Playland

by John Gregory Dunne

  The last official entry in the case file was the reply to a letter Lieutenant Spellacy had sent, in 1952, seven years after the murder of Meta Dierdorf, to the police chief in Fort Smith, Arkansas, about a murder suspect, Emory Lyon, who had come to Lieutenant Spellacy’s attention via a report distributed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Emory Lyon had crammed a towel down the throat of his latest victim before he had raped and killed her. There was no reason to believe that Emory Lyon had strangled Meta Dierdorf, as his area of criminal activity centered on the Southwest, but in the absence of any other evidence, the M.O. of the crime seemed at least to warrant an inquiry. The reply from the chief of police in Fort Smith, Arkansas, to Lieutenant Spellacy read:

  This man is a professional hitchhiker and murderer. He claims he has been hitchhiking since he was 14 years of age. The states he has been hitchhiking mostly in are Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah.

  We have him definitely connected with five murders in Arkansas and one in Kansas. When we start questioning him about murders outside the state of Arkansas, we will definitely question him about your murder in Los Angeles.

  There was no further communication in the Dierdorf murder book from the Fort Smith, Arkansas, police department. Yet in this single cryptic communiqué (available, I suppose, only to me, and perhaps to Lieutenant Spellacy during the lonely hours during which he was trying to tie any threads together), there was the clearest possible sense of life’s improbabilities, of the way the path of Emory Lyon, a professional hitchhiker and murderer from Arkansas, the Land of Opportunity, could happen to cross, however indirectly, the equally haphazard path of Blue Tyler, child star and box office champion. As had the paths of Harold Eustis, Evangeline McGuinn, Lieutenant Commander Alastair Drummond, RN, and the red gelding named Oscar. I would argue that consideration of these improbabilities is a recipe for madness.

  After thirty years in the LAPD, Lieutenant T. J. Spellacy finally retired in October 1963. Clipped to the last page of the Dierdorf murder book was a handwritten note, dated the day of his retirement:

  “V, Vida—who?”

  It is compelling to read the minutiae of a homicide investigation, and to see the number of lives touched by that investigation, and how often, in the course of the digging and detecting, a mosaic of petty treasons, moral misdemeanors, quiet desperation, and even evil as an abstraction is uncovered having nothing to do with the crime in question, only with the permutations of life itself. I wish I could tell you that my own examination of the evidence, when I was armed with information unavailable to Lieutenant Spellacy, helped solve the murder of Meta Dierdorf, as it would in a tidier narrative, and that her killer was one of my principals, or in some way connected to them, but in fact she will probably rest in eternity with her murderer undiscovered. In one of his private notes, remember, Lieutenant Spellacy had wondered if she was “just unlucky,” and just unlucky seems a perfect description of this beautiful, spoiled, unloved, wanton, larcenous, and not-overly-bright child. Meta Dierdorf is, however, not simply a digression, the kind English departments tell you occur so often in what they call the “baggy monster” novels of the great Victorians—Vanity Fair, say, or Bleak House, or Middlemarch. As you may have intuited, I did ultimately learn the identity of “V,” “Vida,” or “Vide,” and while the knowledge was eminently helpful in driving my narrative toward its conclusion, it was just another salacious sidebar to the unseemly and unlucky life of Meta Dierdorf.

  Beautiful, spoiled, unloved, wanton, larcenous, and not overly bright—words that might also have described Blue Tyler.

  Who was lucky.

  Or perhaps just unlucky in other ways.

  III

  It was Chuckie who cleared up the identity of “V.” I had let him see the forensic photographs and some of the more lewd and lubricious passages of the crime book—the confession of Captain Benedict that he was responsible for two but not three of the used rubbers in Meta Dierdorf’s bedroom, and that the semen in her mouth was not his, particularly titillated him, as did Dorothy Estrella’s comment on the size of Harold Eustis’s organ—and it was after he had read it that I happened to mention to him the mysterious Vida.

  He shook his head.

  Sometimes referred to as “V,” other times as “Vida,” and still other times as “Vide.”

  Vide? he said suddenly.

  You know?

  It was Blue. That was her nickname at that stupid studio school. I haven’t heard it in fifty years.

  Why Vide?

  French. For her initials.

  B.T., I said incredulously.

  No, Jack. M.T. For Melba Toolate.

  I don’t get it, Chuckie, I said with some irritation.

  Just listen. She hated being called Melba. But for some bureaucratic reason, her name was never legally changed until she was in her teens. So she was registered as Melba Toolate with the Los Angeles County department of whatever it was that had oversight at the school. Anyway, all the students took a beginners’ French course. Her initials were M.T. M.T. as in “empty glass.” Empty in French is—

  Vide, I said.

  And that’s what they called her at the school. Vide. She didn’t mind that. As long as no one called her Melba. She was always spouting her ludicrous French on the set.

  It has a certain je ne sais quoi, she had said that first day at the Autumn Breeze trailer park, and I bet you never thought you’d hear any of that French shit in some RV camp in Hamtramck, Michigan, the reason is I took French at the studio school and I always had a French governess all those years I was at Cosmo, the number-one box office star in the country, that was Mr. French’s idea, Mr. French’s French idea, that’s cute.

  And her schoolmate Meta:

  V demain—$$$$$ … Vide—ici avec Monsieur Pepe La Moko, ooo la la, peut-être cinquante dollars … beaucoup l’argent pour ma silence …

  If I had to make an educated guess, Chuckie O’Hara said, I would bet that apartment was where Walker Franklin was boning her. I mean, he couldn’t just check into a hotel with her, it was simply not done, even if she was of age, and she couldn’t do it at home, because the staff was all on Moe’s payroll, and she certainly wasn’t going to go down to Central Avenue, that was for a cruiser with a taste for danger.

  Like you, I said.

  Like me, Chuckie said, smiling as if remembering days of youth and thunder and a perpetual bone. They had to have a place to meet, a place they could get in and out of without anyone seeing them, and I think Miss Dierdorf might have provided it, and if anyone asked questions, they were just two little girls doing their homework together. The father was never around much, he was always one step ahead of the law, from what you tell me, and this kid was essentially on her own. For Blue, a dream setup.

  When did she begin sleeping with Walker Franklin?

  Right after Carole Lombard died. I was supposed to direct her in Cotton Candy, but the Marines called me up, and Alan Shay was assigned to the picture. The night before I reported to Camp Pendleton, this was in February 1942, maybe March, there was a party for me. That’s when she hinted about it. A few years before, it was at the wrap party for Lily of the Valley, I think, she’d caught me in the kitchen doing something naughty with the butler, and after that she told Aunty Charlton everything.

  Her way of paying back Moe, I said.

  Can you blame her?

  Then she gets knocked up and goes to Lou Lerner, the studio doctor, and he takes care of it.

  He was a sleaze, Lou, Chuckie said. He was going to get arrested for selling morphine one time, then Lilo made some calls, and after that he was in Lilo’s pocket. You went to get a blood test, and Lilo knew the results before you did.

  What about Blue and the girl then?

  A little teenage muff-diving, I’d assume, Jack. Nothing serious.

  Chuckie, she’s kept her photograph ever since. Had dozens of postcards made. She still carries them around with her.

 
; First love and other sorrows, Chuckie said.

  But she was blackmailing her.

  No, not really. It gave Blue a place she could go fuck without anyone really knowing about it. She had the money, and the other girl was broke. Teenagers don’t think in terms of blackmail. She was helping her friend out.

  You think Lilo knew?

  Lilo knew everything, Chuckie said. I used to think it was Lilo who counted out the thirty pieces of silver for Judas Iscariot. Or at least negotiated the price.

  And then Moe picked up on the girl, I said.

  Kismet, Chuckie said.

  Did Lilo fill Moe in?

  I wouldn’t think so. It was Lilo’s card to play. Why fill in Moe until he had to?

  The way he kept what he knew about Blue and Walker Franklin for a rainy day, I said.

  Exactly.

  One thing bothers me, Chuckie.

  You want to know why Arthur just volunteered it to you about Meta and his father?

  Right.

  Because Arthur didn’t know what and how much you knew, Chuckie O’Hara said. You were being just as cagey as he was, Jack, Arthur knew that, and he was just trying to buy time.

  Bad dreams.

  Too many questions. Where had Arthur been the night Meta Dierdorf was killed?

  In San Francisco, it turned out, with Blue and Lilo Kusack, showing a propaganda film he had made about women war workers to President Truman, there with Mrs. Truman, who was christening the aircraft carrier Manila Bay at the Mare Island shipyard.

  As alibis go, not bad.

  And where was Melba Mae Toolate?

  No sightings, Maury Ahearne reported in his nocturnal check-ins. But the word was out. He had friends. The friends owed him.

  Maury was suffused with a sense of self-importance.

  And Meta Dierdorf had just been unlucky.

  IV

  You got a fax machine?” It was nearly four in the morning, and it took a moment to shake myself awake and recognize Maury Ahearne’s voice. I muttered yes, and gave him the number. I knew enough not to ask him what it was. It would be on the fax, which began coming through almost immediately. It appeared to be a letter. The childish script was unmistakably that of Melba Mae Toolate. “Happy birthday, baby, wherever you are now,” the letter began. “You’d be 42 this year, twice as old as I was when I had you, and if you’ve learned one thing by now you’ve learned that all men are snakes …”

  The letter went no further.

  The telephone was ringing. “Where’d you get this?” I said as soon as I picked up, wide awake now.

  “The guy who runs the trailer park where she was,” Maury Ahearne said. “August Johnson. There’s a new couple in that RV she was in, and the wife found a whole bunch of these in a folder wedged behind the medicine cabinet. All dated the same day back through the years, twenty years or more, none more than a page or two long, some just a few lines, all beginning the same way. The one you got was the last one.”

  “The date was the day before she skipped.”

  “That’s it,” Maury Ahearne said. “This lady, the one that rents Slot 123 now, she gives the folder to August Johnson, and he gets in touch with me. Like I told him to …”

  “… when you busted into her RV, and told him it was police business and scared the shit out of him.”

  “Oh,” Maury Ahearne said. “And I just thought he was a citizen doing his duty.”

  I had no tolerance for his jokes anymore. “Can you send them to me?”

  “I’ll have copies made.” Meaning he would keep the originals. The originals might have monetary value. “You know she had a kid?”

  “No.”

  “The kid is where the money is,” Maury Ahearne said.

  Even after reading the letter Maury Ahearne faxed, I was still not entirely convinced Blue Tyler actually had a daughter. I had of course read about one in the clips, and about its putative fathers, but I thought it more than likely she had concocted a daughter the way a child invents an imaginary friend. It seemed to me a cri de coeur from a lonely, aging, perhaps periodically mad woman in Slot 123, Forsythia Lane, at the Autumn Breeze trailer park and recreational vehicle encampment, a woman whose only real family life after she was abandoned by Cosmopolitan Pictures was with the shut-ins she visited in her position as chairperson of the Shut-in Committee at St. Anton the Magyar’s Church, in Hamtramck, Michigan 48212.

  But after reading the entire packet of letters, I was not so sure.

  The letters were all handwritten, on lined notebook paper (from the kind of spiral notebook I had seen her buy at Farmer Dell’s what now seemed a century ago), every one dated, but without the year included. I rechecked the date Jacob King was assassinated; the anniversary of his death was eight months less nine days before the date on each of these letters, meaning that if indeed the child did exist, Blue was pregnant the night Jacob was murdered. Jacob King was sleeping with her in the appropriate time frame, and Arthur French would not deny that he was also. Not that they were the only candidates. She had a history of sport- and grudge-fucking, and her capacity for holding a grudge for some slight, real or imagined, from one of her equals or betters, was bottomless; her method of payback was to favor social inferiors with her favors—gofers and chauffeurs, grips and gaffers. It was a pointless promiscuity, the kind of revenge a child indulges in, but of course a child was what she was, even unto her exile at the Autumn Breeze in Hamtramck, Michigan.

  There was a chatty quality about the letters, as if she had just finished talking to her correspondent on the telephone and wanted to add a few things she had forgotten to say, so there was no need for any sort of preamble or identification of the players. I tried to sort them chronologically, but since the year was not included in the date, it was often difficult. If the order seems haphazard, so too was her life.

  Happy birthday, baby, wherever you are now,

  You’re 21 today, the same age as I was when you were born, and you might be wondering why I never got in touch with you before this, but that was because it was part of the deal, I couldn’t try to contact you, or write you or anything. But now you’re 21, the age of consent (and is that a laugh, my age of consent was 13), and you can come looking for me if you want. You’ll have to get it out of Arthur, but he won’t tell you, and the guy called Max won’t either. So let me give you a little background. I was a big movie star one time, the biggest in the Industry, and then I got pregnant and wanted to have you. It wasn’t done in those days, look at what happened to Ingrid when she got knocked up by that wop, a word I’m not supposed to say today, but that’s what he was, an Italian guy. I got pregnant the first time when I was 14 (I hope that doesn’t make you think I’m some kind of slut or something, I was just mad at some guy, I don’t want to say who or why, and it was by this other guy, the first guy would’ve killed me if he found out), and the second time when I was 17, that was an accident. I was doing tea with an actor who was a pretty big star at the studio (not as BIG as me), I was in a couple of pictures with him, and he was always billed after me, below the title, I was always above, it was in my contract, and I wasn’t careful, and, well, you know. Lou Lerner took care of me both times. Lilo fixed it, he had something on Lou, now he had something on me. With you it was different, I just knew I wasn’t going to let Lou Lerner near me. It caused a real big stink, this was after Chuckie and all that stuff in Washington. I mean, I had to agree to give you up, I was a star, and like I said, look what happened to Ingrid. I never even saw you, it was done by what they call a C-section, and I was out with the anesthesia, and when I woke up, you were gone, I never knew who you went to, Arthur said Jimmy took care of that, he said he didn’t even know who you went to, but you never know when Arthur is telling the truth or not. I’ll finish this tomorrow.

  She did not finish the next day.

  Happy birthday, baby, wherever you are now,

  It’s no big deal, not having a mother, I never did either, you get right down to it. I had a bunch of
governesses and shit, and Irma, who bought me for a bus ticket (get Arthur to tell you that story, it’s a doozie), she was OK, Irma, Mr. French just didn’t like to have her around, she made him nervous, and then there was Chloe who was a dyke. What I’m trying to say is this, I didn’t have a mother either, and I turned out OK, Clark Gable gave me an Oscar one year, I never liked Clark, I told him once you could bunk in his ears, they were so big, and he didn’t like it much. It was Carole Lombard I liked.

  The letter ended there.

  Happy birthday, baby, wherever you are now,

  The thing about being a movie star is that you never really had any friends, because people my own age weren’t as famous as I was or as rich, and so I couldn’t hang around with them, Mr. French didn’t like it. So there I was like seven years old, pretending Bob Hope was my best friend. Meta at the studio school was different. She was like me, not as famous, but alone a lot of the time, living by herself with maids and stuff, and by her wits, Arthur said, the state should step in and take care of her, put her up for adoption like you were. He was such a pill sometimes. Arthur said her father was a confidence man, I didn’t know what that was at the time, but I do now. Arthur wanted to get rid of her at the studio school, he said her father was the type who would cause trouble one day, but by that time Moe had latched on to her, and Moe liked her to come up to his office, and Arthur was in the service (big war hero making movies, and living at home at Willingham, it wasn’t like Chuckie in the USMC getting shot at), so he wasn’t around to make that much of a stink. That was how me and Meta became such friends, we had this secret about Moe we shared together. She was funny about Moe. He had this secret entrance to his office so no one’d know he was seeing someone, and he’d be dressed up in boots and riding breeches when she went up there. Me and Meta tried it a couple of times, but she wasn’t that way, and I guess I wasn’t either, we just liked each other. She let me use her place to meet people, that was another secret we had together. I took a picture of her nude when she was 15 or 16 yrs old, real arty, and she was going to take one of me, but she never got around to it, and then she got bumped off. Moe wouldn’t let me go to her funeral, I had to go to some Catholic church instead. To tell the truth, I thought Moe might have done it, but he was at a preview of January, February in Santa Barbara that night, and everyone stayed over at the Biltmore. The picture was a real piece of shit, Alan Shay directed it, and Moe said that was when he knew Alan was a Commie. I think of Meta a lot. She used to call me Vide, and I’d call her Plein (figure that out, you’re my daughter, so you can’t be some dumbbell) or Doc, after her initials. When I left L.A., I found the picture of her, and I had a lot of copies made, I didn’t want to lose any, because she was my best friend, after Arthur.