by Ed Ifkovic
Tansi’s remark surprised me. So she still entertained the idea of marriage, this middle-aged woman? Good God. Why? The maiden lady as temptress; the hideaway virgin as vamp; oxymorons for the dreaded cocktail hour. Why would she want to be married? She’d made it forty-five years without male interruption. Frankly, I cherished my own much-touted spinsterhood, embraced it like an anthem, a badge of arrival.
Inside, I let myself be squired to this gaggle of important souls, then to that one. The mayor. The lieutenant governor. Betty Grable. Lex Baxter. Ricardo Montaban. I drank champagne, only one; just one. My habit, for many years now. Souls nodded at me, some virtually genuflected so I assumed I was somehow their paycheck, and I smiled and resisted the urge to hiccough. Photographers circled, bumping and questioning, following Rock or Liz or Mercy or Sal. But not Jimmy, who hadn’t arrived. “He told me he’d be here,” Tansi pouted. “I begged him.”
And then he was there. A group of men moved, and there was Jimmy, sitting on a side chair, a drink in his hand. No tuxedo on him, to be sure, but a black turtleneck, very tight, and he’d shaved. Creased blue linen slacks, falling just right over black penny loafers. I thought he looked collegiate, a little East Coast preppie, a runaway from Phillips Exeter.
But he also looked tired, droopy. Perhaps the need to select appropriate clothing for the formal affair had exhausted him, I mused. I headed over, but found it difficult to maneuver my tiny self through well-wishers and progressively drunker and drunker guests. Japanese waiters floated by with huge trays of drinks and platters of hors d’oeuvres. I glimpsed assortments of caviar, shrimp, wedges of cheese, shimmering yellow and white under the lights; diced avocados on bits of toast slivers; even a cascade of white-hazed deep purple grapes, looking individually polished. I wondered why it all looked so unappetizing, this cornucopia of spoils. And then it hit me. It looked like a movie set prop, a plaster of Paris construction, fake food arranged and painted and shellacked. Nothing looked savory, tempting-a culinary landscape that seemed paste and sawdust and sprayed-on enamel. You weren’t supposed to eat it-just admire.
I spotted Lydia, standing nearby, watching Jimmy but not approaching him. She looked pale and shaky, and at one point Jimmy glanced her way, frowned, and Lydia, panicking, rushed out of the room.
A photographer asked Jimmy to stand for a photo; he didn’t answer. The man, his burdensome camera pressed against his chest, repeated the request, probably believing Jimmy didn’t hear him over the din. A chamber ensemble to his left was playing Chopin, and not very well. No response. Jimmy stared at the floor, his fingers drumming the arm of the chair. But he did extract a Chesterfield from a pack, flipped open a matchbook, and lit it. He expelled smoke into the air, in the direction of the photographer. I realized he had heard the request. The photographer, unhappy, was already moving away.
“Jimmy,” I said, approaching. “You were rude to him.”
He smiled thinly. “I guess I’m rude a lot lately.”
“Why?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I’ve made three movies in about a year. I’m losing my energy.”
I tried unsuccessfully to avoid the obsequious Jake, who more than once sidled up to me, smiling, asking irksome questions: “Can I do anything for you?” “Is Tansi taking good care of you?” “Do you know you can call me?” “You’re not using the car the studio has made available to you?” Then, finally, “You haven’t spoken to anyone in New York about the…the Jimmy matter?” Everything seemed to lead up to that last question, and he waited, pensive as a schoolboy caught cheating at multiplication tables.
“Well,” I said to him, “I did speak to a close friend at The New York Times.”
A gasp, a bubble forming at the corner of the mouth. “Miss Ferber.”
“Mr. Geyser, I’m jesting. My lips are sealed.” Nodding, he hurried away.
Then Tansi was at my side, bustling, nervous. Unfortunately a few strands of her careful coiffure were breaking free, and I realized Tansi, antsy as a barnyard hen, couldn’t help picking at her hairdo. “Edna, come with me.” I followed. In the hallway we spotted Mercy, who was sneaking out, a sheepish grin on her face, and Tansi fumbled for her cigarettes. She had trouble striking a match. “You’re not going to believe this,” she said to both of us, “but Jack Warner just told me he got a second letter from Carisa this afternoon.” She paused, inhaled, coughed, and waited.
“What did the new letter say?” Mercy asked.
“Just one line.” Tansi took a deep breath. “It said, ‘Tomorrow nothing will be confidential-or will it?’”
“What?” I asked.
“The scandal magazine. She’s definitely going to that slime bag Robert Harrison of Confidential to expose Jimmy.”
“Expose what?” I asked, exasperated.
“Does it matter? Lies, innuendo, misconceptions. Once rumor is out there the damage is done.”
I was naive. “Just how important is this Confidential? I’ve never read it.”
Tansi started to explain, but was a little frenzied, and she sputtered to a stop. Mercy, coolly, “It’s a sleazy pulp that thrives on gossip and sin, appealing to America’s prurient interests. I’ve read some copies left in dressing rooms. Titillation, suggestion. Cruel and deliberate. Big-bosomed girls like Jayne Mansfield. Adultery among the stars, unwed mothers, fornication; you name it. Their current crusade is the lavender crowd.”
“The what?”
“Homosexuals. Like ‘The Lavender Closet,’ that sort of thing.” She paused. “They call them the hands-on-hips boys. Girly men. It’s gutter stuff.”
Tansi found her voice. “They don’t like Liberace with his red-ruffled shirts and all that gold and black brocade he sports.”
I smiled. “Well, then they have a modicum of taste, despite their scandal-mongering. But is there more to the Jimmy story than the allegation of an unwed baby with Carisa?”
Silence. Tansi and Mercy looked at each other. Mercy cleared her throat. “Jimmy has done some indiscreet things.”
“Like what?”
Mercy sideswiped the question, lowering her voice as some people passed by, leaving the party. “America is a scary place these days. Hollywood is a whipping boy for old-style Aimee Semple McPherson evangelists-den of iniquity, sin city, you name it. Eisenhower blandness covers us. McCarthy and his witch hunt. The infernal black list.”
“And,” said Tansi, “it’s like everyone is waiting for the next explosive scandal.”
“And that might be Jimmy,” I said, flat out.
A bustle behind us, as Jimmy flew out of the room. He said nothing, though we stared, expectant. His face was scarlet, and from where I stood, I could see the veins in his neck, swollen and purple.
“Warner must have told him about the new letter,” Tansi said, scared.
“Party’s over,” Mercy said.
“Jimmy,” I called out to him.
He bumped into some men smoking cigarettes, and then, almost blindly, he rushed out of the hallway, headed to the street.
“My God,” Tansi said, edgy. “I’ve never seen him like this.” She turned. “I need to get inside. I have to powwow with Warner and Jake.” She hurried away.
Mercy’s eyes followed Tansi. “Edna, I’m worried about Jimmy.” I shook my head. I was thinking about Confidential, and the vague, amorphous accusations. What was I missing here? “I don’t want to go back in there,” Mercy added. “Not now. Jimmy took the party with him. What do you say you and I grab a bite at Jack’s Drive-in on the Strip? The food is wonderful and we’re way overdressed, although on occasion I’ve seen some Beverly Hills matrons there in mink coats ordering hot dogs with chili sauce.” She hesitated. “Unless you have obligations in there.”
“No, I’m ready. But I sense you have an agenda, Mercy.”
“Of course. You and I, I’ve decided, need to plan our visit to Carisa. That new letter is too scary.”
I returned to the party to say my goodbyes, but I couldn’t locate Stevens or
Warner. Even Henry Ginsburg, I discovered, had left. Tansi was walking in circles. When I saw Jake approaching me, I fled, but I realized he was also sneaking out, maneuvering himself toward a side door. That made me smile. Mercy waited in the lobby, and then, with me as a passenger, we drove to the eatery to plan our assault on the hapless Carisa Krausse. “Our commando raid,” Mercy termed it.
“More like,” I countered, wryly, “the charge of the frightened brigade.”
I savored a massive hamburger slathered in avocado and mayonnaise; the bun crisp and chewy; and fried potatoes cut so slender I thought them wood shavings, with a trace of sea salt, perhaps; and a dish of peach ice cream, speckled with huge chunks of red-gold fruit the color of a good sunset. Good food at last, I told Mercy. “In California most food, I’ve found, is filtered through sunshine and dabbled with greasepaint.”
Mercy laughed. “Edna, you have to come to my home for a home-cooked meal.”
“Well, this is a good start.” I bit into the hamburger.
“So,” Mercy began, “let’s talk about Carisa.”
Suddenly, I blanched. I’d just been thinking how restful I felt, tucked into the booth, when the image of Jimmy and his mountainous rage flooded me. “Oh, Mercy,” I cried out.
“What?” Alarmed.
“I just had a horrible thought. You don’t think Jimmy would go there now-to Carisa’s. He’s in such a foul mood. You don’t think…”
Mercy covered her mouth for a second, looked scared.
“We’re going there.” I stood up.
“It’s a dreadful neighborhood,” Mercy said, hesitating. “Skid Row. And it’s late.”
“It’s barely,” I glanced at my wristwatch, “eight o’clock. Civilized people are just sitting down to dinner.”
But Carisa’s neighborhood silenced me-blocks of sad, dilapidated buildings, seedy, ill kept. I’d glimpsed New York’s Bowery over the years, shook my head over the vacant-eyed winos bundled in mission-house overcoats. But this Skid Row was numbing, block after block of what looked like sagging flophouses, shanty hotels, pawnshops with weathered signs. As Mercy’s car cruised into the area, I observed panhandlers, hookers, lost souls leaning against walls, or hunched over. “It’s really called Skid Row, this area,” Mercy told me. “Or the Nickel, because much of it centers on Fifth Street. Los Angelinos avoid the area-notorious for crime, drugs. Look.” She pointed to a man staggering off a sidewalk. “It’s like a big stereotype,” she said. “A Warner backlot for a James Cagney movie. Angels with dirty faces.”
I frowned. “A stereotype is sometimes nothing more than the redundancy of truth.” Mercy looked at me. Third Street. Fourth Street. Street after street, fading daylight, shadows settling in.
Flickering neon sign on a corner bar: H RRYs, the A missing. That alarmed me. A cardboard sidewalk shelter, a man’s feet visible. Eight-thirty at night, the streets eerily still, souls shuffling along, trancelike; yet the night seemed noisy, violent. The echoey tintinnabulation of jukebox music from deep inside a tavern. Then, as we idled at a light, snatches of a fierce husband-wife spat filtered through thin walls. The sobbing of a child-or maybe it was an alley cat in heat, hidden behind a shabby fence. The clamoring of a distant late-night freight train; a truck bumping over a broken street, headed to the warehouse district. Mercy parked her car in front of a three-story building, and we sat there. An old man staggered by, bumped into her fender, and I started. Not the brightest of ideas, this.
Gathering my voice, “You’ve been here before, right?”
“In daylight,” Mercy said, faltering. “High noon.”
“It must look better then.”
“Well, it looked safer, shops open, traffic, you know, cops.”
“This is what Tansi warned me about?”
Mercy frowned. “Tansi wasn’t built for this patch of God’s earth.”
“And we are?”
I surveyed the adjacent buildings. A pawnshop with oversized signs: CALL ME LARRY! RADIOS amp; TOOLS HIGH PRICES PAID! BUY amp; SELL. PH. MI 2021. A storefront window cluttered with motley goods. LUCKY BOY HAMBURGERS. RUTH’S GRILL COCKTAILS.
“Well, what should we do?” Mercy asked.
I caught my breath. “Which apartment?”
Mercy pointed up. “In front. The second floor. The one with the lights on. She’s home.”
“How do we know she’s alone?”
“God, I never thought about that. I just hope Jimmy’s not there.” Mercy looked at me. “You want to leave?”
I shook my head, resolute. “I’m never coming back to this neighborhood after tonight.”
Mercy smiled. “It’s not, I suppose, dangerous. It’s just…poor.”
“Not much consolation, I fear. And we’re really not dressed for this.” We looked at our fancy dresses, the jewelry. “We look all wrong.”
“Maybe they’ll think we’re working girls.”
“We are working girls.” I grinned. “I look like an aged madam out on the town.” A pause. “Let’s go.”
“You want to stay in the car?”
“No, I wouldn’t miss this conversation. Carisa Krausse has loomed a little too large in my imagination these past couple days. I need to place a face to-to the madness.”
The building was quiet. On the first floor, a radio blared from a back apartment. A Spanish station, a soap opera perhaps, with slammed doors and breaking glass. Then a male voice, a tenant’s gruff baritone. But I was confused by the interior: the hardswept foyer, the polished but discolored old ceramic tile, with long-abused art-nouveau designs; the nicely lighted hallway, old wallpaper but clean, stairs swept and scrubbed; railings worn but glistening. The stink of old varnish and countless tenants, but also the astringent odor of lye soap, diligent cleaning, a battle against grime and decay and mites and spilled lives. I walked slowly up the stairs, holding onto Mercy’s arm.
There was music coming from Carisa’s apartment, not loud but wafting gently into the hallway. Lavish violin strings, the thump of piano keys, the light air of a girl singer. Rosemary Clooney? The Boswell Sisters? I had no idea. Music from radios, especially the plaintive crooning of adenoidal female singers, always irritates me. I consider the sentimental slurring of the Andrews Sisters tantamount to treason during the last world war. But I keep such sentiments to myself. Jerome Kern, yes; Cole Porter, certainly. Witty men, clever lyricists, jaunty confections, the Broadway ditties. Yes, I thought, Rosemary Clooney. Or maybe Kate Smith?
I didn’t like the fact that Mercy, unconsciously, was humming the tune.
When Mercy gently rapped on the door-a little too softly, I thought-the door flew open because it had not been latched, and we stood there, staring at the body of a young girl, sprawled indecorously on the floor, her head resting in a pool of blood, her body twisted.
I looked at Mercy, Mercy at me.
“Is it…?” I gasped.
Mercy nodded.
I stepped into the room. “This is not going to make anyone happy.”
Mercy frowned. “But maybe it solves somebody’s problem.”
For a second I closed my eyes. In the darkness I saw zigzag, shooting shafts of bright light, and I felt the rush of blood to my temples, throbbing, throbbing. “So it begins,” I said, my voice scratchy. “So it begins.”
Chapter 7
Late that night, long after midnight, I lay in my bed, unable to sleep. I was trying to place events in order, categorizing, shifting the facts. I sorted through the last, horrendous hours, from the moment of awful discovery of the body to our dismissal by the police, with Mercy dropping me back at the Ambassador.
I wondered how I’d managed to stagger to the elevator, make it into my suite. In my room I’d slipped into a chair and sobbed for a half hour.
The police: Detective Cotton. What was his first name? Xavier. Detective Xavier Cotton rushed in a half hour after the beat cops arrived, Mercy having knocked on the superintendent’s first floor apartment door, startling the old Spanish man, and spu
ttering: Call the cops. Then everything happened so fast. Looking back, it seemed but a matter of scant minutes before the two fat, balding cops and then Detective Cotton rushed up those stairs.
I marveled at the detective, frankly. You saw a trim man in his late thirties, dark and wiry, short, a pointy ferret face; with weary dark brown eyes, dull and a little washed out. Baked-bean eyes, I considered them. Eyes that looked like they hid everything, the surface glazed over, disarmingly. That made me nervous. When he spotted Mercy and me waiting in the upstairs hallway, his eyes got large, as though trying to focus. That razor-lipped mouth was suddenly agape, reminding me of farcical cartoon characters registering shock. Of course, he was surprised, really. Here in this tenderloin building, this bitter, noisome outpost of Hollywood’s glitter-dome world, here stood these imposing and improbable women-both decked out in elegant silk dresses and pearls and diamond bracelets. Cotton stared at me as though I were Ma Barker dressed for a cotillion. Mercy stood at the top of the stairs, with arms folded, waiting, head down; and I stood near her, grande dame with my mane of white hair, my quizzical stare, my eyes darting, my curiosity volcanic. And wearing an over-sized sapphire-studded pin on my dress (a gift, I reminded myself, from Erle Stanley Gardner-and thus amazingly perfect). Two escapees from a decadent Hollywood party, detoured somehow into a Dickensian corner of the globe.
Detective Cotton nodded at us, entered the apartment, and I watched him approach the sprawled-out body and stare down at it, all the time nodding his head. He seemed out of focus, in the wrong place. I sized him up immediately: a dullard, a plodder, and therefore dangerous.