True Confessions

by John Gregory Dunne

  “What the fuck is he talking about?” Crotty said.

  During the next forty-eight hours, the Robbery-Homicide Division established the following facts:

  Timothy Mallory was clean. On the night Lois Fazenda was killed, he was directing a stag movie in a house out by the airport with the telephone operator, the model, a girl from Bakersfield, two boys, an old man and a horse. The girl from Max Factor had a severe case of menstrual cramps and never left the house on North Cherokee Avenue. The singer attended a sneak preview in Burbank of They Wouldn’t Believe Me with Robert Young, Jane Greer and Susan Hay ward and afterward had her nose broken in a bar on Central Avenue by a unit publicist and spent the evening in the emergency room at Central Receiving Hospital. The prop man at Paramount had an alibi, as did Jim, Johnny, the man named Red, Jack, Lee and Fred, whose model agency was actually an outlet for Timothy Mallory’s dirty photographs. The outfielder for the Sacramento Solons was playing in Seattle against the Rainiers and went oh-for-five and dropped a fly ball in the bottom of the tenth to let in the winning run. As it happened, the pilot from Chicago was in Seattle and had seen the game. The pilot said he hoped the outfielder could fuck better than he played ball and then said he was sorry about Lois Fazenda but she wasn’t all that great a piece of ass. The owner of the religious-supply store on Hollywood Boulevard was at Saint John of God’s Hospital where his wife gave birth to stillborn twins and developed a puerperal infection. Maurice, the radio announcer with the British accent, was actually a Jamaican octoroon and was now an all-night rhythm-and-blues disk jockey at a colored station in Brownsville, Texas. The tall, sinister, elderly man who drove a Packard was in fact short, thirty-seven, drove a La Salle and was Timothy Mal-lory’s trick.

  These facts were learned about Lois Fazenda. She was twenty-two years old. She had come west from Medford, Massachusetts, three years before in hopes of becoming a movie star. She worked as a waitress, an usherette in a movie theater, a carhop and a checkout girl in the PX at Fort MacArthur. For two months she was a volunteer at County General Hospital, working for a Catholic charity called the Protectors of the Poor. The volunteers of the Protectors of the Poor worked the emergency rooms and orthopedic wards of County General passing out candy and cigarettes and toothpaste and razor blades and Virgin of Guadalupe medals to indigent accident victims of Mexican descent.

  Lois Fazenda also did two days as an Arab extra in Casablanca at Warner Brothers. Her only other movie work was being eaten out in a film directed and associate-produced by Timothy Mallory. She lived in a series of boarding houses much like the one on North Cherokee. On West Adams Boulevard she thought she was pregnant. On Camino Palmero she hemorrhaged. On North Orange Drive she was tattooed. The tattoo artist was currently in the federal penitentiary on Terminal Island for violation of the Mann Act. On Linden Drive in Long Beach she left behind a poem that said, “Remember me and keep in mind/A faithful friend is hard to find/But when you are good and true/Trade not the good ones for the new.” On K Street in Lancaster there was an unmailed letter to Joe that said Doc was courting her and that unless Joe made his intentions clear, she could not vouch for what Doc would do. There was also a letter from the pilot in Chicago: “You say in your letter you want us to be good friends, but from your telegram you seem to want more than that. Are you really sure just what you want? Why not pause and consider just what your coming out here would amount to. Helen still hasn’t agreed to the divorce. I think she has private detectives following me. I care too much for you to subject you to that. Perhaps Matt is your out. In your last letter you mentioned he had sent you a ring. Diamond? Engagement? You gave no explanation. Matt sounds like a big spender and if he wants to make an honest woman out of you (that’s a J-O-K-E, ha ha), he might be better for you than me.” On Bronson Avenue, there was a newspaper clipping from the Wenatchee, Washington, Herald: LOCAL ACE HONORED. The story said that Captain Matthew J. Kronholm, a flight instructor at Peterson Field in Colorado, had recently been promoted to major. “Major Kronholm is the son of Mrs. Matthew J. Kronholm, Sr., and the late Mr. Kronholm, a local pharmacist. Major Kron-holm’s brother, Samuel, is an actor in Hollywood under the name of Sammy Barron. Major Kronholm is engaged.” To whom it did not say, but the word engaged on the clipping was circled in lipstick. On Harold Way there was a letter from Mrs. Matthew J. Kronholm, Sr.: “Matt asked me to write you because he said you were a very refined girl. He said you would ‘fit right in.’” On Sierra Vista there was a note from Sammy Barron: “The doctor’s name is Snyder and he’ll do it at his house and not at his office and bring $200.” On Formosa Avenue there was a telegram from Mrs. Matthew J. Kronholm, Sr.: “Received word from War Department Matt killed in a crash. Our deepest sympathy is with you. Pray it isn’t true.” Lois Fazenda had left Formosa Avenue without paying her rent. Nor had she paid her rent on Sierra Vista, Harold Way, Bronson Avenue, K Street in Lancaster, Linden Drive in Long Beach, on North Orange Drive, Poinsettia Avenue, Camino Palmero or West Adams Boulevard.

  Lois Fazenda’s mother had died of a stroke when her daughter was sixteen. Her father, who had divorced his wife in 1931 and moved west, was a refrigerator repairman in Lompoc. He had not seen his daughter in two years. She had come to live with him in Lompoc when she was out of a job, but he had thrown her out after five weeks. Lewis Fazenda said his daughter would not keep house for him and was only interested in men. She had once wired him for two hundred dollars. He had not sent it. It was his opinion that his daughter was “no damn good.” He had a graduation picture of Lois Fazenda wearing a white cap and gown and it was published in the Express, the Times, the Herald, the Daily News, the Examiner and the Long Beach Press-Telegraph, Sammy Barron had a photograph of Lois Fazenda in the Arab costume she wore during her two days of extra work on Casablanca at Warner’s. It was printed in the Express, the Times, the Herald, the Daily News, the Examiner and the Long Beach Press-Telegraph.

  Sammy Barron was a midget. He lived in a trailer park in Glendale.

  “She nearly shit, Lois, when she saw I was a little person,” Sammy Barron said. “Matt was a tall, blond-headed kid. His prick was bigger than I am. The schlong on him. I mean, you could have put it in costume and given it a lead in The Wizard of Oz”

  Sammy Barron puffed on a cigar. He was losing his hair and his legs barely extended to the edge of his chair. Tom Spellacy wondered if it was better to stand or to sit. He slouched down in the chair in Sammy Barron’s trailer until he was practically sitting on his shoulder blades.

  “Nobody told her I was a little person,” Sammy Barron said. “Not that I don’t grant you it’s a tough subject to ease your way into.” He began to speak in a high-pitched falsetto voice. “ ‘He’s not exactly Matt’s big brother, Lois, he’s what you might call an older brother.’ “ Sammy Barron pulled on his cigar. The ash shivered. “My old man used to look at me funny and say, ‘Circus work is good, I hear. Steady. Outdoors. Like being a cowboy.’ Three foot two, eyes of blue, I was going to sit on the Lone Ranger’s lap. The tiny Tonto.” He dipped the butt end of his cigar into a beaker of brandy. “So I cut out of Wenatchee when I was twelve. With a circus.”

  “You kept in touch with Matt?” Tom Spellacy said.

  “He looked me up when he joined the Air Corps,” Sammy Barron said. “That was the golden age of little people in this business. The Wizard of Oz I did, then Lady in the Dark. Speaking parts. You know Ray Bolger? A good pal of mine. Jack Haley. Ginger Rogers.”

  “Judy Garland?”

  “A pain in the ass. And Georgie Jessel, too.” Sammy Barron sucked the brandy from the cigar end. “Anyway, Matt comes to see me on the set. I take him to lunch in the commissary and he’s looking at all the fluff and he says, ‘How long has this been going on?’ “

  “Did you introduce him to Lois?”

  “Quiff is one thing Matt never had any trouble finding. He latched onto her somewhere and then when he’s leaving town, he asks me to look out for her.”

  “They were en
gaged.”

  “Shit,” Sammy Barron said. “He was dipping it, is all. Knocked her up is what he did. I was doing Casablanca at Warner’s. No lines, but two close-ups. In that crowd scene outside of Rick’s Place where Peter Lorre gets it. I got run over, is how I got the close-ups. Anyway, I talk to this friend of mine and he talks to another guy and this guy talks to Curtiz and Curtiz thinks it’s cute, a little person with a girl friend. ‘Most guys go down on a girl,’ he says. ‘You go up.’ I give him a big wink and he gives her a job. She didn’t have any close-ups, though.”

  “I got a couple of suits off that picture,” Crotty said.

  Sammy Barron looked perplexed.

  “From Sidney Greenstreet,” Crotty said. “You remember the white double-breasted one?”

  “It had bone buttons,” Sammy Barron said.

  “That’s the one,” Crotty said.

  “I didn’t know you knew Sidney,” Sammy Barron said.

  “I know somebody who knows him, gets me his suits,” Crotty said.

  “You’re about the same size,” Sammy Barron said.

  “48 regular,” Crotty said.

  Tom Spellacy cleared his throat. “You arranged the abortion?”

  Sammy Barron looked from one officer to the other.

  “You won’t get busted,” Crotty said.

  “I lent her the two hundred,” Sammy Barron said. “And gave her the name of the guy does all the major studio scrapes.” He chewed on his cigar. “That’s the last I saw of her.” He grew pensive. “She was very interested in the problems of little people.”

  “There’s a little good in everybody,” Tom Spellacy said.

  Sammy Barron pulled himself from his chair. “Listen, I could use a little ink if you can see it that way, maybe mention me to the boys in the city room. ‘Her friend, Sammy Barron, the actor, wept when he heard the news,’ something along that line, and then a couple of credits. I cry on cue, the papers need a picture. It’s always been slim pickings in this business for a little person, is why. Stand-in work is all I get now. For screen tots.” A look of distaste crossed his features. “Cinemoppets. Roddy McDowall.”

  Howard Terkel was being a pest.

  Think of a nickname, Crotty said.

  The Virgin Tramp, Tom Spellacy said.

  Eleven

  Tom Spellacy stopped at a red light at the corner of Figueroa and Seventh. The motor coughed and died. He held his foot on the accelerator until the engine caught and turned over.

  “It idles funny,” Corinne Morris said.

  “It idles funny because someone pinched the radiator cap and I’ve got a piece of cloth stuck in there,” Tom Spellacy said. “Right in the department parking lot there, they pinched it. They got a regular black-market ring working the lot there, pinching radiator caps from 1937 Plymouths with 110,000 miles on them, they’re such a desired item.”

  “What’s it cost, a new one?”

  “Nothing, you want to know the truth. I go to an auto-supply store and say I’m a servant of the people, a man in blue, and I hear he’s got some swell radiator caps, and it’s a shame he could lose them all in a fire, him having those greasy rags in a pail out by the back door and all. And he says take two, they’re small, as a matter of fact, take a box, and speaking of caps, here’s some distributor caps, I had a cap pistol, you could take one of them, too.” The light changed and he made the left turn across Seventh into Figueroa. “It’s the principle is all, why I don’t get a new one.” He shook his head. “The department parking lot.”

  “Sometimes I think there’s more crooks in the department than on the street.”

  “There’s them thinks the same way,” Tom Spellacy said. She ought to meet Jack while she’s at it, he thought. Brenda, too. It might make it easier to take, Mary Margaret coming home. He shuddered. He was going to have to tell her.

  “Actually I meant a new car,” Corinne said.

  “That’s what I thought you meant.” The traffic was backing up. Horns hooted. He made only one block on Figueroa before the light changed again. “I got my eye on one, as a matter of fact. An Olds 98. Fully loaded. Hydra-matic.”

  Corinne smiled. “That’s terrific, Tom.”

  He realized he had made a mistake. Everything he talked to her about carried so much freight, could be interpreted as meaning something else. The Olds 98 had the weight of making plans, looking to the future. Bail out. “And I bought my ticket to the Irish Sweepstakes. My horse comes in, I can make the down. Otherwise I got to hope Santa’s going to be good to me this year.”

  Corinne stubbed her cigarette into the ashtray. “You’re always complaining about money.”

  “You don’t have any, you bitch about it, that’s the way it works, they tell me.” He did not like to talk to Corinne about money. Low down, monthly payments. They hinted at domestic arrangements he was not willing to make. Even if Mary Margaret weren’t getting out of Camarillo. Change the subject. A newsboy was working his way through the stalled traffic. Tom Spellacy gave him a nickel and handed the Express to Corinne. The headline read: THOUSANDS ATTEND VIRGIN TRAMP’S LAST RITES. He thought, Oh, shit, it never ends. The women in my life.

  Corinne read, “ Thousands of curious mourners backed up downtown traffic for nearly an hour today as funeral services were held for Lois Fazenda, playgirl victim of a werewolf slaying that has shocked the free world.’ “ Corinne dropped the newspaper on her lap. “That is such shit,” she said.

  “What else does it say?”

  Corinne picked up the paper. “ ‘As reported exclusively in the Herald-Express, Miss Fazenda, twenty-two, was known as The Virgin Tramp . . .’”

  “I still don’t believe that,” Corinne said. “They made it up.”

  “They’ll do anything to sell newspapers, those people,” Tom Spellacy said. No need to tell her how Lois Fazenda got the name. No need to complicate my life any further.

  Corinne continued reading, “ The last rites were conducted by Evangelist Jack Mayo, who under the name Cap’n Jack is pastor of the evangelical Good Ship Grace . . .’”

  Corinne crumbled the newspaper and threw it on the floor of the car. “Shit, that’s all it is,” she repeated. “Why not let the poor girl go quietly. Instead of making it a circus.”

  “Corinne, that dame is out of control,” he said quietly. “People are bored. The war’s over. They need something, sink their teeth into.”

  “Forget their own crappy lives,” Corinne said.

  He started to say, I was there, it was worse than you think, but he held up. He did not want to debate the morality of Lois Faz-enda’s funeral with Corinne. Especially since his dreaming up the name was one reason it was a circus. For an instant he wondered what they had to talk about outside of bed. It had been that way since Des told him about Mary Margaret. He erased the thought. The funeral. Fuqua’s brainstorm. Murderers show up at funerals sometimes. Me, I don’t think that’s such a hot idea, but Fuqua said it was a definite pattern. The Good Ship Grace was an experience. Des could pick up some pointers, next time he’s thinking of building a cathedral. Stained glass portholes instead of windows. The center aisle a fucking gangplank. No murderer showed up. Just a fairy who wanted to get into the casket with her.

  “I heard part of it on the radio,” Corinne said. “McDonough & McCarthy sponsored it. They had some fucking thing called the Layaway Layaway Plan they were pushing.” She mimicked the announcer. “‘Our layaway plan allows you to lay away a loved one.’”

  You have to hand it to Sonny, Tom Spellacy thought. “He planted her, Sonny. Free. Cap’n Jack was his idea. He’s got a big following on the radio is why he picked him. He’ll come out all right, Sonny, doing it for nothing, don’t you worry about that.”

  “I’m surprised he didn’t try for the Cardinal,” Corinne said.

  Tom Spellacy leaned on the horn. The traffic began to untangle. “He did. He was hoping she was a Catholic.”

  “She would’ve been better off, the Cardinal said a Solemn
High for her. ‘Ahoy, all sinners,’ Cap’n Jack says. ‘All fornicators to the poop deck.’ On the radio. Live. ‘Let’s pipe this virgin into heaven.’”

  Tom Spellacy eased by the car causing the tie-up. It was an old Studebaker with a flat tire. A family of frightened Mexican children stared out the windows at the drivers shouting curses at them. Their father was under the car with a jack that did not appear to work. A traffic patrolman was screaming at him to move.

  “Forget about it,” he said. “That’s why we’re going out tonight, forget about shit like that. See the fights, have a few drinks, relax. I got to worry about Lois Fazenda in the morning, is why I don’t want to think about her tonight. Okay? I’m home from the office, shaved, showered, clean socks, nice Jockey shorts, starched shirt, tie, I don’t want to think about her, let’s have a nice time, we haven’t had one lately. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  He turned into the lot at the Figueroa Auditorium and parked in a space marked Matchmaker. In the shadows of the parking lot, a raucous crap game was going on. He turned on his headlights to see the game better. A uniformed police officer was standing over the kneeling players with a handful of dollar bills. The policeman told him to turn off his fucking lights.

  “You can’t park there, buddy.” The voice belonged to a thickset Mexican with balloons of scar tissue over both eyes.

  “Fuck off,” Tom Spellacy said.

  The Mexican circled slowly, moving with difficulty, looking for an opening, his hands in the fighting position. Corinne clung to the automobile, afraid to speak. Tom Spellacy crouched, waiting. Suddenly the Mexican was inside his guard, pummeling him in the stomach. Tom Spellacy tied him up. The Mexican stepped back, a smile on his face.