Another City Not My Own

by Dominick Dunne

  * * *

  “Gus, there’s a guy here from the Associated Press who wants to interview you. He says Linda Deutsch of the AP told him to call you. There’s also a reporter from the New York Post, Brendan Bourne, and there’s someone from the Tucson paper.”

  “Good God,” said Gus.

  “All this press is because of you, you know that, don’t you?” said Grafton, with a slight tone of accusation in his voice.

  “This is the second time you’ve said that to me, Grafton, and I don’t think it’s fair,” said Gus. “Don’t turn on me now, just because we’re all tense and upset.”

  “I don’t see why you have to talk to these reporters,” said Grafton. “We didn’t ask them to come here.”

  “It’s not because of me that this has become a news event,” said Gus. “It’s because I’ve become a noticeable figure at the O. J. Simpson murder trial that they’re making Zander’s disappearance a news event. Otherwise, it would have made the local paper in Nogales and nothing more.”

  “It’s on CNN every hour on the hour,” said Sigrid.

  “I know. Mario, at the Chateau Marmont, just told me on the telephone that Mart Crowley sent a fax from Tuscany. He read about it in the Paris International Herald Tribune,” said Gus. “I have to talk to these reporters.”

  “Why?” asked Grafton. “You don’t have to talk to them.”

  “Yes, I do,” replied Gus. “I’m in the same business they are. I do what they do for a living. Ask questions of people in distress. I can’t pull a ‘No Comment’ act on these guys.”

  “A guy who saw you on television last night called the television station,” said Chief Lopez. “He says he saw your son late Saturday afternoon on the Patagonia Trail of the Santa Rita mountain range. He said he didn’t have any water. He said he was looking for a stream. This man told him where to go. He didn’t have a map. But now we can start looking for the car. We have pinpointed on the map exactly where the man met up with Zander. The car will have to be within walking distance of that. There are two helicopters. What they do in search cases like this is paint the missing person’s name on the bottom of the helicopter. Do you want it to say Zander or Alexander?”

  There were volunteers from two counties, K-9 patrols, police, a sheriff, helicopters, and two planes, one of them from the television show Entertainment Tonight, joining in the search. The helplessness of sitting around waiting for news was unnerving for Gus. At the end of day four, he gave up on the possibility of a rescue.

  “I don’t see how he could possibly be alive,” he said to Grafton.

  “No, no, he’s alive,” said Grafton. “Believe me, Dad, I know my brother. He’s going to show up.”

  “No food, no water, the guy on the mountain said,” replied Gus.

  “I just have a feeling he’s going to reappear. We can’t give up,” said Grafton.

  “No, you’re right,” said Gus. “I’m not giving up, but I’m feeling very pessimistic.”

  Then came the rains. Torrents of water.

  “They’ve called off the search. They’ve brought everyone back down,” said Sigrid. “It was just on the news.”

  “Dear God,” said Gus. “I have to tell your mom, Grafton. It’s not fair for her not to know, especially when she finds out this has been going on for five days.”

  “What are you going to say?” asked Grafton.

  “I don’t know.”

  Peach’s house, under the supervision of Zander, had been built to the specifications of an invalid. The master suite, from which Peach rarely ventured, could have been in a big city hospital, so accommodating was it to the needs of a helpless person. No amount of yellow chintz on bed and chair coverings or family photographs in silver frames could disguise its medical purpose. At the bottom of her bed was a giant television set that was almost never turned off. The nurses who sat with her twenty-four hours a day switched channels each time a newsbreak came on, so Zander’s disappearance was still unknown to her, or so they thought.

  Gus, tentative, sat on the side of Peach’s bed, as he often did when he came into her room to speak to her. He knew she liked to hear about the trial, which she watched religiously. For a while he watched with her. His reporter friends from the courtroom, Shoreen Maghame and Harvey Levin, called him each night to fill him in on what had gone on that day.

  “That’s Marta Weller, with the red hair, from Channel Five in Los Angeles,” said Gus to Peach. “I’m surprised you get that here in Nogales. She’s the anchorperson, and she keeps the commentary going all day. I’ve been on quite a few times with her. During breaks, Ron Olson, who’s that reporter right there holding the microphone, grabs you and puts you on to tell what’s just happened in the courtroom, and then Marta asks questions. Ron’s camera setup is right outside the media room on the eleventh floor of the Criminal Courts Building. Right after I saw the autopsy photographs of Nicole and Ron, which made me feel faint they were so terrible, Ron grabbed me and I went on the air with him and Marta. Maybe you saw me, if this is the channel you watch; I was still white-faced from the faint feeling. Nothing had prepared me for the savagery of those murders. You can’t even imagine what a slit throat really looks like. That afternoon back in court, I couldn’t look at O. J. after seeing those pictures, Peach. I actually hated him. Only a monster could kill people that way. I still think he had to have been on drugs to have done it. Drugs are the dirty little secret of this case, but nobody wants to talk about drugs at the trial. The thing that upset me the most, looking at the pictures, was that Nicole’s eyes were open, and so were Ron’s, so they knew who it was who was killing them. In the novel I’m writing on the case, I’m going to go inside the heads of both Nicole and Ron at that final moment and tell the last thoughts of their lives.… Do you know who’s at the trial? Judge Katz, or former Judge Katz, as they call him on Larry King. He’s become a reporter for the Malibu Times, and he goes on TV every five minutes, doing legal analysis. Do you remember at our trial when he called the photographer from People magazine into chambers and asked him which pair of glasses made his eyes show up better in the pictures? I don’t speak to him. I almost walked off Larry King Live one night when I found out he was going to be on it, too. Harvey Levin told me Katz is writing a book about his career on the bench. Apparently there’s a section about our trial, explaining why he refused to allow that other woman to testify, whom Lefty beat up so terribly. I don’t give a flying fuck what he has to say on the subject. I believe if a man who beats women kills a woman, the jury ought to hear about his past history of abuse against women. Listen, Peach, there’s something I have to tell you. I’ll, uh, wait until the nurse leaves the room. Oh, do you know who else I saw? Not at the trial but in the courthouse. Marv Pink, Lefty Flynn’s lawyer. Remember him? As if we’d ever forget. Do you remember that day in court when he said to Katz, ‘Your Honor, Zander Bailey has tears in his eyes,’ as if it were an evil thing to be grieving for his sister, and they kicked Zander out of the courtroom? I didn’t recognize him at first. He’s stopped wearing that thirty-five-dollar rug he used to wear. Leslie Abramson, who’s a friend of his, once told me, when we were still speaking, that I’d hurt his feelings when I wrote that his toupee looked like a veal chop pasted to the top of his head. Apparently Pink was under the impression everyone thought the rug was his real hair. They all think that, guys who wear rugs. Do you remember when you and I used to count toupees at all those Industry dinners we had to go to at the Beverly Hilton Hotel? The Directors Guild Dinner always had the most. I once suggested to Graydon Carter an article called ‘The Top Ten Toupees in Tinseltown,’ but he said it sounded cheap. The only rug that ever fooled me was Lyle Menendez’s.… Oh, speaking of rugs, I saw Sinatra recently at Kirk and Anne Douglas’s. Frank’s stopped wearing his rug. He pretends he doesn’t see me, and I do the same. Very subtle. No one notices. I never had it in me to forgive him, because he never had it in him to apologize to you for the way he spoke to you at Swifty and Mary Lazar’s party i
n the upstairs room at the Bistro. It was me he disliked, not you.”

  But Gus was only half-involved with what he was saying, and Peach was only half-involved in listening. Their minds were on other things.

  “See that guy talking to Marta and Ron? With the neck brace? That’s Joe Bosco. He broke his neck diving into Joe McGinniss’s swimming pool. He’s writing a book on the case. So’s Joe McGinniss. Joe rented Evie and Leslie Bricusse’s house on Tower Road while he’s here for the trial. He gives great media parties in that house. We’ve all been together so long, we’ve gotten very close. Joe’s house is the only place we ever get to unwind. One of his parties ended up on Page Six of the New York Post, because David Margolick from the New York Times and Michelle Caruso of the New York Daily News had a romantic moment in the pool. You and I went to a party in that house once—you probably don’t even remember—just before we broke up, for Joan Collins and Tony Newley, when they were married. By the way, their son, Sacha, wants to paint my portrait. He’s pretty good. He already painted Gore Vidal and Billy Wilder. I told him I couldn’t do it until after the trial’s over.… You have no idea how much mail I have started to receive. Stacks of it. Like movie stars get. The magazine forwards it out to me every week. That’s how strongly people feel about this case. I couldn’t ever possibly answer all of it. But I also get quite a bit of hate mail. I never had that before. I seem to enrage some people when I talk about Simpson’s guilt in all my ‘Letters.’ Some of it’s sort of scary. A lady from Warren, Ohio, wrote that she wished I was lying in a pool of blood, like Nicole and Ron. That makes you feel great to read. I’ve become very close to the Goldmans, and I write about Kim and Fred and Patti a lot. These hate letters, especially the anonymous ones, are virulently anti-Semitic. They say things like ‘How do you like sitting next to those big-nosed Goldmans?’ There’s another lady, in Portland, Maine, who wrote me that I deserve every tragedy that’s happened to us in this family. She was talking about Becky, of course. Imagine writing that. I have this urge to answer the hate mail, but everyone tells me I’d just be asking for trouble if I do. These people take it as encouragement, and the next thing you know, they’d be showing up on my doorstep in Prud’homme with a gun in their hands.… You know I wasn’t bragging about the fan mail, don’t you? It’s the sort of thing I have to discuss with someone, and you’ve known me the longest. It’s a new experience for me, being recognized. People who read Vanity Fair were aware of me, and people who read my books. My lectures at clubs and hotel ballrooms always sell out, but I was never a name or a face to the people you pass on the street or see at the supermarket. Now I am. It’s all over the television. I have a face now that people associate with O. J. Simpson. They see me, and O. J. Simpson jumps into their mind, and they want to talk about him. The stewardess on the plane flying over here from Los Angeles literally knelt by my side the whole flight so she could tell me her theory of what happened that night. She said O. J. went to Bundy to cut the tires of Nicole’s car, because she hadn’t saved him a seat at Sydney’s recital, et cetera, et cetera. If you knew how many theories about what happened that night at Bundy I’ve listened to in checkout lines and at gas stations. People I see at Beverly Hills parties give me messages to give to Marcia Clark, like Bud Yorkin, who told me the other night at Tita Cahn’s, ‘Tell Marcia to introduce the freeway chase, for God sake.’ By the way, Bud’s second wife, Cynthia, was in Becky’s acting class. They have tiny little kids, and Bud’s my age. Women give me letters to Marcia offering her clothes to wear at the trial. Every butler in town knows me. So does every maître d’. They all ask me questions about O. J. ‘Do you think he’s going to walk?’ is the most frequent. That’s what everyone seems to think is going to happen. Not me. I still think it’s going to be a hung jury. I’m counting on juror number three in the front row, a sixty-year-old blond woman, to hang the jury. People want to know if Marcia Clark and Chris Darden are having an affair. I don’t know if they are or not, and I wouldn’t tell if I did know. I was up in their office with them recently, after the trial, after everyone was gone. Just the three of us. I was telling them something I’d heard. Marcia keeps a bottle of scotch in her desk drawer. She knocked back a few straight shots. Chris had a beer. They acted cozy with each other. They’ve become very close. It’s only natural when you spend that many hours a day together, working in tandem, passionately believing in the same thing, as they do, that O. J. killed these people. It’s like when you’re on location for a movie. The two leads usually fall in love, at least for the length of the picture. Like Loretta Young and Clark Gable. Ali McGraw and Steve McQueen. On and on. And when the picture’s over, so’s the romance. I don’t think it’s any more than that, and it may not even be that, for all I know, but I think so. The people all want to know why Marcia doesn’t use the freeway chase. They tell me, as if I didn’t already know it, that ninety-five million people watched the freeway chase. Oh, here’s a scoop for you that you don’t know. My mole on the defense team tells me O. J. failed a lie-detector test with a minus twenty-four the day after the murders. Shapiro and Kardashian set that up. I make sure to repeat it everywhere I go. I told it at Betsy Bloomingdale’s the other night. She seems to have forgiven me for the book. She told me she liked Marcia Clark better with the curls than the Diane Sawyer look. A girl I met at Paul Jasmin’s birthday party told me she’d once been in a threeway with O. J. and Paul Sabara. She gave me details, but I won’t go into that. You never shared my interest in that sort of information, Peach. See? I got you to smile. I went to Eva Gabor’s funeral, and the usher who walked me up the aisle asked me questions about O. J. all the way, until he put me in the same seat with Nancy Reagan and Merv Griffin, a row behind Zsa Zsa and Magda. Do you remember that time we went to one of Zsa Zsa’s weddings? When she married that friend of your father’s, Josh Congdon? I wish you could have seen them, Peach. They looked wonderful, like something out of Colette. On the altar, there was this huge photo blowup of Eva, very glamorous, in color. The frame was made out of pink roses. I hadn’t been to Mass for quite some time, so I got right back into Catholic action and was doing all the sits and stands and kneels in the right places. During one of the kneels, Nancy Reagan leaned over and whispered to me, ‘Gus, promise me at my funeral you won’t let them put a photo blowup of me on the altar.’ Naturally, I collapsed with laughter just as the consecration bell was ringing.… You know, Peach, it was the first time I’d been in Good Shepherd Church since Becky’s funeral. It brought that whole day back to me. Do you remember when the chauffeur opened the door of the limousine outside the church the confetti from a wedding just before our funeral blew into the door? And all those cameramen surrounding you as the boys were getting you into your wheelchair? Okay, I won’t talk about it. I know you don’t like to talk about it. I’ve been going to the cemetery every Saturday since the trial started. I always leave a yellow rose. I went there five nights ago, on my way to give a lecture for Sherry Lansing’s charity at the Beverly Wilshire, and I said, ‘Becky, help Zander.’ Listen, Peach, this is what I’ve been leading up to. Zander’s missing. I know it’s painful even to think about, but it would be wrong for you not to know. You must have known something was going on here. You must have wondered what I’m doing here in Nogales in the middle of the trial of the century, and what Grafton’s doing here in the middle of casting his movie. The house has been full of people for days, although no one comes back to this part where you are. Food’s being delivered. Flowers are being delivered. There’s a bouquet for you from Elizabeth Taylor that’s nearly as big as your bed. The phones never stop ringing. The nurses have turned off the phones here in your room so you can’t hear. The nurses turn off the news when it comes on, so you won’t know. Sigrid is manning one phone line and Chata the other. He went off on an afternoon hike five days ago, and he hasn’t come back. Calls are coming in from everywhere. All over the world, as a matter of fact. It’s on CNN every half hour, apparently. I know you always said I was a terrible name-drop
per when we were married, and I can anticipate that Miss Porter’s School haughty look you used to get on your face when I’d say something crass like, ‘Becky’s godmother is Gary Cooper’s daughter,’ but name-drop or not, King Hussein and Queen Noor sent us a fax from Amman, saying they were praying for Zander. Everyone who calls or writes or faxes says that they’re praying. There are crews from all the Tucson stations outside. Listen to this, if you would like to hear something utterly improbable. Entertainment Tonight has sent a plane to join in the search for Zander in the mountains. We were going to snub them, but they have the best plane and the best pilot who can fly the lowest over the mountains, so we accepted their generosity. I was in the plane a couple of days ago with Charlie Wessler. Charlie located Zander’s car from their plane, so the search parties could start fanning out from there. It was such an odd feeling sitting in that plane with a cameraman holding a video camera pointed right at my face in case a discovery was made out the window. They painted Zander’s name on the bottom of the helicopters, so if he’s hurt and lying somewhere, he can look up and see his name and know that people are looking. I went to McDonald’s and bought seventy-five hamburgers to take up to the battle station halfway up the mountain. Yesterday, when I was in the helicopter, Judge Ito called me from the trial. He said everyone was praying. I was so touched by that. He’s been very kind to me on several occasions, and I feel guilty when I criticize him. Gil Garcetti called to see if there was anything his department could do. He’s the D.A. in L.A. Marcia Clark called. Oh, and Fred and Patti Goldman called. Can you imagine, with what they’re going through, that they took the time to call? They’re great people. You see, it’s all because of O. J. that there’s all this media hype. The other day Grafton practically turned on me and said, ‘You know, this is all your fault,’ meaning all the reporters and cameramen. I tried to explain to him that it’s not Gus Bailey who’s making this newsworthy. It’s Gus Bailey of the O. J. Simpson trial. O. J.’s the key here. This new friend of mine, Robin Clark of the Philadelphia Inquirer, was killed on Friday in a car wreck on the Pacific Coast Highway, and Zander went missing the very next day, so they’re working up some kind of O. J. jinx story, I suppose. Nancy Reagan called. She sent you her love. She’s praying. Everyone’s praying. Ronnie’s in terrible shape, everyone says, but I never talk to her about that. Some of Zander’s friends from school have arrived to join in the search. A lot of your L.A. friends have called. Connie Wald. Ann Petroni. Jill Cartter.… Gordon Miller called from Santa Fe. Oh, listen, Peach, when you dozed off, Tita Cahn told me David Begelman committed suicide at the Century Plaza Towers the same day Zander was reported missing. Shot himself. I called Annabelle. I don’t think you knew Annabelle. The wife you knew was Gladyce. She died. David always married nice ladies. Annabelle said, ‘I’m praying for you, Gus,’ and I said, ‘I’m praying for you, Annabelle.’ I had dinner with David and Annabelle a couple of Sundays ago at Matteo’s in Westwood. He wanted to talk about the O. J. trial. I told him that he was responsible for my second career as a crime reporter. He seemed puzzled at first. Then I told him that when I was down and out I helped the two investigative reporters from the Washington Post break the story of his forging that check with Cliff Robertson’s name. David was so perverse that he roared with laughter when I told him. I know I’m talking non-stop, Peach. I know I’m getting on your nerves. I can’t bring myself to face the reality that Zander might be gone. If I keep talking, I can put it on the back burner for a few paragraphs at least. I drove by the old house on Walden Drive the other day. The new people, whoever they are, have kept it up nicely. They’re not the same ones you sold it to. They sold it to whoever has it now. They took out the rose garden in the front. They moved the swimming pool from where we had it. Do you remember how we loved that house? So much happened there. There were some great parties in that house. I wish you could remember some of the good times we had and not just the bummers. Like Kate and Ivan’s wedding. And the black-and-white ball. Can you remember all the talk that party caused? Can you believe we ever gave that black-and-white ball? Two orchestras. We must have been out of our minds to have given a party like that. I can’t believe we ever lived like that. Do you remember? We emptied the house and had all the furniture put in storage! Do I see just the beginning of a smile on your lips?”