by Ed Ifkovic
“You don’t like him,” I said. “And yet you used to be drinking buddies with him.”
“I go out drinking with a lot of folks. Me, who has a low tolerance for alcohol. A couple whiskeys and I’m dancing on a table. But, well, Josh got too familiar.” He turned to face me. “I’m uncomfortable around fem guys like that. I knew Carisa through him, in fact. But you know that. When he drinks, he gets, well, swishier. Is that a word? There’s men, and then there’s men.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t want to talk about this.”
“I don’t even know what we’re talking about.”
“You know, Miss Edna, Carisa used to sleep with dirt bags in the industry-to get small parts. Lots of people do it. You’re gonna hear stories about me. There was this director Rogers Brackett, who I knew here and then in New York. I lived with him, I did things. I had to. Or he did things. You know. That’s how I got on Broadway. It’s what you do. Carisa liked to throw that in my face. She used to taunt me. When you’re real famous, it’ll all come out. Or, why are you denying that part of your life? I bet you hang out at Cafe Gale on Sunset, where they hang out. Well, I got all kinds of parts to my life. I’m not too sure what I am. You know? I mean…”
“What, Jimmy? Tell me.”
He banged the steering wheel. “Nothing, Miss Edna. Nothing that has to do with nothing. It’s just that Josh and Lydia talked about me-to people. And Josh has got his grip on the innocent Sal Mineo, a little boy, who stares at me with puppy eyes and doesn’t understand that Josh is using him.”
“How?”
“How does anyone use anyone else? You find their vulnerability, and then you mine it like precious ore.” He bit his lip. “Miss Edna, I got things inside of me that scare me.”
I touched him on the wrist. “Jimmy, you have to find what makes you happy.” I paused. “And someone to make you happy, no matter who it is.”
He looked at me. “What are you telling me?”
“I don’t know much about these things, but I do know that you can’t live your life by someone else’s rules.” I smiled. “But you already know that.”
His eyes got wide. “You’re something else, Miss Edna.”
I started to answer, but he shook his head. “No more.” He swung out of the car, opened my door, and walked me to the gate. “I’m going home.”
“You’re not on call?”
“Not today. I gotta meet Tommy and Polly for dinner tonight. They told me to ask you and Mercy.”
“When were you planning on telling me?” I asked, smiling.
“Right about now. Polly’ll call you later.” He waved. “I’m going home to work on the sculpture of your head.”
“You’ll need a lot of clay.”
He smiled. “I’ll need a lot of nerve.”
Coffee with Tansi and Jake guaranteed the day would move downward. Both were lively and talkative. I was used to it with Tansi, the resident Warner’s booster child. Tansi’s years in Hollywood, I now believed, had made her a little scatter-brained and twitchy. But Jake, with his crisp manner and supercilious haughtiness, seemed to have caught Tansi’s exuberance. For two people who ostensibly hated each other, they exuded an unpleasant camaraderie when I joined them.
Lydia Plummer. Her shadow paradoxically hung over the day, allowing people suddenly to brighten up. How downright sad! Over and over I recalled my brief, scattered words with her on the phone. It broke my heart.
Of course, the conversation centered on Lydia. Originally Tansi had scheduled the meeting to outline my next few days of meetings, preparatory to my leaving within the week. But Jake had asked to join us. Interesting, this development. A day before Tansi would have been annoyed at his intrusion. Now they were the Bobbsey twins at the seashore. They said all the right things about Lydia: how sad, how tragic.
“Warner is preparing to have her body sent back home,” Jake said.
“To where?”
“Lavonia, Michigan. A mother is there. We’ll plan a little memorial tribute on the lot. She had friends…”
“Frankly, you two, I must say that everyone seems rather relieved at her dying.”
“Nonsense.” Tansi glanced over at Jake.
Jake frowned. “Miss Ferber, let me say this. No one wanted to see Lydia Plummer die like that, but she took her own life.”
“How do we know it wasn’t accidental?”
“She was playing with fire. Drugs, Miss Ferber.”
“Or she could have been murdered,” I said, staring at him.
Tansi nodded toward Jake. “I told you Edna thought that a possibility.” She turned back to me. “Jake says that’s absurd.”
“Of course it is,” he crowed. “She killed herself. And the fact of the matter is the whole James Dean thing is over with, Miss Ferber. Odds are she killed Carisa. They’d been friends, they fought, she was angry. Jimmy left her, and she blamed Carisa.”
“So all the strings are conveniently tied.”
“Exactly.” He sat back in his chair, complacent, breezy.
I couldn’t win. Tansi and Jake, two studio lackeys, one admittedly a decent old friend, but myopic, choosing the happy ending. America craves happy endings. In Hollywood even death is a happy ending.
Jake took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. Like Jimmy, he smoked king-sized Chesterfields. I hadn’t noticed that. I followed the wisp of smoke across the table and desired one. Tansi noticed me eye the cigarette. “Edna, another one?” She offered me one of her Camels, withdrawing her own pack and sliding it across the table. I shook my head. “Let me try a Chesterfield. That’s what Jimmy smokes.”
Jake wasn’t happy, “Oh no,” he groaned. “Another acolyte.”
“Camels are better for your health,” Tansi insisted, tapping the pack. She pushed it in front of me.
I took one of Jake’s cigarettes, and Tansi lit it for me, striking the match with a flourish. “Tallulah Bankhead has nothing on me,” I said, waving the cigarette dramatically. They laughed, and Jake told me to keep the pack. “Please.”
Tansi placed her cigarettes back into her purse. “I love how Jimmy keeps his pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve of his T-shirt with the matches tucked under the cellophane. He forces you to look at that bicep, at the sleeve with the crumpled pack tucked there. Imagine Cary Grant or Charles Boyer doing that. It’s a whole new way of looking like a man…”
Jake lost his buoyant manner, turning sour. “He looks like a juvenile delinquent. A menace to society. And you two…” He stood up. “Women like you,” he looked at Tansi and not at me, “would let a man like that get away with…”
He started to say murder but stopped. He fled the room, the sentence unfinished.
Mercy and I walked into the Tick Tock Restaurant on North Cahuenga, where the sign in the window promised Home-Cooked Meals. “I have a feeling somebody wants to tell me something,” I’d told Mercy earlier. Polly had phoned, telling me the name of the restaurant and the time. Now I spotted the back of Tommy’s head, and for a second thought Jimmy had arrived: that sandy-colored hair, styled into a gentle pompadour, but, lamentably, the red jacket as well. The red badge of slavery, I thought. Hester Prynne wearing the symbol of sin-and, ironically, love. Tommy, suited up for servile fancy.
Polly, spotting us, waved. “Oh, I’m glad you came, Miss McCambridge.” She turned to Tommy. “This is a pleasure. An Academy Award winner. A Pulitzer Prize winner. Both at our table.” Tommy looked confused. “Awards, Tommy,” she said, irritated. “At the top of their profession.” Polly was dressed in a polka-dot dress with a lime-green sweater, buttoned at the collar. She looked cute-little-girl now, wandering from schoolyard hopscotch. She’d even styled her hair-not cinnamon tonight, but a sensible auburn-into a ponytail.
Of course, we talked about Lydia, and Tommy shared his inanity. “The wages of sin are death.” He spoke in a preachy voice, didactic as all hell. Polly frowned at him and delivered her own practiced line: “I always felt
sorry for her-she seemed to be always running into trouble.”
Mercy asked, “Were you surprised at her death?”
A pause. Then Polly spoke in a small voice. “I don’t think about people dying.”
We delayed ordering because Jimmy hadn’t arrived, and eventually Polly, glancing one last time at the doorway, drummed her index finger on the menu. “I don’t think he’s coming.” That made everyone nervous, as though Jimmy were the glue that held everything together. His absence meant vacant lots of stalled conversation.
“Just like him,” Polly griped.
“I sense that you asked me to dinner for a reason.” I waited.
Polly and Tommy looked at each other, and Tommy cleared his throat. “That last dinner we had, you know, well, I…we…think that we left you with some wrong impressions. I said some things…”
“Or,” I said, blithely, “you gave me some very clear impressions.”
“No, the whole thing with Carisa,” Tommy began.
Polly spoke over his words. “Miss Ferber, I know that Tommy slept with Carisa.”
“I told her,” Tommy said. “Detective Cotton told her my prints were there. We had a fight, and I confessed. I lied about going with Jimmy, there. I mean…you know…”
Polly leaned in, nodding. “It’s a sickness.” She sighed. “I sort of suspected it all along, you know.”
“Tell me, Tommy,” I began. “Did you go to Carisa’s apartment the day she was murdered? That night, in fact?”
“Why?” Tommy looked at Polly, who seemed frozen in place.
“You see, the super’s granddaughter said Jimmy was there twice that day, within minutes. Once, she sees him up close. A little later, riding on a bus, she sees him running out the door. Jimmy said he was there once. That second time was you, Tommy, right? Connie, the super’s granddaughter, caught a glimpse of someone that looked like Jimmy-red jacket, the look…”
He nodded, unhappy. “Yes.”
“You went then?” Polly blurted at Tommy.
Nervous, looking at Polly, he explained, “I lied to Detective Cotton. Told him I wasn’t there.”
“Why were you there?” Mercy asked.
“Well, she phoned me the day before. She was crazy, you know. She thought she could blackmail me. She was gonna tell Polly I slept with her. You know what she wanted from me? I mean, real crazy. She wanted me to talk to Jimmy-make him come to his senses. She wanted him to say he was the father of her baby. Real nutty. So I stupidly went there, you know, to plead my case.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Nothing. She came to the door, started yelling about Jimmy fighting with her, abusing her, calling her a whore, just minutes before, I guess, and if I thought I was gonna come and abuse her, well, I had another thing coming. She’d call the cops. I got real scared and ran away.”
“Connie thought you ran to a woman waiting for you in a car.”
That stopped him cold. He looked at Polly, nervous. “No,” he stammered. “I parked around the corner.”
“There was no woman?”
Tommy glanced at Polly again. “I just wanted to get away. I thought she’d call the cops. So I ran.”
“Did you see a woman?”
He shrugged. He was starting to sweat.
“So you lied to Detective Cotton?” Mercy said.
“Are you going to tell him I was there?”
“No,” I said. “You are.”
“But he’ll think I murdered her.”
In the awful silence that followed, Polly spoke up, her voice laced with venom. “Well, did you?”
Chapter 17
Irritable, suffering from the lack of a good night’s sleep, I wandered the Giant soundstage aimlessly, avoiding entreaties by Warner’s staff that I rest, read magazines, have coffee. When I spotted Detective Cotton, who was lolling near a stairwell, jotting something into a small loose-leaf notebook, I grunted, got his attention. I wasn’t happy with my own attitude, to be sure. Certainly the law had no obligation to fill me in on every myriad detail of the case; certainly not. I was a civilian, an East Coast interloper no less; and, frankly, a little too nosy sometimes. Yet Cotton had confided, or seemed to. He had proffered information and seemed to respect me as a confidante. No, I told myself, I feared I’d misread him. I’d thought I might like him. But now I was back to disliking the self-assured, smug warden of the law. He nodded at me, still intent on his jottings.
“Sir,” I said, drawing myself up to my imagined height. “Good morning.”
“Miss Ferber, a pleasant surprise.”
“I don’t know what’s pleasant about it.”
He tucked the pad into a side pocket of his sports jacket. “Something wrong?”
“Frankly, yes. You see, Detective Cotton, when we had that little tete-a-tete in my suite, I thought we’d established a rapport that suggested trust and-” I stopped. The look on his face was slack-jawed, almost comical, a little like that of an excessively loose-flapped hound dog.
“Madam, I did share with you. Honestly.”
“I sense that you mete out morsels of information to designated parties with the hope that one will spark some reaction.”
He laughed. “Miss Ferber, I’m not that complicated.”
“You deny it?”
He looked away, and then back at me. “All right, a little. It’s a technique an old-timer taught me. But must I share every idle speculation I have or every trial balloon I send up?”
“Yes.”
He laughed. “What are we really talking about here?”
I decided to shift the subject slightly. “I have information for you.”
“That’s why I’m here.” He waited.
“I know you’ve been told that James Dean made two appearances at Carisa’s apartment the evening she died, one just before the murder…”
“Or,” he interrupted, smiling, “during the murder.”
“I learned last night that you’ve been lied to. Tommy Dwyer, who, as you know, dresses like Jimmy, admitted to me that he made a visit to the apartment. It seems to me you would have garnered that information from him earlier.”
Cotton laughed. “Miss Ferber, I must tell you that I just assumed all along Tommy was lying to me when he said he wasn’t there. He’s a shifty, unreliable man, not too bright, and he doesn’t know how to lie persuasively. Given Connie Zuniga’s spotty eyewitness account, I figured it was him running out of the building.”
“And you did nothing about it?”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Well, no. But…”
“Look, it was just a matter of time before Tommy confessed. I’ve talked to him, and another investigator talked to him, and we were convinced the third go-round would crack that obvious lie.”
“But this is a bit of evidence that suggests Jimmy is telling the truth.”
“Yes, true. Jimmy was there earlier and not then. Tommy, maybe seven or so. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t return a little later-James Dean, that is.” He paused. “Thank you.”
I nodded. “And I take it you’re not convinced that Lydia Plummer’s death ends this case.”
“Not a bit. That’s a lot of baloney.”
“Baloney?”
He smiled. “You don’t like the word, Miss Ferber? I know everyone around here is ecstatic about her death. People in Jack Warner’s office-not the head man, yet-are placing a large blotted period at the end of the sentence. That’s why I’m here today. To remind everyone, including the killer who might be lurking here, that it ain’t over till it’s over. Let me say this. Lydia Plummer did not kill Carisa Krausse.”
“You can say that with conviction?”
He touched his gut. “I know it here. Street savvy. Years of flatfooting it on L.A. streets, even Skid Row where Carisa lived-a place you seem to like to visit occasionally. Lydia’s death is convenient, not only for the murderer, but for the studio. But it’s not convenient for me. Look, Miss Ferber, Lydia, in her last w
eeks, was unfocused, a shambles, a weeper, a spurned lover, a bumbling soul, strung out on drugs. When I interviewed her-twice, in fact-she talked of James Dean, their affair, and she had a lot of vicious things to say about Carisa, vitriol I’ve rarely heard about a victim, frankly. And salty, too, a fishwife’s harangue. It struck me as odd, that diatribe, because murderers usually try to temper their dislike of their victims to the police. She didn’t.”
“Really, sir,” I began, “she was an actress. Remember that.”
“Now ain’t that a beautiful epitaph for her. You know, she would have appreciated the line.” He stuffed his notebook into a side pocket. “Miss Ferber, the fact of the matter is my staff verified her somewhat lame alibi for that night. After she left the cocktail party. So, as of a couple days ago, I knew it was impossible that Lydia killed Carisa. She wasn’t in two places at one time.”
“Well…”
“I’m sorry. I suppose I should have phoned you.”
“There’s no need to be sarcastic, Detective.”
“Sometimes there is.” He smirked. “You know that.”
I actually smiled. “At times there is. So what happens next? You’re drawing in the wagons around Jimmy, no?”
He was ready to leave, but then paused, moved closer, an intimate’s closeness. “So far he’s the one with the motive.”
“Think of it, Detective Cotton. Why would James Dean risk everything he’s built up? He’s not a stupid boy, truly. Killing Carisa would draw attention to him. He’s the one who was the object of her madness, the target of her flood of letters-even to Jack Warner’s office. He knew that. So he kills her, and you come swooping down, waving the letters like battle pennants. He had nothing to gain and everything to lose by killing her.”
“Well, for one thing,” he said, leaning back against the wall, “your boy seems to believe he has a charmed life. I know all the stories about his manic car racing in the hills. I know all about his nightlife. He’s a risk taker. He lacks common sense. If Jack Warner wasn’t on my back, he’d be making bail right around now. But so be it.”