Make Believe

by Ed Ifkovic

  Lorena Marr seemed surprised to hear my voice on the phone. “Edna, my word. Has something happened?”

  “No, Lorena, I haven’t spoken to you since Sol’s funeral.”

  There was hesitation in her voice. “I know. I’ve been in hiding. Ethan called me early yesterday morning and told me Frank was mad at Tony. I guess Tony mouthed off at Ava’s house.”

  “Yes, not pretty.”

  “It’s amazing how Ethan checks in with me now more than when we were married.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Just that Tony made a fool of himself.”

  “He did that, certainly, but I don’t think he knows how to behave anymore. He’s wading in quicksand.” I waited a second. “He hates Frank, doesn’t he?”

  Long silence, the dead space of a phone conversation. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because it’s obvious. He resents Frank’s success the way a poor family member hates the crumbs a wealthy relative tosses his way.”

  “No one wants to face that.”

  “I do.” I waited. “And Ethan himself was not the picture of decorum that night.”

  Surprise in her voice, a chuckle. “He didn’t share that information with me.”

  “Doubtless.”

  Lorena spoke matter-of-factly. “Ethan keeps his emotions hidden.” I could hear her lighting a cigarette, the striking of a match. “Ethan is troubled, I guess, because Frank was ice cold on the ride back into town.”

  “Well, they said some unflattering things to him.” Now I warmed up. “I gather Ethan refers to them as Adam and Ava. The lost souls of paradise.”

  “He doesn’t mean anything by that. Ethan is hard to read sometimes.”

  “You make excuses for him, Lorena. Patient Griselda, home waiting for her man.”

  “That’s not fair, Edna. We were in love.”

  “Past tense?”

  A pause as she changed her mind. “I’m lying to you, Edna. It does mean something. With Frank losing favor these days, he’s shoving the boys aside, particularly Tony. He’s…impatient. It’s hard to like Tony, loyalty to Hoboken notwithstanding. Some of us remember the quiet, funny guy—before Lenny died. I suppose Tony does resent Frank’s stupendous success, even though he’s been riding his coat tails freely.”

  “I sensed that.” I waited a second. “What about Ethan? How does he view Frank?”

  “Well,” Lorena breathed in slowly, and I could hear the intake of a cigarette, “lately he’s told me he doesn’t like Frank’s mockery of Tony.”

  “But that’s so much sport these days. The lost drunk. Tony’s out of control and you’re all watching him as though he’s a scene in a movie you don’t care for.”

  “You know, Edna, out here in gaga land, everyone is surprised when they realize they haven’t become rich and famous over night.”

  “That’s Ethan?”

  “A little bit. Back when. But I was thinking more of Tony.”

  “Sometimes I think that he’s never so drunk as he acts. Even smashed, he’s watching everyone.”

  A long silence. “God, Edna. I don’t think so. He gets hammered and passes out.”

  “True, but at the Paradise, under Ethan’s watch. But I sense a bit of the actor in him. A bad one, yes, but I detect cleverness in him. Acting the fall-down drunk allows him to get away with things. Oh, poor Tony, the sad drunk on Saturday night. Poor Liz, putting up with him. Poor Ethan, the guardian angel. Well, what can you expect from a drunk?”

  Again, the hesitation. “Well, maybe.”

  “Ethan mentioned that he and Tony are headed back to New Jersey.”

  Now she laughed out loud. “Ethan has been threatening to do that for a while. He claims to be sick of L.A., that he is saving Tony from a drunk tank and death. God, back in Hoboken he’d disappear into a package store and never come out. But L.A. is in Ethan’s blood. Go to the movies with him sometime—he’s like a little kid, all revved up, almost giddy. ‘They make movies here!’ he once chirped at me. Imagine!”

  There was a rush of voices behind her. “You’re busy.” But I added, hurriedly, “I called for a reason. Do you have Liz Grable’s phone number?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “I’d like to talk to her.”

  A long pause. “Liz?”

  I stammered. “I told her we’d have a talk.”

  “Really?”

  My request puzzled Lorena, though she gave me Liz’s number as well as that of her hair salon.

  “Call me, Edna. Before you leave.”

  “We’ll talk, Lorena. I promise.”

  “No, no,” she insisted. “Call me. Do you know how rare it is in L.A. to talk to someone who listens to you?”

  ***

  When Liz Grable was called to the phone in the hair salon, she began talking immediately, her voice loud, angry. “You were supposed to call this morning, Tony. I want my goddamn key.”

  I broke in. “Miss Grable, I’m afraid…it’s Edna Ferber calling.”

  Silence, heavy breathing. In the background women’s high-pitched voices, a lazy voice on the radio. Finally, Liz spoke into the receiver, her words clipped, wary. “Miss Ferber? What do you want?”

  “We haven’t spoken…”

  “I’m at work. I’m busy.” She repeated, “What do you want?”

  Good question, I reflected: what did I want? Ava’s comments had me mulling over the circumstances of the murder, prodding me to dwell on the night of the murder and the people—the players—involved. Who was where that fateful night? And, of course, missing from the equation was Liz Grable. Tony admitted to calling her from the Paradise Bar & Grill, but claimed she wasn’t at home.

  “I was wondering if you’d join me for lunch.”

  She didn’t answer at first. Someone nearby called her name. “What?”

  I repeated my invitation. “I thought it would be nice…”

  Bluntly, her mouth too close to the receiver. “Why?”

  “Liz, we barely had time to talk at Ava’s when we met.”

  She gave out a false tinny laugh. “I wonder why.” Her voice had a whiny, hollow tone, as annoying as grit in your eye, and it baffled me that she believed she could be an actress. Perhaps in silent pictures, one more fledgling actress tied to the railroad tracks with the locomotive barreling down at her. The Maiden’s Mistake; or, How Lizzie Caught the Train.

  A deep breath. “I’m curious about something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Your…perspective on the murder.”

  “Max?”

  “Yes.”

  A heartbeat. A whisper. “I have nothing to say.”

  “A short conversation.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so.” A slight, phony laugh.

  “People don’t let you talk, Liz,” I began. “Tony and Ethan dominate, and Frank…well…”

  “Is a bastard,” she finished for me.

  “It’s unfair to you, Liz.”

  “You said it.”

  “That’s why I thought…well, you must have ideas. You’ve been around…”

  “Well, yeah, but I don’t know.”

  Exhausting, this disingenuous probing on my part. Liz, the unfriendly witness—to use that sickening and destructive phrase so happily employed by the HUAC in Washington. Are you now or have you ever been…?

  “I’d like to hear you.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I shifted gears, so blatant a move I expected her to slam down the phone. “We started talking about Cimarron that night. You mentioned my heroine Sabra Cravat, the land rush, your family settling there. The Sooners. Your family in Oklahoma.”

  The abrupt shift in my words startled, but I had little time for the diplomatic niceties of journalistic interviews. The train was coming down the track. Excitedly, Liz told me, “My grandpa was late for the land grab then, so we missed out, but he had some wild stories.”

  “I wish he’d been someone I’d interviewed when I was there.”r />
  She tsked. “Too bad. Yeah, but you’d have to talk to the dead.” She considered her line funny because she chuckled.

  “That’s a problem I have when I research the past.”

  “A killer, no?” Another sigh. She covered the receiver and her muffled voice addressed someone nearby. She came back on the line. “All right, Miss Ferber, I can get out of here early afternoon. Say one o’clock?”

  I agreed to meet her at Jack’s Luncheonette two blocks over on Hollywood. “One o’clock,” I stressed.

  “I know how to tell time.”

  When the taxi dropped me off at Jack’s, she was already standing in the doorway. Nervously, she shook my hand, a quick, blustery gesture, and then mumbled something about almost changing her mind. As the waitress seated us. Liz told me over her shoulder, “I’m not one to talk about people, you know.”

  “Neither am I, Liz.”

  She eyed me suspiciously. “Hey, you make living talking about people.”

  I grinned. “But they’re not real. I make them up.”

  “I wouldn’t be too happy seeing myself in one of your books.”

  “Why not?”

  She tilted her head and rubbed an ear. She held up the menu in front of her face, shielding her mouth. “I’m the dumb blonde who’s got dreams that get her nowhere. That picture is all over the movie screen now, that kind of broad, and it ain’t the real me. I ain’t daffy.”

  I made eye contact with her. “You shouldn’t let other folks tell you what you are, Liz. That’s a secret most women don’t know. Invent yourself, and stick with it.”

  She scoffed. “Yeah, sure. Nobody believes that I got a brain. I mean, Tony thinks he’s smarter than me.”

  I assumed my Magnolia Ravenal Southern-belle voice. “Get out of here!”

  For the first time she laughed out loud. I joined her.

  We ordered sandwiches and coffee. “I like your dress,” she said. “It goes great with your white hair.”

  She sat back, relaxed. The waitress filled water glasses and Liz frowned at her retreating back. “A girl that skinny should never wear her hair like that.”

  I hadn’t noticed. “Tell me something, Liz.” I put down my glass. “You were the one who knocked on Max’s door the night he died, right?”

  The question, hurled so brutally at her, stunned her.

  She’d been sipping water, a gingerly movement she’d obviously appropriated from some Jean Harlow movie, but my words made her sputter. Water dribbled down the side of the glass, and she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her eyes darkened, scared. For a second, she reached up to check on her puffed platinum hairdo, as though she feared it had collapsed like a surprised soufflé.

  “How did you know?” she whispered.

  “A guess, and not a very clever one, Liz. Someone visited Max that evening. You didn’t answer when Tony called you from the Paradise, which surprised him. No witness has come forward to the police, so far as I know, and, frankly, you’re one of the few players unaccounted for that evening. I had the feeling that Tony was suspicious when you weren’t home. As I say, a guess.”

  She grinned. “A good one.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Nothing really to tell, though I don’t want anyone to know. I mean, like Max got killed right after that visit. So I can’t go to the police…”

  I cut her off. “Of course, you can. You have to.”

  She shook her head. “God, no. They’ll think I…”

  “Tell me what you know. Liz.”

  She sat back, folded her arms across her chest, glanced around the crowded room. She leaned in and seemed to be weighing her words, time for intimate confession. “I’m sick of it all, Miss Ferber. I’m sick of Tony. Of Ethan. Of Frank. All of them. I stayed too long at the fair, as they say.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve had it. You gotta know that I told Tony he had to get out of my place now that he’s lost that dumb job in the valley. Yeah, quite the job! A measly few dollars a week, lost on the ride back home. Drinks and poker. I mean, I sort of love the slob— I mean the old Tony who made me laugh, who bought me cheap trinkets on Sunset, who promised me the moon.” She sighed. “Before everything fell apart. The drinking. You know, I won’t allow that in my apartment. I don’t even wanna be around him then—like that night at Ava’s when we showed up there with Frank and Ava was having that cocktail party. I told them I didn’t wanna go. I know how those nights end, for God’s sake.”

  “So he drinks at the Paradise.”

  “Yeah, that sleazy gin mill.” She bit the corner of a nail. Red enamel flecked off. “You know, I started thinking about my life. My career. I was dumb enough to believe that Tony had some influence—with Frank and Ava. But they’re in their own pretty little worlds. Frank’s mean to me. Ava is sweet but only looking at Frank. Ethan thought I’d be good for Tony—he pushed the relationship on me, paid for everything. He planned it like a military operation. He didn’t know how to handle Tony—once Tony became this…you know, different guy. Get Tony out of his hair once and for all. But Ethan’s a jerk, too. ‘Are you going out looking like that?’ ‘Why would someone your size wear a dress like that?’ That’s how he talks to me. I know style, Miss Ferber. I got a chinchilla fall jacket with a velveteen collar. High style. Look at Ethan. Mr. Neat Freak…ooh ooh ooh, I got me a button loose. Help me! Ooh ooh, somebody scuffed my shoe.” She paused, out of breath.

  “Don’t let people be mean to you, Liz.”

  She nodded, eyes wide. “Anyway, I decided to back off, cut my losses, you know. Especially now. It’s annoying how one day you wake up and there it is slamming you in the face: time is going by, lickety-split, and I’m wasting it with a bunch of creeps. Tony is the dirt road to nowhere. I’d thought I’d get parts by now.”

  “You got Max as your agent through Tony, right?”

  She rolled her eyeballs and grunted. “That’s funny. I had this here agent—at least he had a card that said that—when I met Tony. Ethan introduced us. Max was Tony’s agent. Tony started out okay, a decent stand-up comic making fun of himself. Real likeable. He ain’t as stupid as…well, he lets on like he is. It made for a funny act onstage. But he got fat and drank and started wearing those sequined tuxedo jackets with wide lapels with bells and whistles all over them, and he practiced insulting old ladies in the grocery store. Real clever, no?”

  The waitress placed our sandwiches on the table, poured coffee, so Liz stopped talking, watching her intently, waiting until she moved away. She spoke in a theatrical whisper. “Waitresses hear too much, Miss Ferber. They’re phonies. I don’t want to end up in the gossip sheets.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that.”

  She squinted at me. “I am with you. You’re famous.”

  “Not in this restaurant.”

  “Well, anyway, Max said some nasty things to me. I started hating him.”

  I bristled. “Max could never be unkind.”

  “Try going into business with him, lady.” She rolled her tongue out suddenly, like an anxious frog. “Lord, I shouldn’t speak bad of the dead, right?”

  I shrugged. “I do it all the time. The dead are wonderful targets.”

  Now her tongue rolled over her lower lip, the frog having captured the unsuspecting fly. “Not surprising to me. You got you some mouth.” She looked smug, happy with her put down.

  “Go on, Liz. In a war of words, I…well, never mind.”

  She leaned across the table, her pale gray eyes becoming dark marbles. “I just lied to you, Miss Ferber. Max wasn’t that bad. I mean, I used to get mad because he couldn’t find me no work. But then Max married Alice, and all hell broke out. World War Three. I mean, Tony went ballistic. Ethan couldn’t speak in complete sentences. I only met this holier-than-thou Lenny one time, but he was a grease ball, flashy suits and women and doling out those dollar bills to the dizzy boys. But suddenly everything had to change. Tony quit Max. So I did. It was a dumb move becaus
e it left me with nothing. But at the time I thought—well, Tony says Frank Sinatra is going to get him gigs. Why not me, too?”

  “Was Ava around then?”

  “Yeah, Ava was in the picture then. The first time we met she was real nice, which surprised the hell out of me. When Frank made fun of me, she rubbed my shoulder, like we were old girlfriends. I mean, you’d think she’d be a bitch.” She smirked. “I would if I was her. With that face. I used to be friends with a crew guy at Metro. He said she was common people. She’d eat lunch with the crew, not in her dressing room. So I thought, well, she’d help me. I wasn’t allowed to ask her. Ethan warned me—don’t you dare ask for a favor. Frank’ll go nuts.”

  “Tell me about Frank.”

  “What’s to tell?” Liz took a compact from her purse and checked her face. “Excuse me a sec, Miss Ferber.” She found a tube of lipstick and dabbed at her lower lip, then rolled her tongue over her lips. Satisfied, she sat back.

  The waitress dropped dessert menus with us, and Liz deliberated with rapt concentration, her fingers pointing from one to the other, unable to decide. “The cheesecake,” she told the waitress. “You know, a big slice.” She checked her wristwatch. “I gotta watch the time, Miss Ferber.”

  “Frank,” I repeated.

  “A smug bastard. Treats me like I was a streetwalker. But then he treats all women that way, even his beloved Ava. He likes that about her. He’s got a voice and all, but so what?”

  “I know. It’s amazing how the world makes excuses for people with talent or genius. The poor slob who plods along at his job is roundly upbraided for a minor mistake, while Einstein can routinely and carelessly spill his coffee on you and we’d find it harmless, if not an amusing lapse. A charming idiosyncrasy perhaps.”

  Wide-eyed now. “What?”

  “Do you think that he could kill anyone?”

  The question stopped her cold. A giggle escaped her throat. She pointed a finger at me, a gun, while she mouthed the words: bang bang. “Anyone could. You could.” She gave me a creepy smile. “You probably have, Miss Ferber.”

  I grinned. “I’ve been tempted.”