Yates watched the woman awkwardly trot off toward her car before once again turning his attention to the scene before him. The squirrel that had seemingly been observing the meeting was sitting on its back haunches staring at the man. The studio head smiled and chortled, “You must think I’m nuts too.”
18
June 16, 1936
It was just past six, and Shelby Beckett was still working on altering a coat that was needed first thing in the morning. As she hand-stitched a sleeve, Betsy Minser walked in from the now quiet sewing factory.
“It has to look perfect,” the supervisor reminded her newest employee. “They are shooting retakes for a movie that wrapped last week. It seems the film from one scene was overexposed and thus it forced the reshoot. So this jacket will be seen in close-ups from a lot of angles and that tear has to be patched so no one will notice it. That’s why you are doing it too. You’re just that good. I got lucky when they brought you in here.”
“I had a great home economics teacher,” Shelby explained. “Mrs. Booth could teach anyone how to sew.”
“Well,” Minser noted, “you have some talent too. By the way, who is the man sitting in the corner and why is he in here?”
“My dad, he’s my ride home.”
“Hope he doesn’t mind waiting,” the supervisor whispered.
“I could give you a ride home,” a hopeful Willard Mace chimed in. “I’ve got a nice Buick sedan.”
“Where’d you come from?” Minser asked.
“I was behind the racks,” he explained. “And I could give you a ride, Shelby. I’m a safe driver, and I would love to do that for you.”
“You don’t have to,” Shelby replied between stitches. “Dad doesn’t mind waiting. Besides I spent most of my life waiting for him to finish his work at the farm so we could eat supper, so this seems fair.”
“Who’s waiting?” Dalton Andrews asked as he flew into the room through an open side door.
“My father. He works on the lot too. We share rides. Some of us folks only have one car for the whole family.”
“I see,” the actor replied. “Well, is the jacket ready to try on?”
“It will be in another twenty minutes,” came the reply.
“Then I’ll wait. And I don’t think we’ve met. My name’s Dalton Andrews. That’s my jacket you are working on.”
“I’m Shelby, and I know who you are.”
The handsome man grinned, “Now that is an unusual name. I’ve never met a Shelby before.”
“Most people haven’t,” she assured him. “And before you ask, I was named after my mother. Her maiden name was Shelby.”
“I like that,” he chimed in, “a family that embraces its roots. Do you have a last name? I mean, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
“Beckett.”
“Shelby Beckett,” he almost sang the name out, “that’s better than the ones the studio picks out for most of us. I used to be Jasper Rooks.” He paused and grinned, “I can’t believe I told you that.”
Shelby looked up, “Really, that was your name?”
“Sadly, yes! I was named for my father who was named for his father. We had a lot of Jaspers in our family. It’s a tradition that ended when Jacob Yates gave me a new name.”
She smiled, “We once had a mule named Jasper back in Oklahoma.”
“Shelby,” Minser broke in, as she stepped between her worker and Andrews, “I hate to interrupt this fascinating bit of family history, but I need to take a few dresses over to stage 6, are you clear on what you need to do?”
“No problem,” the young woman assured her boss.
Shelby looked up from her work to observe Minser’s exit. As she did Andrews walked across the room to where John Beckett was sitting. Shelby watched the two shake hands and exchange words before her father nodded, picked up his coat, and walked out a far door to the street that ran by the building. After the exit closed, the actor casually strolled back her way, dug his hands into his pockets and watched Shelby work.
“Where did Dad go?” she asked as she continued her tedious labor on the dark blue coat.
“He’s headed home,” Andrews explained. “I told him it was my fault you were working late and as my way of apologizing I’d take you out to eat and then drop you off at your house.”
Shelby looked up, raised her left eyebrow, and frowned. “You didn’t bother asking me about this.”
“Did you want your father to be stuck waiting here?”
“No.”
“Well,” Andrews smiled, “that’s taken care of then. So rather than be upset about it, you should be thanking me.”
Shelby completed the stitching on the tear in the right sleeve and then studied a rip in the left one. Folding the wool fabric to where she needed it to be, she went back to work. As she did, she explained, “I usually make up my own mind on accepting a date or not. I don’t remember you asking.”
“OK,” he laughed, “what if I had asked you if could I take you out to eat and then home? What would you have said?”
“No,” came the derisive reply. “I don’t go out with strange men.”
“Now you see how smart I am,” Andrews quipped. “I guessed how you’d respond and removed that option. So you have no choice.”
“It’s only a mile,” she explained as she continued her work, “I can walk.”
“It’s raining,” he announced. “So, I think you might want to reconsider.”
“I don’t even know you,” Shelby chimed in.
“Are you kidding,” he laughed, “you’re one of a handful of people in this whole town that knows my real name.”
“Not sure that counts much when it comes to judging your character.” She tied off the thread and turned the coat right side out. She examined it closely before handing it to the actor. “Try it on. See what you think.”
Andrews slipped into the jacket and walked over to the mirror. He turned and stretched, looking at it from several angles before nodding. After removing it, he walked back to her and gave it back. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” she replied as she placed the jacket on a wooden hanger and slipped it back on the rack. When she turned back the actor’s way, he grinned.
“Miss Beckett, here’s the deal. It was presumptuous on my part to just assume you’d let me take you out to eat and escort you home, but it really is raining. So, as a compromise, we can go over to the commissary, and then I can call you a cab.”
“My name is Shelby,” she grinned, “and no one has ever called me Cab before.”
Andrews looked momentarily confused before locking onto her play on his words. “I guess I need a script to say things clearly. I meant that I would pay for a taxi to take you home.”
She grinned, “Rather than the commissary, could you take me someplace that doesn’t cost much?”
“I’ve got lots of money,” he argued. “In case you hadn’t figured this out . . . I’m a movie star.”
“I know,” she assured him, “before we got too poor to go to the movies I saw you in East Of Tulsa, River’s End, and Tried and True. But I’m just off the truck from Oklahoma and I mean that literally. The dress I’m wearing is one I made from material that was left over at a secondhand store and that was two years and a hundred washings ago. The soles of my shoes have been lined with cardboard to cover the holes. So I’d be embarrassed to go anywhere really nice.”
“I don’t care,” he argued.
“Maybe you don’t,” she softly replied, “but I do. So, if you will take me someplace where a quarter can buy a meal, I’ll go with you.”
“Wait right here,” Andrews pleaded as he looked down at his wool slacks, shiny black leather shoes and silk shirt. “Give me five minutes.”
Racing through a side door the actor disappeared. Completely baffled, Shelby, now realizing how tired she was, sat back down in a chair, closed her eyes, and dozed off. When she heard the clicking of shoes on the wooden floor she lifted her
head and looked to the door. As it swung open, Dalton Andrews, now dressed in dungarees, a faded blue cotton shirt and scuffed brown shoes stepped into the room.
“Where’d you steal that getup?” she asked.
“My dressing room,” he explained. “These were the clothes I was wearing when I came into town six years ago from Kentucky. In fact, they were the only ones I owned then. I look at them each day to remind myself just how fortunate I am to be where I am now. And, if dressing like this gets you to join me for dinner, then I’d say they are worth a lot more than the dozen silk suits that hang in that same closet.”
“Jasper,” Shelby laughed as she stood and smoothed her faded, pink dress, “I’d be happy to accompany you to the nearest roadhouse and share a blue plate special.”
“I could take you,” Mace again offered as he looked on from where he was pressing suits. “It’s out of Mr. Andrews’s way. I saw your address on your job application, and I go by your house each morning and each night. So it’d be easy for me.”
“That’s OK,” Andrews said with a grin. “You go ahead and finish up. I don’t mind spending a bit of time with the woman who fixed my coat. After all, she’s the reason I will look good tomorrow.”
19
June 16, 1936
The City Diner was so off the beaten path it almost took a guide to find it. With a dozen tables, six well-worn booths and a twelve-stool counter all crowded into an adobe building a half-mile from the Pacific, it shouted, “Catering to those with almost empty pockets.” The food was cheap, the plates chipped, the glasses mismatched and most of the forks bent. It appeared those folks who made their way out of the rain and into the place were largely solitary men dressed in greasy clothes and had likely spent a long day doing manual labor. They looked tired, beaten, and worn.
“Is this cheap enough for you?” Andrews asked while pulling out a chair for Shelby. After she was seated, he grabbed a seat across from her. He’d just gotten comfortable when she rewarded him with a smile and an observation.
“We’ve got a lot of places like this back home. The Bakers have a café in downtown Cordell that reminds me of this one. Except none of their chairs actually match. Here a few of them do.”
“Has to be a mistake,” Andrews laughed. “It seems there are no menus, so I guess we just read the chalkboard behind the counter and make our choices. What looks good to you?”
She scanned the offerings before landing on one near the bottom, “The ham sandwich fits my bill.”
“I think I’ll get the same.” As a small, thin, middle-aged woman wearing a heavily stained, once-white apron strolled up, Andrews smiled and announced, “We’ll each have a ham sandwich and a Coke.”
The obviously tired waitress nodded, “You got it, Buster. And you only get one napkin each so don’t get too messy. I’m the only one working, so I’ll bring your drinks with your meal.”
“She’s a friendly sort,” the actor noted after she was out of earshot.
“Probably has had a tough life,” a suddenly saddened Shelby observed. “In truth, of those I saw on the road from Oklahoma, she would have been one of the happy ones. What I’ve discovered on our trip is there are a lot of people in this country who are more dead than alive. They’ve quit believing in things. When you quit believing, you might as well quit living.”
A sad look replaced the smile on the actor’s face as he noted, “When I convinced you to go out with me, that’s not the direction I wanted to take this conversation. I was hoping we’d discuss things that make us smile, not make us cry. Right now, I feel like I need to sing a chorus of ‘Nobody Knows The Trouble I’ve Seen’ and was hoping we’d close tonight with ‘Happy Days Are Here Again.’ ”
“Sorry,” she replied. “I guess it’s hard for you to identify with those of us who sometimes went to bed wondering if we’d eat the next day.” She studied the people who were sitting around her in the café. “I’m betting some of these people know what that’s like. For the past two years, money and even food has been harder to find than hen’s teeth. And even now with Dad and me having jobs, it’s still not easy. We live in a three-room flat, and I sleep on a couch. We have one tiny closest in the whole place and, sadly, we have plenty of room for everything we own. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not feeling sorry for myself, I just don’t guess you can imagine what life is like for the folks we are sharing this diner with tonight.”
Andrews’s eyes scanned the clientele before he turned back to his date, “Look at these clothes. I was raised poor. For most of my life, we couldn’t put two dimes together. So I take nothing I have now for granted. And because I know all about being poor and hungry, I know what being poor does to people. It either breaks their spirits or makes them so angry inside they boil up and explode.”
“Broke my people,” Shelby cut in. “My dad and mom never got mad, not even the day the bank foreclosed on our house. They just got sadder each day. It was like every new sunup brought a new funeral into our lives.”
“My mom was that way,” he chimed in, “but I was more the other way.”
Shelby nodded, “Want to tell me about what life was like before you became Dalton Andrews, or is that something you’d rather leave buried in the past . . . like your real name?”
With a faraway look accompanied by a sober expression, he shrugged. “My story is not very interesting and not much different than any other poor person’s. I grew up in a town in Kentucky that was so small it wasn’t on a map. We were about sixty miles from Louisville, but we might as well have been a million. My dad worked on the railroad. He was killed in an accident when I was eight. I don’t remember much about him. After that, my mother took in washing to make enough to keep food on the table for my sister and me. Still, even with her working from sunup until sundown we were forced to move a half dozen times until we finally found a shack we shared with a thriving family of mice. From there, it just got worse.”
“How could it get worse?” she asked.
He looked at the top of the wooden table and sighed, “My sister, Shirley, was four years older than me. She waited tables at a place not much different than this. One night she didn’t come home. At first, that wasn’t a big deal as there were a lot of nights she didn’t come home until about sunup. But this time she didn’t come home even then. We thought she might have run away until two days later, when they found her body down by the river. Someone strangled her. I was twelve, and I don’t ever remember my mother smiling again. Five years later I buried Mom, but she really died when she saw Shirley wearing a blue dress and lying in the mud . . . dead.”
Shelby nodded, now sad she’d asked Andrews to share his life. She fumbled for words before finally just admitting, “I have had it easy compared to you.”
“Lots of folks have had it tougher,” he quietly suggested. “Anyway, when Mom died I started west. A year and a hundred odd jobs later, Jacob Yates saw me unloading fruit at a grocery store and put me in the movies. I haven’t been hungry since.”
Shelby shook her head, “That’s terrible about your sister. Did they ever find who did it?”
“No,” the weight of his sadness carried in each word, “it could have been anyone. Shelby, Shirley wasn’t a good girl. From the time she was fifteen, there were men in her life . . . a long list of them. It’s not easy to have a sister who sells herself. I don’t know if Mom was aware of it, but I knew the men she was with. They were low and dirty. And I came to hate her for being with them. On the night she died, Shirley likely went home with someone who wanted more than even she would give.” He took a deep breath before mournfully adding, “In a sense she likely got what she deserved. What does the Bible say . . . sow the wind and reap the whirlwind?”
“No one deserves what happened to her,” Shelby argued. “Just like that actress at the studio didn’t deserve to be murdered.”
“What actress?”
“Didn’t you hear that Leslie Bryant was strangled?”
“No,” he assured her. �
��I spent the day in my dressing room answering fan mail. When did you hear about it?”
“It was on the radio a few minutes before you came into wardrobe. It made Betsy so sick she turned it off. She’d worked with Miss Bryant at a fitting last week.”
Andrews once more got a faraway look in his eyes before quietly noting, “I guess she should have gone out with me.”
“What?” Shelby asked. “I don’t understand.”
He forced a grim smile, “She picked the wrong man to go out with. She was a lamb and she opted to run with a wolf.”
“Dalton, what are you talking about?”
“It’s just this town, Shelby. You can’t let your guard down. This place uses people and then throws them away. You have to be suspicious of everyone and trust no one. Leslie was a sweet girl who is now going to be remembered not for what she was, but for how she died. And just watch, people will make up lies and report them as news, and the lies will be believed long after the truth is just a memory.”
“That’s pretty harsh,” Shelby noted.
“Shelby you’re the real deal,” he said with a smile, “while I’m a lie. My name is false, the bio they wrote up on me is fiction, and now, the parts I play on the screen become the parts I play in real life.”
“You’re real now,” she argued.
“Yes, and I’m thankful for that. But tomorrow Jasper will disappear, and I’ll once more be Dalton Andrews. Dalton has money and fame and his supposed best friend, at least according to studio publicity, is the biggest star in Tinseltown.”
“You mean Flynn Sparks?” she cut in.
“Yeah,” he shook his head, “and I don’t even like him. In fact at this moment, I hate him.”
“Why?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Andrews shrugged.
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