Double Feature

by Donald E. Westlake

  A receptionist answered. When I asked for Byron Cartwright she put me through to a secretary, who said, “Who’s calling, please?”

  “Ordo Tupikos.”

  “And the subject, Mr. Tupikos?”

  “Dawn Devayne.”

  “One moment, please.”

  I waited a while, and then she came back and said, “Mr. Tupikos, could you tell me who you’re with?”

  “With? I’m sorry, I…”

  “Which firm.”

  “Oh. I’m not with any firm, I’m in the Navy.”

  “In the Navy.”

  “Yes. I used to be—” But she’d gone away again. Another wait, and then she was back. “Mr. Tupikos, is this official Navy business?”

  “No,” I said. “I used to be married to Dawn Devayne.”

  There was a little silence, and then she said, “Married?”

  “Yes. In San Diego.”

  “One moment, please.”

  This was a longer wait, and when she came back she said, “Mr. Tupikos, is this a legal matter?”

  “No, I just want to see Estelle again.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Dawn Devayne. She was named Estelle when I married her.”

  A male voice suddenly said, “All right, Donna, I’ll take it.”

  “Yes, sir,” and there was a click.

  The male voice said, “You’re Ordo Tupikos?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. It wasn’t sensible to call him “sir,” but the girl had just done it, and in any event he had an authoritative officer-like sound in his voice, and it just slipped out.

  He said, “I suppose you can prove your identity.”

  That surprised me. “Of course,” I said. “I still look the same.” I still look the same.

  “And what is it you want?”

  “To see Estelle. Dawn. Miss Devayne.”

  “You told my secretary you were with the Navy.”

  “I’m in the Navy.”

  “You’re due to retire pretty soon, aren’t you?”

  “Two years,” I said.

  “Let me be blunt, Mr. Tupikos,” he said. “Are you looking for money?”

  “Money?” I couldn’t think what he was talking about. (Later, going over it in my mind, I realized what he’d been afraid of, but just at that moment I was bewildered.) “Money for what?” I asked him.

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he said, “Then why show up like this, after all these years?”

  “There was something in a magazine. A friend showed it to me.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, it surprised me, that’s all.”

  “What surprised you?”

  “About Estelle turning into Dawn Devayne.”

  There was a very short silence. But it wasn’t an ordinary empty silence, it was a kind of slammed-shut silence, a startled silence. Then he said, “You mean you didn’t know? You just found out?”

  “It was some surprise,” I said.

  He gave out with a long laugh, turning his head away from the phone so it wouldn’t hurt my ears. But I could still hear it. Then he said, “God damn, Mr. Tupikos, that’s a new one.”

  I had nothing to say to that.

  “All right,” he said. “Where are you?”

  I told him the name of the motel.

  “I’ll get back to you,” he said. “Some time today.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  The phone booth was out in front of the motel, and I had to go back through the office to get to the inner courtyard and my room. When I walked into the office the day clerk motioned to me. “Come here.” His expression now portrayed pride.

  I went over and he handed me a large black-and-white photograph; what they call a glossy. The blacks in it were very dark and solid, which made it a little bit hard to make out what was going on, but the picture seemed to have been taken in a parking garage. Two people were in the foreground. I couldn’t swear to it, but it looked as though Ernest Borgnine was strangling the day clerk. “Whadaya think of that?”

  I didn’t know what I thought of it. But when people hand you a picture—their wife, their girlfriend, their children, their dog, their new house, their boat, their garden—what you say is very nice. I handed the picture back. “Very nice,” I said.

  * * *

  Everybody knows about the movie stars’ names being embedded in the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard, but it’s always strange when you see it. There are the squares of pavement, and on every square is a gold outline of a five-pointed star, and in every other star there is the name of a movie star. Every year, fewer of those names mean anything. The idea of the names is immortality, but what they’re really about is death.

  I took a walk for a while after talking to Byron Cartwright, and I walked along two or three blocks of Hollywood Boulevard with some family group behind me that had a child with a loud piercing voice, and the child kept wanting to know who people were:

  “Daddy, who’s Vilma Banky?”

  “Daddy, who’s Charles Farrell?”

  “Daddy, who’s Dolores Costello?”

  “Daddy, who’s Conrad Nagel?”

  The father’s answers were never loud enough for me to hear, but what could he have said? “She was a movie star.” “He used to be in silent movies, a long time ago.” Or maybe, “I don’t know. Emil Jannings? I don’t know.”

  I didn’t look back, so I have no idea what the family looked like, or even if the child was a boy or a girl, but pretty soon I hated listening to them, so I turned in at a fast-food place to have a hamburger and onion rings and a Coke. I sat at one of the red formica tables to eat, and at the table across the plastic partition from me was another family—father, mother, son, daughter—and the daughter was saying, “Why did they put those names there anyway?”

  “Just to be nice,” the mother said.

  The son said, “Because they’re buried there.”

  The daughter stared at him, not knowing if that was true or not. Then she said, “They are not!”

  “Sure they are,” the son said. “They bury them standing up, so they can all fit. And they all wear the clothes from their most famous movie. Like their cowboy hats and the long gowns and their Civil War Army uniforms.”

  The father, chuckling, said, “And their white telephones?”

  The son gave his father a hesitant smile and a headshake, saying, “I don’t get it.”

  “That’s okay,” the father said. He grinned and ruffled the son’s hair, but I could see he was irritated. He was older, so his memory stretched back farther, so his jokes wouldn’t always mean anything to his son, whose memories had started later—and would probably end later. The son had reminded his father that the father would some day die.

  After I ate I didn’t feel like walking on the stars’ names any more. I went up to the next parallel street, which is called Yucca, and took that over to Highland Avenue and then on back to the motel.

  * * *

  When I walked into the office the day clerk said, “Got a message for you.” His expression was tough and secretive, like a character in a spy movie. The hotel clerk in a spy movie who is really a part of the spy organization; this is the point where he tells the hero that the Gestapo is in his room.

  “A message?”

  “From GLA,” he said. His face flipped to the next expression, like a digital dock moving on to the next number. This one showed make-believe comic envy used to hide real envy. I wondered if he really did feel envy or if he was just practicing being an actor by pretending to show envy. No; pretending to hide envy. Maybe he himself was actually feeling envy but was hiding it by pretending to be someone who was showing envy by trying to hide it. That was too confusing to think about; it made me dizzy, like looking too long off the fantail of a ship at the swirls of water directly beneath the stem. Layers and layers of twisting white foam with bottomless black underneath; but then it all organizes itself into swinging straight white lines of wake.

  I s
aid, “What did they want?”

  “They’ll send a car for you at three o’clock.” Flip; friendliness, conspiracy. “You could do me a favor.”

  “I could?”

  From under the counter he took out a tan manila envelope, then halfway withdrew from it another glossy photograph; I couldn’t see the subject. “This,” he said, and slid the photo back into the envelope. Twisting the red string on the two little round closure tabs of the envelope, he said, “Just leave it in the office, you know? Just leave it some place where they can see it.”

  “Oh,” I said. “All right.” And I took the envelope.

  * * *

  The car was a black Cadillac limousine with a uniformed chauffeur who held the door for me and called me, “sir.” It didn’t seem to matter to him that he was picking me up at a kind of seedy motel, or that I was wearing clothes that were somewhat shabby and out of date. (I wear civvies so seldom that I almost never pay any attention to what clothing I own or what condition it’s in.)

  I had never been in a limousine before, with or without a chauffeur. In fact, this was the first time in my life I’d ever ridden in a Cadillac. I spent the first few blocks just looking at the interior of the car, noticing that I had my own radio in the back, and power windows, and that there were separate air conditioner controls on both sides of the rear seat.

  There were grooves for a glass partition between front and rear, but the glass was lowered out of sight, and when we’d driven down Highland and made a right turn onto Hollywood Boulevard, going past Grauman’s Chinese theater, the chauffeur suddenly said, “You a writer?”

  “What? Me? No.”

  “Oh,” he said. “I always try to figure out what people are. They’re fascinating, you know? People.”

  “I’m in the Navy,” I said.

  “That right? I did two in the Army myself.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  He nodded. He’d look at me in the rear-view mirror from time to time while he was talking. He said, “Then I pushed a hack around Houston for six years, but I figured the hell with it, you know? Who needs it. Come out here in sixty-seven, never went back.”

  “I guess it’s all right out here.”

  “No place like it,” he said.

  I didn’t have an answer for that, and he didn’t seem to have anything else to say, so I opened the day clerk’s envelope and looked at the photograph he wanted me to leave in Byron Cartwright’s office.

  Actually it was four photographs on one eight-by-ten sheet of glossy paper, showing the day clerk in four poses, with different clothing in each one. Four different characters, I guess. In the upper left, he was wearing a light plaid jacket and a pale turtleneck sweater and a medium-shade cloth cap, and he had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and he was squinting; looking mean and tough. In the upper right he was wearing a tuxedo, and he had a big smile on his face. His head was turned toward the camera, but his body was half-twisted away and he was holding a top hat out to the side, as though he were singing a song and was about to march offstage at the end of the music. In the bottom left, he was wearing a cowboy hat and a bandana around his neck and a plaid shirt, and he had a kind of comical-foolish expression on his face, as though somebody had just made a joke and he wasn’t sure he’d understood the point. And in the bottom right he was wearing a dark suit and white shirt and pale tie, and he was leaning forward a little and smiling in a friendly way directly at the camera. I guess that was supposed to be him in his natural state, but it actually looked less like him than any of the others.

  The whole back of the photograph was filled with printing. His name was at the top (MAURY DEE) and underneath was a listing of all the movies he’d been in and all the play productions, with the character he performed in each one. Down at the bottom were three or four quotes from critics about how good he was.

  The driver turned left on Fairfax and went down past Selma to Sunset Boulevard, and then turned right. Then he said, “The best thing about this job is the people.”

  “Is that right?” I put Maury Dee’s photograph away and twisted the red string around the closure tabs.

  “And I’ll tell you something,” said the driver. “The bigger they are, the nicer they are. You’d be amazed, some of the people been sitting right where you are right now.”

  “I bet.”

  “But you know who’s the best of them all? I mean, just a nice regular person, not stuck up at all.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Dawn Devayne,” he said. “She’s always got a good word for you, she’ll take a joke, she’s just terrific.”

  “That’s nice,” I said.

  “Terrific.” He shook his head. “Always remembers your name. ‘Hi, Harry,’ she says. ‘How you doing?’ Just a terrific person.”

  “I guess she must be all right,” I said.

  “Terrific,” he said, and turned the car in at one of the taller buildings just before the Beverly Hills line. We drove down into the basement parking garage and the driver stopped next to a bank of elevators. He hopped out and opened my door for me, and when I got out he said, “Eleventh floor.”

  “Thanks, Harry,” I said.

  THREE

  All you could see was artificial plants. I stepped out of the elevator and there were great pots all over the place on the green rug, all with plastic plants in them with huge dark-green leaves. Beyond them, quite a ways back, expanses of plate glass showed the white sky.

  I moved forward, not sure what to do next, and then I saw the receptionist’s desk. With the white sky behind her, she was very hard to find. I went over to her and said, “Excuse me.”

  She’d been writing something on a long form, and now she looked up with a friendly smile and said, “May I help you?”

  “I’m supposed to see Byron Cartwright.”

  “Name, please?”

  “Ordo Tupikos.”

  She used her telephone, sounding very chipper, and then she smiled at me again, saying, “He’ll be out in a minute. If you’ll have a seat?”

  There were easy chairs in among the plastic plants. I thanked her and went off to sit down, picking up a newspaper from a white formica table beside the chair. It was called The Hollywood Reporter, and it was magazine size and printed on glossy paper. I read all the short items about people signing to do this or that, and I read a nightclub review of somebody whose name I didn’t recognize, and then a girl came along and said, “Mr. Tupikos?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Mr. Cartwright’s secretary. Would you come with me?”

  I put the paper down and followed her away from the plants and down a long hall with tans walls and brown carpet. We passed offices on both sides of the hall; about half were occupied, and most of the people were on the phone.

  I suddenly realized I’d forgotten the day clerk’s photograph. I’d left it behind in the envelope on the table with The Hollywood Reporter.

  Well, that actually was what he’d asked me to do; leave it in the office. Maybe on the way back I should take it out of the envelope.

  The girl stopped, gesturing at a door on the left. “Through here, Mr. Tupikos.”

  * * *

  Byron Cartwright was standing in the middle of the room. He had a big heavy chest and brown leathery skin and yellow-white hair brushed straight back over his balding head. He was dressed in different shades of pale blue, and there was a white line of smoke rising from a long cigar in an ashtray on the desk behind him. The room was large and so was everything in it; massive desk, long black sofa, huge windows showing the white sky, with the city of Los Angeles down the slope on the flat land to the south, pastel colors glittering in the haze: pink, peach, coral.

  Byron Cartwright strode toward me, hand outstretched. He was laughing, as though remembering a wonderful time we’d once shared together. Laughter made erosion lines crisscrossing all over his face. “Well, hello, Orry,” he said. “Glad to see you.” He took my hand, and patted my arm with his other hand,
saying, “That’s right, isn’t it? Orry?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Everybody calls me By. Come in, sit down.”

  I was already in. We sat together on the long sofa. He crossed one leg over the other, half-turning in my direction, his arm stretched out toward me along the sofa back. He had what looked like a class ring on one finger, with a dark red stone. He said, “You know where I got it from? The name ‘Orry’? From Dawn.” There was something almost religious about the way he said the name. It reminded me of when Jehovah’s Witnesses pass out their literature; they always smile and say, “Here’s good news!”

  I said, “You told her about me?”

  “Phoned her the first chance I got. She’s on location now. You could’ve knocked her over with a feather, Orry. I could hear it in her voice.”

  “It’s been a long time,” I said. I wasn’t sure what this conversation was about, and I was sorry to hear Dawn Devayne was “on location.” It sounded as though I might not be able to get to see her.

  “Sixteen years,” Byron Cartwright said, and he had that reverential sound in his voice again, with the same happiness around his mouth and eyes. “Your little girl has come a long way, Orry.”

  “I guess so.”

  “It’s just amazing that you never knew. Didn’t any reporters ever come around, any magazine writers?”

  “I never knew anything,” I told him. “When the fellows told me about it, I didn’t believe them. Then they showed me the magazine.”

  “Well, it’s just astonishing.” But he didn’t seem to imply that I might be a liar. He kept smiling at me, and shaking his head with his astonishment.

  “It sure was astonishing to me,” I said.

  He nodded, letting me know he understood completely. “So the first thing you thought,” he said, “you had to see her again. Just had to say hello. Am I right?”

  “Not to begin with.” It was hard talking when looking directly at him, because his face was so full of smiling eagerness. I leaned forward a little, resting my elbows on my knees, and looked across the room. There was a huge full-color blown-up photograph of a horse taking up most of the opposite wall. I said, looking at the horse, “At first I just thought it was eerie. Of course, nice for Estelle. Or Dawn, I guess. Nice for her, I was glad things worked out for her. But for me it was really strange.”