True Confessions

by John Gregory Dunne

  Crotty put the handwriting analysis back into his pocket. “Not just a fairy,” he said. “A fairy who plays the clarinet and dances a nice waltz.”

  “You should let them analyze your handwriting, Frank.”

  “Not a chance,” Crotty said. “They got it down to such a science, they’ll look at the shape of my Os and tell me I’m building a motel with a bunch of Chinamen who got me paying off Cosmo Gentile.”

  Tom Spellacy thought, She’s a gold mine, this Lois Fazenda. A magnet for every two-bit swami and shrink and expert, handwriting and otherwise. Not to mention the newspapers. The life story of Lois Fazenda with photographs of Lois Fazenda in a bathing suit. Somebody was turning a nice piece of change on Lois Fazenda in a bathing suit, he was sure of that. It was hard to pick up a newspaper without finding resurrected an old unsolved murder of some girl, along with a picture of Lois Fazenda in a bathing suit and the headline: WHERE IS THE MISSING LINK? Tits and ass were the missing link, that was simple. He wondered how many little boys were beating their meat into the Express. At least they were getting something out of it. There didn’t seem to be anything but dead ends. He supposed that was a good thing. Dead ends meant more work, and the more work there was, the less time to worry about Corinne. And Mary Margaret. Mustn’t forget Mary Margaret. There was no point in rousting Jack Amsterdam. He could account for every minute the day of the murder. Save that one for a rainy day. When I don’t give a shit and it might be nice watching Jack sweat. He had checked the M. O. file after seeing Brenda. For a barber who liked to shave pussy hair. One name. Harold Pugh. Questioned 1944, not charged. Harold Pugh was listed in the northwestern directory. Harold Pugh was also dead. Automobile accident. He had spent the better part of a morning listening to Harold Pugh’s widow keening on the telephone. On Harold, the father. And Harold, the husband. And Harold, the provider. There were no complaints about Harold. Good Harold.

  The morning hadn’t been wasted. He did not think about Corinne once.

  The roller coaster pulled to a stop. The nuns got out and surrounded an elderly priest in a black homburg.

  “It’s His Eminence,” Crotty said. He was so surprised that he did not notice the ice cream dripping from his cone onto his suit. “What’s an old number like that doing on a roller coaster?”

  “Not paying for it, I bet,” Tom Spellacy said. He had never seen the Cardinal in person before, and he was surprised at how old he looked. There must be nothing like a roller coaster full of nuns to make him doubt his vocation, he thought. What was he now? Eighty? He looked every minute of it. He’s going to conk out soon. Des better get bishop nailed down quick.

  “I bet he stiffs that guy for all the nuns, too,” Crotty said. He began trailing after the Cardinal’s caravan. “I’ll go look for the puppet guy.”

  “His Eminence isn’t investing in motels this year, Frank.”

  “The credit rating he’s got, maybe he can pass me a couple of secrets,” Crotty said.

  Tom Spellacy took off his hat and sat in the sun. I notice Des isn’t here, he thought. Him and Dan T. Campion are probably trying to make Cosmo Gentile the next Pope. He watched the nuns lead the Cardinal down the boardwalk, buying sandwiches and soft drinks at the vending stands. No money ever seemed to change hands. He wondered who was going to get stuck with the tab. Probably somebody wants to become a papal knight. The soda pop was just the down payment. There’d be a new kitchen range for the convent and a furnace and insulation for the attic and probably a paint job, too. All in all an expensive afternoon, but then getting to be a papal knight was an expensive proposition. He thought of Moira. He could never think of her as Sister Angelina. He wondered if Des had sprung her for Mary Margaret’s homecoming. Moira ought to be here. All that ice cream and cake was like sanctifying grace to Moira. If you got a plenary indulgence for food, Moira would be Mother Cabrini by now.

  One of the sisters scooped up a small dog and handed it to the Cardinal. Tom Spellacy saw a look of displeasure flash over his face. Then the Cardinal smiled. Sourly. A nun fastened a leash to the dog’s collar and gave it to the Cardinal. He held the leash as if it were a stick with something bad on the end of it.

  Tom Spellacy turned away. He was irritated at himself for paying so much attention to the Cardinal. I’ve got problems enough of my own without worrying if a dog’s going to piss on his shoe. He watched the ocean wash against the beach. Six years in the navy and a lifetime in the city and he bet he could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he had been swimming. It was just a waste of time sitting on the sand. A place to get sunburned. His shoulders always blistered. And then the skin peeled off in sheets and the freckles plastered his back. He had tried to fuck Mary Margaret one night on the beach. Early in their marriage. It was the last time she ever asked about romance. The moon. The stars. And the sand that got in everyplace. Everyplace. It was like doing it with sandpaper. She had cried. But then Mary Margaret cried in the bedroom. Not so Corinne. Corinne got tan. Corinne said she liked to fuck at the beach. There were a lot of things that Corinne liked to do that he guessed he would never get to try.

  Not after last night.

  It was his idea to have dinner. “The Windsor,” he had said over the telephone.

  “For old times’ sake,” Corinne said.

  He did not like the sound of that, but he let it pass. “A lot of things have happened.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like Chuckie Quinn’s name turned up as a suspect.”

  “Who’s Chuckie Quinn?”

  “Isn’t that your first husband’s name?”

  “Charlie Quinlan.”

  “Oh.”

  “Close, though.” She added, not unkindly, “I can see someone making that mistake.”

  “He was clean anyway, Chuckie.” A stupid mistake. And unnecessary. There was no Chuckie Quinn picked up. It was just that he always needed an opening to talk to her. And so he grabbed a name. The wrong name. Stupid. Her second husband, the one who was killed, what was his name? “At least I didn’t say we picked up Homer Morris.”

  “No.”

  “You were married to him, too, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “The one who was killed.”

  “Yes.”

  “At Pearl.”

  “Tom, you don’t get any points for remembering the names of my ex-husbands.”

  She was like Des that way. Very free with the lessons. “I’ll pick you up.”

  “I’ll meet you. In my own car.”

  And that was that. She showed up at the Windsor five minutes late. In her own car. He was already working on his second drink.

  “I know you got a car,” Tom Spellacy had said. “As a matter of fact, I like your car better than I like my car. If the fanbelt works, I got to like any car better than I like my car, you want to know the honest truth. But the way it works, they tell me, if you go out with me, I pick you up in my car. I park the car in front of your house, and if there’s a lot of niggers in the neighborhood, I lock it, because cars have a way of disappearing in that kind of neighborhood, is what they tell me. And I ring the doorbell and you say, ‘In a minute,’ and then you open the door and say, ‘Hi, my name is Corinne, would you like a drink,’ and I say, ‘Thanks, no, I’ve got a table at the Windsor at eight, we’re running a little late,’ and you say, ‘Swell, I’ll get my coat,’ and we go downstairs to my car. If I’m lucky, I still got all my hubcaps, and if I catch any little bastard stealing them, I’ll break his toe. That’s how it works. Til meet you there,’ that’s a new one on me. ‘I’ll take my own car,’ that’s another one I never hear. I figure dinner’s thirty bucks and before I even get here, I’m hit with a couple of surprises, and that doesn’t include the check.”

  Corinne put her purse on the table and kept the scarf around her shoulders. She looked as if she were ready to run. “There’s a reason I brought my own car.”

  “I’d like to hear that, I really would.”

  “I don�
��t want to fuck you.”

  “That’s nice talk. I was in Wilshire Vice there, I didn’t have to pay a cover charge to hear talk like that. They talked about that a lot, the people you met in Vice. Sucking, too, you get right down to it. Eating out is what they call it in Vice.”

  Corinne put her hands on her pocketbook. “You’re drinking that stuff like it’s water.”

  “Well, I been drinking it since four o’clock this afternoon, which is four hours and ten minutes ago, the way I figure. You know something? You’re not very funny. On my own personal laugh meter, I figure you about a two-and-a-half. You don’t even get a box of Mars Bars.”

  “That’s ‘Dr. I.Q.,’ Mars Bars. The laugh meter’s ‘Can You Top This.’ “

  “You know something, you’re a pain in the ass.”

  “I’m leaving,” Corinne said.

  “And I’ll break your arm, you do,” Tom Spellacy said. They stared at each other across the table. The waiter came and he ordered another rye and water. Corinne asked for a daiquiri and a menu. She buried her head in the menu until the waiter returned with the drinks.

  “I’ll have the Salisbury steak.”

  “That’s a four-dollar-and-fifty-cent name for hamburger,” Tom Spellacy said. He asked the waiter how the trout amandine was cooked and the beef Wellington and the breast of capon in white wine sauce and the rognons de veau and the salmon mousse and the chicken tetrazzini and he finally ordered Salisbury steak and another rye and water for himself and another daiquiri for Corinne.

  Corinne had not touched her first drink.

  “You want to start over again?” she said when the waiter left.

  “Sure.”

  She took off her scarf and placed her pocketbook by the leg of her chair. “When you were pulling that act with the waiter . . .” He started to protest but she kept on talking, “... I kept thinking about Charlie Quinlan. About after I was married to him, I mean. I don’t think I thought of him in years until you mentioned him yesterday.”

  “I’m sorry I thought his name was Chuckie Quinn, if that’s what’s giving you the hard-on.”

  “It doesn’t make any difference. I wouldn’t recognize him if he was the waiter.”

  “You were married to him, for Christ’s sake.”

  “For three years. I probably fucked him seven hundred times. I still wouldn’t recognize him.” She lifted the daiquiri and over the raised glass, she said, “I cut my losses, Tom.”

  “Always?”

  “Always.”

  “And that’s what you were thinking.”

  “No,” she said. “I was thinking that after the divorce, I wore dirty underwear the first couple of years, I guess on the grounds that anything that made me keep my clothes on was all to the good.”

  “That’s swell,” Tom Spellacy said. “Really swell. It makes a lot of sense, that does.”

  She watched a waiter wheel a meat trolley through the room and then looked him in the eye. “It means,” she said finally, “I wasn’t listening to you. All that time you were doing that number with the waiter about the menu, I wasn’t listening to you. I wasn’t embarrassed you were trying to cause a scene, I was somewhere else.”

  “Thinking about your fucking underwear.”

  “Dirty underwear,” she said quietly.

  “It’s so important, your dirty drawers.”

  “No,” she said, “it was not listening to you that was so important.”

  The wine steward asked if they wished some wine. Corinne shook her head and Tom Spellacy ordered another drink. The waiter took away the service plates, gave them each a new napkin, switched knives and served the meal. They did not speak until the waiter had departed.

  “It’s very good,” Corinne said after taking a bite.

  “Tasty,” Tom Spellacy said. His meal was still untouched.

  “I have only one rule about restaurants.”

  ’Td like to hear that.”

  “You never eat fish in a restaurant where the menu says, Trom Neptune’s Locker.’ You know, with drawings of mermaids.”

  “Why’s that?”

  She looked surprised. “That’s what somebody told me once.”

  “You don’t have much gift for small talk, you’re not talking about fucking.”

  Corinne smiled brightly, as if he had just told a joke. She took a drink of water and then leaned across the table, still smiling. “I’ve moved out of the apartment. That’s another reason I brought my car.”

  “You’ll be easy to find.”

  “I left your things in a box inside the door. You can pick them up and leave the key with the super.”

  “Fuck the Jockey shorts.”

  The smile on her face did not waver. She propped her chin on her finger and she was utterly calm and he realized suddenly that she was serious and that he could not make her back down. I always cut my losses. It didn’t do much for the pride, but in ways he would not wish to admit, it was a relief. He picked up his knife and fork and began to eat.

  “You’re going to get the scrape.” It was a statement, not a question.

  She nodded.

  He thought of Brenda nicking Lucille Cotter and he wondered if he should give her the name of a good man. A safe man. When he was in Wilshire Vice, he knew the names of all the safe men, the gynecologists who had lost their licenses for selling morphine or over a woman and who weren’t on the bottle. The good men used by city hall and the department and the DA’s office. A little scrape to help you out of a scrape . . .

  “Tom,” Corinne said.

  His smile felt foolish and he wondered if the liquor was beginning to hit him.

  “Nothing’s changed except it’s finished, and you’re relieved.”

  “We could always . . .” He could not continue. Could always what? He did not know what to say.

  They ate in silence.

  “Don’t worry,” she said after a while. It had not occurred to him to worry. She caught the surprised look on his face and said, “Not that I think you were consumed by it.”

  “You know all the answers,” he said.

  “That’s always been my problem. By the time I know all the answers, it’s all over.” She folded her napkin into a neat triangle. “Right now, for example, you’re embarrassed. You think your relief is showing.”

  He did not answer.

  “Have a chocolate eclair,” she said. “A second cup of coffee. Change the subject. What shall we talk about?”

  He carefully removed the paper from a cube of sugar, avoiding her eyes.

  “Your brother,” she suggested.

  “My brother hasn’t got anything to do with this.”

  “Oh, yes, he does. You don’t know why, but you always blame your brother.”

  “Give it a rest, Corinne.” Finish the coffee, pay the check, tip the parking boy. He wondered if he had enough change for both cars. He wondered if they would shake hands or if he should kiss her on the cheek. He felt in his pocket. He had two quarters.

  “You give him a rest. You want to make him just like you. You want to prove he’s just like you. That’s what you don’t understand. He is. Just like you. He’s your brother.”

  It always came down to Des.

  She shook out her napkin and dropped it on the table.

  “Be like me,” she said, and then she smiled. “Always hopeful. I’ve cut my losses so often, I’d better be.”

  The nuns were herding onto the merry-go-round. Tom Spel-lacy could see some of them trying to induce the Cardinal to go on the ride. The Cardinal raised his hands and kept shaking his head no. He was holding a bag of peanuts in one hand and there were fragments of peanut shells clinging to his black suit. The merry-go-round started, and as it picked up speed, the Cardinal waved wearily at the nuns. Then he turned and walked slowly to a bench. He seemed to sit down in sections. He dismissed his attendants and took off his homburg. His skin was white and already turning pink in the sun. From the shadow of a hot-dog stand the Mother Superior and a
young priest and two middle-aged laymen watched him with the same intensity as nurses watching a patient in an oxygen tent. One of the laymen tried to approach and the Cardinal irritably brushed him away. The tiny terrier arranged itself at the Cardinal’s feet. For a moment Tom Spellacy thought he was going to kick it.

  The old bastard likes to be alone, he thought. It was an appealing notion. He tried to imagine the Cardinal giving Des the brush. No. It would never happen. Des would anticipate.

  I don’t anticipate, that’s my problem. With me, people cut their losses. Corinne. Brenda. Even Mary Margaret. In and out of Camarillo without so much as a by-your-leave. In the parking lot at the Windsor, Corinne had put her arms around him and held him for a moment. Then she had tipped the parking boy herself.

  A half-dollar.

  He watched Crotty approach down the boardwalk, leading an old man who looked as if he had not taken a bath in a month. The old man was pushing a grocery shopping cart filled with carved shooting-gallery targets. The Cardinal stared at the spectacle of the old man and for a moment Tom Spellacy thought that Crotty was going to stop and introduce them. A little different from Dan T. Campion and Cosmo Gentile and the other leading Catholic laymen he gets to see, that’s for sure. All he knew about the old man was that he carved puppets and pushed his shopping cart around the state, one end to the other, and that his name was Shopping Cart Johnson and that he had left a message for Crotty that he knew the murderer of Lois Fazenda and that he would be at Ocean Park today selling puppets to the target galleries. Crotty had run into him before. He must be a hundred years old, Crotty had said, and he smells like he uses dog shit for shaving lotion. A junk man, we used to call a guy like that, or a bum, maybe, we weren’t feeling too good that day, but he picks up things, being on the go all the time, and sometimes he’s useful.

  Shopping Cart Johnson took a Camel from the package Tom Spellacy offered. He lit the cigarette, inhaled deeply, blew out the match and then put the package into his shirt pocket.