Suspects

by David Thomson

  So Bruno killed Miriam, strangling her on an island at a fairground in the town where she lived. And then, like anyone who believes in fair play, he looked to Guy to dispose of his own hated father. Crisscross? One good turn deserves another, the spirit of doubles—one at the net, the other taking the baseline.

  Guy was embarrassed. The police could see how he had been freed by the death of Miriam; he had no satisfactory alibi; he did not tell the story of Bruno, that charming maniac, because he was afraid it would not be believed, or because he was guilty about a real pact. Had there been a moment when he had grinned at Bruno, said “Okay, pal!” and told himself, why not, if this idiot feels like it? He did not report Bruno; it was his backhand again, tensing and shrinking under pressure.

  But it all worked out. Bruno was too unstable to make a case against Guy: he became obsessed with incriminating clues and some final fairground disaster. He died. Guy was cleared. He married Ann Morton and became an assistant to her father. He was himself elected to the Senate in 1964, representing Delaware, and he was not seriously damaged when Ann Morton divorced him, charging adultery with a woman or women on trains between the capital and the Haines home in Westchester.

  Senator Haines became a confidant of President Nixon in the late 1960s, and so it was—crisscross, everything in meetings—that he was charged in the aftermath of Watergate with attempts to obstruct justice, convicted, and stripped of his office. He served eight months, and now runs a tennis school on Long Island where whites are obligatory. He has not temporized with the recent taste for colored shirts. Guy Haines wears long white trousers as he runs around his backhand.

  PETE “SWEDE” LUNN

  Burt Lancaster in The Killers, 1946,

  directed by Robert Siodmak

  Peter Lunn was born in Bemidji, Minnesota, in 1908. His parents were both Swedish—his father from near Askersund—and they had made their way to America in the early years of the century. The mother had been married once before, but her husband fell sick and died in the terrible northern Minnesota winter of 1905. A year later she married Olf Lund, a dairy farmer on land to the north of Leech Lake. The family went by the names of Lund or Lunn, slowly yielding to American usage, not noticing as the lilt in their voices went flat.

  Peter was the largest in the family, a runner in summer and a football player in winter. He would have gone from school to the farm, but for the illness of his father in 1926–27. An uncle, Lars, came over from Sweden to help with the farm, and Peter reckoned that he was being edged out. So he left Minnesota and drifted down to Chicago. He was working in the stockyards when he read a notice in the paper inviting strong young men to come to a gymnasium. A fight manager was looking for new talent. Peter had grown up a gentle kid, extreme only in his taste for romantic gestures. He was amused at the idea of putting on boxing gloves and hitting another man, but in his trial he knocked out his opponent in the first round, and he was signed up on the spot. He took it as it came, reckoning that if he made some money he would send it back to his parents. The manager said he was going to change his name for fights to Ole Anderson—it sounded more Swedish—but he called Peter “Swede,” and that stuck.

  From 1928 to 1935 he had seventy-six bouts as a light-heavyweight; he won fifty-five, lost nineteen, with two draws. All the losses came in the first and last years of his career. In the times between, for five years, he went unbeaten, with twenty KOs. With better backing and promotion, he might have been a contender. But his manager was a mediocre guy, and Swede learned that Scandinavians were not a draw in the big Eastern cities where title fights were held. So he never got his chance, and that hurt him for, once he had been beaten five times as a novice, he stopped laughing at boxing and learned the craft. He wanted to be champion as much as he had ever wanted anything. In 1934, he beat Gunboat Smith in Detroit and fought a twelve-round draw with the Englishman Len Harvey.

  He was making as much as two thousand dollars a fight, but he lost half of that to his handlers, and he never managed to control the costs of training and travel. Somehow he had the idea that a potential champion should be extravagant. He bought rounds of drinks and then watched the fun around him as he sipped a soda. Naturally shy with women, he would invite a couple of girls to have dinner with him and his gang. Then he’d see the girls go off with a sparring partner and a second, while he got to pick up the check.

  Nineteen thirty-five was the bad year. In January he had promised himself he’d have a title fight that year. Then he lost six in a row, and in Philadelphia in October he broke his right hand on Tiger Lewis’s head and stood up like a dumb Swede while Tiger beat him. His corner and the crowd were telling Swede to go down, but it went the full ten, and he was never the same young man again. One fight can age a boxer. If Peter Lunn had lived, chances are he’d have been punchy by the time he was fifty.

  So he retired. He still had money and clothes enough in those years. Boxers and gangsters are drawn together. Boxers have grown up more than they know with gamblers and their most obvious chance of reemployment is as bouncers or muscle. For their part, gangsters like to tame tough men who have taken and handed out punishment without notice or much profit. They regard fighters as idiots, and gangsters are so insecure they keep themselves surrounded by foolish strength.

  Lunn had known Jim Colfax, and he hung around with him without understanding what Colfax was up to. He had a detective friend, Sam Lubinsky, who warned him off Colfax, but by then Peter was crazy about Kitty Collins, Colfax’s mistress. The Swede wasn’t as smart as Colfax had been. He believed Kitty when she said she wasn’t anything more than a friend of Colfax’s; and he was impressed when she told him, “I hate brutality. I could never bear to see a man I really care for being hurt.” That one comment finished boxing for Lunn; he saw how ugly he had been for eight years. He was madly in love, but he said nothing to anyone and he thought no one noticed.

  Then one day in 1938, Peter Lunn was there when his old friend Lubinsky came into a Philadelphia restaurant and made to arrest Kitty because she was wearing some stolen jewelry. “Don’t do that, Sam,” said Swede, casual as could be. “I gave it to her. She don’t know nothing about it.” Kitty went along with the gallantry, Lubinsky had no option, and despite his years in jail Peter never asked himself how the stuff came to be around Kitty’s neck and pinned to her sweet bosom. It had been a grand moment, stepping forward, like raising his arms and having the announcer call him the new champion.

  Colfax and Kitty were still friendly in 1940 when Peter Lunn got out of jail, and he came back to the gang. Maybe Kitty was touched by him. Maybe Colfax got irritated. In any event, the two men fought over her, and Colfax learned just how hard you can be hit in real life by a hand that was broken so that its owner had to give up boxing. They made a sort of peace, and they got on with robbing the payroll from the Prentiss Hat Company in Hackensack. That was July 20, 1940—a quarter of a million. A champion’s lifetime in a few minutes.

  Colfax had planned to double-cross Peter, but Kitty warned him and the two of them went off to Atlantic City with all the money. She said of course she loved him, and the Swede was in glory and heaven. But she left him inside a week, took all the money and went back to Colfax. Lunn was so sad he tried to throw himself out of the hotel window, and only a devout chambermaid stopped him and told him to be a man.

  He went away, but not far, to Brentwood, New Jersey, where he worked at a gas station and lived in a room at Ma Hirt’s on Spruce Street. He led an uneventful life, plain and straight, and he waited. One day in 1946 Colfax happened to drive by and stop for gas. They had a friendly talk, never mentioning the job. Then a few weeks later two men came to the diner just before six when the Swede normally ate. They waited, and then they went up to Ma Hirt’s, found him in his darkened room and put eight shots in him where he lay. Swede must have heard them coming, big men on an outside wooden staircase, all creaks and their repressed breathing, but he never made a move to save himself.

  I would like to b
e like Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas, calling up the characters on a telephone. Yet I have never met him, and he seems utterly unmeetable. “How pitifully absurd!” Mary Frances said once when I told her I thought, perhaps, I resembled James Stewart in Harvey. She was right, is right, like a rope around my neck.

  KITTY COLLINS

  Ava Gardner in The Killers, 1946,

  directed by Robert Siodmak

  “My word, sir, that’s a lovely child you’ve got there,” said the gunman to Christopher Collins, a while before he shot him. This was one night in August 1924, hot and humid, in a tenement house in the South End of Boston. Collins was a policeman home by eight for his dinner. Ten minutes later there was a knock at the door and three of them came in, leaving a fourth on the doorstep. Mrs. Collins was indignant and scared, the two feelings coming in rapid flushes, so she hardly knew what she was saying. But her Chris was not surprised, and that shocked her—he a policeman, apparently seeing nothing outrageous in three men coming in, in jackets too on that night, and shooting him. Without a protest. And a fond-faced smile when the man remarked on little Kitty’s looks, as if the father had not noticed it before for himself.

  This Collins had come out of Ireland in 1919, landed in Boston and joined the police. In 1920, he married Kathleen Carroll, whose father was in the railways. A year later, Kitty was born, and Donal, the next, and Cliona in 1923. Their house was noisy with argument, and because Collins had trouble sleeping he got a habit of cheap white wine. He didn’t notice much, which no one found odd in a Boston cop. But it affected those near him. He might have Kitty on his lap, dark with lustrous eyes already at the age of three, yet her father wouldn’t reckon he had more than the cat asleep there, something to stroke once in a while.

  A week after the shooting, the Globe said aha, this Collins was a black-and-tan; and that explained why years later a party would come to his house and shoot off his face in front of the wife and kiddies. It was assumed that he’d done something bad in Ireland, and his colleagues in the police came to the realization that, why, yes, surely he’d been an anxious man. There was a police pension, and a collection in the city (which might have tripled but for the hints that Collins had deserved what he got). So the family lived on in the South End, looked after by the police, and once a year the recipients of a banker’s order, out of Philadelphia, for three hundred dollars, never explained, but somebody’s way of remembering Kitty’s eyes, and allowing they shouldn’t have had to see the blasting of her daddy.

  Kitty grew up tall, slender and gorgeous, but always fighting with her mother. The mother had formed the opinion that her Chris had been a no-good—hadn’t he let her down and ruined her life?—and she said Kitty was like her father, and a liar too. And just to show her mother, Kitty by the age of sixteen could tell sweet, polite lies to anyone with the look of a young nun on her face, and then a wink that was a startling thing, like the Virgin Mary giving you the eye.

  She gave up school around then, and in 1937 she found a job as a waitress on the trains between Montreal and Washington. She liked the crowds of men on business, and she got nice tips. But best of all, after dinner, she went to the observation car at the back of the train to count her money. One night there she met a glib fellow, Dickie McCoy, who sat with her and picked her pocket without her feeling a thing. Then, on the spur of the moment, instead of going off with the money, he told her what he had done and won her with the magic of it. She laughed, and later that night he took her maidenhood with the same light touch. He was years older than Kitty, but she woke enchanted and in love. The lying had made her romantic.

  McCoy taught her to be a dip, and she was fair at it. The railroad company got complaints, but they never thought it might be a woman. By Christmas 1937, Kitty was rich and happy. Then, one day, between Philadelphia and Baltimore, a man named Jim Colfax caught her hand inside his coat and said she was a wicked girl. He talked about turning her in, but he took her off the train with him and made her his woman in his house in Philadelphia. Colfax was big in the rackets, and he needed a pretty young thing around to impress people.

  After she’d got over the humiliation of it, Kitty saw that Colfax was a dull man. She was bored without the motion of the trains and meeting all sorts of new people, joking with them and flirting, bringing them a Reuben and lifting the wallets from their inside pockets. Colfax took her to nightclubs and places but he was always leaving her on her own while he chatted with some men. Once or twice she asked about his business, but he was hard on women knowing anything.

  One night at a club in Baltimore, she was on her own when Pete Lunn came over to ask her to dance. He had a hold like a bear, and she thought he was grand. They got close, but then Colfax turned nasty. Kitty liked having the two men growling at each other over her, and she led them both on. It was a change from getting up late and trying on all the expensive clothes Colfax bought for her. But boredom made her reckless. Without any need but sport, Kitty had taken to stealing again. She took some jewelry one night in a Philly hotel, and she was wearing a fancy brooch in a restaurant when a cop arrested her. But Lunn was there, and he knew the cop. With a radiant grin on his face he said he had stolen the stuff, and given the one piece to Kitty out of sentiment. So Lunn went to prison instead, and Kitty thought he was the sweetest dope she’d ever met.

  Lunn was away two years, and Kitty sent him a few postcards in jail with harmless messages. Colfax never knew about it, and so when Lunn got out of prison in 1940 he was taken back into the gang as someone who was owed a turn. But by the time they did the Prentiss Hat job in July, the three of them were all suspicious of one another. Maybe Kitty never knew which side she was on: it was a lot for a nineteen-year-old, in love with Lunn perhaps, but softened by Colfax’s money, and still a liar. So she went off with Lunn and the money, and then back to Colfax. It had one result: everyone else on the job was cut out. Colfax and Kitty kept all the money—$200,000 to split, said Kitty with a grin.

  It was ’forty-six when Lunn was found and shot. But that was the end for Colfax, for an insurance man named Reardon got interested in the case and he worked it all out and stirred up the members of the old gang so they came down on Colfax and shot him. There’s always someone whose sole purpose in life seems to be to work everything out—geniuses with no lives of their own to live.

  Kitty learned from it all. She decided the gangster life was exaggerated. She called herself Grace Devlin and dyed her hair blonde. So she went to Atlantic City—where she and Lunn had gone on the lam—because she had liked the air and the slow roll of the gray sea. In the summer of 1947 she came in second in a Betty Grable look-alike contest, and she met a handsome man who was bodyguard to all the girls, Lou Guarini, a swell talker. They had a fling and Kitty got a job as a receptionist in one of the hotels. She met Tim Reid, the house dick, and they were married in 1949. They lived in a set of rooms at the hotel until 1963, when Tim died. Grace enjoyed the hotel business, and she got to be an undermanager, friendly with all the people, making sure that Tim was one-up on the dips and grifters.

  In 1965, she moved into a place of her own and went back to seeing Lou. Her health was going, or so she said, so Lou would go out for her medicine and her sherry. He moved in with her and they’re there still, a well-known couple, devoted and bickering. Grace let her hair go back bit by bit, until she found it was quite white. She never looked better, and she’d had some money put aside, so they manage and feel superior to the way things aren’t what they were.

  AMY JOLLY

  Marlene Dietrich in Morocco, 1930,

  directed by Josef von Sternberg

  The child christened Elise Rissient was born in Courbevoie, a suburb on the northwestern side of Paris, in 1905. Her father was a projectionist of moving pictures. As this man extended his influence—to the ownership of theaters, the publishing of film magazines, and at last the production of movies—the family became more prosperous, acquiring a summer house in Rozven, in Brittany. It was there, in the summer o
f 1922, when Elise was seventeen, that her intense love affair with a young man, Francis de Pene, was observed fondly but inquisitively by a neighbor, Colette, who took it as the inspiration for Le Blé en herbe.

  Yet Colette was not just a voyeuse, feeding off the girl and the rapid flow of her enthusiasm and wretchedness. The novelist became her character’s friend, taking her on picnics, showing her the wild flowers on the cliffs, describing the trial of Landru to her, and teaching her Burgundian cooking. The two women spent a summer in love and fragrance, celandines and garlic, exchanging confidences as if there were no difference in their ages. “Ma belle,” Colette exclaimed one August evening, “quand t’es aimé, si jolie.” The cascade of open vowels, in Colette’s rough voice, was like the first drops of rain before a thunderstorm—Elise Rissient never forgot the sentence, and so it presaged her own next name.

  It was Colette who encouraged her singing, and gave her lessons in how modesty could command a stage as surely as nakedness. In 1924, at nineteen, Elise left Courbevoie and took a room on the rue Jacob which Colette helped her find. She worked hard at her singing lessons and began to build an audience in the small left bank cabarets. She sang sweet songs, full of sentiment in a simple, child’s way. Yet her modesty sometimes seemed to crack—like the shell of an egg as a fledgling stirs—and the glimpses of a darker wisdom were intriguing to men in the audience. Elise had several short affairs in 1925 and 1926, and in that time she grew into a mysteriously detached young woman, a little teasing toward men and love. In a way she never understood, but which was related to her spreading fame as the model for Le Blé en herbe, Elise was called a temptress and a femme fatale. This reputation, however she resisted it, did harden her a little. As a singer, she offered a sexual mischief resting within the fripperies of romantic convention, like a sword wreathed in tissue paper. She won a following whose cheers grew louder and more urgent as Elise declined to notice or be warmed by them.