City of Lost Girls

by Declan Hughes

  Keith agrees, and I make a call and get a seat on a British Airways flight out of LAX at 5:45 that will get me into Dublin, via London, by 2:30 on Saturday afternoon.

  Over lunch, Keith tells me about his life: how his parents split up when they were kids and his dad got custody, how Janice had been six years older—they were half siblings, different moms, their dad was a deadbeat, frankly, not violent or unpleasant, just feckless and weak and generally useless at the basic stuff like keeping a roof over their heads and food on the table. Janice bailed when he was nine, and he didn’t see her much after that. But up to that point, she looked after him, and loved him, like a mother, really. He didn’t blame her for leaving, fifteen-year-old girls aren’t supposed to be their half brother’s moms, if it hadn’t been for him she’d’ve been gone years before. It’s why he’d always liked Jack Donovan’s movies, they always have this murky fucked-up are-you-my-sister-or-my-mother vibe going on, not exploitative, more…you know, Adam and Eve, man, the original brother and sister, that’s how we got going around here.

  He did see her once more, when he was about twelve. She’d been in some movie, and she came around to give him some money, told him to hide it from his dad, who wouldn’t even spend it on something you could measure and enjoy, she said, like booze, or women, wouldn’t waste it with integrity, he’d probably just go and lose it, or buy more shitty furniture or another tragic car or the wrong kind of potato chips. She was funny, Janice. She was smart, too. She said she was hoping to make it in Hollywood, that she had dreams, not dreams like some silly little tramp that ends up selling her ass in the Valley, real dreams. She had read the history, researched the background. She said your dreams were like your conscience, they need to be informed in order to be valid. He’s always remembered that.

  He doesn’t know whether she had it in her to be a star. He doubts it. She was twenty-four when she…when she disappeared, still working as an extra. That wasn’t very promising, really, was it? He isn’t going to make her out to be more than she was. And he’s no one to talk, he doesn’t know how long they have until they jack the rents on Market again and they’ll all be out on their butts. But she was a good person. Not in any kind of moral sense, well, maybe that, too, he doesn’t really know about that, although he thinks she probably was from what he has read in the notebooks. See, that’s what Loy should start with, he can take the books to Ireland but the notebooks stay with him. What he means is, a good person, like the common good, you know, like a rounded person who gets the…gets the shape of things? The proportion. How they fit together, how everything is integrated? He isn’t explaining it well. Wine at lunchtime, not a good idea. If Loy reads the diaries, he’ll understand.

  After Keith has gone back to the store, I order a large espresso and a bottle of San Pellegrino and I unload the Prosecco box and set three brown ring-bound notebooks aside and quickly inspect the books. They are all paperbacks, and all in one way or other have something to do with Hollywood. There are novels by Budd Schulberg and Nathanael West and Michael Tolkin and Bruce Wagner and Gavin Lambert. There are memoirs and biographies and histories of film noir and screwball comedy. There’s The Dress Doctor by Edith Head, and a book of postcards of costumes by Adrian.

  I set the books aside and start to work my way through the notebooks. They are handwritten, and filled with quotations Janice had selected, some from the books in the box and some from movies, along with recipes, beauty tips and motivational exhortations to herself. Some are typical of a girl her age, complete with exclamation marks: Life is NOT a rehearsal!!! Others feel like she’d come up with them herself: Happiness is not the Destination, it’s the Journey. There are no smiley faces, or dog and cat stickers, or drawings of Pierrots or clowns. Every so often there is a list of infrequently used words—attenuate, redact, compunction—and their definitions alongside. I think the seriousness and earnest intent of these lists—orotund, factitious, numinous—moves me as much as anything else in the notebooks. I’d like to have met Janice Holloway. So would a lot of other people.

  I can see nothing in the notebooks that makes any connection with a possible murderer: no names, no initials, no references to Ocean Falls or to any concrete aspect of Janice’s life.

  I pay the bill, leaving half the bottle of wine behind, and walk back to Keith’s Komix. Keith is assembling a pile of reserved comics for a bearded guy in his sixties, evidently a regular, while several other customers—many, I am pleased to see, with shorts, or goatees, or reversed baseball caps, or metal T-shirts, some with all four—pore over the new arrivals. There are even a couple of girls. I like comics stores. I like the look of the comics, of course, the kinetic artwork and incendiary color schemes and the exaggerated sense of life they have, and I guess the fantasy aspect must appeal to my inner geek. I even like the smell of the paper and ink. Most of all, though, I like the way everyone seems so happy in a place that is not about being rich and famous, a place that doesn’t care what you look like or how cool you are, a place that is devoted to something other than making money.

  I give Keith Janice’s diaries and shake my head at his raised-eyebrow inquiry into my progress thus far. I’ve asked him for a photograph, and he gives me a paper copy of a scan. I take his card and give him mine and tell him I’ll be back.

  It takes me longer than I expect to get to LAX, and though I had confirmed over the telephone that I could return a rental car at LAX that had originated in Burbank, this seems to come as radical and unwelcome news to the obdurate and very stupid guy at the rental desk; after many reluctant (on his part) discussions with his superiors, he is finally persuaded to do his job. I make it through security and get to the gate as the flight is boarding.

  On the plane, I work my way steadily through Janice Holloway’s books, page by page, line by line, looking for anything: a faded pencil mark, a significant underlining—she liked to underline passages or place exclamation points in the margins. There’s a lot about the dark side of Hollywood, the difficulty of making friends and of finding and holding on to love, and of doing good work, but there’s no clue to the man who murdered her. Two books—The Day of the Locust and Inside Daisy Clover—have pages inserted that look like they were pulled from her ring-bound notebooks, but each page just has a quote from the book copied out in Janice’s handwriting. She did these on the fly, I guess, and with a certain amount of enthusiasm, as you can see the indentations from her ballpoint where she copied out the quote using the facing page as a base.

  The other thing I do, while the plane is in darkness and the bulk of the passengers sleep, is power up my laptop and watch a DVD copy of Ocean Falls I got from Maurice Faye. I fast-forward through the bulk of the action, and concentrate on the beach parties. It’s not long before I spot Janice Holloway, and though I think I see the backs of the other girls’ heads, Janice is the only one who is focal. It’s not as if she’s given any close-ups, more that the footage is artfully constructed to make you feel Janice is the kind of standout “girl in the crowd” your eye is naturally drawn to. It seems to me that Mark and Jack should certainly have remembered this, and mentioned it to me. I think again of Mark correcting himself in the restaurant, saying he suddenly remembers Janice after all. Is that to cover himself in case I watch the movie? Or does this put Jack in the mix? He is the director, after all. I freeze-frame a shot of Janice dancing on the beach, her hair uplifted from her head, the glow of a bonfire behind her, her face abandoned to the ecstasy of the dance. It’s very beautiful and immensely sad.

  I sleep for a while before we touch down in Heathrow, and sleepwalk through immigration. TV screens are running nonstop on the Three-in-One Killer. I feel like I’ve flown around the world and back in thirty-six hours to learn no more than I could have had I sat at home and watched television. I think about powering up my dead phone at the charging pole, but our arrival from L.A. was late, and my flight to Dublin is already boarding, and in any case, I don’t have any concrete information to communicate to anyone yet. I
feel hot and shiverish simultaneously. To complete my sense of personal well-being, when I board the Aer Lingus flight to Dublin and sink into my window seat, hoping at least for an hour of sleep, a mother sits her excited five-year-old boy in the seat beside me. In fact, the boy turns out to be perfectly well behaved, and spends the entire flight coloring Spider-Man pictures in a book. And with his help, as we’re beginning our descent into Dublin, I find out who the killer is.

  In On Cukor, Gavin Lambert’s book of interviews with the famous director, there’s a passage during the discussion of the film Gaslight where Cukor talks about various cameramen he has worked with over the years. Janice had underlined their names, and placed asterisks in the margin. On the facing page, she had evidently written a note. The indentation this time is not quite so clear, but I could tell she had not copied out a quote, simply what looked like a list of the names of the cameramen. I ask my young co-traveler if I can borrow one of his coloring pencils, and he nods his smiling assent before his mother can have me seized for child endangerment. With a red pencil, I shade over the page, and the indentations reveal themselves in script:

  William Daniels

  Joseph Ruttenberg

  Karl Freund

  Robert Planck

  Freddie Young

  Oliver Marsh

  Ask M.C. about their work!

  A night’s sleep, as it so often had, makes the decision for him.

  He awoke thinking of the dinner in Eden, when the details of the next phase first began to fall into place. He had balked at the idea of harming children before, and doesn’t condone it in general, but Jack’s grotesque display of grandstanding sentimentality that night deserves some response. And when Loy’s girlfriend revealed that she has two children as well, it seemed heaven-sent. Three-in-One, One-in-Three. He has no idea what age Jack’s “wife” was now; he remembers her vaguely from the Sierras, when she seemed in her early twenties, the perfect age. Now she would be in her early thirties. That was old. While Anne Fogarty must be close to forty.

  Old women. Jesus.

  Still. The children would be the leaven in the dough.

  “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.”

  Blake said that. One of Jack’s favorite quotes.

  That will come back to haunt him, won’t it?

  He isn’t happy about it. Not deep down. He isn’t looking forward to it. He doesn’t want to see children die, who does? And old women, that would be as depressing. But where else can he go now? He knows it’s all coming to an end. Entropy, is that the word? All energy dissipates. What he refuses to do is wind down. He has to go out with a bang, not a whimper.

  Now he has a public in thrall, he can’t just deliver the same old story. He has to keep moving forward, raising the stakes. Action and revelation, the future and the past. You can’t give next year’s audience last year’s movie. He has learned that from Jack, at least. Now he is emerging into the light, he has to dazzle, to blind them with his own.

  In fairness, he has learned a lot from Jack. In fairness. That is a piquant expression. For what has Jack learned from him?

  Jack learned plenty, right from the first, right from insisting he always be in the edit suite, up until Ocean Falls, anyway. But Jack never wanted to pay tribute, to acknowledge his vital contribution.

  Other people know what he has had to put up with. Even the other day, in the Irish Times, Derek Doyle gave credit where it was due. It’s not just that he is crucial to Jack’s films—he’s the reason they are the way they are.

  Look at Armageddon Factor—it’s obvious to everyone. Without him, it’s Hollywood Hack time. Where was the Donovan poetry, the Donovan magic, the Donovan touch then?

  The irony of it: being the rightful owner of the Jack Donovan trademark and having the credit denied you.

  Gall and heartburn, every day of your life.

  It’s all about Jack, when it comes down to it. And Loy, who is a kind of surrogate Jack, a shadow Jack, Jack’s representative on earth. Loy had forced the pace. Without Loy none of this need have happened.

  Maybe he hoped somehow the blame might fall on Jack’s shoulders. Jack had behaved so abominably to women over the years, that’s what made his guff about family and children in Eden so nauseating. Home is the wanderer, home from the sea, fatted calf served up without demur. Where is the natural justice in that? He has no right to happiness, less right than any man. The depraved way he treated his own sister!

  But in fairness—perhaps he overuses that expression, but a man could have worse vices, could he not?—in fairness, he had not set out with the intention of framing Jack. And Loy only became involved after he had snatched Nora and Kate. He had followed his own lead, his own desire…yes, Blake again, he had never considered it before, but of course, Jack had used those quotes in black screen before A Terrible Beauty—don’t use Yeats, Jack said, the title will do that work, use one of the great influences on Yeats.

  “Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.”

  Perhaps he had been an unconscious disciple, Jack’s creature. Perhaps that was how it would be seen. Perhaps—no, without question—there would be a movie.

  Never mind about that.

  What he has found, in the void of sleep, is resolution.

  He will not wait for the knock on the door.

  It is too late for comfort, for safety.

  He knows it is time to move beyond where he has been, beyond his own control, release himself from the tyranny of self.

  It is time to place himself beyond time.

  CHAPTER 27

  Anne Fogarty thinks she is dreaming when the doorbell goes at eleven the next morning and there is Jack Donovan, large as life, with flowers and croissants and coffee and a boxed set of Wagner’s complete Ring cycle, which Anne very much hopes he isn’t going to ask her to listen to.

  “I’m very very sorry,” he says, dropping to his knees on the doormat.

  “And so you should be,” she says, laughing. Across the road, Sandymount Strand at low tide stretches out for what looks like miles. They need a dog, she thinks, not for the first time. Jack stands up, his expression an improbable, endearing mixture of sheepish and cheeky. He is a very bad boy.

  “I simply had too much to drink,” he says. “But if it is at all possible, I would like your advice. On a matter of the heart.” With that, he places his hand on his heart, and thrusts his head back, and Anne suddenly feels like she has been propelled without warning, and still in her dressing gown, onto a very public stage, and rushes Jack into the house before he starts to sing.

  The girls are in the living room playing on their Nintendos or watching TV or doing whatever they do: Saturday mornings at the Fogarty house are strictly free-range. The world looks two hundred percent better after twelve hours’ sleep. All she has to do today is get a new mobile phone. And maybe see if anyone has called her on it. Her boyfriend, for choice.

  Anne sits at the kitchen table with Jack and puts the croissants on plates and drinks some coffee and waits for him to begin.

  “I suppose I’m really wondering what I should bring by way of gifts. I mean, it’s a complicated situation, an incredibly complicated situation, and while we did speak on the phone, it would be easy…very easy to get things wrong.”

  “What were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking…I was thinking, perhaps, of a new car.”

  Anne thinks he’s joking, then sees he is serious, and bursts out laughing.

  “No no no. God Almighty. That’s ridiculous. She would feel…not that I have any experience of men trying to buy me cars, you understand, but I think, especially if it’s a getting-to-know-you-again visit, she might feel a car would be just a little over-the-top.”

  Jack looks at her earnestly, but she doesn’t feel he is getting it.

  “Look. To put it mildly, you’re going in there on the back foot. Ground to make up. So to a certain extent, all you want to
be bringing with you are token gifts. Nice things, but nothing that says, See How Much I Love You, nothing that looks like it’s trying to prove a point, nothing that makes her feel uncomfortable.”

  “So. Not a car.”

  “Not a car, not paintings, or jewelry, or bags, or designer gear or expensive gifts of any kind. God, I hope I’m not talking her out of booty here, but all that can wait.”

  “What will I bring, then?”

  “Well. Something for the girls, of course. And after that, a version of what you brought me. Some nice flowers, something to eat, maybe something to drink, not champagne, looks a bit previous, on the other hand, who doesn’t like champagne?”

  “Champagne?” Jack says.

  “Champagne. Not Wagner’s Ring cycle.”

  Jack looks amused.

  “I think Ed likes Wagner.”

  “Good for Ed. He can play it in his apartment. On his own. Anyway, you get the picture. The kinds of things you’d bring to someone’s house if you didn’t know them very well, but knew them well enough to like them a lot, and hoped they might grow to like you, but knew you were not going to endear yourself to them by grandstanding or showing off or being fabulous.”

  “I can see why Ed likes you so much.”

  “Did he say he liked me so much?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me. But I know he does.”

  “Get the girls—what are they, six?”

  “Five.”

  “Get the girls fairy-princess dresses in Avoca.”

  “No question?”

  “Hands down. And…”

  “What?”

  “Well, I don’t know you well enough to be telling you things—”

  “That’s why I came here. People either know me too well or not well enough. No one will tell me anything. I’m too important to need to know how to behave, apparently.”