit.” He ch
ecked his directions, then headed off to ambush Bernard Harper.
***
Hector was wearing a dove gray trench coat and matching fedora. He’d even taken the trouble to put on a necktie. He had an honorary badge given him a few years before by an LAPD chum. Flashed at the average citizen, the badge was convincing enough to open doors.
It certainly worked well enough on Bernard Harper. At least that was so until Hector got inside and cast off his hat. Then Bernard bit his lip and said, “You’re that man from the party. Are you really a detective?”
Hector locked the door behind himself. He slipped off his trench coat and tossed it over the back of a chair and threw his hat atop it. Then he drew his Colt. The old surrealist’s eyes widened as Hector leveled the long barrel of the Peacemaker at him.
Hector said, “You here alone, Pops?”
“Yes, but I can scream and the neighbors will hear,” Bernard said.
“And I can shoot you before you finish drawing breath for that scream. The folks around here, the folks up on the hill, have probably never heard a gunshot. They won’t know what they heard. Probably mistake it for a car backfiring. But it doesn’t have to play like that. Park your scrawny ass on that sofa, Bernie, won’t you.”
Careful to keep his Colt trained on Bernard Harper, Hector shook out a cigarette from his pack and drew it out the rest of the way with his mouth. He opened his Zippo with a one-handed flick and lit up. Inhaling deeply, he cast a glance at the fireplace mantel. There were numerous photos of Rachel there — little girl through her late teens and into her early twenties. Hector didn’t see any photographs of Alva. He was flustered to see the photos of Rachel. They were the first real images of her he’d seen since he left her alone in his Key West house in September 1935 to strike off for Matecumbe with Hem. There had been echoes of Rachel’s features in Alva’s self-portraits, but these were photos of the real, still-living Rachel Harper, and they unsettled Hector.
All the unexpected feelings he’d come to have for Rachel flooded back over Hector. And that’s bad news for her old man, Hector thought.
Toros & Torsos (The Hector Lassiter Series) Page 22