Things in Glocca Morra

by Peter Collier

  A platoon of cameramen had captured that spectacle, but today there was only one lonely photographer at the entry to the chapel, standing there with his press card in his hatband, checking people out before shooting to make sure they mattered enough to waste a flashbulb.

  Inside and out, the Wee Kirk was an uncannily exact copy of a country church in Scotland. The sunlight streaming in through stained-glass windows illuminated scenes from a tragic Scottish courtship and cast a lucent mosaic across the pews. The organ music was mournfully upbeat; the huge wreaths of flowers at the altar gave off the smell of death with the sting removed.

  Val was lying tilted slightly upward on a bed of satin in the open casket, wearing an elegant mauve silk dress. Her hands were folded over her chest, with a single white rose entwined in the fingers. A makeup artist from Warners had done her face and hair. She was perfect as Snow White in her glass coffin waiting for the wakeup kiss.

  I didn’t recognize most of the thirty or so people scattered like extras through the church. But Veronica Lake was there, near the back, a surprisingly petite woman whose trademark veil of platinum hair, as usual, hid one side of her face. Next to her was John Payne and a couple of other cast members of Tomorrow Is Too Late, along with two well-dressed men wearing matching ties and pocket squares who appeared to be low-level Warners executives. Several rows ahead of them, Temple Rose sat weeping quietly with her cheek pressed into Jimmy Adcock’s shoulder.

  Jack shuffled like a stroke victim as I led him into the pew behind them. Across the aisle I saw the bizarre figure of Emile Beaufort, reading a hymnal as avidly as a suspense novel, his normal eye just a few inches from the pages.

  Fortunato was up front, bracketed by Geist and his twin bodyguards. Seeming to sense our presence, he stood and turned around, suddenly becoming kinetic. Geist grabbed his shoulder and whispered urgently into his ear, at the same time commanding the Sicilians to block his access to the aisle. Fortunato shot a look of unalloyed hatred at Jack and then allowed Geist to pull him back down.

  After more whispering between them, Geist came back to where we were sitting.

  “Why are you here?” Jack asked preemptively.

  “I’m here for Nicky. And Nicky wants you to take a hike.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe because he doesn’t think his daughter would be dead if she hadn’t met you?”

  “I cared more about her than he did.”

  “I doubt that,” Geist said smoothly, “but I guarantee that you and Nicky are headed for a big falling out if you don’t leave.” Then he added, with oily conciliation, “I’d probably be a little more forgiving myself at a time like this, but my only begotten child didn’t just kill herself.”

  I saw that Fortunato had stood up again. Jimmy Adcock rose too, as if in readiness, and Temple Rose put a restraining hand on his arm.

  “Let’s go,” I took Jack’s elbow. “This could get out of control. We’ll say our goodbyes in our own way. This is not our show.”

  He pried my hand off his sleeve, but then let me usher him out of the chapel.

  The sun stabbed our eyes and Jack reeled like a blind man until I pulled his dark glasses out of his breast pocket and put them on him. He resisted when I tried to head him toward the car, instead walking over to sit on a memorial bench under a tree with a sign inviting newlyweds to pose for pictures there after saying their vows in the Wee Kirk. We could hear a priest droning the Latin liturgy, an enemy language in this habitat of Scots Presbyterians, and a eulogy given by someone whose voice was unfamiliar and whose words were indistinct. Then the organ played “Over the Rainbow” and the doors opened. A youthful handler hustled Lake and Payne toward a limousine idling in the parking lot, with the solitary photographer running after them. Geist and the Draco twins smoothly handed Fortunato into another limo, which proceeded straight to the front of the queue headed to the graveside.

  Beaufort was one of the last to emerge from the chapel. He headed straight toward us, but hesitated when he saw Temple Rose coming our way too, and then veered off when a police cruiser entered the parking lot.

  A cop we hadn’t seen before got out, hitched up his pants and centered his dark glasses with a forefinger before sauntering over to us.

  “I’m Officer Decker,” he spoke in a slightly adenoidal voice that accented his superciliousness. “Officer William is no longer on the case and the department asked me to come by to let you know that the coroner has determined that everything was within normal limits.”

  “Normal limits,” Jack repeated in a monotone.

  “Normal limits,” the cop said again, as if closing out a litany. “The words speak for themselves.”

  Then, after surveying the scene, he nodded slightly and headed back to his cruiser. As he opened the door, I thought I saw Geist shoot him a look of recognition out of the rear window of his limousine.

  Temple Rose watched the cop drive off: “I’m not sure you should take everything they’re telling you at face value.”

  The way she said it caused the idea of behindness—deep meanings suppressed by official explanations—to pop into my head.

  Jack looked at her blankly. She took hold of his hand with both of hers, but he withdrew it. She shook her head sadly as I guided him to the Zephyr and got him in. While I was starting the engine, she tapped on the driver’s side window, and I rolled it down.

  Looking across me at Jack, she said, “I know you don’t want to talk about this right now and maybe I shouldn’t mention it either, but if you want to know the state Val was in, you should be aware that a week ago she asked about working for me.”

  Jack tried to break out of his fugue state.

  “I know,” she nodded. “It seems unbelievable. But it’s true. I already knew from the conversations we’d had that something was eating at her—taking big bites. But this threw me for a loop. At first I thought it was a joke. But she told me, ‘This is the profession I deserve.’ I wasn’t having it, of course. I told her, ‘There are many reasons to become a courtesan’—I would have used a different word with anyone else—‘but a guilty conscience is sure as hell not one of them.’ I tried a couple of times to get her to tell me what the problem was, but she wouldn’t say any more about it.”

  Tears were cutting paths down through the powder on her face now: “That girl was quality. She just had too many things to deal with.”

  “And maybe she was a little crazy to begin with,” Jack said bitterly.

  “You shouldn’t believe that,” Temple implored. “We don’t know…”

  But seeing that Jack had resigned from the conversation, she shrugged and stood back from the car, releasing us. As we pulled out of the parking lot, I saw her in the rearview mirror looking down at the ground.

  On the drive home, Jack stuck his hand out the passenger window with fingers flattened into a rigid wing, and angled it up and down against the wind like a child experimenting with aerodynamics. It occurred to me that everything—the bruise, the blood at the corner of her mouth, the empty envelope on the coffee table, the coroner’s true opinion, the death itself—would always just be random data incapable of correlation, except in a world where all such events were presumed to have a suppressed message and meaning.

  When we got to the beach house, Jack sat down on the sofa, took off his shoes, and drew a knitted throw around his shoulders, shivering slightly although it was in the high seventies.

  I went into the kitchen and spent a half hour on an unnecessary cleanup and then looked in on him again. He was staring at the painting of Val’s mother. The silence in the living room was coldhearted and I asked him if I could turn on the radio.

  “No noise,” he said, not looking back at me.

  I went back in the kitchen and rustled around some more.

  After a few minutes he called me back into the living room. “It’s too quiet. You can go ahead with the radio.”

  I turned the dial until I heard Spike Jones’s nutty version of “Cocktails
for Two.” This usually broke us up, but not today. The program was called Make Believe Ballroom, hosted by someone named Al Jarvis, who played one song after another with a little commentary about each and few commercial interruptions, a format we hadn’t heard on the East Coast.

  When the network news came on at the top of the hour, the anchor was in the middle of a detailed piece about a joint commission created by the U.S. and the U.K. to examine the question of European Jews and Palestine, when a local newscaster came on: “We interrupt this program for breaking news. Authorities have confirmed the death of a local labor leader in an incident near Pershing Square. Our reporter has just returned from the scene…”

  Jack and I locked eyes when the news report played an interview with a sobbing female eyewitness.

  “… and when he came out of the building I recognized him as the man who led the strikes at Warners and Paramount. He saw me looking and gave me a big smile as he got into his little Chevy. I was walking away when he started the engine, but then I heard this huge boom. I turned and saw the car suddenly expand like a paper bag with air being blown into it and then explode in a ball of fire. The guy went up through the car’s convertible top like a rocket. He broke right through and came down with his head and shoulders bent and the stumps of his legs pouring blood. He screamed, ‘The blankety blanks have killed me!’ I can’t say the word he used on radio. I went over to help but there was nothing to do. I watched his eyes go dim and he died right there in front of me.”

  Jack began slowly shaking his head: “Why did they have to do that to him? It was over. They’d won and he’d lost. His union was finished and he wasn’t a threat anymore. He was done for. They didn’t have to kill him.”

  He jumped up with a frantic look on his face and put on his shoes while the newscaster continued:

  “… The police are still investigating, but preliminary indications are that the explosion was caused by an iron waterpipe filled with dynamite wired to the car’s ignition.”

  Jack wasn’t listening anymore. “Let’s go!” he commanded.

  “Where?”

  “To Geist’s place.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s behind all this!” Jack yelled incoherently. “We can’t just keep doing nothing about all these things. I need you to drive me over to his bar right now!”

  “Geist probably won’t be back from the funeral yet,” I tried to stall him. “Fortunato might still be with him. It could be a bad scene.”

  “I don’t give a shit.” He was forcing his arms into his windbreaker. “Let’s go!”

  I stayed put, gesturing for him to sit back down and pleading, “We need to think this over.”

  He glared sternly at me, grabbed the car keys off the kitchen table and headed toward the door. I thought he might go without me, but he stopped and stood with his back to me for a moment, then took the windbreaker off and returned to the sofa. His expression said that he was no longer trying to make sense of it all.

  The next morning’s early edition of the LA Times played the story up big, featuring faint and hypocritical praise for Selkirk by some of the studio heads, including Jack Warner, who called him “a man of strong convictions.” Local labor figures were also interviewed. One of them was Geist himself, who said, when asked who might be responsible for the murder,

  “Maybe another Communist. Look what happened to Trotsky. For these reds, small political disagreements are deadly things. They know how to hate. They’re like tiny organisms devouring each other in a drop of water.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Jack got up early the next day, called the Hearst headquarters in New York and resigned. The editor he spoke with offered him a raise to get him to stay, but Jack hung up on him.

  He spent the rest of the day sitting on our deck watching the waves crash on the shore and drag what little shingle there was back with them on their withdrawal. Once when I went out to check on him, he nodded mechanically at the water and said: “Sophocles heard it long ago on the Aegean..”

  Rousing himself to quote from my favorite poem even when he was at the bottom of a rock slide of misery himself was Jack’s oblique way of showing that he appreciated my presence. Comments like this—the right thing at the right moment—were part of what neutralized his narcissism and bonded people so strongly to him.

  Tragedy was definitely not his métier. More than anyone I’ve ever known, he hated unhappiness. He not only didn’t want to be unhappy himself, he didn’t want to have anyone anywhere near him who was unhappy. All his friends knew that if they gave the slightest sign of feeling blue he would unleash cutting ridicule and then, if they didn’t immediately “snap out of it,” as he liked to say, he would quarantine them as ruthlessly as if they had typhoid. But now he gave himself over to an immobilizing grief, allowing it to wrap its coils around him and squeeze.

  Late in the afternoon the phone rang. I waited for him to come inside and get it. When he didn’t, I picked it up.

  “This is Emile calling,” the Bayou voice was unctuous. “Emile Beaufort. I believe this is Mr. Billings? I hope you remember me.”

  “Yes, the home invader.”

  “Amusing.” He sidestepped my disdain. “I had a matter I was going to tell young Mr. Kennedy about the other day at Forest Lawn, but it didn’t seem to be the right moment.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “Perhaps it is now.”

  “It never will be.”

  “Is he there?”

  “He can’t come to the phone.”

  I was about to hang up when he said, “All right, then, let me give you the information and you can pass it on to him and his father. Please tell them that I’m showing a movie. The two of them are guests of honor. The movie is being presented at the old Excalibur Theatre on Pico. Three p.m. tomorrow. It’s a command performance in every respect. Tell them that they will both see familiar faces. I’m hoping to secure financing for it, so Mr. Kennedy Senior should definitely be there. And your young friend too.”

  “Don’t expect us,” I said.

  “It would be a mistake not to attend,” he continued, obviously enjoying himself. “Please believe me, this is something the Kennedys father and son won’t want to miss. Or”—here he lowered his voice into an octave of melodrama—“have someone else see before they do.”

  The call was as creepy as it was corny. After hanging up, I told Jack about it. He just kept looking out at the ocean, giving no indication that he had heard me. I thought I’d better telephone the Old Man.

  The line to his room at the Biltmore was busy for a long time. When I finally got through and told him about Beaufort, the only thing I heard for several seconds was the sound of two and two being put together.

  “I don’t know what he’s cooked up, but even though he’s a weird son of a bitch, he’s not a man you ignore. Bring Jack over here tomorrow at 1:30 and he and I will go see what this asshole wants.”

  Later on, when Jack seemed to be paying attention, I told him about the plan.

  “I’m not going to be part of this, whatever it is,” he replied without looking at me. “I’m not interested in any of this shit anymore.”

  I told him that his father had been insistent.

  “Up his.” Jack was still staring out at the ocean.

  I called the Old Man early the next morning and told him that Jack refused to come.

  “Did you tell him how important this is to me?” He was ready to smash the rebellion.

  “I told him.”

  “What was his response?”

  “Up yours.”

  “Up mine?” I could hear the choler start to rise, but then he let it go. “Oh well, he’s distraught. Probably just as well that he stays there anyhow. I don’t know what Beaufort has up his sleeve, but it’s bound to be disagreeable at bare minimum. You can come in Jack’s place.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah. I’ve got Molly on something else today and I’m sure as hell not doing this by myself.”


  I didn’t say anything right away.

  “Yes?” he rammed the word into the phone.

  “Yes.”

  There was no resisting him.

  I drove to the Biltmore knowing already that I was in over my head. The Old Man had left the door to his third-floor suite open for me. He was sitting at a desk talking on the phone—not issuing orders as usual, but listening carefully and giving minimal responses. As he talked, he nervously yanked on the beaded chain of the desk lamp, turning the light on and off.

  He didn’t look at me until he hung up. Then he just said, “Let’s go,” and put on his coat and headed out the door.

  While we waited for the elevator I tried to make small talk, saying that I’d read somewhere that Mickey Cohen had three double rooms with craps tables in the Biltmore.

  “That’s on a different floor,” he said tersely. “Never seen him. Ships passing in the night.”

  There were three rented Chrysler Imperials waiting for us outside the hotel, each with its own burly driver.

  “Our crash cars,” the Old Man gestured for me to join him in the back seat of the middle one.

  “Why do we need them?” I asked as the first Chrysler moved out a few yards ahead of us and the second one stayed tight on our back bumper.

  “Maybe you’ve forgotten I’ve already been shot at once,” he rasped. “These are armored and have bulletproofed glass. Things seem to be coming to a head. Forget about bullets, I don’t want someone head-onning me or slamming into my ass.”

  He stared straight ahead as our convoy took off. When we passed the intersection of Grand and Third Street, I recognized it as the site of the great scene in the Harold Lloyd movie where he floods the streets with soapy water that makes cops and pedestrians slip and slide.