Roll the Credits: A Hector Lassiter novel

by Craig McDonald

  “Let’s not be that extreme, Hector.”

  “I think we have to,” I said. “I mean to at least keep Höttl on the run until I can strike at him through others. I’m working some angles toward that end, even now. A lot of these Nazi cocksuckers, they’re fleeting to South America. I figure maybe Höttl’s headed that way from Spain. I’m seeing if some of my hired hunters can get his scent there. Maybe I can at least cost him many a peaceful night’s sleep. Just maybe I can keep Höttl looking over his shoulder.”

  “A salutary notion,” Jimmy said. He shook his head. “Imagine that bastard filming your torture and murder.”

  “I don’t have to imagine it. I was in the chair, facing those cameras.”

  Jimmy smiled sadly at me. “You artist-types are the strangest, damnedest lot. On that note, Fionnula says Marie’s best subject is English. Ironic, isn’t it? I mean, given she came here with hardly any of our language at all.”

  “Children are like sponges,” I said. “If we could only learn foreign tongues as easily as they do, we’d all be cosmopolitan as hell.”

  “Well, Fionnula said Marie is top in her class for story and journal writing,” he said. “Fionnula thinks Marie might grow up to be a writer, like you.”

  Jimmy smiled, added, “And wouldn’t that be something?”

  BOOK THREE

  The Judas Kiss

  September 1957

  36

  “Goddamn Krauts! Damned Germans think they’re the only one’s who can frame a shot or light a set. Screw that!”

  Sam pulled his eye patch down over his empty socket. “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,” he shouted after the French journalist now on his way out the trailer door. Then Sam added, “And it’s goddamn Samuel Amos Ford! Sam Ford, not John Ford—he’s a different one-eyed director named Ford, you goddamned frog! If I’d directed The Quiet Man, I’d have eaten a goddamned Winchester in contrition! Print that!”

  Sam spat and poured himself four more fingers of rye. Softer he said, “Swear to Christ, Hector, I’m done giving interviews, especially to these goddamn so called cinéastes, whatever that means. Goddamn snooty French intellectuals have to contend they discover everything, and if it’s something truly American, like the Blues or crime films, they slap some Frenchified label on it. So-called ‘film noir’, say. And is that enough for ’em?”

  I started to comment but Sam forged ahead. “Christ no, it’s not enough! Some frog journalist has to go and say we stole all our imagery from the Fritz filmmakers. All that piss water from a goddamn egghead who goes and confuses me with that oater director John Ford. Hell, John’s eye patch is on the other goddamn side.”

  We were waiting out a rainstorm in Sam’s custom silver Airstream trailer on the Universal back-lot. I’d been two-stepping with Sam for most of ’57, fitfully squeezing in script work on a pet project of Sam’s about cockfighting called Rooster of Heaven, a film he envisioned to be shot south of the border. Filmed, “Well away from the lying studio heads and their crooked accountants,” as Sam put it.

  But there were funding shortfalls. To fill the chinks, Sam had agreed to take over direction of a film noir called The Judas Kiss. The film’s original, dipsomaniacal director had recently perished when he missed a turn high up in the Hollywood Hills.

  Sam said, “The paycheck on this gig will give me some walking around money for location scouting in Juárez, Tijuana. Seed money to get our film up and running.”

  I said, “And I’m here because…?” Through the trailer window, I watched the bustle on the studio lot. Gregory Peck and Chuck Heston walked together under big black umbrellas. The rain percolated against the trailer’s aluminum skin.

  “Because this damned ‘noir’ script is a dog, Hec. Plot’s okay. Basic beats are in place. But the dialogue’s awful and the pace is a mess. Now, if you’re finished dicking around with interviewers, stolen skulls and the Feds, I want to get to work and make a movie. Fast as you are, I think a week of your work will make the script spank.”

  It had been a bitch of a year in most ways. And as Sam had said, there had been this mess earlier in the year involving the severed head of a long dead Mexican revolutionary—craaazy stuff. I felt I was just starting to touch ground again. A berserk and probably boozy week hanging with Sam wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. I said, “Sure. What the hell is one week, after all?”

  Sam grinned, wringing his hands. “That’s the spirit, kid! Everyone’s already buzzing about how that Welles’ film, Touch of Evil, marks the end of an era for iconic crime films. The last great film noir they’re already crowing. Screw that! We’ll make a film to shame that goddamn whale’s ponderous potboiler.”

  He poured me a drink and raised his glass for a toast. “Here’s to The Judas Kiss!”

  “That title sounds like some robe-and-sandals Bible epic,” I said. I nearly gagged on the rye. “This stuff is terrible.”

  “Hell, it’s just an acquired taste, buddy.”

  “If that’s so, the price of acquisition is too high, Sam.” I put down my glass. “What’s the gist of this picture’s plot?”

  Sam ran his fingers back through his unruly salt-and-pepper hair. “It’s a torturous potboiler sorely lacking twists and reversals, but with your patented touch I think it might be confused for something that isn’t not art.”

  I squeezed the bridge of my nose. “I’m still parsing that one,” I said.

  “Don’t matter,” Sam said. “Here’s the premise. A G.I., still having readjustment-to-civilian-life grief, is struggling to pull it all together in 1957 Los Angeles. This grunt’s cross to bear is heavier than most.”

  “How so?”

  Sam drove home points with his index finger. “Our boy, Hank Lasher, was caught by the Nazis and fell into the hands of this sadistic kraut named Aldrich Bieber. Bieber’s an SS-type of your worst fucking nightmares. This guy is one ass-nasty son of a bitch with a real zeal for blood. I mean one wicked-ass Kraut monster. I’m trying to get Vincent Price to play Bieber.”

  “Price sounds good for that.”

  “In spades,” Sam said. “So Hank was caught by the Nazis and fell into the hands of Bieber. The Nazis want these invasion plan details they figure Hank is privy to. They stay at him and stay at him, slowly taking him apart. In the end, he breaks. Hank sells out his unit, and his fellows are killed to a man, including Hank’s best buddy from back home, Ernie Johnson. Ernie’s devoted, doting kid sister is the luscious Lizabeth Johnson, a blond, blue-eyed looker. Hank loves her. No, more than that, he worships her.”

  Sam poured himself some more rye. “Flashing back, our boys raid the place where Hank is being tortured and get him out before anything too permanent happens to him. I’ll push the torture scenes as far as the censors will allow, but we won’t be seeing too much, I figure. Anyway, that nasty-ass Nazi Bieber escapes. Hank is saved, and as there is nobody left alive except Bieber to contradict him, Hank lies and swears they never broke him. But they had broken Hank, made him a traitor, and that intelligence Hank spilled gets Ernie and the rest of his buddies annihilated by the Krauts.”

  Sam bummed a cigarette. “Now, flash-forward. Hank’s recovered and is ready to be sent stateside. He demurs returning. He’s overcome with guilt for selling out his mates, so he stays on in Europe for a long time, hunting Bieber. He’s sworn to kill the son of a bitch, whatever the cost, figuring it’s the only way to make up for betraying Ernie and his band of brothers.

  “After ten years of fruitless searching through the hellholes of South America, no success in his hunt, not even a faint trace of Bieber to show for all his efforts, Hank finally returns home. He works up the courage to pay a visit to Lizabeth. Turns out, she’s married, and very happily, for like, eight or nine years. Then, on the fireplace mantel, Hank spots a wedding portrait of the happy couple. The groom is fuckin’ Aldrich Bieber, the evil bastard who tortured Hank! How dramatic is that?”

  “Seems a reach,” I said.

 
Sam shot me a look. “Nah, it’s in the script… such as it is. When he was on the rack, Hank tried to stall and buy time by rambling on about his best girl back in Los Angeles, luscious Lizabeth. Bieber falls in love with the notion of Lizabeth, and after establishing his new identity in the States, he went in search of her. Seduced her. This damned Nazi set himself up as a respectable Los Angeles businessman with a pretty wife and a nice little house on the outskirts of the city. Mr. Joe Citizen, of a sudden.”

  Sam blew a few smoke rings. “All of that plot stuff I’ve told you, all of it, I need you to cram into the first fifteen minutes of the film. The current version of Vargas’ script burns about three-quarters of screen time to set all that up. I need you to shorthand it, so we can get into the meat of the story pronto, Hec.”

  I said, “And the meat of that story is…?”

  “Hank wants to kill Bieber, slow and bloody,” Sam said. “Yet it seems Bieber somehow makes Lizabeth genuinely happy. She’s utterly devoted to him. The Nazi may really love her. And, of course, Bieber could conceivably tell Lizabeth how Hank got Ernie killed.”

  “Not without costing himself his wife, he couldn’t,” I said.

  “Not an insoluble plot problem with a crafty and creative sucker like you pulling the strings, Hec. And anyway, it’s your logic issue to solve, buddy. I just make your words sing with pictures, as always.”

  Sam tossed me a dog-eared script. “Just fix it, buddy, and fast. And now, vamoose. I’ve got a hooker due here within the hour.”

  37

  The security guard said, “Anyone ever tell you how much you look like William Holden, only taller?”

  I smiled ruefully and got my Chevy back in gear. “Few here and there.” I palmed my turquoise ’57 Bel Air out of the studio’s lot. The rain was picking up. I nudged the wipers on and dialed around the car radio to a country station. A horn honk. I waved at a passing convertible. Clark Gable, Cadiz Ohio’s favorite son, waved back.

  World War II.

  Nazi torturers.

  It had been years since I gave any of that any thought. That last war, for me, seemed to stand away from the rest of my life in a funny way, almost an annex from the main event.

  Duff and I had split in late forty-six. Peacetime and much time alone together in the desert found us less than compatible. The split was all very amicable and tinged with real regret from both sides. We still talked, still wrote each other long, loving, funny letters. Before my rather disastrous last marriage, when our paths crossed, Duff and I would often as not end up between the sheets for a weekend or two.

  We were still good together as lovers, just not for very long.

  And the others of that time…?

  Gertrude Stein died of stomach cancer in 1946. Alice had been left alone to try and nurse Stein’s memories, to handle her posthumous works and to dodge money-seeking Stein relatives who saw all those paintings and thought, “There be mucho dinero.”

  Jimmy was still in Cleveland, still a cop and still hunting the Cleveland Headhunter on his own time.

  Werner Höttl…? I spent the rest of the 1940s underwriting searches for that one. No trail of a flight to South America or anywhere else ever emerged. No trace, even, of his ever having left Madrid. As Franco was proving durable, Spain was still off limits to me.

  Little Marie? Last word I had on her was that she was in school, studying English lit and film at some Cleveland-area college. She wanted to be a screenwriter, Jimmy said. That prospect made me wince.

  And Duff? She was here in L.A., somewhere. She was a studio publicist, by day. By night, she sang in various nightclubs and reputedly was building a pretty good following. She’d be forty in a few weeks. I toyed with calling her. I hadn’t seen her face-to-face since late forty-nine.

  Given my rocky last couple of years, I decided it was maybe better not to re-open that door just now. I sensed I’d be clingy.

  And, anyway, I needed to get my ass in the chair and my fingers on the typewriter keys.

  The material Sam wanted me to distill down to fifteen minutes of film now seemed to comprise about seventy-five percent of the existing script, just as Sam had said. I had a week to essentially rewrite the whole damned thing and build in now-absent second and third acts.

  I headed back to my hotel room at the Biltmore and bent to the task.

  An hour of work down. Then the phone rang:

  I scooped it up, said, “Lassiter.”

  “Mr. Lassiter, it’s Fenton Young.”

  Christ. Young was some tinhorn scholar/biographer who’d been hounding my ass the past few months, trying to secure my “official blessing” for a biography he planned about me. He was too steeped in this psychological mumbo-jumbo for my tastes. Too focused on my World War II experiences and, most alarmingly of all, on the recent death of my wife and child.

  “Listen, you son of a bitch—”

  He spoke over me. “Easy there, friend. I saw in Hedda Hopper’s column you’re here in Los Angeles working with Sam Ford. As a happy accident, I happen to be here, too. I’m actually calling from the lobby and I thought over drinks—”

  Goddamn it. And goddamn Hedda Hopper. Few years back, the old bitch had spilled the beans on Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Tracy actually kicked Hedda in her fat ass in Ciro’s. I figured I might do much worse to the failed actress-turned-gossip maven.

  But first I had this scholar to cope with. The fact the son of a bitch was from Yale made him more the menace in my eyes. Probably a Skull and Bones member, the weasel.

  “Fenton, the answer is, emphatically, no,” I said. “You write about me, let alone publish anything, and I get wind, then I’ll feed you your own hands. Now you best get back East, ’cause if I spot you in the lobby, or anywhere, I’m going to lay you out cold.”

  I slammed down the phone and then called downstairs and asked my calls be screened. Only female callers and Sam Ford were to be put through.

  ***

  I passed my week in that chair, fixing logic problems, punching up dialogue. Laying in some flirting from Lizabeth’s end to further stoke Hank’s reasons for trying to find a way to burn down Bieber and so not cost himself Lizabeth’s love.

  I burned up nights with a notebook and pen, nursing whisky and waters in the Formosa Café, watched over by framed portraits of Hollywood icons as I wrote. It was a scripting sprint.

  Each time I returned to the Biltmore, the desk clerk handed me a sheaf of notes from Fenton Young, my would-be biographer. Each of those scraps of paper I dumped in the trash bin, unread.

  ***

  Sam turned the last page of my version of The Judas Kiss and said, “It does spank, Hec! We’ll be great to go, soon as the director of photography gets here.”

  I slid off the trailer’s couch to make myself a drink. I’d brought along my own bottle of single malt. “I thought you had Steve Janning on board. He’s a local. Hell, by birth or for business reasons, all these film-types are Angelinos, aren’t they?” I took my first sip of whisky.

  Sam waved a hand. He shook his head in disgust. “Janning? That bastard bailed three weeks ago,” Sam said. “DP now is this cat named Armand Vargas. The script you fixed is his. He’s the one who recommended me for director, though I’ve never met the guy. We’ve just exchanged a lot of memos. He knew you and I had worked together a few times and he put a bug in my ear to get you here to polish the script. Armand says your last book, The Land of Dread and Fear, might be your masterpiece.”

  That assessment put this Vargas in a very small club. I’d taken a critical drubbing for the novel. It was, the wags said, “too dark, too noir. Too literary to be pulp.”

  I said, “Sucker has good taste.” I sipped more whisky. “But he’s still a shitty screenwriter.”

  Sam helped himself to some of my top-shelf whisky. He said, “This next item could be good news, or bad news, depending on your mood.” He took a sip of Scotch, let the burn pass, then said, “You are a freshly reborn bachelor, ain’tcha?”
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br />   My stomach was suddenly sour. “That’s right. You read about it in Hopper?”

  “Nah, some scholar was by couple days back. Said he’s writing your biography and you’d given your blessing for me to talk on the record about you.”

  I nearly came out of my chair. “Fenton Young?”

  “That’s the longhair!”

  I growled, “Don’t ever talk to him again, Sam. He lied. I’m trying to bury this book of his.”

  “Anyway, he mentioned this stuff about you being on the market again. This last wife, what, number three, four? She stick you for much cock tax?”

  “Wasn’t a divorce,” I said. “I’m a widower. Maria died.” I got up and poured myself more whisky.

  “Sorry, Hec. Didn’t know the particulars.”

  “Why the hell do you ask?”

  “The publicity person for this film—I got word today they hired this particular woman. Her name is Duff Sexton. Me not knowing many Duffs in my life, hell, not more than the one you married few years back, I figured maybe…”

  “She’d be my Duff,” I said. I shook my head. “I mean, my former Duff. I mean, yes, it’s my ex-wife. That is to say, one of them.”

  “You two still talking?”

  “Yeah, we left it very well. You don’t have to sweat keeping us apart, Sam.” I said, “Do you have her current address? Her phone number?” Now our reconnecting seemed foreordained.

  He winked his one good eye. “Guess y’all didn’t leave it that well.”

  “We don’t always send Christmas cards,” I said, “but we are…friendly.”

  Sam struggled up out of his chair. “Let me make a call. I’ll try and get you the dope on where to reach her.”

  38

  Duff had settled into a cozy place on Los Feliz; the Griffith Observatory loomed above and behind.

  I slid out of the Bel Air, bottle of wine in one hand and flowers in the other, running head down through hard autumn rain. I dashed under the shelter of her front porch awning. I knocked on the door with the toe of my shoe.