Hollywood Buzz

by Margit Liesche

  There was a bright side. The food must be excellent. Only one of the booths along the walls was vacant and the tables in the center of the room were all occupied as well.

  Noticing four men in a window booth staring at me, I blushed. I fidgeted under their gaze until a sudden spray of noise and smells diverted their attention. A diminutive Chinese woman, carrying a tray laden with dishes of steaming food, had pushed through the swinging doors along the wall down from where I stood. I caught a glimpse of kitchen chaos as the doors bounced to a close behind her.

  At first glance, the young woman looked ill-prepared to tote such an enormous load. Not only was she a wisp, but she wore a high-necked turquoise brocade dress that was floor length, form-fitting and, by all appearances, restrictive. A hip-high slit and well-toned arms partly made up for the tightness of her costume and slim frame.

  I watched the tray glide across the room as though on a conveyor belt to the window booth. The men clearly delighted in the young woman’s presence, and there was a lot of friendly bantering while dish after dish was served. As a sort of finale, the waitress slid a platterful of something into a large bowl of broth. Loud crackling and a burst of steam—like a basket of French fries hitting a vat of hot oil—followed.

  “Sizzling rice soup,” a voice whispered in my ear, as heavy hands pressed down on my shoulders.

  “Sam!” I exclaimed, whisking around, hand at my heart. “You scared the wits out of me.”

  Standing there, an impish grin on his face, silky spikes of dark umber hair veiling his forehead, Sam looked every inch the altar boy. And devilish prankster. Well, why not? He’d pulled one over on me. Appeared out of thin air, quiet as a mouse. I hadn’t even noticed the door opening. How had he done it?

  Truth was, I didn’t care. I was disappointed with the place, uncomfortable in my dress, and uninterested in playing childish games.

  Sam, correctly sensing I’d found nothing amusing about his sneak attack, adjusted his glasses and tried getting his mischievous grin under control. He wasn’t completely successful. The corners of his mouth remained curled upwards.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  The apology seemed insincere, his behavior odd, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I was being too peevish. The real point in coming to May Lee’s was to discuss remaking parts of the WASP film, right?

  I smiled weakly. “It’s okay. Rough afternoon. I’m a little jumpy.”

  Sam started to ask about what happened, but the young Chinese woman was descending upon us in a flurry of short, quick steps. Her head inclined slightly, she greeted us with “I May Lee,” reached under the counter that held the cash register, grabbed two menus, then gestured for us to follow. A ponytail so long it nearly reached her buttocks swept her back like a pendulum as she shuffled briskly ahead.

  Sam steered me by the elbow, the gesture grating on my self-reliant nature. The behavior seemed inbred in him; he’d directed me in this manner before. Well, not tonight. I wrenched my elbow from his grasp.

  May Lee led us toward the vacant booth. A few heads bobbed up as we navigated past.

  “I should have told you to dress casually,” Sam whispered.

  Yes, you should have.

  “But you look so lovely in purple, I’m glad I didn’t.”

  Hmmm. “Thank you,” I said coolly as we slid into the booth.

  “Two beers and pot stickers,” Sam said to May Lee, tucking in opposite me.

  I caught Sam’s eye. “Have you been here before?”

  “No. I live nearby but I’m not comfortable…”

  His appearance projected discomfort, indeed. Hunched forward on the table, arms crossed, brow furrowed, he sat mute, totally at a loss for the right words to complete the sentence.

  Geez. The question hadn’t seemed complicated to me.

  “What were you saying about being uncomfortable?”

  “Uh…It’s been a while since I’ve eaten at a Chinese restaurant. I mean, at any restaurant. Uh, I don’t like to eat out alone.”

  Big deal. Who did? Solo restaurant stints were part of the routine for a ferry pilot constantly on the go, but my preference was otherwise. My sister pilots felt the same. But curiously I’d always associated the quirk with women.

  Sam changed the subject. “You had a bad afternoon. What happened?”

  I spent a moment considering the possible replies. How about: Roland Novara won’t listen to me because I’m a woman. Or: Frankie’s plane was sabotaged and I don’t know what’s being done to find the person who did it, nor can I ask anyone about it. Maybe: I found a hush-hush memo and enemy film stashed in the house where I’m staying.

  Finally, I turned to the only subject I felt free to talk about.

  “They’re saying now that Derrick Brody was murdered.” I sighed heavily. “To think we were with him just hours before it happened. He seemed like a decent man. Who would do such a thing? I don’t believe for a moment it was Russell Chalmers, do you?”

  Sam’s elbows slid from the table and he sat up straight. “Chalmers? Where’d you hear that? The papers said foul play, but I didn’t read anything about him.”

  I’d forgotten that the news of Chalmers being brought in for questioning wasn’t public knowledge yet. Gus had told me about it. Since he hadn’t asked me to keep the information secret, I went ahead and shared the scuttlebutt about investigators on the scene making an incriminating discovery.

  Sam listened attentively, keeping his gaze on me, but he seemed to be adjusting his socks while I talked. He was in that position—chin jutted forward over the tabletop, hands fumbling somewhere near the floor—when our appetizer and drinks appeared.

  While May Lee arranged the glasses and two bottles of beer on top of the table, I leaned back and took a discreet look underneath. Sam had not been adjusting his socks. He was scratching his legs. Had something bit him? Did he have a rash? He’d been sick.

  Sam, having satisfied his itch, sat up and took a long pull of beer, then tugged the bottle from his mouth with a jerk and, holding it out mid-air, waited for a toast.

  I decided to ignore the rude behavior, attributing the sudden urge to scratch, as well as the parched mouth, to a case of jitters over our date. I took my sweet time, however, pouring my beer into my glass. Bad manners were bad manners. A grown man ought to have a better grip.

  “To Brody,” we said simultaneously.

  Sam took another long swallow, while I took a sip. Beer wasn’t a favorite, but it was either that or tea—an even less festive choice.

  Sam obviously was satisfied. At the moment he was eying the bottom of his nearly drained bottle.

  May Lee returned. “Take you order?”

  Sam did the honors. He requested several dishes. It might have been a while since Sam had eaten at a Chinese restaurant, but he hadn’t lost his familiarity with favored dishes.

  Sam used chopsticks to dip a pot sticker into the soy sauce, quite a feat given its slippery nature. He held the dumpling in a chopsticks vise midway to his mouth as he brought up his visit to the hospital and my mention that Frankie had murmured a few sounds.

  “What’d she say?”

  Jabbing one of the appetizers with my fork, I slid it around in the soy sauce pool on my plate. “The sounds were really garbled, more a soft moaning, than anything. She seemed to be trying to form words, but nothing made sense. I wonder…Do you suppose if I could repeat the sounds to her, they might bring her back again?”

  The idea excited me. I looked at Sam, but he was staring at the wall behind me. His mind was elsewhere.

  “Sam?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he pushed his plate away and buried his face in his hands.

  After a decent interval, I cleared my throat.

  Sam pulled his hands away. “Wha…Oh, sorry. I was remembering the accident.”

  I’d forgotten he talked with Frankie shortly before the accident. Could he have seen something? Someo
ne? With a little prompting, might what he saw come back?

  I sipped my beer. “I heard maybe it wasn’t an accident. Did you notice anything unusual? Was Frankie worried about anything? It’s important you try to remember. Someone could have tampered with her plane.”

  Sam scratched the crook of his arm. “Who-o-o told you?”

  “No one told me,” I answered quickly. “It’s a rumor I heard.”

  “I didn’t know Frankie would be hur—hurr- hurt.” Sam’s eyes welled up and I reached across the table to pat his arm, stop the nervous scratching. Sam was genuinely broken up about Frankie. Was there more to their relationship than friendship?

  He’d stopped scratching. I rubbed his forearm. “It’s okay. It was just something I heard. Scuttlebutt.”

  Our main courses, including Sam’s beer, were delivered. I pulled back my hand. Sam swigged from the fresh bottle.

  The array of food was unlike anything I’d seen or smelled before. There were paper-thin pancakes, sauces, scallions, peanuts, peas, mushrooms and bamboo shoots. Everything but the kitchen sink, though one could speculate some items had backed up through a drain somewhere, by the look of them.

  Sam loaded his plate with a spoonful of this and a spoonful of that, while I approached with caution. The rice looked safe so I scooped a hefty portion from the bowl only to discover it was so sticky I had to knock the clump free with a discreet shove of my finger. To top it, I spooned on a small serving of the chicken, peanut, and pea dish.

  Sam clamped a scallop with his chopsticks, but didn’t lift it off his plate. “In our meeting with Novara you didn’t seem so keen on reshooting the target towing sequence. Is that why? You’re afraid what happened to Frankie might happen to you?”

  For a millisecond I considered telling him the truth. But, much as I wanted Sam to understand the risk I was up against, I couldn’t divulge the dark secret Max had entrusted to me. Still, I didn’t want him to think I was a sissy or not capable of performing the maneuver.

  “Miss Cochran still hasn’t given her blessing.”

  Sam looked disappointed.

  My ego got the best of me. “She’s bound to say yes. Meantime, we can shoot the ferrying sequence. I was approved to fly the P-51.”

  The grand announcement was out, now I was committed. I could hope the saboteur would be caught before the time slot I’d reserved for showing off the P-51. I glanced at my watch: approximately forty hours from now.

  Sam snapped to life. “Great! When?”

  The food on the table was all but forgotten as I filled him in on the arrangements that had been made for Saturday at March Field. A current of excitement ran between us as we automatically began plotting out the details of how the segment should unfold for the shoot. A screenplay, Sam informed me as we jotted down notes and ideas on a spare paper placemat, was actually a series of directives—a one-of-a-kind manual for the director and actors to follow as they transposed the script to the screen.

  A boon to my apprenticeship, there was a format to follow. An added bonus—the structure wasn’t as foreign as I would have expected. I’d used a similar process in composing brochures at Midland.

  After sketching the whole thing out in more detail on yet another fresh mat—including rough scene description, music and voice-over direction—we relaxed against our respective benches, satisfied we’d covered most of the particulars.

  “Congratulations are in order.” Sam tipped his bottle in my direction. “We just completed writing our first scene together.”

  The milestone had an interesting ring. We chinked glass to bottle, then I took a sip of beer as Sam took another serious slug.

  Novara had charged us with organizing “the works,” so, though not ordinarily his duty, Sam promised that first thing in the morning he’d contact the person responsible for getting a film crew scheduled for the shoot. For my part, I agreed to finalize arrangements with the March Field staff.

  Sam had a trace of a smile on his lips and a look of admiration in his eyes. “You’re quite a woman, Pucci. I’m impressed.”

  I felt the blood rush to my cheeks under his gaze. Not sure how to respond to the compliment, but hoping for more, I lowered my eyes, fixing them on the peas and peanuts dotting the plate before me.

  “I’m serious,” he added softly. “You chased after that soldier who dropped the tubing from the catwalk.” He shook his head, smiling. “That was something. Then you finagled an advanced fighter for this film. Not many men could have pulled that off. You’re attractive, smart, capable…Much more so than I would have expected.”

  The attention and intensity of his gaze were getting to me. I squirmed. The moment I’d hoped for earlier this evening was here, but now I was unsure about encouraging his advances. Temporizing, I asked Sam to tell me about his childhood. He signaled May Lee for another beer—I would have declined the offer if he’d thought to ask me—then began his story.

  Sam, like me, was an only child. His father died when he was a boy, and his mother, a seamstress, also deceased as of a year ago, had to work long hours to support the two of them. Her profession frequently brought her to the movie studios where she created and fitted costumes for the stars. As there was no one to keep an eye on Sam when he wasn’t in school, many times she brought him along. To amuse himself while she sewed, he read or made up stories and wrote them down.

  In high school, Sam won an academic scholarship to the University of California, Los Angeles campus, where he decided to be a writer. Since he’d made a number of friends at the studios where his mother worked, he was able to get a research job at MGM that eventually led to writing screenplays. It was a way to make a living doing what he loved, until he could afford to write at “a more literary level.”

  Sam spoke freely about the past—the latest beer may have helped—and I enjoyed listening. We shared some common experiences and interests conceived from our lonely childhoods and a love of reading and writing. I felt some of my ambivalence give way.

  “Enough about me,” Sam said turning his attention back to the dishes on the table. “Time for you to learn how to put together a serving of Musée Pork.”

  I wasn’t hungry anymore and, of the platters of food on the table, that dish was the least appetizing of the lot. A gruesome mound of unidentifiable items, it contained numerous spindly things Sam said were mushrooms, but which I was convinced were really slimy slugs and tiny octopi.

  Still, like the good soldier I was trying hard to be, I went along, first laying a pancake on my plate, then smearing it with dark plum sauce, then adding a sprinkling of scallions and, finally, scooping on a small pile of the jumbled dish. The idea was to flip in the two sides, tuck the ends to the center, and make a kind of burrito of the whole mess. Wouldn’t you know! My first bite dribbled and a splash of plum sauce landed on the bodice of Della’s dress. Not only that, the innards of my “meal pod” tasted cold, oniony and oily.

  Sam, contrite over the stain on my bosom and my now downcast spirit, offered to pay for cleaning the dress.

  “The color blends,” I said graciously. But my mood was definitely down. In a moment of pique, I decided to test Sam again. “Say, do you like to fly? I heard Frankie took someone up with her the day before she crashed. The someone was likely from your film crew. Was it you?”

  Behind the steel rims, the puppy dog eyes blinked. “Nooo…”

  May Lee chose that moment to plop several cartons for leftovers on the table. I wasn’t the least bit interested in lugging even one of them home.

  “Dessert?” May Lee queried.

  Sam turned to me. “We still need to come up with a plan for incorporating those other ideas, right?”

  He was talking about the scenarios I’d proposed to replace the frivolous scenes that made up a good portion of the current version of Sky Belles. Testimonials, interviews, charts of facts and figures depicting the contributions we’d made to the war effort. Brody had agreed to the ideas in princ
iple, but it was our responsibility to see that they were carried out. No small task. Each concept needed to be treated individually. That meant—while we’d completed a detailed outline for the ferrying segment—we still needed to hammer out similar summaries for each of the other proposed scenes.

  Sam smiled and added, “How about going to my place for dessert and at least getting started?”

  I checked my watch. It wasn’t that late and I wanted to have a rough shooting script and schedule in front of Novara. Besides, my gut was telling me Sam knew more about what happened to Frankie than he was letting on. Strike while the iron is hot.

  “Great, let’s do it.”

  Holding out a wad of cash, Sam said, “May Lee, would you please pack up a box of –”

  Not fathoming a word that followed, I watched May Lee.

  After she left, Sam said, “Guess I haven’t been such a good dinner companion, have I?”

  His eyes were doleful, his hair disheveled, and, for some inexplicable reason of the heart, my attitude toward him softened. Maybe it had to do with “the something vital” he might know about Frankie.

  I shrugged. “Guess we’re both carrying around some heavy baggage at the moment.”

  Sam looked at me the way people look at you when you say something they didn’t think you could possibly know. Then his face brightened. “Let’s get going.”

  ***

  Sam lived only a few minutes from May Lee’s in a neighborhood that was neat and quiet. Many of the modest bungalows we passed driving along the tree-lined streets were already dark. In others, pulled shades reflected a coppery glow of silhouettes of family life. At Sam’s instruction, I pulled the Packard to the curb.

  The carry-out boxes had been propped between us on the drive over. I eyeballed the seat for seepage as we divvied them up for transport inside. It was a relief to find none.

  The top was up and the smells of whatever we’d eaten were so pungent they’d permeated the car’s interior. I left the driver’s side window open a crack. I cringed thinking what the stuff must be doing to our insides.