Digging James Dean

by Robert Eversz

  She wrinkled her nose, baffled. “You don’t think I’m grateful for what you did?”

  “Teenagers are never grateful,” I said. “It’s a universal principle.”

  “Would you really leave me here?”

  “I’d take your shoes with me, too.”

  The world looked like it was ending in her green eyes and when a single tear slid down her cheek I wanted to take her in my arms and stroke her head. Wanted to, but didn’t.

  “They’re wannabe actors, think they’ve found the way to be famous,” she said. “It’s not fair. I was going to tell you anyway and now you think I’m talking because I’m afraid or something.”

  “I’m tired of being lied to. Just tell me the truth.”

  I stroked her cheek, once. She nodded.

  “How old are they?” I asked.

  “About my age, some older, some younger. The Goth, that’s this girl looks a little like a vampire? She’s the youngest. She’s thirteen.”

  “And the one who picked you up at the mall?”

  “Luce? She’s eighteen, already been cast in three TV shows.”

  “When she picked you up, what did you tell her?”

  “That Sean was the one betrayed them, not me.”

  “How did Sean betray them?”

  “Scandal Times was his idea. He called the reporter, the guy we met last night, after we got to town. To tell him about what happened to James Dean’s grave. But he couldn’t get any money out of him, the cheap bastard. So when we got this other tip, the one about Stonewell? Sean contacted the other tabs but they said forget it, they weren’t interested, until I contacted you.”

  “I wasn’t interested either,” I said.

  “Sure you were.” She dared a small, triumphant smile. “You paid.”

  “I’m a sucker,” I said. “Why Stonewell?”

  “It was just something he’d heard.”

  “Where?”

  “From Luce. She was always really cool to us.”

  “Is she the one who bought the bones from you?”

  “Eric did that.”

  “Who’s Eric?”

  She stared out the front windshield at the desert warming beneath the morning sun. “The asshole in the van. Not the one you ran over. That was Bobby. They’re older than everybody else so they’re like the gang leaders.”

  “What did they pay for the bones?”

  “Not enough. That’s why Sean was so mad. He said Sven had promised him five thousand but Eric only gave him five hundred. That’s why he ratted them out.”

  “Who’s Sven?”

  “Sven, short for Svengali.”

  “Not his real name,” I guessed.

  “Nobody knows who he is in real life. He just, like, talks to people over the phone. He’s the head of this society I was telling you about.”

  “The one that makes people stars,” I said.

  She heard the doubt in my voice.

  “It really exists! Leonardo DiCaprio, Ryan Phillippe, Kirsten Dunst—they’re all members. Winona Ryder was, too, but she messed up. She wanted to, like, break away from them or something and so they punished her by planting drugs in her purse and arranging for her to be arrested for shoplifting.” Her eyes flashed in recounting what happened, convinced the story was perfectly true.

  “This secret society, it have a name?”

  “Of course it does, but you have to be initiated to know what it is, one of those names-that-should-

  not-be-spoken things, you know, like the Harry Potter books. I think I would have made a great Hermione, don’t you?” She showed me her profile, nose tilted to the sky as though playing a smart, conceited little girl. “I mean, if I was a little younger and maybe English? Although Emma Watson—that’s the girl who played her—did a really good job.”

  “This secret society, this name-that-cannot-be-

  spoken, you think maybe you could whisper it in my ear or write it down on a piece of paper for me?”

  “You think I know the name? I never got initiated. They don’t tell you the name until they let you in.”

  “Does your friend Luce know?”

  “Oh yeah, Luce is like a priestess or something, I mean, she’s not a star yet but they’re already grooming her for the big time.” The girl turned to me, her eyes flicking little glances here and there, as though she was about to tell secrets, exciting secrets. “This society, you see, they control who gets the breaks necessary for stardom. It’s nearly impossible to make it beyond bit parts without their support. That’s why so many super-talented actors get, like, nowhere. You go in for an audition, it’s all rigged. I mean, you still gotta have talent, but between two talented people? The society member always gets the part. And that’s why Eric thought he could get away with screwing Sean and me. Only he didn’t know Sean wanted to make it as a stage actor and the society doesn’t have so much pull in the theater. And me, I’m hot on Sean so I side with him instead of the society. Then what happens? He dumps me.”

  “The kids I saw last night, they’re all members?”

  “They’re like the acolytes, you know what I mean? They aren’t stars yet but Sven says they’ll be stars in the future.”

  “Tell me about Sven. Did you talk to him?”

  Theresa shook her head, responding less to my question than to a thought horrifying enough to pale her cheeks. “Bobby? The guy you ran over in the desert? Do you think you killed him?”

  “No, but I don’t think he’ll walk straight for a while.”

  Tears welled in her eyes, seemingly from nowhere, and her hands flew to her face to catch a sudden sob. The lightning changes of her emotions amazed me.

  “He tried to kill you,” I said. “He deserves what happened to him. And if it makes you feel any better it wasn’t your fault. I was the one who hit him.”

  She pulled her hands away from her anguished face, her green eyes rimmed red with grief. “It’s not that!”

  “Then, what?”

  “Don’t you see?” she cried. “Now I’ll never get to be a movie star!”

  Twenty-One

  IDROVE Theresa to a freeway Denny’s in Palmdale, hoping that her emotional changeability was due in part to low blood sugar. The prospect of food slowly cheered her. By the time we claimed a table for two in the corner of the restaurant she had stopped sobbing and begun to hiccup. Hiccupping was considerably easier on my nerves than the howls and wails that had accompanied us on the road leading out of the desert. When I told her to go to the restroom to clean up a little, she stood and moved to the back of the restaurant like a child-zombie. I left messages at Frank’s office and on his cell phone while she washed. He’d know how to find out who owned the warehouse in North Hollywood. He was good at that, checking records, making phone calls, tracking the paper trail.

  Theresa looked livelier when she slid across the booth from me. “I’m sorry about your sister,” she said. She’d scrubbed her face pink and splotches of water from the bath she’d taken in the sink stained her silk blouse.

  I handed her a menu folded open to the breakfast page, said, “I don’t hold you responsible for that.” If she’d known those people were killers she wouldn’t have volunteered for her own execution the night before.

  “Can I get anything I want?”

  “Keep it under ten bucks, please. I’m broke. I’m having the Grand Slam Breakfast.” I poked my forefinger at an entry on her menu depicting a small mountain of pancakes, eggs, and fried meats. I have the eating habits of a python, gorging one day and digesting the next. “My sister was pretty much a mystery to me. She didn’t do me any favors, that much is sure.”

  “She asked me so many questions I was sure she was tabloid.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “Who was in the gang, mostly. You know, names, hometowns, ages. She seemed real interested in the kids, like maybe she was going to write about these wild runaways robbing graves.” She pointed to an even bigger pile of food on the menu. “The Gran
d Slam Slugger Breakfast gives you everything the Grand Slam does but you get hash browns, orange juice, and coffee extra. Can I have coffee?”

  “I’m not your mother. Have what you want.”

  I shut the menu and glanced around for a waitress. A thin woman with the wrinkled face of a pack-a-day smoker and a name tag that read BEATRICE hustled over. She took our orders, said, “Glad you gals brought your appetites.” I asked her to have the cooks mix three eggs with a pound of raw hamburger for the Rott, and after some back-and-forth about whether or not that would be possible she hustled away to place the order.

  “I wish you were my mother,” the girl said.

  Had I been drinking coffee at that moment I might have sucked it down the wrong pipe and sprayed it against the window. “I’m not old enough to be your mother.” Confronted by the disappointment in her eyes, I did the math. “Okay, technically I am old enough but I have enough trouble taking care of myself and my dog. The idea of motherhood makes me nervous. Maybe you could instead consider me more like your favorite aunt, the one that lets you do whatever you want as long as you don’t hurt anybody. And what’s wrong with your own mother?”

  She shrugged, said, “Nothing.”

  “She loves you, I’m sure,” I said.

  “She doesn’t have any time for me, except when she has something to criticize. It’s like I’m never good enough for her. Not smart enough. Not talented enough. Not anything enough.”

  Theresa looked like she wanted to curl up in a ball and hide under the table. I wasn’t so old that I’d forgotten what it had been like to be a teenager, my skin on fire with the pain of being, the self-conscious insecurities of learning who I was and more painfully who I wasn’t. I said, “Did I tell you I went to prison?”

  The revelation drew the girl out of her own problems in one stroke. She stared at me, mouth and eyes gaped in disbelief.

  “Four years. It taught me a lot about time. I thought I’d never get out. But one day passed into another, and the next day into another one, and here I am…” I pointed to the walls and windows around us. “No bars.”

  “What did you do, I mean, why were you arrested?”

  “Wrong place, wrong time, wrong people.” I smiled at the waitress, who stopped by to deliver our coffee thermos. “I’m not trying to scare you, but it wasn’t fun. You can’t do anything in prison without a guard, inmate, or camera watching how you’re doing it. The system tells you when to get up, when to go to sleep, what work to do, what to eat. Do something wrong and you got a guard standing on your neck and a visit with the staff psychologist.”

  “Sounds like school,” she said.

  “How old are you? Exactly?”

  “Seventeen.” She held my gaze for all of three seconds before her cheeks colored to flush out the lie. “Fifteen,” she said.

  “Three years left on your sentence, then. That may seem like forever to you now, but you haven’t learned about time yet.”

  “You mean, it’s like I’m in prison,” she said.

  “That’s right. And just like prison you can run away, but you can’t really escape. Even if they don’t catch you they won’t allow you to live your life because you haven’t put in your time. They make you pay your dues. They always make you pay your dues. But the time passes, and if you’re smart, when you turn eighteen, you’ll be ready for your freedom.”

  “Eighteen?” She screeched the number as though it represented an age too ancient to understand. “You don’t understand. Winona Ryder got her first serious acting role at fifteen. So did Reese Witherspoon. And Brittany Murphy? She was fourteen when she was cast in her first TV series. Eighteen is over-the-hill in this business. If I have to wait that long I might as well be dead.”

  The teardrops swelled again and I awaited the inevitable moment of opera when she burst into sobs, but her glance darted up and to the side and a moment later two heavily laden plates swung around my shoulder to land on the table before us. She momentarily forgot her failing career as a teenage movie star and dug into her plate of bacon, eggs, sausage, pancakes, and hash browns with the eager determination of someone whose meals had come far and few between the past weeks. We ate in a dedicated, almost holy silence until, about two-thirds of the way through, she started talking about Sven. She’d called Luce from the phone box at Canyon Plaza to confess she’d been duped by Sean and when Luce sympathized by saying Sean had duped everyone, she thought it would be safe to ask to join the society. Luce had been honest enough with her. It wasn’t her decision to make, she’d said. But she’d pick her up, give her a place to stay, and ask around to see if it was possible. Sven called less than half an hour after they arrived at Luce’s apartment. “I felt totally honored,” she said around a mouthful of pancake. “I mean, do you like know how many people Sven talks to in person?”

  “I thought you said he called over the phone.”

  “In person over the phone.” She glanced to the ceiling in exasperation that I should be so dense. “Like nobody. I mean hardly anybody. Luce has talked to him, sure, and maybe the others in the group from last night, but he’s really selective who he talks to. And he called to talk to me. Because he thought I had a special talent.” A dreamy look glazed her eyes and she almost smiled. “That’s what he said, a special talent. Can you believe that? He called me his lost little lamb, said he was happiest when someone who once was lost was found again.”

  “His voice, how would you describe it?”

  “Soft but really strong, like honey and whiskey mixed together. It makes you a little high just listening to it.”

  “Could it have been Stonewell’s voice?”

  “You mean, like Stonewell playing a character?” She wagged her head back and forth. “No way. Stonewell isn’t that good an actor and I’ve never seen him play smart so even a ten-year-old would believe it.”

  “Sven sounded like an educated man?”

  “Not just educated. Cultured. Like he was from England or something, except without the accent. And totally persuasive. I’ve never met anyone so convincing in my life. I would have done anything for him. He said he had a special future all planned out for me, that I had a special talent so I deserved a special future.”

  She started to get that teary look again.

  “Wake up, girl. The man just tried to have you killed. The special future he planned for you involved a shallow grave in the Mojave Desert.”

  “He said he forgave me. I believed him.”

  “Just because he lied to you doesn’t mean you aren’t what he said you are, that you don’t have a special talent. All it means is that he lied to you. The two are different, understand?”

  She nodded, her eyes puffy and her lips taut. Some lessons are hard to learn. When I first learned that men would call me special not because they believed it but to get something they wanted from me—usually sex—it broke my young heart. “You told him about me, about my interest in finding out who killed my sister?”

  “I told him everything,” she said. “Absolutely everything.”

  Though I’d learned a lot in prison it wasn’t an experience I could recommend to an impressionable teenaged girl. As I drove Theresa to the bus station I thought about how she could avoid it. The authorities couldn’t legally send her to prison, even if they managed to trump up a grand larceny charge from the theft of James Dean’s bones, but juvenile hall would scar her no less than prison. The penal system changes people but for only a small percentage is that change a redemptive one. “You’re going to be in trouble with the law,” I told her. “No way to avoid that. How serious that trouble depends on you.”

  She squinted against the bright desert sun as she gathered her wind-whipped hair into a ponytail, asked, “What can I do to make it less serious?”

  “How good are you at telling stories?”

  She flashed a bright and spontaneous smile. “I love to tell stories.”

  “You have to get your story straight in your head and stick with it. I’m not a
saint, saying you have to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God, but the story you tell has to be ninety-nine percent truth. You can get away with one lie, maybe two, but no more. If you try to lie your way through this, they’ll catch you for sure. And no way are they going to let you skate on everything, understand?”

  The girl nodded and looped a rubber band around the ponytail, her expression almost comically serious.

  “The police are not going to let you go without something in return. You’ll have to give them Sean.”

  “They can have that lying bastard on a silver fucking platter.”

  “No swearing. Cops swear all the time but they hate to hear it from anyone else. You have to play it sweet and innocent. And there’s one other thing you can do for yourself, other than get a good lawyer and tell a consistent story.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Cry like a baby and beg for mercy.”

  She smiled, said, “I’m good at crying.”

  Theresa proved it by breaking into tears again at the bus station when I handed her twenty bucks for food and a one-way ticket to Kokomo, Indiana, routed through Las Vegas. She clung to me so fiercely that I joked about needing the pry bar just to get her onto the bus. She didn’t want to go, she said. “What if they return? They might hurt you. You need me to watch your back.”

  “I need you to get on the bus,” I said.

  When the driver tooted the horn she peeled away from me and ran for the door. At the top of the steps she waved, a broad grin bursting through her tears, and called, “I promise I won’t forget you when I’m famous!”

  Twenty-Two

  THE MOST compelling images from the film I’d shot the night before, spread across Frank’s desk in the form of proof sheets, depicted black-clad figures in wide shot walking single file through the spill of light outside the North Hollywood warehouse—good enough for the story’s inside pages but hardly fitting for the headline. Every time I zoomed close the image darkened to the color and clarity of mud. I hadn’t managed to get a clear shot of Eric, Theresa’s abduction, or even the van’s license plate. None of the photographs proved anything. However, I did manage some very nicely composed images of cactus flowers.