Digging James Dean

by Robert Eversz

  She responded with an enthusiasm that matched her appetite. Reese Witherspoon was her favorite actress, followed by Winona Ryder, Thora Birch, and Renée Zellweger. Romantic comedies were clearly her favorite genre, though the plots didn’t interest her as much as the characters. She saw every film through the eyes of the female lead, talking about their predicaments to the exclusion of all else. Films were about stars and the roles they played. In that she wasn’t different from most actors I’d met—or filmgoers. When she reduced the bag of takeout to empty wrappers I said, “Tell me what happened to my sister.”

  She cupped a fist to her mouth to suppress a belch, said, “I don’t know.”

  I slipped the cell phone from the side pocket of my jacket.

  “I’m not lying.” The girl looked at the phone, offended more than frightened. “All I know is what I heard on the radio.”

  “She picked up the phone when you called?”

  “I thought it was you at first.”

  “What did she say?”

  “That you were too busy to meet me, so I should talk to her.” She glared over the top of her lavender glasses, as though I shared the blame for what happened. “She was your partner. I mean, didn’t she like, call you or something, say what was happening?”

  “That’s what she said? That we were partners?”

  “First thing out of her mouth when I called. Said the same thing when I met her. She carried a little camera, said she was a photographer too, you worked together on things.”

  “Where did you meet?”

  Theresa pointed her chin toward the palisades across Pacific Coast Highway. “Same place we did. By the bathrooms in the park. So was she your partner or not?”

  “Not,” I said.

  “Then why did she say she was?”

  “Probably thought there was money in it.”

  “You mean your sister double-crossed you?”

  I nodded.

  “Your own sister?”

  I nodded again.

  “That’s so cold it’s ice.”

  “About as cold as your boyfriend ditching you.”

  “That little fucker. I hope his bus crashes.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “New York, probably.”

  “Why New York?”

  “The theater.”

  “Ah. Another actor,” I said.

  “Real actors work on the stage, he said.” The girl grabbed a handful of sand, spread her feet wide, and let the grains dribble from the bottom of her fist. “I should have known he was going to run off when he started lying about how easy it is to get cast on Broadway, the rat bastard.” She gave her head a disconsolate shake. “And I let him hold the money.”

  “Which one of you met my sister?”

  “I did.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “Just that something was supposed to go down in the cemetery.” The girl grabbed another fist of sand. “I should have known something was wrong. She didn’t even know where Paramount was. And that camera she carried? The camera? What a joke.” Behind the lavender shades her eyes rolled scornfully. “At least you carry a real camera.”

  “What did you care as long as she paid you?”

  “She was a real bitch about the price. I wanted five hundred.”

  “Five hundred is a lot of money.”

  “You would have paid it.”

  Even a teenaged girl from Indiana could see it.

  “I’m a sucker, obviously,” I said.

  “You’re not a sucker. You’re just fair.” She watched the sand drift from the base of her palm, and after the last grain fell, her eyes slid to mine as though judging whether or not she had fooled me.

  “Who told you about the cemetery?”

  She said, “Nobody,” as though it might be a negotiating ploy, and eyed my hand, curious whether I’d reach once more for my cell phone. I plotted in my mind the moves I’d need to make to pin her face down and feed her a little sand to go with the hamburger. She may have been a shameless liar but she was only fifteen and I had difficulty imagining myself astride her back, beating the truth from her. I remembered what I had been like at her age and how intensely I resented all authority figures, particularly my pop, for whom force was the first, middle, and last resort. I remembered thinking that my turn would come someday, that someday I would be the strong one beating the weak. I could make her learn to hate me quickly if I pushed rather than guided her. She was testing me just then, trying to figure out for herself whether I was just another morality cop telling her what to do or whether I intended to help her. Then again, maybe she was calculating how big a sucker I was. And no matter how much I despised force when I was a teenager it kept me in line, a seemingly sweet and submissive girl until one day I stopped obeying and all hell broke loose. I said nothing. I stared and waited.

  “Nobody told me anything.” She returned my stare with a look of innocence, as though it was my fault for misunderstanding. “My ex-boyfriend is the one who found out. I’ve seen them around but he’s the one knows them best.”

  “Them?”

  “The gang.”

  “What gang?”

  She looked at me like my stupidity was tragic, said, “The gang that broke into the cemetery.”

  Her use of the word gang summoned to my imagination desperate characters and hardened criminals before I realized the difference in our experience could lead to an equal difference in perception. “This gang, who’s in it?” I asked.

  “Runaways, mostly.”

  I thought I noticed a glimmer of deception behind her violet shades but in the fading light I couldn’t be sure. “So kids, mostly.”

  “Just because they’re kids doesn’t mean they can’t get involved in some serious shit,” she said. By my definition she was a kid too, and the way I’d dismissed them offended her.

  I nodded once, asked, “These kids the type to kill somebody?”

  The girl picked up another handful of sand and shrugged. “What kid isn’t the type to kill somebody anymore?”

  Good point. It figured to be kids playing games with death and the devil. Sex alone does not obsess the adolescent mind. Like a positive print and its negative image adolescence and death mirror each other. Teens develop a fascination with death and dying the moment their bodies spring most to life. They dwell on death with all the fervor of romantic love, compelling them to visions of doom and decaying flesh, to contemplate the end of desire when they first begin to feel how unbearable desire can be, the sense of fatal romance drawing them to fights and speeding cars, drugs and cemeteries at night, and other means of courting death.

  I played the scene out in my mind, my sister walking into the cemetery before the gates closed, hiding behind one of the monuments until the kids broke into the crypt, the spark of flash when she released the shutter betraying her presence. Could she have been that stupid? If she thought she photographed nothing more threatening than kids on a prank, maybe, but breaking into Hollywood Forever wasn’t a prank. The operation required equipment serious enough to crack the metal gates guarding both the cemetery and the mausoleum and then to break into the crypt itself. Why would kids go to the trouble to steal the bones of a movie star idolized by their great-grandparents? “I’m sorry, but this makes no sense to me,” I said. “Maybe you’re telling me the truth and maybe you’re not.”

  “I’m not lying,” she said, her tone sullen.

  “Then tell me where I can find them.”

  “I need money,” she said.

  I was tempted to grab her by the hair and drag her into the next wave. I resisted. She watched me above the rims of her shades, her eyes sly as a poker player’s. “You think I’m a greedy little bitch, don’t you? All I want is bus fare back to Indiana. And some money so I can eat along the way. I want to go home, okay?”

  I stood, dusted the sand from the seat of my pants.

  “You’ve gone too far to find home the same place you left,” I said, and extended
my hand to help her up.

  “Does that mean you’ll pay or not?”

  “I won’t pay,” I said. “But I know a reporter who might.”

  Sixteen

  AWARREN of concrete barriers protected the entrance to the Scandal Times building, and the iron-gated, steel-reinforced front doors, electronically monitored by a security guard at a control desk shielded in bulletproof glass, could withstand impacts up to but not quite including high-velocity tank rounds, making the newspaper almost impregnable to attacks by terrorists, space aliens, hostile celebrities, three-headed sheep, and other frequent subjects of the paper’s sharp and incisive editorial coverage. Some considered Hector, the security guard in charge of entry most nights, the weak link in this impressive chain of defense. Fifty-five years of age, balding, overweight, saddled with a chronic limp from a bad hip, and cheerfully confessing that if ever forced to draw his gun he’d be more likely to shoot his foot than his intended target, Hector was about as intimidating as a ball of wool. He was also one of the paper’s most ardent readers and so the most popular guy in the building. When I buzzed for entry he called through the intercom, “Hey, it’s the damsel in distress and her heroic hound!”

  He met us at the door personally, the most recent issue of Scandal Times neatly folded open to the Rott’s page-twelve photograph and the article below it, headlined “aMazing Mutt Mauls Muggers,” which recounted the dog’s attack on the men in terms appropriate to a World Wrestling Entertainment match. My sister had showed me the same article the afternoon she’d come to my apartment. As much as I enjoyed photographing for Scandal Times, I didn’t appreciate being the subject of its reportage.

  Hector offered the Rott his hand to sniff as a way of greeting. “How’s the wrasslin’ Rottweiler tonight? Bite any bad guys lately?” The Rott licked the guard’s hand and leaned against his leg, his way of soliciting a scratch. Hector obliged, pointing to the guest register with his newspaper hand and asking us to sign in.

  I signed my name and the time into the ledger and extended the pen toward the girl, who stared at it for several seconds, either unsure of the process or unwilling to play her part in it. “You have to sign in unless you want Hector here to throw you out,” I said.

  The girl took the pen and moved the tip across the surface of the page. I glanced at her entry before we headed up the stairs, curious to know her last name. Natasha Gurdin, she’d written. I briefly wondered if that was her real name and so I said it aloud while she walked ahead of me, not calling her specifically, just saying the name to see if she’d turn to it. She didn’t. Still, the name sounded familiar, though I hadn’t a hope of placing it, not with my sieve of a brain and the sight of Frank appearing at the landing at the top of the stairs, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

  “Shit, thought I’d have time for a quick smoke,” he said, delighted to see me. “Well, you’re here so we may as well get this over with.” He offered his hand to the girl, who stared at it as though he’d just extended a dead fish on the end of his arm.

  “You’re the reporter,” she said, touching his hand with hers and pulling it away as quickly as politely possible.

  “Best damn reporter in the business, I might add,” he said, and introduced himself by name.

  “I know who you are,” she said.

  “Another fan, eh?” Frank seemed pleased to be recognized, his disappointment at not being able to sneak out for a smoke momentarily forgotten. He led us through a news bullpen half staffed for the night shift, mostly reporters working late on stories composed from imagination as much as fact, and pointed the girl to a chair across from a desk littered with the remains of Chinese takeout.

  The girl swept the seat cushion with her hand and, satisfied that the surface was relatively clean, sat. “I want five hundred dollars,” she said.

  “I want five million but I haven’t a chance in hell of getting it.” Frank plunked his elbows onto the table and stared at the girl, a tactic intended to intimidate his source and control the interview.

  “No money, no story,” the girl said.

  Frank heaved a world-weary sigh and pulled a sheaf of twenties from the top-right drawer of his desk. He tossed one to the corner nearest the girl. “The first one’s free, just for showing up. The rest you’ll have to earn.” He slid a reporter’s notebook under his pencil. “Let’s start with your name.”

  The girl looked at the twenty, then at the sheaf on Frank’s side of the desk, and I thought I could see despair sag at her face, as though she enjoyed little hope of seeing much more than that first twenty. “No names,” she said.

  “No names, no money.”

  The girl tried to meet his stare and failed. “Natasha Gurdin.” She leaned abruptly forward to snatch the twenty from the corner of the desk.

  Frank rolled his eyes. “Right. If you’re Natasha Gurdin, I’m Bernard Schwartz.”

  “Her name’s Theresa,” I said. “At least, that’s the name she used when we first met.”

  Frank wrote it down, asked, “Last name?”

  The girl remained stubbornly silent, staring at me, certain I had betrayed her.

  “Theresa’s good enough for now. I’m assuming you’re a minor, so we wouldn’t normally publish your full name anyway. Where you from, Theresa?”

  “Chicago.” She tried to sound tough saying it, as though she knew people from Chicago were tough and so she had to sound tough, too.

  Frank swizzled the pencil’s eraser tip in his ear and said, “I’m sorry, what town in Indiana is that?”

  “Chicago is in Illinois, not Indiana.”

  “Indianapolis?” Frank tapped the eraser on his desk while he stared at her, contemplating her origins, or pretending to. “No, too big. Fairmount?”

  The girl’s eyes widened a fraction, a noticeable fraction.

  “No, too small.” He snapped the eraser end forward. “I’d guess Logansport or Kokomo.”

  The girl again stared at me.

  Frank leaned back in his chair, kicked his feet onto the desk, and linked his hands behind his head, elbows veed outward like chicken wings. “What you got to tell me, Theresa from Kokomo?”

  “I know who broke into the cemetery next to Paramount Studios.”

  “Great.” Frank stifled a yawn. “Who?”

  “Some runaways my ex-boyfriend knows.”

  “Care to be a little more specific than ‘some runaways’?”

  “Teens mostly. They live up in the hills outside the city.”

  “Names, descriptions?”

  “I only saw them from a distance. They looked like Goths. You know, long black trench coats, black hair all greasy like, big boots, upside-down crosses around their necks, lots of piercings and tattoos.”

  Frank reached for the pile of bills, airmailed another twenty across the desk. “Why did they break into the cemetery?”

  The girl pocketed the twenty and dropped her voice to a melodramatic whisper. “They wanted to hold a black mass, you know, pentangles, blood sacrifice, that kind of shit. They’re devil worshippers. They needed some bones.”

  Frank jotted a few lines into his notepad, said, “And this being Hollywood, they decided to steal the bones of a dead movie star?”

  She drew her head back in a bad imitation of surprise. “Wow, you’re quick. How did you guess? My ex-boyfriend, he said they told him the mass would be more powerful if the bones of somebody famous was used.”

  “This ex of yours, what’s his name?”

  The girl backed against her chair, her face stiffening as though she might refuse to answer, but something that looked like spite flashed in her eyes and she said, “Sean Casey. He’s from Logansport.”

  “Sean have a history of problems with the law?”

  “Just shoplifting, marijuana possession. Nothing major. He wants to be an actor, you know? James Dean is his idol. And James Dean was no saint.”

  Frank dropped his feet from the corner of the desk and leaned as far across the surface as his ampl
e stomach allowed. “He idolized James Dean? Is that why he dug up his grave last week? He wanted a souvenir, some talisman for luck?”

  Theresa may have been a talented young actress but she had entered the room prepared to play an entirely different scene, and so the sudden change in performance required iced her. She stared at Frank as though unable to believe he knew what he knew and uttered a single profanity to express the trouble she found herself in. The look she turned on me, seconds later, so accused me of betrayal I could have mistaken it for hatred.

  “He was caught by a security camera with a key piece of evidence later found at the scene,” I said. She wasn’t my responsibility but I didn’t want her to remain ignorant of the trouble she faced.

  The girl crossed her right leg over her left and both her arms across her chest as she thought about what that meant. Her look turned defiant and she asked, “What evidence?”

  “A thirty-two-ounce soft-drink cup from McDonald’s.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “A store in Kokomo caught him on surveillance tape.”

  “Big deal. Lot’s of people buy Cokes at McDonald’s.” Her voice had both hope and scorn in it. She thought she might be able to bluff her way through this.

  Frank coughed into his fist to stifle a laugh and said, “Sure, but not many people leave their fingerprints on a McDonald’s cup found at the bottom of James Dean’s grave.”

  She stared at the wall.

  “Did you drink from the same cup?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I don’t eat junk food. Half the girls in my school are twenty pounds overweight because of that stuff.”

  “Maybe you’ll get lucky, then, skate on all charges,” Frank said. “Even if stealing the bones was your idea.”

  “It wasn’t my idea. I wasn’t even there.” The girl darted quick, arrowlike glances at me, as though trying to read my mind. Beneath her affected calm grated the harder edge of anxiety. “The security camera, did it film anybody besides Sean?”