Digging James Dean

by Robert Eversz

  The people I passed looked at me like I was a crazy woman and it wasn’t until then that I realized I was shouting. Even the Rott was looking at me like I’d lost my mind. I’d been shouting at my sister. For her dishonesty. For her thievery. For her years of silence. For her ease in forgetting me. For her failure to give a little big-sister advice that might have made all the difference. For her attempts at manipulation, which continued after her death. So what if she’d been looking for her daughter? So what if she’d sinned against me for a greater cause? She’d still lied and stolen my money. Even dead and laid out on a stainless-steel slab in the morgue, unclaimed by friends or family, she was trying to manipulate me. She stared at me from the dark hole of family, a family that had abused and disowned us, and pleaded with me not just to forgive her but to recognize that we were bound more inextricably than ever because I knew who she was behind the false masks and fast cons and I was the only one who could or even cared to help her gain the redemption she’d failed to achieve in life.

  Thirty-Five

  THERESA CHATTERED nonstop about actresses and roles that had inspired her during the morning rush-hour drive to her callback audition in Hollywood, obsessively smoothing invisible wrinkles from her slacks. The young Laurence Olivier would vomit before stage performances, so I counted myself lucky that Theresa’s nervous energy expended itself in talk. The audition was scheduled for nine AM in a bungalow complex north of Hollywood Boulevard. After we parked I told her to wait in the car with the Rott and circled to open the trunk, where I kept the crowbar. The complex had originally served as bungalow apartments, early-twentieth-century clapboard and shingle units constructed around a central courtyard. Its first tenants had worked for the studios. The bungalows had been converted to office use when the tenants moved with the studios to Burbank. I zippered open my camera bag and placed the crowbar inside, careful to secure it against the padding.

  “What are you doing?”

  Theresa stood behind me, her voice shrill with adolescent panic. She’d moved so quietly I hadn’t heard her.

  “Just making sure it’s safe,” I said.

  “You can’t go in there with a tire iron!”

  “I thought I told you to stay in the car.”

  Her face flushed bright red and her breath fluttered with the first stages of hyperventilation. I couldn’t remember when anything had meant so much to me as this audition meant to her. “I’m not going to walk in swinging,” I said. “Sven has connections in the film business. What if he knows you’re going to be here? It’s not like your first audition was a big secret. Your ex-friend Sean knew and you probably told Luce. So get back into the car and wait.”

  She opened her mouth as though about to continue her protest but spun on her heels in tacit admission I was right and returned to the car. I shouldered the camera bag and crossed the street. Theresa had been crying the night before when I’d returned to the motel from my walk. She had pretended nothing was wrong but by the changed position of my camera bag on the bed I knew she had found and read the letter from my niece’s foster mother. “I understand that you couldn’t really help yourself,” I’d said. “I understand you need to know what’s going on, but in general, you should never go through someone else’s stuff. You understand me?” I thought she was going to lie and deny. That’s what I would have done at her age. But she nodded, a little too easily, and hopped into bed. She tossed a few times, then fell still with sleep long before I did.

  The casting agency occupied a double bungalow at the end of a brick walkway flanked with pink lawn flamingos. I put my eye to the brass nameplate on the door, noting from the oxidized corners that the plate hadn’t been screwed on that morning. I opened the door to a harried redhead tapping at the keys of a laptop and talking to herself. A black cord dangled from her ear. She was speaking on the phone. I glanced over the padded folding chairs and framed posters that lined the room, not looking for anything in particular but trying to sense whether anything looked or felt out of place. Bad things rarely come out of nowhere. Bad things usually come from bad places. The redhead lifted a hand from the keyboard long enough to press the disconnect switch on the cord and glanced up at me as though about to ask what I wanted.

  “I’m here with Theresa,” I said.

  The redhead glanced at a list on the corner of her desk and nodded. “She’s our first girl this morning. Bring her in and she can get started reading the sides.” The phone played the first few bars of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, without the cannon fire. She reached back to the cord hanging from her ear to connect again. If she was giving a performance, it was a convincing one.

  Theresa paced the sidewalk outside the bungalow complex, a compromise between my command to wait in the car and her impulse to follow me into the casting agency. When she glanced up and spotted me walking down the brick path she darted forward and might have run me over had I not braced myself for the impact. The hug she gave me was short and fierce, something taken for confidence.

  “What’s a side?” I asked.

  “Pages from the script they give you to read for the audition,” she answered, her voice quick and a little surprised that I didn’t know already.

  “They don’t give you the whole script?”

  “Not if you’re auditioning.”

  “Then how do you know you’ll want to do it?”

  She glanced up at me like I’d just asked the dumbest question in the world. “Because it’s film,” she said.

  From the sides I discerned that Mischief at Malibu High was a teen comedy. I didn’t laugh at the jokes, but then I wasn’t the intended audience. Theresa was auditioning for the role of Daisy, the daughter of the new janitor, recently moved to Malibu from Oklahoma. When we read the lines together she tried a few with an accent that sounded dead-on Oklahoma to my ear. “One of my dad’s girlfriends was from Tulsa,” she said. Then the door behind the front desk opened and the production assistant called Theresa’s name. I told her to break a leg and she smiled at my attempt to sound like show business. She told me that the average audition lasted between ten and fifteen minutes; anything over that was a good sign.

  I used the time to step out onto the lawn and call Marshal Tuckman at his office. He greeted me with a terse question about the location of his witness. “We have a little problem here,” I said, and proceeded to tell him about Theresa’s return, the audition, and her appointment to talk to detectives Dougan and Smalls.

  “You said she’d be on the bus,” Tuck said. “She wasn’t. And now you tell me that in addition to her legal problems she wants to be a movie star? This kid is in a heck of a lot of trouble and I don’t have the time to play games.” I strained to hear the easygoing, friendly country marshal in his voice and failed.

  “I put her on the bus once already but she did a U-turn,” I said. “She’s in the middle of the audition right now. I couldn’t break the kid’s heart. I couldn’t put her back on the bus. She would have jumped at the next stop anyway.”

  “You could have given her to children’s services.”

  “Sure, I could have cuffed and gagged her and tossed her into the trunk, because that’s the only way she would have gone.” I kicked at one of the pink flamingos with the tip of my boot. “Then I could have just forgotten about her and continued about my business, right?”

  “Better going about your own business than interfering with the law’s. I know who this girl is now, understand? I know her name, where her father lives.”

  “And why do you know her name?” I tried to keep the anger from my voice. “You wouldn’t even know she existed if I hadn’t identified her. You’d still be watching surveillance tapes from every McDonald’s within a fifty-mile radius.”

  Ten seconds of silence confirmed the truth of that, a truth Marshal Tuckman might not have appreciated hearing. He cleared his throat away from the receiver, said, “You get that girl back on the bus by tomorrow at the latest, then we still have a deal about not pressing charges.”


  “What if she passes the audition?” I asked. “She isn’t guilty of anything more than bad company. If you keep her from taking the role you’ll kill her dream.”

  “You’re checking in with this detective, what’s his name, Dougan?”

  “Right after the audition,” I said.

  “Let me know how the audition goes,” he said. “I’m not gonna deal in hypothetical situations. You tell me what happens and I’ll tell you what I want you to do from there.”

  I hung up feeling okay about the call. Tuck didn’t sound like he was going to play the heavy with Theresa. I was beginning to hope that everything would work out for her. If she didn’t get the part, I’d put her back on the bus, sadder but wiser. If they wanted her for the film, we’d find a way to make it work, at least during the time it would take them to shoot her scenes. I knelt to straighten the flamingo I’d flattened and checked my watch.

  Thirty-two minutes after Theresa began her audition the door behind the production assistant opened and a short man with bristly salt-and-pepper hair and matching goatee stepped with her into the anteroom. By the tear tracks running down her cheeks I figured the audition hadn’t gone well enough. The director introduced himself and shook my hand, said how much he’d enjoyed working with my daughter. I thought to correct him about the relationship but a smile burst across Theresa’s face when he spoke and I didn’t want to blunt her happiness. The way she’d chapped and reddened her skin was perfect for the part, he said. He was surprised to find such advanced method-acting techniques in a young performer. He was auditioning several girls for the part. It would take the production a couple of days to settle on a choice. Then the front door opened to another child actor, herded by a woman with a stress-pinched face, and the director retreated behind the closed door. The woman gritted her teeth toward us. She might have meant it to be a smile.

  The February sun hung just high enough in the morning sky to ride through Hollywood with the top down. Theresa bounced in the passenger seat, the Rott at her feet. “He asked me to work on another scene with him,” she shouted. “That’s why it took so long.” She beamed through the wind-whipped tendrils of her hair, her face incandescently bright in the morning sun. I could never tolerate being an actor, waiting around for someone to tell me whether or not they wanted me, but she seemed not to mind. She talked about the scene and recited some of the lines she remembered—and she remembered most of them. The casting director had read the other parts so it wasn’t like doing a real scene, but still, she felt she connected with her character. She liked the director. He was very adult. She’d heard that some directors could be difficult, more like angry little kids than adults. But this one was good. She wanted to work with him.

  “You gave it your best shot,” I said. “We’ll go somewhere nice for lunch to celebrate after we talk to Detective Dougan.”

  The light on her face did not measurably shift but still she darkened, as though lit so clearly by the emotions inside that changes in her mood played like light upon her skin.

  “You never know when you’re going to be cast in a cop film,” I said, trying to sound sage. “Think of it as research.”

  Detective Dougan walked out of the Hollywood station five minutes after I gave my name at the front desk, gravity tugging even more than usual at the bags and folds that pieced together his face. Cops work long hours, I’d noticed, and they can age quickly. He thanked me for dropping by, his manner so unexpectedly polite I suspected he’d forgotten that I was an ex-con. He was probably just tired. It takes energy to be rude. I introduced him to Theresa, who stared up at him with a mixture of suspicion and awe. If the girl’s age surprised him, he didn’t show it. He wanted to talk to the witness alone, he said. Theresa’s panicked glance told me what she thought of that.

  “Don’t worry, he’s a good guy,” I told her. “He’s interviewed me a couple of times, didn’t hit me once.”

  I’d wanted to reassure her, make her laugh, and failed on both counts. Dougan raised the drawbridge to the side of the front desk, used for the station’s walk-in trade. I gave her a hug and told her I’d be waiting in front of the station when she was finished. I watched her disappear down the hall and stepped out of the station, thinking I’d take the Rott for a walk while I waited. Dougan lumbered down the steps behind me before I reached the sidewalk.

  “What’s your relationship to the girl in there?”

  “Complicated.” I thought it was a trick question, an attempt to trick me into admitting I’d withheld evidence. “Right now I’m taking care of her.”

  He folded his arms across his chest, said, “Well, she’s under arrest.”

  “What do you mean she’s under arrest? I brought her to you in good faith! She’s not a runaway, not anymore. She has her father’s spoken permission to be here to audition for a movie. I heard him say so last night. She hasn’t done anything wrong here, she hasn’t committed any crime except being under eighteen.”

  Dougan raised his palm like a stop sign and his gaze, patient at first with the anger in my voice, hardened until it reflected no give at all. “I’m not the one who issued the arrest warrant.”

  “Then Smalls?”

  He shook his head again, said, “The arrest warrant is coming out of Indiana. Madison County. The fax came into the station less than twenty minutes ago.”

  Thirty-Six

  MY SISTER’S body had been found on granite steps that descended to a pond in front of the Douglas Fairbanks memorial. Marigolds in fluted brass urns lined the staircase, framing the view of the pond from the top step, and just beyond the far end of the pond, partly obscured by jets of water pluming from the fountain at its center, the white marble crypt of the Fairbankses themselves gleamed beneath the late winter sun, father and son nestled side by side behind a patinated copper medallion depicting the senior Fairbanks’s famous profile. A low wall of granite block shielded the landing of the staircase from the street, and it was there that I imagined my sister had lain in wait with my little point-and-shoot. As I stood where she knelt, looking toward the stodgy gray mausoleum where Valentino’s coffin lay stacked with hundreds of others like files in a drawer, I concluded that despite all my efforts to learn how and why she had died I knew no more than the few facts grudgingly dispensed by Dougan and Smalls the night they had taken me to identify her body.

  She had died from a broken neck, they’d said. I remembered the blue-gray pallor of her face framed by the green plastic of the body bag that sheathed her, remembered the single cut bisecting her eyebrow. The steps were steep and the boughs of a eucalyptus shielded the staircase from the ambient light of the city at night. She had crouched behind the low granite and waited, but for what? A glimpse of her daughter? Or a tabloid-worthy photograph of the theft of Valentino that might score her twenty grand to add to the nineteen grand she had stolen from me? Had she been foolish enough to fire off a shot the flash of light would have revealed her position. She might have taken the shot and turned to run. Her pupils would have contracted at the flash of light and when she bolted she might not have seen where one step dropped to the next. Maybe she hadn’t even been murdered. She could have tripped, her brow splitting on the granite step as she fell, the awkward splay of her body as she tumbled down the steps cracking her neck.

  I trotted down the steps and looked toward the Fairbanks memorial. Water lilies scudded across the surface of the pond and poplars lined the back of the memorial like sentinels. She might have thought she could escape by running through the cover of trees. Or maybe she stood her ground to confront whoever came to investigate the source of the flash. They argued and he hit her. Maybe he hadn’t intended to kill her. Maybe all he wanted was the camera. Under other circumstances her death might be considered manslaughter but she had been killed during the commission of a felony. Whoever pushed or hit her could be charged with first-degree murder. I glanced back up the staircase and saw Frank staring down at me.

  “I have something to show you,” he call
ed. He set two cups of take-out coffee and a box of donuts on the low granite wall. When I reached the top step he flashed a photograph faceup beside the box. “Ever seen this guy before?”

  The man in the photograph looked fit and well fed within the sleek confines of a dark gray suit, good-looking but not so good-looking somebody would suggest he make a living from his face. “Never seen him before,” I said. “Who is he?”

  “Stonewell’s agent.”

  When I laughed my lungs opened as though surfacing from a long stint underwater. “You thought Stonewell was telling the truth about Sven being his agent?”

  “I didn’t think anything,” he said. “I’m just desperate because a story moves or dies and this story is starting to look like a lizard stuck in the middle of six lanes of traffic.” He dealt a second photograph onto the granite. “How about him?”

  I didn’t recognize him either.

  “Stonewell’s manager,” he said. “I’m running out of ideas here. You remember Bartlet said he’d heard rumors about a shrine at Steve Reeves Ranch in Canyon Country?”

  “Families fuck you up,” I said.

  Frank stuffed a donut into his mouth, said, “What?”

  “I don’t know.” I really didn’t. I didn’t know anything.

  “Are you talking about your family? Or families in general? What’s going on with you anyway? You never swear, not once have I ever heard you say the F word.” He looked at the staircase and his head snapped back with the realization of where we stood. “Isn’t this where your sister bit it? It is, isn’t it?” He pointed his chin toward the pond. “Here at the base of the stairs.”

  “She’s only fifteen years old,” I said.