Rita sat down on the couch and patted it for Hector to join her. He did that. He said, “I’m his friend and I’m not certain that Orson is committed to anything,” Hector said. “He’s a big one for grandiose schemes and unfinished projects. Not finishing equates with no risk of failure in Orson’s mind, I think. He’ll take a picture 90 percent of the way and then let the studio hacks hijack it and mutilate his ‘masterpiece.’ Gives him something to bitch about.”
“It’s a harsh assessment,” Rita said. “And you think that philosophy extends to his women, too?” Rita sipped her drink. “You think his relationships are run the same way?”
“Maybe,” Hector said. “You should think about what you want to do next, M. I think you’re right about Orson not hanging around much after this film wraps.”
She shook her head. “Right. They all see the woman on the screen, you know. Orson was the only one who saw through it. He really talked to me...engaged me as person, not as that damned ‘Gilda.’ Engaged me in very sense, I mean. He was the only one to ever do that. Other than you of course — the only man who knows Margarita.”
Hector smiled and squeezed her hand. “Gildas make for jazzy weekends, honey. Margaritas are the ones you marry.”
Hector and Rita seemed to end up in bed every few years...not lovers in the purest sense, but more like one another’s safest harbor. He felt himself drifting that way now, and could tell she was, too. “The Man I Love” played low in the background.
“What is it with men?” Rita posed that question and offered Hector her glass for a refill. He realized his was empty, too. Hector got up and mixed two more drinks — deep ones this time.
He said, “What do you mean, ‘What is it with men?’”
Rita said, “There are sure no happy, or even enduring marriages in this sorry town. And you — how many times have you gone to the well, Hector?”
“Marriage? More than once.”
“Did you love them?”
Hector handed Rita her fresh drink. This time he’d used some ice, too.
Rita said, “You didn’t, clearly. Not all the way. Were there ones you loved and who got away? Ones you wished you’d married?”
He’d loved his first two wives very much, but said, “Funny you should ask.”
Rita took it the wrong way. “Me and you, Hector...”
“No, I wasn’t talking about us.”
She smiled. “That’s a relief.” She checked the wall clock. “Orson said if you were back in time — say, two or three — you should bring me along and meet at him the soundstage where the ‘Crazy House’ is set up.” She checked the clock again. “There is still time before we have to do that....” She stroked his thigh.
He smiled. “Sure.”
She fiddled with his tie. “God, I’ve never seen you in one of these. Seems wrong.”
“I was playing police detective.”
“You’ve taken up acting?”
“Only around painters and photographers.”
She frowned as she loosened his collar and saw his throat. “Lord...someone sure has been here first.”
“It was nothing, but if it bothers you...”
“No, it’s just...you’re such a man.” Some of her Spanish inflection crept in there.
Thinking of Mercedes Marshall, Hector said dryly, “Some women like that in a man.”
“Some, yeah.” Rita took his hand and led Hector back to his own bedroom.
“Artistic imagination must remain free. It is by definition free from any fidelity to circumstances, especially to the intoxicating circumstances of history.”— André Breton
STRIKE
34
Hector said, “Dammit!” as they reached the door of the soundstage.
The door was slightly ajar. The door’s handle was mangled and askew — nearly sheared off.
“Maybe Orson forgot his key,” Rita said.
“But he remembered his sledge hammer?” Hector toed the door open further, simultaneously drawing his Colt. “This is trouble.” He said, “Stay behind me, M. If things go wrong, get bad or I go down, you run back out here and scream like Fay Wray.”
Powerful friends, Bernard Harper had said. Powerful enough to afford studio access.
They edged into the darkened soundstage, the light through the door glancing off all those mirrors, flooding the soundstage with natural light. Hector tried to see past the dozens of himself in the mirrors; past all the hundreds of stunning blonds dogging his heels.
Hector said softly to Rita, “Your first time on this set, M?”
“First time seeing it,” Rita said. “Orson has described it. He didn’t do it justice.”
“It gets worse...more frightening, I mean.”
They explored the entire, lurid set and found nothing — no signs of a struggle and no signs of Orson. They didn’t even come across a sleeping, pale-skinned, henna-haired painting assistant named Betty.
Hector was about to take Rita and leave the set when he saw an envelope skewered on the horn of the bull’s skull mounted on the wall. Rita was examining the lurid wall paintings, her back to Hector. He took down the envelope and slipped it in the pocket of his sports coat.
Rita said, “I’m going to check the commissary. Maybe he’s grabbing some food.”
“Do that,” Hector said. “Also look for a young girl, probably in her early twenties. She has pale skin and longish black hair. Her name is Betty. She and another woman helped Orson paint all this. She might know where to find him. While you do that, I’ll hang around the soundstage here, outside, just in case he shows up. You look for me here.”
He watched Rita cross the lot, gorgeous in a tailored gray dress and pumps, then Hector sat down on the step of the soundstage’s front door and ripped open the envelope.
It wasn’t a handwritten letter, but something that looked more like someone’s notion of a ransom note taken from pulp magazines or B-movies — a collage of letters and words clipped from disparate magazines and newspapers...a riot of fonts and point-sizes. The letter said:
Fuck wIth ARt,
AND
ART wIll
Fuck wIth yOU!
Hector folded up the note, put it back in the envelope and slipped it into his pocket.
So much for his lone wolf theory for himself.
The surrealists were striking at him through Orson...and maybe through this “Betty” friend of the wired auteur.
***
Rita found him still sitting on the step of the soundstage. The stubs of three cigarettes lay at Hector’s feet. She said, “You’re burning through those.”
“Thinking,” Hector said. “Plotting.” He stood up and brushed off the seat of his pants. “Nothing?”
“Nada,” Rita said. “Not of Orson, or that girl you told me to look for. Nobody in there has ever seen her, near as I can tell.”
“They didn’t come back here, either. Not Orson, and not Betty.” Hector took Rita’s arm.
She fell in step alongside him. She said, “So what next?”
“We get you somewhere safe.”
“You think something has gone that wrong?”
“I have reason to think so.”
Rita scowled. “What, you think this could be some kind of kidnapping thing? Orson’s a publicity fiend, but even he wouldn’t try that old dodge. The staged-Hollywood kidnapping was stale twenty years ago...”
“It wouldn’t necessarily be staged,” Hector said. “And I’m not even thinking that way, not yet.”
“I’m staying with you,” Rita said. “I can’t be safer than running around with a man carrying a six-gun. How do you get away with that, anyway?”
“I wear big coats.”
***
Hector drove downtown. He parked next to a payphone where he could keep an eye on Rita and fished coins from his pocket. He called the operator and got the number for the Marshall house.
Mercedes answered. Hector said, “Alright, toots, you’ve got my attention.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, lover,” she said.
“Sure you do.”
“No, I don’t. And I don’t have important conversations over the phone. Not anymore. Wire taps, you know. HUAC, and the like. Several of my friends have warned me about talking over phones. Oh, but did you hear the terrible news? Someone beat up poor Bernard Harper. Nearly killed him. Bernard’s old, so it wouldn’t necessarily take a tough guy, a man, to hurt him. They say whoever did it probably has bruised knuckles, though.”
Hector looked at his own hands. He’d seen worse.
“Just let Orson and the girl go,” Hector said. “We’ll call it even.”
“I really don’t know what you’re talking about, Cowboy.”
“If I have to come over there...”
“You’d be trespassing, Hector. I’ve already called the police and asked for a watch on my house. We’re going to be traveling, you see. Maybe go to Canada. Maybe to Europe, or down to Mexico. My lawyer will be in touch about Alva’s paintings...about shipping and the like.”
Hector said, “If anything happens to Orson or that girl, there’s nowhere you can run to get far enough away from me.”
He could hear Mercedes’ sneer in her voice. “Hector, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over in hopes of obtaining a different result. Haven’t there been enough destructive threats? And did you feel better, after, a big strong man like you, beating the stuffing out of an old man like Bernard?”
Hector slammed down the phone. He called the LAPD and was connected to his friend, Russ Evans. He chatted him up a bit and then asked for ways to contact Russ in a pinch. Russ said, “Something big shaking?”
Hector hesitated. “Not yet. But I have a feeling.”
Rita eyed him suspiciously when Hector climbed back behind the wheel of his Chevy. “You look shaken up, Hector,” she said. “Has something happened?”
“Not yet.” He started up his Chevy and started rolling. They’d traveled four blocks when Hector steered toward Brentwood. He was watching the mirror: a 1936 black Ford sedan back there, several car lengths behind. He thought about forcing a confrontation. Then he rethought that strategy. He said, “Where’s Huston live?”
Rita scowled. “Huston? John Huston, you mean?”
“Yeah. You know the place?”
“Been there once or twice with Orson, so yeah, I can find it.”
“Let’s go there now,” Hector said.
“The bullfight itself has a religious origin. Its ancestor is the Minotaur. The bullfighter is something of a priest.”— John Huston
COUNTERSTRIKE
35
Huston kept horses at his ranch. Hector hadn’t been on horseback much since he’d ridden behind Black Jack Pershing in search of Pancho Villa in the run-up to the Great War. It came back easily enough, though Hector felt foolish to be riding a horse while wearing dress slacks and a sports jacket...wing-tips and black sunglasses.
John’s wife had loaned Rita one of her riding outfits. John was dressed in jodhpurs, calfskin boots and a riding helmet. Hector was very much odd-man out.
Rita and John’s wife were riding some distance ahead. John’s and Hector’s horses were plodding along at restrained reign.
“I foreswear any knowledge of this, Hector,” John said. “You have to believe that. I really know nothing, and I’m committed to knowing nothing. I will endeavor in the days ahead to maintain that blissful — and safe — state of ignorance. That said, I think Orson is simply too big, too famous for them to harm in any real way.”
“But they are capable of harm,” Hector said thinly. “That’s implied in your phrasing.”
“God preserve us all from close listeners,” John said.
“Where might they have taken them, John? Too that damned ‘temple’ in Laurel Canyon?”
John shook his head. “No, there last of all. Probably somewhere more squalid and out of sight. If they have done what you propose. Frankly, I can’t see them kidnapping those two. It’s daft, Hector. They’re intellectuals...dilettante artists and art collectors. They kill with words and brushes. They slander with reviews and slash with their tongues. I don’t think it within their purview to commit acts of enduring physical violence.” He cast an eye at Hector’s barked and swollen knuckles, then ducked low for a low-hanging branch. “Only crime writers do that. Men who live what they write and write what they live.”
Hector was growing very tired of that line and it’s incessant application to himself. What, had some publicist placed an ad, or something? Where was that coming from?
“Well, I suspect you’re in a position to send a signal back,” Hector said. “So you tell them I’m issuing a new ultimatum. If Orson isn’t delivered safely back to my bungalow by this evening to report to the studio for filming mañana, I’m delivering on all threats. I’m going to become an enthusiastic snitch for HUAC. Hell, I may even go on camera. I’m told I look like a taller, beefier Bill Holden.” Hector winked and smiled. “In other words, John, I think I’m ready for my close-up.”
“You bear a passing resemblance to Holden, to be sure, though I think Bill has a nicer smile,” John said.
“That’s because old Bill maybe has nicer friends,” Hector said.
John frowned; his right eye twitched. “I’ll make some calls...try to pipeline your threat. But I do it under duress, Hector. What you propose is essentially the same as giving them twenty-four-hours’ warning to kill you. You know that don’t you?”
“Bring ’em on,” Hector said. “What can a bunch of intellectuals and dilettantes, as you characterize them, do to lay a glove on the likes of me?”
“I told you, they have powerful friends.”
“And I told you that I do, too.”
***
Hector hit another pay phone and contacted another of his Left Coast chums — Arnold, “Packy” Thompson, an Angelino heavyweight with a 30 and 2 valley record — the undisputed champ of California water-tank towns. Packy was between bouts and sacked out in his swanky Brentwood apartment. When he heard he’d be standing watch over Rita Hayworth he waived Hector’s offered fee for protection.
Rita balked at staying with the boxer for the afternoon, but when Hector explained his next stop was a federal office to make an overture to HUAC she acquiesced. Rita said only, “You’d really sell out to those bastards?”
“No, I’d really use those bastards.”
Hector left her in the hubbub of a bus station to be picked up by Packy. Then Hector drove to a diner and ordered himself eggs, toast and coffee. While he waited for his food, he called Washington, D.C. and Special Agent Edmond Tilly.
Tilly said, “Christ, Hector, it’s been a long time.”
“Ten years.”
“Well, as you see, with all these subpoenas flying around you, but not at you, I was good to my word.”
“I know,” Hector said. “That’s why I’m calling you now. I have some more dope for you. Same terms. You protect me now, use me silently, and you hide my participation within your own department’s archives, now to forever.”
He could hear the zeal in Agent Tilly’s voice. “What do you have?”
“You sitting down, Agent? You might want to pour yourself a drink, too. It’s a long, crazed story and there are a lot of big names...artists, photographers, sculptors and art collectors. And now that we’re done using my name, you might want to put me on speaker and shag yourself a steno. Oh, and get yourself a Los Angeles federal judge in cue. You need to file subpoenas an hour ago — some of these cocksuckers are almost in full flight.”
***
Hector spent an hour on the phone with Agent Tilly. He told him about the killings in Key West, and in Mexico and Spain. Hector mentioned “a suspect the Spanish authorities” had at the time, one “presumed killed” soon after. He didn’t tell him that he thought Rachel Harper/Alva Taurino might still be alive. If Rachel was still alive Hector wanted to confront her directly...he
wanted some options.
Then Hector ate his cold, late-afternoon breakfast, picked up some newspapers and headed back to his bungalow.
As he approached the front door, he saw that the door had been forced. He quickly surveyed the living room, but saw nothing out of place; nothing obviously missing. The pages of his manuscript were still sitting stacked on the couch, just where Rita had left them. The intruders were creative types themselves, Hector guessed — they couldn’t countenance destroying even an enemy’s creative endeavors.
Gun-in-hand, Hector continued combing through his bungalow.
He found Orson stretched out on the bed, fully clothed and bathed in blood.
“The only difference between myself and a madman is that I’m not mad.”— Salvador Dali
OUT OF THE PAST
36
Hector was a big man, but so was Orson: it was hard work getting Orson up off the bed, stripped naked and into the shower. Hector first took off his own shirt and coat to avoid ruining it with all the blood on Orson’s clothes. Hector got the bath water warm, then he got Orson up and across his back and shoulders in a sloppy fireman’s carry. He lugged the director into the bathroom and muscled Orson into the tub. Hector stripped him, then turned on the shower, leaving Orson unconscious in its needle-spray.
After he did that, Hector grabbed an empty, aluminum trashcan, placed it in the middle of his backyard, and stuffed in some old newspapers. He then wadded in Orson’s clothes — suit, socks, underwear, belt and shoes. He covered those with his own bloodied sheets. Hector poured in some starter fluid stored in the carport next to a portable barbecue and he set fire to the trashcan’s contents.
While all of that burned, Hector phoned Packy’s apartment and asked that the boxer bring Rita by his place.
As he hung up, he heard Orson’s distinctive voice over the shower spray, ringing off the tiles. “Jesus fuck, where am I wounded?”
Hector grimaced and hung up the phone.
He found Orson still sitting in the tub, looking vaguely drunk, holding up his hands, now pink with water-diluted blood. “Good Christ, Hector, what has happened to me?”
Toros & Torsos (The Hector Lassiter Series) Page 24