“You take them?”
“Played a couple.” He laughed. “Of yours, too, for that matter,” he said, pointing at the tape recorder. Another laugh. “So that’s who she is.”
“You ever see her?”
“I watched her take out the garbage. You know, she went through other people’s trash cans, looking for shit.”
There was no point in getting into that. “I mean when she was a movie star.”
“No. Heard the name. That’s it. She was like Shirley Temple, right?” A leer. “A Shirley Temple who gives head.”
I let it pass. “Anything else.”
He hesitated for a moment, then took several postcard-sized photographs from a jacket pocket and handed them to me. They were copies of a single exposure, a young girl scarcely into pubescence, certainly no older than sixteen or seventeen. She was naked, sitting on what appeared to be an ottoman that was almost lost in shadow, her arms clasped behind her, hair cut short, head in profile facing right, eyes looking down, her body still developing, her thighs held tight together, as if protecting her pubic triangle. She was shockingly, innocently beautiful, this naked child, in the manner of a Botticelli Venus or a Man Ray nude photograph, and I wondered who she was and who had taken the picture, and why Blue Tyler had kept so many copies of it.
“These were in the frig, too,” he said. “Stuffed in an empty box of rice.” He seemed quite proud of himself and his discovery. “Anyone you know?”
I shook my head.
“Kind of old-fashioned looking.”
He was right. There was something dated about the photograph, and the fin de siècle pose of its youthful subject. I took a copy and handed the rest back to him.
“Take another one,” Maury Ahearne said equably. “She had a lot of them. A whole boxful.” He handed me another picture, then a third. “I left her some. I guess she gets off looking at the chick’s pussy. Maybe when that guy with a hard-on calls Mona.”
He was trying to goad me, for no other reason than that he enjoyed confrontation, but I was not about to play his game. “Is that all you found?” I said.
“Sure,” he said. Even if he had found something else, I knew he would not tell me. Full disclosure was a concept foreign to Maury Ahearne. What he might know that I did not was always negotiable.
I showed the photograph of the naked young woman to Arthur French the first time I went to Nogales. He said he did not know who she was. The picture is the third of the three photographs I keep on the bulletin board in my office, but I did not pin it there until later.
Much later.
NOVEL & SCREENPLAY
I
Enter Rupert Hayes. His is a name you will read only three times in this narrative, and he is of no importance to it. He was an Australian reporter, one of those large beefy red-faced types from Sydney or Melbourne, who called everyone “mate” or “monsignor” and drank prodigiously and talked too loud, usually about the venality of Australian journalism, a venality of which he thoroughly and boisterously approved, often in song. On first or eighth or twelfth meeting he would repeat endlessly:
You cannot hope to bribe or twist
The Aussie journalist.
But given what the man will do,
There’s no occasion to.
He lived in a brothel in Hué, as he never tired of telling you, where the girls said he was a little quick on the trigger and usually couldn’t even pull it, as he never bothered to tell you. End of psychoanalysis. I avoided him like the plague, but in January 1968, we happened to fly into Khe Sanh together and that night we shared a bunker during an artillery barrage, a thousand rounds from dusk to dawn, between us and mortality only that hole in the ground and six thousand sandbags. The bunker belonged to Bravo Company, 3d Reconnaissance Battalion, 26th Marines, and the jarheads had told us it was the safest place on the hill, a trick to initiate newcomers, neglecting as they did to add that the Bravo bunker was bordered by an ammo dump, a flight line loading area, and the regimental CP, in other words the fucking bull’s-eye for incoming. (Don’t ask how I had washed up in Vietnam. A tricky divorce, war as material, trying to make a reputation, the usual bullshit.) In any event I was there, and that night, January 26, 1968, I thought I was going to die. As indeed did Rupert Hayes. So much so that in the morning when the noise died down and the night’s dead and wounded were being tallied, he said he was flying out on the first C-130 that touched down, and touch down is all they did, they didn’t even switch off their engines, they pushed out the cargo and the empty body bags, picked up the passengers and the loaded body bags and took off, total time on the ground maybe four minutes. Fuck this, monsignor, he said, this is your war, not mine, and I don’t intend to get dead in it. How are you going to file, I said, with that commitment to the facts (truth even then I knew to be something else altogether) that I still thought was important for a reporter (while wishing to Christ I had the nerve to get on the C-130 with him)—in other words name, rank, serial number, home town, casualties, different kinds of ordnance, how bright the light at the end of the tunnel, how much the doggie in the window. In the great tradition of Australian journalism, mate, he said. Make it live. Make it sing. Make it up.
Exit Rupert Hayes. Back to his whorehouse in Hué. Just in time for Tet. When he got dead.
I don’t think I’ve thought of him since.
Make it live. Make it sing. Make it up.
I never did forget that.
This is what I have.
Chuckie O’Hara and Arthur French. Two old men with convenient memories, one overestimating his impact on the story, the other pretending he had none at all, both eminently useful in dressing the set.
What else?
The tapes I made in Hamtramck. I suspected that Maury Ahearne had stolen Melba’s own tapes, the ones she kept in the freezer compartment of her refrigerator, maybe even had duped them, although he denied it, and was keeping them, as she had been, as bargaining chips, his grasp of the main chance as tentative as hers. It turned out I was right, not that it really mattered, because Melba Mae Toolate was scarcely the most credible analyst of the life and times of Blue Tyler.
What else?
As do most writers, I like to research more than I like to write. It is comforting to sit in cramped library microfilm rooms or in front of a computer scrolling through Nexis listings; it gives the illusion of accomplishment and nourishes the idea that you are not just busy but actually working. Finding Walter Sklar, the cameraman on Red River Rosie, long since thought dead, alive and well in Santa Fe Springs, with a senior handicap of fourteen at Torrey Pines, is useful, even if all he had to say was that he heard Blue Tyler died in Cleveland in 1966, and that not many people knew it but Chuckie O’Hara was a fairy. There is as well always the long shot of discovering a nugget streaked with gold; the inconsistencies in a police investigation are perhaps more apparent now than they were forty years ago, unless of course (and speculation is the aphrodisiac of compulsive research) the inconsistencies were part of a cover-up. A long-forgotten police casebook becomes available, and its forensic photographs suggest that someone might not be telling the truth.
So:
Make it live.
Make it sing.
Make it up.
II
It was Rita Lewis who, the same afternoon as her conversation with Morris Lefkowitz, rented Jacob King the gated house on St. Pierre Road in Bel Air, decorated by William Cameron Menzies, with six bedrooms, a projection room seating sixteen, eighteen rooms overall, a six-car garage with servants’ quarters above it, a swimming pool tiled in onyx, north-south tennis court, a championship croquet green with a gazebo for spectators, a three-month lease with an option for an additional three. The house was a permanent rental kept for New York and English actors and directors in town for a picture, or for upper-level Industry people in the midst of divorces or trial separations. It came with four cars, including a Cadillac convertible and a Lincoln Continental coupe, and was fully staffed with bu
tler, cook, chauffeur, three maids, full-time gardener, and twenty-four security. Coincidentally Chuckie O’Hara had once leased it while he was remodeling his house on Kings Road in the Hills, and it was he who described it for me, referring to the photographs Cecil Beaton had taken for Vogue when the Oliviers were living there one season in the sun, the house having long since been torn down and replaced by a faux Regency monstrosity that stretched from property line to property line.
Renting the house for Jacob King had in fact been Lilo Kusack’s idea, his supple mind beginning to operate even while Rita was fellating him by the pool after Morris Lefkowitz’s call. Morris will think it means we’ll do business, he said, and Jake will see all the cooz and forget about business, I don’t know what Jimmy Riordan was thinking, sending Jake out here, maybe Jimmy just wanted to get him out of New York, let him work on his tan while he eases Morris out of the picture, he can’t really think we’ll do business together, Jakey’s just a shooter with a big dick.
Morris, Lilo said when he called Morris Lefkowitz back, adjusting his genitals inside his swimming trunks, Rita said you called, I’m sorry I was out, it’s been too long, Morris, we’ll take care of Jake, get him set up out here, have him meet a few people. I know a nice house, just the place, we’ll make him comfortable, let him see southern California hospitality up close, don’t you worry about a thing, Morris.
It was precisely when Lilo Kusack said not to worry that Jimmy Riordan, listening on the extension in Morris Lefkowitz’s office, began to worry, but he kept his own counsel, wondering to himself what was potentially more dangerous, Lilo Kusack underestimating Jacob King, or Jacob King underestimating Lilo Kusack, either eventuality a volatile prospect. He was also sure that Morris Lefkowitz was thinking along the same lines, Morris in his eighth decade as always immune to smooth talkers, which is one reason he had reached his eighth decade with so few scars, but he too kept his own counsel. It was in these pregnant silences that Jimmy Riordan and Morris Lefkowitz communicated.
According to both Chuckie O’Hara and Arthur French, it was also Rita Lewis who met Jacob King on the platform when the Super Chief pulled into Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. He was all in shades of beige, with no tie and a beige shirt that buttoned to the neck, and a beige jacket with no lapel, and brown-and-beige shoes, and in his hand he had a roll of bills from which he was liberally distributing tips to the porters wrestling with his five suitcases and two wardrobe trunks.
“So, Rita,” Jacob King said when he spotted her leaning against a baggage truck the way minor contract actresses did when they were photographed at the beginning or end of a publicity junket.
“Lilo called that one right,” Rita Lewis said. “He said you’d get off the Chief flashing bills like a two-bit hood.”
“You got a funny way of saying hello, Rita,” Jacob King said. “How long’s it been?”
“Seven years,” Rita Lewis said. “Lillian got pissed off, remember? She didn’t think we should be fucking when she was pregnant. I can only say if she thought that, she didn’t know you very well.” She ran her fingers down the inside of his jacket. “Is this your idea of resort wear?”
“What’s the matter with it?”
“You don’t know, Jacob, then I can’t tell you. Another thing. Stars get off the Chief in Pasadena.”
“Why?”
“They do, that’s why. That’s why they’re stars, they know things like that. But if you’re going to get off the train looking like a Good Humor man, maybe it’s better you stayed on.” She looked at the pile of suitcases. “Planning on staying awhile?”
“Awhile,” Jacob King said pleasantly, staring past Rita at a large man in a dirty white linen suit across the platform who seemed to be watching him.
“Let me guess,” he said to the man in the white suit. “You’re a cop.”
“Frank Crotty, Mr. King,” he said, moving toward them. “Lieutenant Frank Crotty. Vice.”
It occurred to Rita that in all the years she had consorted with men of crime she had never really seen a policeman up close, except when one was giving her a traffic ticket. She liked to be out of town when bad things she thought might happen did happen. In another city. Or another state. Or another country. Switzerland was the country she liked best. Switzerland in the winter when the mountains were covered with snow. In Switzerland she would hear about the blood she was escaping and imagine it making a scarlet pattern on the virgin ski trails. There were no Lieutenant Crottys in Davos or Klosters or Gstaad. Lieutenant Crotty looked like an overweight avuncular rattlesnake, his large belly stretching the buttons of his soiled double-breasted suit. She wondered who had tipped him off that Jacob would be arriving on the Chief, and that Jacob would not know enough to get off at Pasadena. She knew it was not Lilo. Lilo would never tip his hand, and he did not believe in vulgar intimidation. She wondered if she would tell Lilo that the policeman had met Jacob at Union Station, and decided he would already know, because it was the sort of thing he made it his business to know. Not to tell him would introduce another element of distrust in a relationship already complicated by the fact that Lilo was only a middleman who defined for his clients the frontiers between the legal and the illegal, and it had been Rita’s history since puberty that she was always attracted to those who had crossed the boundaries into the criminal without a passing thought, her current alliance with a coordinator like Lilo, a facilitator, a factor more of age and a concomitant instinct for survival than of the recklessness to which she had so often been prone.
“Is this an official welcome, Lieutenant Crotty?” Jacob King said.
“Unofficial,” Crotty said. “You’re planning to stay awhile, are you, Jake?”
“That’s funny, that’s exactly the question my friend here just asked.
“Lillian Aronow,” Jacob King said after a moment spent counting his bags, then nodding toward Rita, “this is Lieutenant Crotty from Vice, who starts off calling me Mr. King and now we’re such pals he calls me Jake.”
Crotty turned his rattlesnake eyes on Rita. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Lewis.”
Now she knew she would tell Lilo. It was dumb of the detective to show he knew her name, there was no advantage in it.
“The vice officers are very quick in Los Angeles, Rita,” Jacob said. “You forgot to tell me that.” He smiled at Crotty. “So, Lieutenant, what can I tell you you don’t already know, you’re so smart?”
“Maybe what’re you going to be doing here, with all these grips?”
“I don’t think that’s any of your business, but I want to be a good citizen my first day in Los Angeles. I used to say Los Angle-us, but then a lady I met said it’s An-juh-lus, so that’s how I say it now. Los An-juh-lus. So how about this? I’m an investor. I believe in the accumulation and utilization of capital. I’m looking for investment possibilities.” He leaned close to Crotty. “I’m an easy guy to make friends with. I’m interested in everybody I meet. I notice little things about them.” He picked at the buttonholes in the sleeve of Crotty’s linen jacket. “For example, your suit. It needs dry cleaning, it looks like soy sauce here, maybe moo shu pork, anyway you should use a napkin when you eat. But I also notice it’s custom-tailored. That interests me. Most police officers get their suits off the pipe, two pairs of pants and free alterations.
“This is quality goods,” he said as Crotty brushed at a spot on his sleeve.
“Sydney Greenstreet wore it in Across the Pacific,” Crotty said, explaining when he did not have to, as Jacob knew he would. “I know a guy at Warner’s, he gets me all Sydney’s suits.”
“I had a custom-made vicuña coat, I gave it to the Pullman porter on the train. George his name was. A colored.” Jacob smiled. His tabloid smile. The smile Rita Lewis had so often seen when he was setting someone up. “I knew you were in the market for secondhand clothes, Lieutenant, I would’ve saved it for you. I think it’s probably wasted on a schwartze.”
I wonder if he smiles when he does a
hit, Rita Lewis thought.
“But then I didn’t know I was going to be met by a welcoming committee, my mistake, I’m sorry, what’re you going to do? Your bad luck.”
Over the public-address system, there was a trumpet fanfare, and then the station announcer called all aboard for the Del Mar Special, departing at eleven-fifteen, track fourteen, post time for the first race at one-thirty, all aboard, please.
Crotty waited until the announcement was finished. “If you want to make friends here, Jake,” he said carefully as the porters wrestled the suitcases and the two trunks onto the baggage truck, “you got to remember to show respect for other people’s interests. People here, they’ve got various interests. Of a business nature. They don’t like other people butting in. You should remember that.”
Jacob nodded, as if taking the words to heart. “Frank … It is Frank, isn’t it?”
Crotty nodded.
“That’s good advice, Frank. I’ll try to remember that.” He peeled a hundred-dollar bill from his roll. “You want to help the red cap with the bags?”
Crotty shrugged, then turned and walked up the platform toward the waiting room.
Jacob King watched him for a moment. “Who sent the flat-foot, Rita?”
It was the kind of question that for most of her life she had conditioned herself never to answer, nor even to surmise a possible answer. It was an article of faith with her that what she did not know, or claimed not to know, would not hurt her, while at the same time in the more realistic lobe of her brain she understood this to be a comforting fantasy rather than an empirical fact. “Who do think I am, the Answer Man?”
“For old times’ sake,” Jacob King said.
She felt herself weakening. “I had to make a guess, I’d say it was Benny Draper, it’s his kind of dumb play.”
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