Gil made a right turn onto Gower. “Los Feliz, right?” he asked.
“Yes, off the boulevard.” It was a relief to answer a normal question. “Near the Brown Derby.” She’d never ridden in his car before. If they’d gone to the Formosa, they would have been sitting in one of the red booths, sipping a cocktail, and after, maybe he would have driven her home. They had made the plan at lunchtime; it felt like years ago.
Going east on Sunset, she let her head fall back against the seat. Ragged palms flew by, a shade darker than the sky; a fire truck screamed; frenetic neon signs danced above nightclubs; cars swerved and honked to avoid a drunk stepping into traffic—Hollywood at night.
After a few blocks Gil offered her a cigarette at a stoplight. Clara shook her head, Miss Simkin’s voice like a parrot inside her head: No smokers around my film stock. He lit one for himself, shielding the flame with cupped hands. The light distorted his features. The Plymouth rumbled a low growl as they waited.
“Who could have done this—who would have wanted to hurt her?” Clara said, breaking the silence. “Do you think it was a crazed fan, or a stalker?”
Gil shook his head. “Not any schmuck off the street can waltz onto a studio lot. My money’s on someone she knew.” He took a long inhale on his smoke, then blew it out. “A movie star is an industry in themselves. Think of all the hangers-on who rely on her for their living—the ten-percent crowd: agent, lawyer, manager…they all want their pound of flesh. Then there’s the studio.” His cigarette smoldered. “If the movie bombs, there are careers on the line. Plenty of folks with an axe to grind.”
The light turned green. He stepped on the accelerator.
“But someone at Silver Pacific?” Clara turned to him. “Someone we know?”
Gil shrugged. “Sure, why not? The studio never wanted her for the part, Hawks had to fight tooth and nail to have her. Pearce wanted Joan Fontaine—a ‘real’ actress.” Gil rolled his eyes. “Didn’t think Bannon’s blond bombshell could act her way out of a paper bag.”
Clara thought it over. “Could her murder have something to do with all the drama on set? I read in the scandal sheets about Randall Ford. They say he resented Bannon from day one because she got top billing. He didn’t want to be sidelined playing a villain.”
“Could be. Brackett would know,” said Gil. “He’s always hanging about the actors, sniffing out gossip. He told me that Randall hated Gregory Quinn. Some age-old feud.”
“Wait,” said Clara, shaking her head. “Casting squabbles and grudges are one thing, but murder?”
“In this town nothing would surprise me.”
They cut up Western and onto Los Feliz Boulevard. It was darker here—pine trees replaced the palms of Sunset and blocked out the streetlights. Griffith Park was a hulking shadow on their left. They passed the Brown Derby and turned off Los Feliz Boulevard into side streets. The car tires swished through a puddle; someone had turned on their sprinklers, and it brought out the papery citrus of eucalyptus.
Clara pointed at the approaching block. “Just up here on the right, after Ben Lomond.” A few of the streets in her neighborhood sounded like they should be in the Scottish Highlands and not sunny California. Gil pulled over and put the Plymouth in park. He killed the engine. They sat for a moment. Clara’s exhaustion felt like an invisible weight pinning her to the seat. They didn’t speak; their silence was filled with Bannon’s murder.
There was a distant hiss of sprinklers, and the air shifted the trees overhead. Gil lit another cigarette. “I met her once, years ago—back when she was Ruby Kaminsky,” he said. His voice was different, as if being on the quiet residential street had given him permission to talk. A memory lit, then faded behind his eyes.
“How did you meet?” said Clara, curious to hear something of Gil’s past—for someone who wrote dialogue all day, he was tight-lipped about himself.
He blew out a cone of smoke. “I’d signed up for an acting class. Advice from a director: ‘It’ll teach you how to be a better writer.’ ” He chewed it over. “Suppose that’s true.” He rolled the cigarette between his fingers, watching it burn. “Ruby was in the class.”
“It’s strange,” said Clara. “I never think of her by that name—Ruby—like it doesn’t suit her. What was she like?”
Gil grunted a laugh. “She was a regular Joe. Mouth like a trucker.” He ashed his cigarette over the side of the car. His other hand was resting on the steering wheel like it had been sculpted—long fingers, the ridge of tendons, smooth tan skin.
“Could you tell she’d become a star?” asked Clara.
He gave a shake of his head. “I never finished the class. It was during the war. I was called up.” Gil was a veteran, but he never spoke about the war. The topic was off-limits. Just like Clara’s past. “Next time I saw her, she was up on the big screen,” he went on. “Nightshade, summer of ’44. A month after D-Day. I was in France.”
Clara remembered that summer before senior year: she’d gone to the movies with friends. Barbara Bannon and Gregory Quinn, the Hollywood golden couple on-screen and—as the gossip columns quickly revealed—off-screen as well. They married and did two more movies together in quick succession. Quinn was killed a year later, in 1945, entertaining the troops. His plane crashed on his way home to Los Angeles. Bannon retreated from public life until Argentan.
Gil leaned over and crushed his cigarette in the ashtray. “Didn’t know you could speak Kraut.”
Clara turned sharply; his gaze sliced her open.
He blinked. “Sorry. I mean German.”
Of course: he’d heard her with Max. She tried to read Gil’s face. She could pretend, make up a story: Swedes spoke German. She was good at languages. But no, she was done with the cover-up, with being careful. Since the murder, something had given way. She took a breath. “I’m German—a Kraut, as you say. We moved here from Berlin before the war.”
“Why didn’t you say?” said Gil. She was pretty sure he meant Why did you lie? “Lots of Germans came to the States after Mr. Hitler showed up,” Gil went on. “What’s the big deal?”
“I don’t know.” She looked down. “I suppose”—she fiddled with the blanket on her lap—“I knew you’d fought in the war. And I didn’t want you to hate me.” I wanted you to like me hung in the air, unsaid. She flushed a deep red, sitting there in his passenger seat, wishing she’d kept quiet.
A distant siren wailed. Gil pried her hand from the blanket and held it in both of his; they were warm. “I like you just fine—American, German, whatever.”
She met his gaze. He leaned closer. Clara’s heart began to punch against her ribs. Her lips tingled; she knew what was coming. She closed her eyes, thinking this was how she had wanted the day to end. But instead his lips brushed her forehead—a brief peck, and he pulled away. Before she knew it, she had gotten out of the car and Gil had turned on the engine, like the film had skipped ahead several feet. They had already said goodbye and he had executed a perfect three-point turn, and now she stood watching as his taillights disappeared into the throng of cars on Los Feliz Boulevard.
Chapter Four
Émigrés
CLARA ENTERED THE HOUSE to the sound of a shot ringing out and a woman’s shriek. All thoughts of Gil vanished as she froze for a moment, pulse racing. The sound was quickly followed by a cheer and the clink of glasses. Champagne. A party—tonight of all nights.
She hung up her cardigan on the crowded rack and stood there for a moment, adrift, leaning into the coats, burying her face in their soft layers—the smell of streetcar, tobacco, and cologne. In the sitting room someone had started on the piano, and a heated discussion competed with the notes. Her mind returned to Gil, and she replayed the scene in his car. How it had ended with that chaste kiss on the forehead. A woman’s laugh pierced through the muffle of coats. Clara straightened; she smoothed her hair and headed into the pa
rty.
When her parents entertained, it always felt as though half of Europe were squeezed into their small sitting room. She navigated her way through them, a hubbub of different languages, mostly German. After the cool air of Gil’s convertible, the room was stifling. Frau Dreyer squeezed her arm, and Otto pinched her chin as though she were six years old.
“Klara! Finally.” Her mother was by the piano. She was wearing one of the evening dresses that had lasted her through the war. Still attractive in her forties, she had deep-set blue eyes, and chestnut hair (with no gray) swept into an old-fashioned style. Her bone structure was strong; it made her seem polished, more finished than Clara, who thought of her own face as too malleable—still under construction—a question mark as to whether she would be beautiful.
“You’re home so late,” said her mother in German.
“I know, I know,” said Clara, giving her a quick hug.
“Wie ist das show business?” said Otto, grinning. Clearly everyone had had a few drinks.
Clara smiled on cue. “Fine, thanks.” The moment she’d seen her mother, Clara had decided that she wouldn’t tell her parents about the murder—not tonight. Since the war, they’d been well practiced in receiving bad news. She would spare them for an evening, let them enjoy their party. A movie star murdered; it would be splashed across the papers soon enough.
Her father, topping up glasses, raised the bottle of champagne in welcome. He came over, wiping the neck of the bottle with a dishtowel, a splash of champagne on his shirt. “They wouldn’t hire you at the Ritz, Papa,” she said in German, giving him a peck on the cheek.
“A glass for Klara,” said her father to no one in particular. It was strange how her name in German always sounded like it belonged to someone else.
Clara shook her head. “I’m fine. Save it for the others.” Champagne was the last thing she could stomach.
“I insist,” he said, and a glass was produced. Her father filled it up, the frothy fizz shooting to the rim. His eyes were bright and smiling. Seeing him happy and unaware made her want to burst into tears. There was a time when she would have kept nothing from her parents, when a hug from her mother or a soothing word from her father had been able to put the world to rights. Those days were long gone.
She took the glass, her head swimming. Babe Bannon was dead. Just holding a champagne flute felt wrong. Clara shook off the thought and forced a smile. “What’s the occasion?”
Her father regarded her fondly, then turned to his guests. “The last time Klara saw Europe, she was a girl of eleven.” He shook his head slightly. “Now she is a young woman.” The piano music had stopped. There was the usual thread of sadness and nostalgia tugging on his words; all refugees had that tendency because of the war. They’d lost so much, and yet they were the lucky ones. Clara scanned the room. Her parents’ friends looked back at her with jolly faces and glistening eyes: expectant. She felt as though she were playing a part but hadn’t learned her lines. Then it clicked—the champagne, the party in the middle of the week. Clara’s breath quickened; her eyes raced across her father’s face. “No!” she breathed. “A new job—already?”
Her father nodded. “University of Bonn.”
Germany. The news stung Clara like a slap. She froze, holding her breath, the eager faces beaming at her. “Wonderful!” she blurted out. What else could she say, with all eyes upon her and her parents looking happy for once. “Congratulations, Papa.” She felt the floor disappear from under her.
Everyone raised their glasses once more. Clara followed suit, swept along in a performance of dutiful daughter. She took a sip of champagne, and the sour fizz of celebration—their celebration—caught in her throat. Her mother drew next to them. “We sail in summer. End of June if we’re lucky.”
Just over a month. So soon. The room was spinning. Clara had thought she’d have more time—time to set up her own life, get the promotion, save for the deposit on an apartment, and time to figure out how to break the news that she wasn’t going back with them to Europe. “But, Mutti, I—”
“You’ll have to start going through your things, throw out all those magazines,” her mother prattled on. “And any clothes that don’t fit. We’ll need to get you a decent winter coat. German winters.” She shuddered. “Mrs. Shuler wants to find a new tenant immediately. She said she’ll start showing the place next week. I don’t know how we’re supposed to pack and keep the place tidy.”
Both Clara and her father started to protest. Clara’s “I don’t want to go back” was overlapped by her father.
“Inge, all that can wait,” he said kindly.
“You’re right, of course.” She didn’t mind being told off. “Tonight we celebrate.” She patted Clara’s cheek. “Finally we’re going home.”
Clara was grateful when her parents were pulled away by their guests. She watched them over the rim of her glass. Did they even know what awaited them back in Germany? It wasn’t the same country they’d left eight years before. Everyone had seen the newsreels of bomb-damaged cities, piles of rubble, civilians in long queues for food—nothing more than dehydrated potatoes and milk powder. Not to mention the other newsreels, the liberated camps, the piles of bodies, survivors like skeletons. Stop. How could they want to go back?
“Schönberg is at the Bowl tonight. Have we missed it?” Frau Dreyer said, motioning to the wireless, her face flushed from alcohol. “Someone turn it on. I’m sure it’s tonight.”
Clara choked on a sip of champagne. Her mind raced to the possibility of a breaking news report: We interrupt this concert with tragic news from Hollywood. Thinking quickly, she turned to Otto, taking his arm. “Why bother with the radio when we have a maestro right here?” The guests nodded their approval. Otto bowed to the room and took a seat at the piano. He’d been famous in Berlin before the war—that ubiquitous phrase that all her parents’ friends used when referring to their former lives.
Otto began playing, and Clara retreated from the others. As piano music filled the sitting room, she stared vacantly at the floor, letting the music wash over her, relieved for the pause in her charade. Her gaze landed on her shoes. There was a mark on the toe of her right foot. She peered at the peach suede—a streak of dried blood. Her stomach lurched, and her heart began to race. The body in the vault flashed across her mind’s eye like the lurid cover of a pulp magazine. She tried to concentrate on Otto’s music, forcing herself to breathe deeply—in and out—in time to the sonata. But thoughts of Bannon’s dead body kept surfacing. Squeezing her eyes shut, she pushed them away.
“Klara?” She opened her eyes to find her mother watching her. “Are you all right?”
“Just a bit of a headache,” Clara said, holding up the champagne flute.
“Have something to eat. There’s leftover schnitzel in the icebox. Heat it up first.”
“Mutti,” said Clara before her mother turned away. She had a sudden notion to come clean and blurt out everything—about the promotion, about the murder, how everything about the day had turned on its head and she didn’t know what to think. But another guest swept her mother away to settle an argument about composers. Clara set her glass down, and with everyone else applauding Otto’s playing, she slipped away.
* * *
—
In her bedroom Clara discovered that her old trunk had magically appeared—her parents must have pulled it from storage. Clara glared at it, annoyed that they had already begun packing. On top was a small box with a note from her mother: Found this inside. Clara took the box, kicked off her shoes, and plumped down on her bed. It was a pale blond cigar box with Spanish writing, vaguely familiar. She opened it, and the smell of tobacco brought her back to her grandfather’s house. She must have been ten years old when he let her keep the box once the cigars had been smoked.
Clara leafed through papers and knickknacks. She remembered now; she’d use
d the box to store keepsakes around the time of their trip to America. There was a deck plan of the ocean liner, the SS Europa. November 1938. She could still remember their cramped second-class cabin. Her parents had waited until they were safely on the Atlantic to break the news: it wasn’t a vacation; they weren’t returning to Berlin. They were fleeing Germany. Political refugees. The ship was a dividing line, the boundary between childhood and adolescence, between Germany and America, and between her two selves: Klara and Clara. After a year in America, Klara with a K had decided that the German spelling of her name didn’t match her new life—it was too foreign, spindly and knock-kneed, like the schoolgirl who had arrived in the United States. She rechristened herself Clara—the American C was curvaceous and mature, a C-cup she planned to grow into.
Clara traced the deck plan with her finger. The upper decks were for first class. She had a vague recollection of exploring where she didn’t belong. Memories spliced together like frames of film: chandeliers in the ballroom, wood paneling and thick carpets, stained glass with the ship’s motif, the covered promenade deck lined with deck chairs.
Under the map of the Europa, there were train tickets from the Super Chief, New York to Los Angeles; and a receipt from a New York diner—amerikanisches Frühstück. She recalled her eleven-year-old self gobbling up her first American breakfast. Tucked away at the bottom she found a dried daisy chain, paper-thin petals and brittle stems. Freya—a sharp twist in her heart as the summer of ’38 bloomed for a moment. The daisy chain was nestled on a handkerchief. She unfolded it carefully. It was edged in lace, and in the corner were the embroidered initials LR. Who was LR? A school friend, a relative, a neighbor? Clara scanned through a roll call of faces from the past, but she came up empty. By now her head was throbbing. It was all too much; she didn’t want to confront the ghosts of Berlin days. It only reminded her of her father’s new job. She closed the lid on the past and slid the box under the bed.
The Silver Blonde Page 3