Things in Glocca Morra

by Peter Collier

  Geist saw him too. He had finally lit his cigarette and was inhaling through his mouth and exhaling through his nose, with his hands back in his pockets.

  “I called you a cab. I also called the cops so they can dispose of the remains,” he nodded at Molly. “Let’s hope the cab gets here first because a murder scene is not a great place for questions and answers. Anyhow, you’ve got bigger problems than some dead mick.”

  We were both watching Fortunato when he stopped about thirty feet away and turned around as if something had just occurred to him. He allowed the pistol to make small nodding gestures like a ventriloquist’s dummy. I thought he was pointing it at me, while Geist retreated a few steps toward his bar.

  I expected Fortunato to come back again, but the whine of sirens caused him to vanish.

  “What was that about?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” Geist was shaken. “Don’t forget: it wasn’t that long ago that the man lost his only remaining kin.”

  He headed toward the front door of El Verdugo.

  “You killed Selkirk,” I accused his back.

  “I don’t even own a gun.” He stopped but didn’t face me. I noticed for the first time that his right hand was palsied, moving like a small metronome outside his pants pocket.

  “Well, you had it done.”

  “What are you, reopening the inquest?” He took a few more steps.

  “I thought you and Mr. Kennedy were friends.”

  This made him turn, with a thin-eyed smile: “A couple of guys who cooperate once every so often when their interests happen to coincide but don’t feel the need to have each other over for dinner. We’re both practical men who have learned to look for a little insurance on our walk through life to make sure that the best thing happens.”

  “Fortunato said something back there in Italian about vendetta,” I said.

  The false chumminess evaporated from Geist’s manner. “Revenge that’s a hundred years old still has its baby teeth,” he translated for me. “That’s been one of his sayings since we were kids. I heard it dozens of times back in the old days. And he means it. He’ll wait forever to get satisfaction. Vendetta is Nicky’s middle name, and every time he says it someone just got his ticket punched for Valhalla. You should tell your people they’d better watch their step, but that probably won’t help very much. Nicky’s only regret with the people he marks for vendetta is that he can’t kill them twice.”

  Then he disappeared into the darkness of the bar.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  When I arrived back at the Biltmore, my heart was still bumping. I sat in the car and let the analgesic of exhaustion calm me down for half an hour before going up to the Kennedy suite.

  The Old Man answered the door wearing a bathrobe. He was barefoot and I noticed that his ankles were blue with ruptured veins and his toenails yellowed and ridged by fungus. For the first time in all the years I’d known him he actually looked like an old man.

  “Where are you hurt?” He suddenly grabbed my shoulders with both hands and gave me a look of genuine concern.

  I noticed that Molly had bled out on my shirt and pants.

  “Not mine.”

  “Whose, then?”

  “Molly’s.”

  “Where is Molly anyway?”

  “He’s gone.”

  “Gone?” The Old Man flinched.

  “He got the film from Geist. But then Fortunato shot him and took it when we were getting into the car.”

  “Molly didn’t make it?”

  I shook my head and tried to keep my sadness at bay by cleaning the stippling of blood off my glasses with my shirttails.

  The Old Man turned so I wouldn’t see that his eyes were glistening.

  “Molly was a phenom,” he said. “I still remember the first time I saw him all those years ago. He could hit a baseball like Tris Speaker. He would have been a star if he hadn’t decided to work for me.”

  Then he made the moment pass and sat down on the sofa, patting the cushion next to him. “Tell me what happened.”

  I sat too and gave him a blow-by-blow account of what had happened, beginning with Beaufort’s hotel room and ending with Fortunato’s threat and that odd moment when he had paused in his walk-away to look back at Geist.

  The Old Man sat silently for a long time.

  The two of us had entered a zone I knew we’d never occupy again, so I seized the moment: “Was Val murdered?”

  He scrubbed his face vigorously with both hands, his stubble making a rasping sound on his hands.

  When he didn’t speak, I did. “I’m asking you if we had anything to do with it.”

  “We?”

  “You.”

  I forced the word out. But instead of the explosion I expected, the look he gave me indicated that he regarded this as a legitimate question.

  “No.”

  He was thoughtful for a moment before continuing: “Ninety-nine point nine that she did it to herself. That woman was a firecracker. All that joy! All that sadness! So alive! Easy when you got to know her to understand why Jack was head over heels. But things aren’t always what they seem, and Jack probably didn’t see that she was always walking on the razor’s edge.”

  I swallowed my resentment over his presumption in analyzing her: “What about the other tenth of a percent?”

  “Such a remote possibility that it doesn’t bear examination.” He was dismissive, but I could tell his wheels were turning. “Still, if you are desperate for a hypothesis, maybe Geist.”

  “Geist? He told Jack and me that he and Fortunato grew up together and were close as the fingers on a hand. He still has pictures of them and their friends as boys on his office wall. Why would he harm a friend’s child?”

  The Old Man gave a weary shrug: “Water is thicker than blood in the world where people like that live. The idea that Fortunato came to Holly wood just to get his daughter in the movies is a fairytale. He was sent out here by his people in Chicago because they felt Geist was losing the war against Selkirk, which meant they might lose their beachhead in the movie business. Remote possibility—Geist might have thought that eliminating the girl was a way to get Fortunato so fixated on this vendetta thing that he wouldn’t be interested in taking over. Geist is a smart guy.”

  He could have been lying, but I always thought of him as someone so beyond good and evil that he didn’t mind truths that reflected badly on himself. In any case, he quickly made it clear that the window of rough intimacy he had opened was now closed and that he was back in his pragmatic, what’s-in-it-for-me mode.

  “But like I say, ninety-nine point nine. The important thing is that Fortunato won’t want the stuff about his daughter to get out. What father would want people to see all that? So this is one of those films that will never be seen. He won’t use it to blackmail us the way Geist would have. He’ll just use it to get a little stiffy of vengeance whenever he’s feeling low. But he’s got punch and we’ll have to be careful. We’ll have to find a replacement for Molly. Maybe two. But that’s all doable. We’ll be fine.”

  As I watched him convince himself that everything was under control, it occurred to me that the deepest of Joseph P. Kennedy’s many character flaws was his belief that no one else could hate as fiercely as he did.

  It was dark when I got home. The house felt dead and deserted—as if Val had carried all its life and vitality with her into the next world.

  I was glad there was no light shining out from beneath Jack’s bedroom door. Molly was still on my skin and in my hair and I wanted to get him off.

  I took a forty-five-minute bath, changing the water twice. Then I drank some warm milk and sank into the sofa. I was exhausted, but the events that had transpired at El Verdugo kept looping through my mind.

  I saw first light before I finally dropped off for what seemed a minute or two, when sounds of Jack banging around in his bedroom woke me. It was almost noon. I rooted deeper into the covers, dreading the questions he would ask and the answers
I would have to give.

  He came into the living room carrying a suitcase and stood at a mirror for a long time as if arranging his features for the future. He was dressed in a blazer and gray slacks, with a starched white shirt and a striped club tie. He was still pale and had thumbprints of shadow under his eyes, but he was already starting to compose his face into that mask of ironic detachment that would one day beguile America.

  “I talked to Dad this morning,” he said, still looking at himself in the mirror. “He told me what happened so you don’t need to give me a replay. He was a little surprised that you survived, by the way.”

  “They’re not supposed to shoot the messenger, remember?”

  “Yes, and I know what the message is too. Another thing we don’t have to talk about.”

  “So you two hashed everything out?”

  “If we’d done that,” he shot me an arctic look, “I’d be a man without a family.”

  I nodded at the suitcase.

  “I’m heading home on the three o’clock,” he said.

  “The Old Man going with you?”

  “No. I’m on my own.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about maybe having a go at that congressional seat after all.”

  “That will make the Old Man happy.”

  “Not really. If I decide to go for it, I’m doing it my way and I’m doing it for myself, not for him. Those days are done.”

  He didn’t say this spitefully; Kennedy DNA was too potent for that. But there was something definitive in the words that made me think he might finally be settling into the driver’s seat of his life.

  A cab pulled up outside and sounded its horn.

  “I’ve done as much as I can to straighten things up here,” he headed toward the door. “Maybe you can take it the rest of the way—dispose of the remnants, sell the Zephyr, do enough cleaning so I get the deposit back, tie up loose ends and all that.”

  Jack was never very good at asking for favors.

  “Afterwards, get yourself a ticket for Boston. I’ve got a line on a flat on Bowdoin Street. There’ll be a place on the sofa for you as usual.”

  Then he took one last look around and was gone, leaving behind a houseful of things that would forever be left unsaid, the dark shape always submerged just below the tip of our friendship.

  I stayed in Malibu for a couple more days, mopping and vacuuming and sifting through everything Jack had left behind, including a closetful of nearly new summer clothing. I called the Salvation Army to come and get it all, including things I probably should have saved, such as the banged-up binoculars he’d brought home from the Pacific War and the equally used portable record player.

  I placed an ad for the Zephyr in the LA Times and had already gotten three calls by eight in the morning on the day it appeared. A young dentist from Glendale was first in line and had someone drive him out so he could look it over. He offered $700 cash on the spot, which was $15 more than Jack had paid for it, even though we had doubled its mileage in the past two months. I told him it was a deal on the condition that he mailed the painting of Val’s mother I’d boxed up for Temple Rose and drove me to Union Station.

  He waited while I made one last sweep of the house. There was a manila envelope with cuttings of Jack’s articles for Hearst, along with some magazines and records, including Yip Harburg’s disc of “Glocca Morra.” I decided to throw it all in the trash, then got into the Zephyr for the last time and watched over my shoulder as the Malibu beach house got ever smaller, a fade-out for our brief interlude in Hollywood.

  I didn’t yet know it would become a forgotten moment—except by me—that would seem never to have taken place, if not for the ripples it created in the Kennedys’ lives.

  Boston/Washington

  Aftermath

  TWENTY-SIX

  By the summer of the following year I was bunking at Jack’s flat in Boston, just as he had predicted, and working as an unpaid aide on his congressional campaign. Aside from providing comic relief, my responsibilities consisted primarily of making New England clam chowder every Friday; holding up a sign with his campaign slogan—The New Generation Offers a Leader—in his appearances at local ladies’ clubs and veterans’ organizations where he gave earnest speeches in the manner of a high school basketball coach; and building levees around his past to make sure it didn’t flood his present.

  He had rolled over nine other candidates in the 1946 Democratic primary and was already dancing circles around his doomed Republican opponent in the general election in late August when Tomorrow Is Too Late was released. Warners didn’t do much promotion and the movie quickly sank into the second spot in double features at neighborhood movie houses.

  Jack never said anything, although I was sure he knew about it, and I didn’t either. I couldn’t bring myself to go see it, but I read some reviews, including Bosley Crowther’s in the New York Times, which was mostly condescending except for one passage that naturally caught my eye:

  The one bright spot in this sad trifle, which sometimes feels like it was edited in a Sunbeam Mixmaster, is the young French actress Delphine LaReve. Given the thankless task of portraying a character who begins as an idealistic refugee from Nazism and ends as a sadly fallen woman undone by the love she cannot keep from feeling, LaReve is a revelation—always believable and above all always beautiful. I can think of no other young actress on the current scene with a screen presence comparable to hers. She shines luminously through the mediocrity of this film and the viewer will keep thinking of her long after Tomorrow is yesterday’s news.

  In the years following “the events in Hollywood,” as I came to think of those indelible weeks, I watched Jack quarantine his heart and adopt the inexorable sense of purpose that would serve as the rebar for the charming nonchalance that had always gotten him by. He had made a bargain with his destiny and understood what it would take to go all the way—employing an assassin’s sense of purpose at the same time that he was effortlessly projecting, on cue, that élan vital he had first sensed in himself back when we were kids. He was a natural, just as the Old Man had said, a great actor as well as a great politician, able to transfix voters by the cool intensity of the character he portrayed.

  His career was like a forest fire propelled by the wind storm it creates from within. It fed on itself and nothing could stop him, not even the death of Kick a couple of years after he was first elected to Congress, although it was the tragedy that hit him harder than any other he ever experienced, except for Val, of course.

  Kick’s death became a key moment in the irresistible Kennedy Melodrama just then gaining steam. She was flying with Lord Peter to meet the Old Man in the South of France on a mission du coeur to override Rose’s refusal to countenance their union, when their plane went down in a driving rainstorm over the Cévennes mountains. The first thing the rescue party found after long hours of searching was one of the red dancing pumps that Kick had been wearing—just one, perched alone on a little hill a couple hundred feet from the smoking wreckage of the crash.

  The image of that red shoe would become fixed in my mind, a beacon lighting the search for her remains long after they had been found and disposed of.

  Foul weather was the cause of the accident, according to the immediate and unambiguous judgment of the French Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis. At first the verdict had a heavy inevitability for me, as for everyone else, but then I began to wonder. Lord Peter’s aircraft was brand new. It was not a light plane. It had two engines and a pilot and a navigator. Shouldn’t it have been airworthy enough to break out of that storm?

  Up until then, I had always thought of myself as an Occam’s razor sort of guy: Demand simplicity in explanations; don’t multiply hypotheses, especially those based on the unknowable; choose the most obvious answer first. I always remained deeply committed to these principles with the upper stratum of my mind. But down below was the harpoon of behindness that Val had impla
nted and I’d never been able to dislodge—the beguiling arcaneness of the alternative truth whose rewards were forbidden to those condemned always to see things through the dark glass of reality.

  The idea took shape in my mind like a slow-growing malignancy that Kick might have been the first course in the long meal of vendetta that Niccolo Fortunato had promised me he would savor over time. I had a daughter and Joseph Kennedy has a favorite daughter about my daughter’s age…

  Jack wouldn’t have tolerated the thought for an instant, and I would have been forced to ditch it if he and I had still been carrying on our old hero-sidekick relationship with the almost daily contact that had been my stabilizer and compass. But when he married, this long continuity was interrupted for a time as he tried to get Jackie used to the prospect that I would always be, as she eventually referred to me with her ladylike whiff of malice, “the man who came to dinner.” So there were a couple of years in the mid-Fifties when I was more on my own than I wanted to be and could not easily whip subversive ideas back into the kennel of my unconscious when they began to prowl on sleepless nights.

  The crazy thought took hold when months of free-associating eventually brought up the name Izzy Abramowitz, Fortunato’s boyhood friend, the near-midget he had called “Nano” and who, as Solomon Geist once told Jack and me, “would do anything for Nicky.” This Nano, I remembered, had worked in aircraft maintenance for Grumman during the war and in its European operations right afterward. Could he somehow have arranged to be in Paris in 1948 and tampered with Lord Peter’s highly efficient plane before takeoff?

  I kept trying to stigmatize the thought as absurd, but finally gave in and called the Grumman headquarters in Long Island on February 20, 1955, which would have been Kick’s thirty-fifth birthday. I asked the operator to connect me with Isadore Abramowitz, expecting her to say that there was no one by that name in the company. Instead, she shuffled her directory, then asked me to hold while she rang his office.