Cold Desert Sky

by Rod Reynolds

  ‘I can’t run. Besides, if it wasn’t me he’d only send someone else.’

  ‘How noble of you to come then.’

  ‘The photographs are right there. You think I took them? Get serious. That is days or weeks of surveillance work. You want to get hot at someone, maybe you should think about who put Siegel on to you in the first place.’

  He bristled, his gaze losing focus, and I wondered if it was because he had a culprit in mind.

  ‘This is too much. Where the hell am I supposed to find ten thousand dollars?’

  Rosenberg’s line about a sugar daddy was too vulgar to broach. ‘You’d think of paying?’

  ‘What choice do I have? I have to consider it, don’t I?’

  I spread my hands. ‘In my experience, if you pay once, they’ll come knocking again.’

  ‘Well, that would keep you in a job, at least.’

  I looked away, enough truth in the slight that it landed. I made to go. ‘I’ve told you what I think. I know this is a lot to take in and I’m sorry for your troubles, truly.’

  ‘And now he pities me. Take it down the road, pal.’

  I went out into the hallway.

  He called after me. ‘Did you even try to talk Siegel out of this?’

  I stopped by the front door, noticing the framed shots of Los Angeles lining the wall and up the staircase. He appeared in the doorway. ‘Of course I did, but they had a gun to my head.’ But as I said it, I tried to think back to that room, think if I did even try to refuse. As futile as it would have been.

  ‘You’re a real hero, aren’t you?’

  The spite in his words provoked thoughts of Nancy Hill and Julie Desjardins. Of all the killings I should have prevented – Ginny Kolkhorst, Jeanette Runnels, Bess Prescott. And Alice Anderson. The one I should have saved. The guilt that walked everywhere with me, like a shadow.

  Even now, by staying in the city I was exposing my wife to danger, trying to make things right for myself. A selfish man with selfish motivations, forever trying to outrun himself. And now a kid actor in another man’s dressing gown calling me out from the moral high ground. I turned the door handle, wanting the night to swallow me up.

  ‘Wait.’

  An unseen clock ticked, filling the silence.

  ‘Please.’

  I ran my hand over my mouth and turned to face him again.

  ‘I don’t … What the hell am I supposed to do?’ He sat down on the staircase. ‘Look at me, I’m so unglued I’m asking you for help.’

  I bowed my head, hands on my hips, trying to think of something to say. ‘Maybe I could speak to Siegel’s men, try to buy you some more time.’

  ‘What use is that? If I had a year I couldn’t raise that amount.’

  ‘Then we’re back to where we started. You take off.’

  He shook his head as if that would make it all go away. Then he focused on me again. ‘Tell me why you aren’t running. If that’s the smart move.’

  I watched him, saw the hope in his eyes that I had some remedy. ‘I told you, I don’t have that option. There are matters I have to take care of. Here, in the city.’

  ‘So you’re working your debt off, is that it?’ He spoke over me before I could deny it. ‘Then you can speak to Siegel, maybe I can do something for him too. Instead of the money?’

  I felt Siegel’s finger in my eye, against my teeth; the tightness in my chest that came with the certainty that he’d kill me when this was through. ‘That’s the last thing you want. Being in his debt.’

  ‘No. This is the last thing I want.’ He glanced towards the parlour doorway, where the photographs still lay.

  ‘I’ll talk to Siegel, see if I can get him to lay off, but for Christ’s sake don’t get your hopes up. Take my advice and start packing.’

  I turned and opened the door, the fear in his eyes too much of a mirror of my own.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The next morning I skipped out early, avoiding the conversation I’d promised Lizzie, the questions I had no answers for. She sat up in bed as I opened the door, watching me go but saying nothing. With a look, letting me know she recognised what I was doing.

  I tried to set aside Bayless for a few hours while I worked on the missing women – but the shakedown nagged at the back of my mind, like a splinter in my brain. I reasoned that the one upside of Siegel catching up with me was that I could move more freely now, at least for a day or two, and I meant to make the most of whatever time I had.

  I left the car in the shadow of City Hall and walked a halfblock down to the LA Times. The building hadn’t changed in the years since I’d left. The lobby was still closer to that of a smart hotel than any newspaper office I’d worked at; the giant globe centrepiece held sway, circled by Ballin’s ten-foot-high Streamline Moderne murals on the walls above. I’d always interpreted their purpose as a reminder we were following in the footsteps of giants. Seemed grandiose now. The surroundings felt familiar and yet not – as if known to me only from the recounted memories of another man. I pictured myself walking through that lobby, a time when my cares ran as far as careerism, or whatever story I was chasing at the time. It seemed an inconsequential life now – but at the same time possessed of an innocence that left me feeling diminished by the comparison.

  The employee roster was nothing like as familiar. Of the dozen or so men I might’ve considered friends, all had moved on in the years since I’d walked beats for the Times. Of the remaining names that I recognised, my best shot for an audience was Hector King, a copy editor I’d worked with fitfully. The girl at the front desk called his line and directed me to a bank of seating to wait.

  He kept me waiting fifteen minutes – the forced inaction grinding my gears. When he appeared, I had to remind myself I’d showed up with no appointment and had no call to be mad at him.

  I met him halfway across the floor and we shook hands in front of the globe. ‘Thanks for seeing me.’

  ‘I’d heard you were back in town. You’re with Buck Acheson’s outfit, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘They working you too hard? We’ve got a couple openings here – mailroom, secretarial pool …’ His smile grew as he trailed off.

  ‘I like the beach too much.’ I dredged up a wink – jovial Charlie on the clock.

  ‘Well, if you’re happy slumming it out there, to what do I owe the pleasure?’ He made no signal to move or sit down.

  ‘I’m working the story of a couple missing girls. Aspiring starlets, left their boarding house for an audition ten days ago and never came back.’

  ‘What’s your angle?’ Even by the way he said it, I could tell he was wondering if I had a story worth hijacking.

  ‘From the Heartland to Hollywood, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Nancy Hill and Julie Desjardins.’ I reached for the photograph in my pocket—

  There was nothing there. I patted down my other pockets, trying not to look frantic, found nothing. My brain skipped through the possibilities – dropped in the motel room, the car, the street—

  ‘Everything okay, Yates?’

  I felt inside my pocket one more time. ‘I had a photograph. Guess I misplaced it.’ It didn’t matter for right then – there was no reason he’d know two new faces in a city with a million and half already here. But it felt like one more strand to the girls had been severed.

  ‘What’s this got to do with the Times?’

  My thoughts were a jumble. I saw him tap his foot and it was enough to make me collect myself. ‘The story needs a happy ending. Right now I’m nowhere close.’

  ‘I don’t think I follow.’

  ‘I’ve been working this more than a week and I can’t turn up any kind of line on them. They—’

  ‘What makes you think they didn’t go back to where they came from?’

  ‘I spoke with Nancy Hill’s mother in Iowa, she hasn’t heard from her since the day she left home. She didn’t even know she’d wound up in LA
.’ The conversation burned in my memory – a crackling long-distance circuit, Luanne Hill distraught; a stranger breaking the first news she’d heard in weeks of her runaway daughter – that she’d disappeared in a city a thousand miles away. Telling me about the pink dress she was wearing the last day she’d seen her; about the pot roast she’d made for dinner, left to go cold on the table when she didn’t come home that night. Begging me to give her something more in return. To do something.

  ‘Only one of them?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You only spoke with one of the families?’

  ‘I can’t track down anything on Desjardins. Guessing it’s a stage name, and Hill’s mother didn’t recognise the description as anyone known to her or her daughter.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like much of a story.’

  The newsman’s response. The tragedy of the situation lost on a man who saw it only in terms of whether it was good for enough copy. ‘That’s why it needs a happy ending. I’m looking for a favour. You’ve got legmen all over the city – give them the names, get them to ask around. Not in place of whatever they’re working on, just an extra question whenever they’re on the street. I’ve tasked our men with the same, but there’s only four of us – you’ve got ten times that.’

  ‘Twenty times. We’ve grown since you left.’

  ‘Even better. I know it’s a needle in a haystack deal, but it’s worth trying.’

  He looked at me, considering it, and I waited to see what it would cost me.

  ‘Sure.’

  I said nothing, still expecting his demands.

  ‘I don’t deal with all of the boys, so I can’t get everyone on it, but I’ll speak to as many as I can, as and when the opportunity arises. I wouldn’t expect good news, though.’

  He held his hand out and I thanked him and shook it. I held his grip a beat too long, thrown by his lack of a quid pro quo. It occurred to me that I needed his interest to prove to myself that there was something worth chasing.

  ‘There anything else you needed?’

  I let go of his hand. ‘I kinda figured you’d want something in return.’

  ‘They’re missing kids, Charlie. Let’s see if we can’t find them before we worry about the spoils.’

  *

  I ran back to the car and tore it apart looking for the photograph. The floor, the seats, the glove compartment – no dice. I tried to place the last time I’d held it, but couldn’t remember for certain. Was it in my pocket when I’d lied to Whitey Lufkins about not having one the day before?

  Then a new thought: the back room at Ciglio’s, Siegel pounding on me. If it’d slipped out then. I tried to picture the room in my mind, thinking if it could have been down on the floor – but with the beating, in the dark, the tables, the memory was indistinct. I stood next to the open car door, traffic speeding by me, everything out of focus.

  It was a minute or two before I regained enough sense to start moving, put the nervous energy to work.

  I blitzed through downtown, doubling back to Main Street and working my way along it as far as Jefferson – two or three miles at least. I quizzed anyone I saw that might have an ear to the street: a pair of bar-hoppers still chasing a night that had left them behind, a beat cop with a drinker’s face, doormen at the Rosebury and the Chartham. It was too early; for the most part the streets were quiet. The kind I needed, those most at home once darkness fell, wouldn’t show their faces until later in the day. Still, it was all I could think to do. I dropped names and descriptions but got blank looks and shakes of the head time and again. In my heart I knew the photograph wouldn’t have made the difference, but still it felt like I’d done half a job – the latest in a string of failures, the consequences unknown.

  When I’d exhausted my options downtown, I drove Sunset Boulevard all the way to the Strip. On the way I passed the backstreet they’d taken me down to Ciglio’s. It loomed in my mind; the smell of Rosenberg’s cigar and the feel of cold tile against my cheek. Siegel’s threat against my life. Still, I felt a pull to go back there. Not just to search for the photograph, but from a sense of unfinished business. A delusional idea that if I went on my own terms, the shoe would be on the other foot.

  I hit the Strip and parked across the street from the Mocambo. The striped awning over the entrance brought to mind memories of the drinking clubs in Hot Springs, and I looked away when I realised it.

  I set about redoubling my efforts. I stopped in every diner, restaurant, bar and club – even pounding on the doors of the ones that weren’t open. I gave out their names but also went further, asking about fresh girls on the scene, girls looking for work, new waitresses – anything I could think of might spark a connection.

  It was wasted shoe leather. Best I came away with was a mention of a girl, maybe sounded like my description of Julie Desjardins, working at a movie theatre on Fairfax, and a carhop with a story about a Nancy looking to score reefer from him – which he swore he knew zip about when he realised I wasn’t buying. He clammed up after that, said he couldn’t remember what she looked like. Neither led me anywhere, but loose as it was, I made a note to swing by Fairfax soon as I could.

  *

  Noon.

  I was sweating in my suit by the time I got back to the car. I dabbed my forehead with my sleeve and started the engine, then took Sunset east to Gower Gulch, making the turn at the Columbia drugstore. The cowboys that gave the Gulch its name milled around outside it, ready to roll in Stetsons and bandanas, looking to catch on as extras in this week’s Western. Dreamers hoping to make it big following in Gene Autry’s footsteps.

  TPK Studios was easy to find, even among the plethora of them along the block. A globe on one corner of the roof was topped with a model radio mast, the company name spelled out in vertical letters along its length; it towered above even the power lines along the street. I parked by the main gate and checked the time again and hunkered down to wait for the guard shift to change, watching who came and went.

  Just past one, the man in the small hut stepped out with his lunch pail and Joseph Bersinger clapped him on the shoulder as he passed to take his place. I climbed out and made my way over. Bersinger had worked at the studio going on fifteen years, starting out as a prop hand before winding up in a security gig that afforded him time enough to study the runners at Santa Anita every day. Buck Acheson put me on to him – a long-time source he’d picked up via one of his legmen when he ran the Times.

  He saw me coming and closed his paper just as he’d got it open. ‘It’s only lunchtime and you look like you had a long day already.’

  ‘I roll out of bed looking this way every day.’

  He cracked a smile. ‘How’s Buck?’

  I weaved my hand. ‘Keeping afloat.’ In truth, I hadn’t seen Buck in person since we came back to the city. ‘It’s a small outfit, I think he gets bored.’

  ‘He should retire while he’s got time. Take up golf.’

  ‘Never happen.’

  ‘I know it. They’ll carry him out of there in a box.’

  I nodded along, itching to wrap up the small talk. ‘Listen, what we spoke about before—’

  ‘I got nothing like good news for you.’ He righted himself on his stool. ‘I spoke to one of the casting agents gives me the time of day and there were definitely no auditions scheduled for December third. Red River Ride was four days over and nowhere near finished, so most everyone in the place was at the back lot in Burbank pitching in. I wanted to be certain, though, so I double-checked the logs for that day and there was no Nancy and no Julie anywhere on the list. Anyone comes through this gate should be on there; even if they’re a last-minute deal, they’re supposed be added as a matter of course. Studio regs.’

  I rubbed my temple with my thumb.

  ‘Now, does that mean they always are?’ he said. ‘Of course it doesn’t. They pay these fellas peanuts to sit here and expect them to be as conscientious about the rules as I am. And what’s besides is, not everyon
e comes onto the lot comes through here.’

  Another line of enquiry closing off in front of my eyes. ‘How else would they get in?’

  He opened his hand to the building behind him. ‘Any number of ways. But the one I’m thinking of is when the high-ups bring girls in through the side entrance on Melrose. It’s one of them things no one talks about, but everyone knows goes on.’

  I twisted my mouth and looked off towards the street. I’d built a picture of the two girls as innocents, but whatever the truth of what happened to them, talk of reefer-rovers and private casting calls was a reminder they were strangers to me. It was unsettling, making me question the assumptions I’d made about their disappearance. Wonder whether I’d built a castle in the sand for my own selfish ends – one that’d already washed away, and I was the only one couldn’t see it.

  He put his hand back by his side. ‘But I go back to what I said about everyone being on set that day. I’d be surprised.’

  ‘Any luck with convincing someone inside to talk to me?’

  He shook his head. ‘And it’s not like I can press it.’

  ‘I don’t expect you to, that’s my job. What about the casting agent you mentioned just now? Would he give me five minutes?’

  He folded his newspaper, smoothing the crease. ‘You have to understand, if the names aren’t on the logs, it’s because they were never here. That’s what it’s supposed to signify. No one’s going to tell you otherwise.’

  ‘Even if I knew whether they made it here that day – just being able to narrow their movements down some would make a big difference.’

  ‘I don’t know what else to tell you. I’m sorry.’

  I fiddled with the door handle to his kiosk, a distraction to fill the silence while I thought on it. ‘What normally happens to the girls get brought in sub rosa? Afterwards, I mean?’

  He puffed his cheeks. ‘I don’t know, Charlie, I’m playing up rumours here. They get cast, they don’t get cast – what difference does it make?’

  ‘No, I mean right after. Do they ever come out the main gate?’