The Silver Blonde

by Elizabeth Ross

  Clara’s eyes darted to Ireland’s. He wasn’t trying to be cutting. His expression wasn’t unkind. And he was right on the money. Leni Riefenstahl was Clara’s mystery, ever since she’d turned up the handkerchief in her box of keepsakes.

  “After the lineup, I have to give Mr. Pearce an update on the case. I can ask him about Connie and Palm Springs.”

  “You won’t mention my name,” said Clara, quickly.

  “Course not,” said Ireland. “My guess is he’ll have no recollection of the hired help from eight years ago. Look.” He let out a sigh. “If she’d worked here at the station, it’s possible I wouldn’t have recognized her either. She was, what, sixteen, seventeen at the time?”

  Clara nodded slowly.

  “Let me ask you this,” said Ireland in a softer voice. “How well do you know this screenwriter guy?”

  “We’re friends.”

  “That all?” He peered at her.

  Clara couldn’t give a straight answer because truthfully she didn’t know where she stood with Gil. Her non-answer hung in the air, a tacit admission.

  Ireland reached for a file on his desk. “Just so you know, the stuff with Bannon wasn’t ancient history.” A queasy feeling rose in Clara’s gut. “We have a letter he wrote to Bannon from France. About seeing her in a movie when he was fighting over there.” Ireland took a piece of paper from the file. “He said the movie saved his life. Sounds like he was still pretty hung up on her.” Ireland handed her the letter. “This was only a couple of years ago.” Clara took the pages lightly, as if they were aflame. She swallowed hard. She recognized Gil’s handwriting from the scribbled yellow legal pads he used at work.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “The studio has a file of all this stuff. They keep tabs on fan mail and stalkers, and anything from an ex that could prove inconvenient for publicity.” Ireland’s gaze was level on her. “I also spoke to his commanding officer. Francis Gilbert was pretty messed up, by the end of the war. He was in a hospital for a while—psychiatric. After he was discharged, there’s the arrest record: bar fights, drunk and disorderly, that sort of thing. Eventually he got the gig at Silver Pacific. Maybe that twist of fate—getting hired on her movie—well, maybe it pushed him over the edge.”

  Clara let her eyes fall to the letter. She had barged into Ireland’s office, Gil’s Girl Friday—Rosalind Russell to his Cary Grant—claiming the detectives had gotten it all wrong and that she had managed to crack the case. But it was Clara who’d gotten it wrong. In her hands was the truth, the real story—Gil and Ruby’s—where Clara was a latecomer glimpsing their all-consuming love affair from the cheap seats. The air in the office was stale; she couldn’t breathe. “But what if you’re wrong? I still can’t believe…” She trailed off.

  “All this isn’t easy to swallow,” Ireland continued. He gently retrieved the letter. “You have feelings for him, I get it. But right now I need you to think back. Did Gil ever express interest in the vaults? Did you take him there, show him around? Could he have seen the vault combination? That’s the one piece we’re missing.”

  Since the murder, Clara had suppressed the memory, but now she held it up to the light. The first time they’d really been alone together. She had been showing off all she knew about the vaults, the fire hazard, all the facts of how nitrate burned and couldn’t be extinguished. The excitement of being alone with him. She’d stood right behind him, feeling the heat of him through his shirt. She’d wanted him to turn around and kiss her, right there against the film racks. Her cheeks burned at the memory.

  Clara nodded slowly. “I showed him the vaults—a few weeks after we met. And there’s one other thing you should know.” Ireland’s eyes were locked on Clara’s. She had to tell the truth. “The night of the murder, I called Gil in his office. He didn’t answer; he wasn’t there.”

  * * *

  —

  Ireland walked her out of the busy precinct. She felt people’s eyes on her along the hallway, down the stairs. She was back to being the thirteen-year-old girl.

  Instead of taking the streetcar, Clara walked the half hour to the studio. The cars and buildings and people on Melrose faded into a painted backdrop. Her mind was back in Ireland’s office, on the letter. Gil had written to Bannon to tell her he’d seen her movie. He had been fighting overseas, surrounded by death and destruction, his life on a knife edge. And seeing her once more, even if it was on a screen, had meant so much to him. He said he felt like it had saved his life. It had given him the strength to keep going.

  Clara could picture the French village after D-Day. The locals watching along with the troops: un film Américain. The excitement would be palpable. The catcalls and wolf whistles when Babe Bannon came on-screen, her face twenty feet high, luminous, unforgettable—so close but unreachable. The first time Gil had laid eyes on her in two years. It must have seared him to look at her. The sound of her voice so familiar. She would be layers removed from him: as her character and then as the movie star—another fantasy—but the girl he knew couldn’t disappear completely. His Ruby—he couldn’t turn away. He might have appeared like any other GI, gaze locked on the screen, but she was his girl.

  And then the knife twisting in the wound: Gregory Quinn. A two-shot of them together—a lot of double-talk and innuendo. Gil would feel the heat of their chemistry sizzle off the screen. This wasn’t acting—it was the real thing. The guys in the audience would feel it too. After their rowdiness and crude comments, they would settle down, mesmerized by the golden couple. Each man would put himself in Quinn’s shoes, or his character’s—it didn’t matter which. They would leave the battle-scarred town in the French countryside behind, and every one of them would drift past the crude canvas screen and into the magic of the movie, each guy channeling Quinn’s “man enough yet vulnerable” shtick to capture Bannon’s heart. Gil would scan the audience: Every goddam soldier was in love with her. The comfort of seeing her turned to pain. It would constrict his chest and shorten his breath. Her face looming over him, close enough for him to see every detail he knew from memory. She was no longer his. Now she existed only on-screen, and he had no hope of seeing her again.

  Until Letter from Argentan.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Amazon Queen

  IT WAS EVENING BY the time Clara returned to the studio. She dragged herself upstairs to editorial. Along the corridor the cacophony of Moviolas had died down for the day.

  She found the cutting room deserted, then remembered that Sam would be at the Argentan screening with Mr. Pearce. Had Detective Ireland already given the studio head an update on the case? Perhaps he’d mentioned Clara after all—some girl in editorial playing detective—and they’d laughed about her crazy theories. She cringed, recalling the scene at the police station. What future did she have at the studio after she had accused the studio head of murder? Not only that but she had pushed the limits of Sam’s patience, pursuing the investigation instead of her editing duties. Jobless and without references, suddenly her prospects in Los Angeles looked bleak.

  She had asked Max once about the old days—if he missed directing. After the biblical epic bombed they wouldn’t hire him as a director anymore. He’d shrugged and recounted what a producer had told him at the time: “Hollywood wants you or it doesn’t, and you don’t have a say.” He had given her a sad smile. “It’s not such a nice business, Klara.”

  Clara slumped down on her chair and let the quiet settle over her. She hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights; the evening gloom suited her mood. She listened to the sound of her breath, grateful she didn’t have to relay to Sam where she had been and what had happened at the precinct—that Gil had been arrested, that he would most likely be charged with murder. She still couldn’t believe it was true. And yet a question had niggled at her ever since she had found out about his past with Ruby. How had he gotten over losing Barbara Bann
on? The answer was simple: he hadn’t. She had assumed her uneasiness was jealousy, comparing herself to a movie star. But was it something else? Was that worm of bad feeling a seed of doubt—had she known all along but hadn’t seen? She recalled Detective Ireland’s words: How well do you know this screenwriter guy?

  She opened her desk drawer and took out the Amazon Queen reel. The canister was cold and hard. She set it on the desk and stared at it. The film existed, and Clara had found it. Like Hitchcock’s MacGuffin—the papers, the diamonds, the thing the characters are after—what she and Gil had been chasing. Her triumph when she’d realized the film was under the Oscars, hidden in plain sight. But what did it matter now? Her theory had fallen apart. It was just a metal canister like any other on Sam’s film racks.

  All her energy had been focused on this dirty secret, the studio’s dalliance with Hitler’s filmmaker. And Gil had played along. He’d helped convince her that there was a trail to follow, that they were chasing the truth, uncovering Pearce’s Nazi-sympathizing past and connecting it to Connie’s murder.

  She scraped her chair back and began to pace. Pearce’s motive to kill Connie was utterly convincing, it was so tangible. But Conrad Pearce had a rock-solid alibi. Not one person but an audience of three hundred—a row of studio people, a cinema manager, and several usherettes. And the idea that he might have hired someone to do it? She shook her head. When scrutinized under the harsh overheads of Ireland’s office, her whole theory had paled. A prickle of embarrassment made her flush even now because, apart from Pearce’s alibi, the story was far-fetched. Like Ireland had said, it was complicated. (A look-alike victim, Bannon’s name leaked to the press, all for show to distract from the real crime.)

  Whereas Gil’s history with Bannon, the letter from France, his holding a torch for her, coupled with his trauma from the war, his discharge record—that wasn’t far-fetched. The crime of passion had been blunt and obvious—if Gil couldn’t have her, no one would. A moment of impulse and a tragic case of mistaken identity. They had a witness. Gil had lied to the cops—and to Clara. He had seen the vault combination. It all stacked up.

  In trying to prove the Pearce motive, Clara had been led by her fascination with Riefenstahl, chasing a ghost from her past, when the truth of Connie’s death had been right in front of her. She had been swayed by the attention, by his handsome face. She flushed, replaying scenes from their friendship. Gil was the misdirect, the distraction, and she’d fallen for it. Fallen for him. Was he really capable of murder?

  The room was too dark. She moved to the window, yanked at the cord to slice open the venetian blinds. The last scraps of sunlight had vanished. The sky was golden, tinged with flames of tangerine in the west. Clara turned back to the dimness of the cutting room, everything in it remote and inhospitable. The rim of the Amazon Queen canister glinted in the dying light. When had it last been watched? By Simkin and Max, back in ’41. She let go a breath. She had come this far.

  Mechanically Clara turned on the Moviola and loaded the reel, squinting at the brightness of the lamp. She pushed down on the pedal, and the machine clattered to life. As the head leader counted down, Clara felt a tight ball of anticipation in her stomach. The synch-pop was silent (the reel was MOS). Then the slate appeared in frame: Camera test, prod 3191.

  The slate vanished to reveal a wide exterior of a desert, and the camera assistant pulled focus to a group of horses and riders in the distance. Someone must have called action, because the group began to move in a slow canter toward camera, like cowboys in a Western—a quintessentially American image—save that they were dressed in flowing robes and armor. As they got closer, the main horse—a white Arabian—was out front, and astride it (sitting a rather jerky canter) in golden armor, with auburn hair flying, was Leni Riefenstahl in her Hollywood debut.

  It was shocking and oddly mesmerizing. Even on the small screen of the Moviola, the power of the film—it was a gorgeous color nitrate print. Unlike the grainy newspaper pictures or the black-and-white snaps of Leni and Pearce at the Racquet Club, these images—moving and in color—breathed life with every frame. Finally, proof of Leni’s designs on Hollywood and the studio’s complicity. As though Clara hadn’t altogether expected to be right. Leni Riefenstahl in full Technicolor. It brought her back to her eleven-year-old self on board the Europa, in awe of the glamorous passenger, wrestling with what she considered her parents’ defection—her deeply flawed understanding of the Nazi regime.

  Investigating Leni’s visit to California had made Clara face not just the past but the conflict inside her. It was an old battle, Clara’s eternal battle. There were two selves: German and American. Two neat and distinct compartments in her mind, two different people distinguishable by the spelling of her name: Klara and Clara. One a German child desperate to join Hitler Youth, enthralled with parades, especially with cavalry officers; the other a young American woman in love with movies—a new arrival on the vast continent of adult life. But since the murder, Klara and Clara had bumped into one another. They’d begun to converge. The past wouldn’t stay put. That little Aryan Mädchen wreaked havoc on the present with her sunny childhood memories. The childhood that Clara had tried to suppress came flooding back: Freya, Matthias…Ruth.

  Clara advanced the reel. Now there was a series of close-ups of Leni—she preened and posed, regal and warrior-like in her costume. She appeared more comfortable on her own two legs than on four. Another setup flew by, B-roll of the desert, a close-up of horses’ hooves galloping past. It was effective. Clara could get a taste for the epic they’d planned to film. The California desert could surely stand in for Greece or Libya, or wherever Leni had originally wanted to shoot. Pearce had been wooing her, seducing her, giving her a taste of what she could expect from a lavish color production, with the Silver Pacific studio machine and expertise behind her. Hollywood: the ultimate prize for any film director.

  Toward the end of the reel there was a series of static shots of Leni on horseback. At the end of a take, her horse spooked—a little bunny hop forward—jolting her in the saddle. A male figure entered the frame. He held the reins as Leni dismounted, and then they embraced. Clara leaned forward, a coiled spring on the edge of her chair, focusing all her energy on the square of light. The camera cut. Clara stopped the reel, put it in reverse, and rewound to the head of the take. Her foot hovered over the treadle of the Moviola like it was the gas pedal of a hot car. She watched the take again, holding her breath. The man steadied her horse while she dismounted, sliding elegantly off the saddle and into his arms. They kissed, together in frame—an unplanned two-shot. The camera cut, and jumped to the slate of the next take. Clara rewound and watched it a third time, freezing the frame on the two of them: Leni and her California lover—the screenwriter Roger Brackett.

  Clara’s heart beat in her throat. Roger and Leni. He was friends with Pearce; he’d been at the studio since the early days. She recalled him at Bannon’s party: The Racquet Club staff couldn’t tell off Clark Gable. The Racquet Club in Palm Springs. Roger the socialite in his heyday, Oscar winner, in demand, holding court. His comments to Gil assuming he wasn’t Jewish. A love affair: Roger and Leni. She sat paralyzed. All the pieces fell into place. Connie must have known about them. She’d been there in December 1938, privy to all of it. And then a few weeks ago, around the anniversary of V-E Day, Connie stumbled on the “Nazi Pin-Up Girl” article. She was already feeling bent out of shape, missing Jim. In the background the ongoing coverage of the Nuremberg trials, bringing Nazis to justice. How bad would it look for Roger if his dalliance with Leni got out? Connie blackmailed Roger. Clara had the right motive all along, but the wrong murderer. Gil was innocent, of course he was. A wave of relief swept over her.

  But what to do about it? She reached for the phone—then stopped short. Who could she call? Gil was locked up, and the detectives wouldn’t entertain more outlandish theories—she had already worn out her welcome wi
th Ireland. Her mind leapfrogged to the next thought: she needed evidence—from the present day, not a story from the past. To convince the detectives, she needed to find something linking Roger to the murder, to Connie Milligan. She glanced at the clock. Roger was in the Argentan screening with Sam and Pearce. His office would be empty.

  Clara turned off the Moviola and dashed out of the cutting room, quick footsteps along the hallway. Roger Brackett. The name reverberated off the corridor walls. Her footsteps drummed down the stairs, the synapses in her brain firing. The misdirect with Bannon. movie star murdered. All the petty Hollywood grudges picked over by the papers, distracting the cops—what a production. It had a screenwriter’s touch. She streaked across the empty studio lot. The scent of jasmine was as pungent as on the night Connie was murdered.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  First Draft

  THE SCREENWRITERS’ OFFICE WAS unlocked. Clara knocked for show as she peered around the door. “Hello! Mr. Brackett?” she called out to the empty office. She slipped through the anteroom past Gil’s desk, walking lightly, as if the vinyl floor were thin ice. She had to be quick. She didn’t know how long Roger would be occupied at the Argentan screening.

  Clara had never been in Brackett’s office before. It was spacious, and he’d had it painted—not the standard-issue white but a warm buttery cream. Against the wall under the double windows there was a low patterned couch, a decent rug, and a coffee table strewn with newspapers and magazines; at the far end of the room sat a large desk in blond wood and a matching bookcase. Clara began her search on the bookcase. The top two shelves were cluttered with trinkets—an old camera, a houseplant, miscellaneous awards—and the lower shelves were lined with leather-bound copies of his scripts. She could imagine Gil rolling his eyes at Brackett’s “literary cannon”—the man’s ego was bigger than his office.