Suspects

by David Thomson

  She ran slowly to the tower, so Scottie could think of catching her, but because she had already lost the excitement of the play. Regret had taken over. She knew she was inflicting this conclusion on him. But there was nowhere to go but up to the top of the tower. Gavin was there with Madeleine’s unconscious body. It was the first time Judy had seen her; she had not expected such likeness. They were identically dressed—Gavin had planned every detail—and Madeleine was draped in Gavin’s arms, a stand-in for the death scene. There was even zest on his face as he looked from one gray-suited blonde to the other. Judy believed that for a moment he was not sure which one to throw away. The thought made her scream, and then Gavin released Madeleine’s body to the ground. And put the same arms around her.

  Gavin had guessed they could get away because Ferguson would have passed out. Such yearning cannot stay conscious.

  They drove back. When Gavin returned to the city he had the grim news of his wife’s suicide, and the pitiful guilt of the detective he had hired to guard her. Judy went … to Omaha, let’s admit it. Gavin had told her to go away for at least a year, not to contact him, then to return and call him if she wanted to. He paid her off.

  But she was not comfortable elsewhere, and she would not work as a stripper again. She was a typist for a bank, the Potter Bank. The shyness Scottie loved in Madeleine soaked into her. After six months she came back to the Bay Area, and she lived in the Empire Hotel on Sutter Street. She planned to spy on Scottie, watch him from afar. But before that could be accomplished, he saw her on the street. He was transfixed; Judy hardly knew how not to notice him. It felt like a mortal sin to be so unaware.

  He approached her and talked to her. He had altered. He was more irritable, less gentle; self-hatred lived in him, eager for more victims. But he courted her, looking past her red hair into the small window of her eyes. He loomed over her with his suspicious love. He asked her to dye her hair blonde, to wear clothes like Madeleine’s. It hurt her. If only Scottie could fall in love with her, the unnoticed her, they could go away and forget Gavin Elster. But he saw Judy just as an actress who might revive Madeleine’s role. She could not speak out. It would kill her to admit betrayal.

  Judy came to Scottie in gray, as a blonde, as Madeleine. The man was moved to tears by the illusion. But Judy did not have to own up to all her lies. She had kept a necklace that Madeleine had worn, an heirloom of Carlotta’s. Now she put it on and waited for Scottie to recognize it: it was an act of passive self-destruction, worthy of Carlotta.

  She saw Scottie notice it and remember; then came his fury and the need for revenge. What would he do? She half-wanted him to kill her. She deserved it. But he drove them both to San Juan Bautista, to the mission tower. She was consenting but afraid, and though he had to drag her up the tower she was urging him on. When they reached the platform at the top, he looked at her, the image of his dead love, the dead love alive again, and disorder swept him off the roof to his death. God keep us from finding whatever we search for.

  Judy Barton went away. She did not speak up. It was easy for the world to conclude that the tormented detective had killed himself, had succumbed to vertigo again as he relived his failure. Gavin Elster goes free to this day, a pillar of San Francisco society. I could correct that error, I suppose; I have worked the story out. But I have duties of my own before that.

  Years later, I still wonder how good an actress Mary Frances was. When we say good do we mean a cool talent to pretend, or a helpless need not to be oneself? She was as good as I have seen, but I must have looked emotionally. Did I stop her acting, or save her from it? Or did she sink into her amateur play, loving it too much for only three hours a day? What was her role, then? Heroine or victim?

  SMITH OHLRIG

  Robert Ryan in Caught, 1949,

  directed by Max Ophuls

  Leonora appreciated the psychological imponderable in the state of his health. That must have been why she went to work for a doctor when she left Smith.

  It was Smith Ohlrig’s curse that he had everything—in a way, possibly, was everything. His cold bravado boasted of this, when he really wanted rescue. The illnesses, the fainting fits, the sudden onset of angina were not only frailties that he had willed in himself, the ultimate fruits of hypochondria. They were the way he had found of asking for love. But since he had everything, he was not supposed to need anything else. The bravado amounted to cruelty sometimes. Anyone with Smith suffered from it. But his uncertain health insisted that he suffered most, more mysteriously than others, and that he was beyond remedy or treatment. In a doctor’s office, Leonora rediscovered the dull ways in which people can be helped.

  Smith clung to ordinariness, or so it seemed. He could be charmingly offhand about his wealth, his companies, his influence. He alleged he had forgotten what he owned. His absentmindedness tried to erode the awesome legend. That’s why he spelled his name for people, as if it weren’t printed on two or three things in most homes. That’s why he repaired his own cars and so often took over driving from his chauffeur. He had his humdrum doctrine in eating: at the best restaurants, he ignored the caviar and the French ways of preparing fish. He ordered a sandwich, and made a radical show of preferring it. He drank milk and Dr. Pepper, at the same time. It was meant to be endearing, but the bland tastes were so rigid that they became famous and forbidding. Instead of appearing ordinary, he resembled someone in the early stages of craziness.

  He seldom kept up with business, but he was always reading the sports sections. He would become a devotee of some ball team, an unknown intimate of its players. “Kipper went two-for-four today,” he’d say. If Kipper slumped and the team slipped, he’d make a big show of worrying over it, putting in calls when they were on the road to see how the game stood in the fourth or the seventh. Then he bought the team, just to put it out of his mind. For once he owned a baseball team, he immediately developed a passion for tennis or horse racing. His new team went into a panic because he never called. They thought he was angry with them. Their game deteriorated and every player was certain he was being traded. They got presents at Christmas, but nothing else. He heard of their losses, on the field and at the bank, with a dry lack of interest. “They think I’m made of money?” he asked.

  Childhood, romance and ambition—all those states of hope and desire—had been eclipsed in him just because of the money. He was no businessman; he was self-taught in a weird half-knowledge that no one liked to challenge. He was capricious, fickle and willfully uninformed. He was always doing several things to avoid one. If there was a crisis in any of his concerns, when its decision came to him (for he arranged everything to need his approval), he would announce that he was going to drive to Salt Lake City to break in a new car. Being always the person in charge may have impressed him as a measure of his concern—that common human touch persisting despite corporate hugeness. But it left the companies dangling on his whim. He always waited to be inspired, and he lost fortunes because of it. But there were more to make up the difference.

  It was as if, being hailed as the richest and most powerful man in the world, he had to demonstrate his helplessness and his indifference to wealth—made of money, he never took it as nourishment. He had a vague longing, beyond his cracked reason, to mock money and its authority. He was an American; he wanted to be supreme but ordinary, a tycoon and a regular guy, an author and a reader.

  It made him inaccessible. So full of oddities and eccentricities, he had no substance. People complained that there was no real man there, just an assortment of Smith Ohlrigs, ways of playing the part. He married Leonora, and then lost interest in her. She might have made a man of him only by refusing him. If she had declined becoming his possession, she could have had whatever she wanted and she might have organized his life. He was only aroused when she left him. For he hated himself and he was moved if anyone else could share that feeling. All his maladies aided his conviction that he did not deserve to live.

  But he could not free himself, e
xcept by driving across the country alone, in search of a common American who had not heard of him. And so when Leonora left him, he went in upon himself and he made a firebreak around his last position. He ordered sterile chambers in the secure penthouse floors of hotels. He surrounded himself with cleanliness, and often that took the form of nothingness. He sat still for days on end, alienated from himself, a moldering wreck preserved in a vacuum, the ghost of a madman who might be driving across some nocturnal desert, uncertain whether he was a dreamer or being dreamed. The more nothing prevailed, the more legendary he became. Unseen, he was imagined. Nonexistent, he was omniscient. Dead, or inert, he could be everywhere. He made a rare journey: uncomfortable as an author, he became a character for everyone, like the bogeyman or Santa Claus.

  HOWARD

  Jason Robards in Melvin and Howard, 1980,

  directed by Jonathan Demme

  He was driving in his blue Chevrolet Caprice from Gabbs, Nevada, to Cypress, California, one night in January 1968. His name was Melvin Dummar. He worked in a magnesium mine in Gabbs and he was going to Cypress to see his daughter, Darcy, who lived there with his estranged wife, Lynda. He was on 95, somewhere between Tonopah and Beatty, when he pulled off the highway looking for a place to take a leak. He was driving on a dirt road when he saw a man lying on the ground. Melvin stopped and got out of the car. He helped the man to his feet. The guy was over sixty, tall, thin, bleeding from an ear. He wore sneakers, pants and a shirt, and his hair was ragged. He told Melvin he had been out riding his motorcycle and he had crashed.

  So the man asked Melvin if he would take him to Las Vegas. They drove on together, and the man said he was Howard Hughes. Melvin got him to sing a song, and when they entered Las Vegas “Howard” asked if he could be dropped off at the back entrance to the Sands Hotel. Melvin gave him a quarter and they parted.

  Melvin Dummar never said the man had been Howard Hughes, only that that is what he had claimed. Eight years later, an envelope was found on the desk of a public-relations officer on the twenty-fifth floor of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Building in Salt Lake City. Inside it there was a second sealed envelope that contained a three-page document handwritten on yellow legal paper. It purported to be the will of Howard R. Hughes, “being of sound and disposing mind and memory.” It was signed and dated March 19, 1968.

  There were sixteen spelling errors in the 261-word will. To describe the Hercules flying boat, the will used the popular term “Spruce Goose,” no matter that Hughes himself hated it. The handwriting resembled that of Hughes and the will left his estate as follows: a quarter to the Hughes Medical Institute, an eighth to be shared among the University of Texas, the University of Nevada, the University of California and the Rice Institute of Technology, a sixteenth to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a sixteenth to set up a home for orphans, a sixteenth to the Boy Scouts of America, a sixteenth to be divided between Jean Peters and Ella Rice (the two wives of Howard Hughes), a sixteenth to William Lummis (a cousin), a sixteenth for a school scholarship fund, a sixteenth for his personal aides, and a sixteenth for Melvin R. Dummar (spelled DuMar). The remainder—an eighth—was to be shared among the key men of the companies he owned. Noah Dietrich, a longtime associate of Hughes, fired by him in 1957, and by then eighty-seven, was appointed executor. Dietrich said, “It’s the real thing.” Some smart handwriting experts said the will was genuine, but others declared it a fake. Eventually, the courts decided that it was not the true will of Howard Hughes.

  Dummar later admitted he had put the envelope on the desk on the twenty-fifth floor in Salt Lake City. He said a man had given it to him at the filling station he then had in Willard, Utah. Yet Dummar still said he had had nothing to do with the writing of the will. He maintained that in 1968 he had picked up a man who said he was Howard Hughes.

  As if authenticity counted in this country. We have all pretended we are Howard Hughes, and it was surely a game that could have occurred to him. After all, he loved to make movies: he made a film about Al Capone, but called the character Tony Camonte; and he made love to the breasts of Jane Russell with a camera in a way worthy of an imagination that could never meet or talk to the real Jane.

  Driving across the desert at night, not that far from Beatty, I have pretended to myself that I was Howard Robard Hughes to keep myself awake. I have allotted the portions of my estate, I have recalled the great thrill of the air, and the line of dark-haired actresses that I knew … and my head has been filled with glory, hope, absurdity and violence. And when I looked out of the window at the night desert rushing by, I have seen old men, hermits and unfound Crusoes, waiting to be discovered, loping along with the jackals. In the desert, fancy soars and a wondrous resolution of all ills comes to mind. The car roars with my excitement.

  EVELYN CROSS MULWRAY

  Faye Dunaway in Chinatown, 1974,

  directed by Roman Polanski

  Even in a book, I have kept them as far apart as possible. There are only darker stories still between here and the end. And no matter that the Cross always stuck in her, Evelyn Mulwray was never simply guilty. There were those who remembered her as a radiant woman, an emblem of Los Angeles in its best days, the 1930s. Some people sigh and say that anyone who saw that in her did not know the real woman. I am not sure. She was a terrible victim, if you like, a spoiled soul. But was the sin, or the mistake—the rape—was that central, or was it something she learned to accommodate? Those who knew her (so few) and those who have fed on the scandal since (so many) took it for granted as the critical incident of her life, the worst thing. I am not sure. It may be the thing of which her father was most ashamed; it may be what made him a monster. But Evelyn could have feared other things more.

  Her first fourteen years are flawless, in the way some lives started just before the Great War strike us as being passed in the last poignant light of a confidence that would soon end. That is sentimental: the Cross family had made its assurance and its home from the best official brand of piracy the world has known—free-enterprise venture capitalism. But the same fraudulent fondness may have worked for that very generation. In 1919, Evelyn Cross, nursing her mother in the influenza epidemic, was old and young enough to know the damage done to the world and to look at photographs of family picnics in the Santa Monica hills when she was seven and eight and nine, a white iris in her picnic dress, and feel the recent, unrepeatable bliss. Her innocence coincided with the world’s weary sinking into suicide. She was not sucked down, but she whirled around like a flower on top of the water.

  At twelve, she had said goodbye to a dozen young men often around the Doheny house, not so much older, but Galahads to the “up-to-date” young lady. Eight of them never came back; only one of the others was not wounded, and he had a nervous deafness from which he never recovered. In the brief American war—nineteen months—California had not lost its weather or its charm. It was a small city then, Los Angeles, conscious of all its countryside. People rode and walked on the paths in the hills. There were painting classes at Malibu, and nature rambles on Cahuenga. This was not southern England, where you could hear the bombardments. America was so removed from the war whose peace it would direct, and California was four days away from Washington or New York. It was the last paradise in the modern world, and Californians still live in a state of loss.

  Her mother died, despite her father’s assurance that that would not happen. He had been talking to himself, I think. Noah Cross had a great fear of being alone. He loved a full house; he had wanted many more children. He may not have loved his wife, not once that first physical desire had been met, and he took that with him wherever he went, like a gun to be fired. So Evelyn’s mother must have known about some infidelities; there was a whiff of sexual gunpowder to Noah Cross. He was a rogue, a user, a robber baron—all of that. But I’m not sure if his energy had been malicious before 1919. Quite literally, he did not know the damage he did. Afterward, he knew; and he acted with what had to be regar
ded as aim and accuracy.

  Noah went to pieces when his wife died. He could not be bluff, sweeping, jocular and commanding. He wept, he could not drag himself out of bed for days at a time; he lapsed into the self-pity of a child. And he had only a teenage daughter to help him recover. What happened? The law says she was raped; she was too young to have a mind in the matter for it to have been anything else, under the law. And what pedantry it is to speculate whether a fifteen-year-old was willing with her father. Isn’t it? But I am not sure that Noah Cross could have done it if his daughter had not, even secretly, been consenting. Suppose, out of some mixture of mercy and curiosity, she offered it? She would not have said anything, not have known how to be seductive; but suppose she merely elected not to get up some afternoon when her sad father came dangerously into the room where she was lying on a sofa, reading?

  Evelyn Cross loved her father. She admired his flourish, his laughter, his ways of riding, eating and telling stories, his appetite for doing all at the same time. She was his spellbound audience, reluctant to go to bed because it meant giving him up, like a storybook. She wanted to ask him to stop, so she wouldn’t lose her place. She loved him physically. He smelled of horses, tobacco and that sourness that clings to a man’s body and which a lap-child follows like a trail. She loves and shudders at it as much as at her own excrement. It is normal for girls to love their fathers, and normal again for that love to be erotic at least for a moment as they grow up. For Evelyn that moment coincided with her mother’s death and her father’s crisis. But he should not have let it happen. He could have angered her, hurt her, by saying no. But he was a weak man, as well as a titan; he could not bear to show her his fear.