by Ed Kurtz
Joe chuckled. “I know him too, a little. That Parson thinks he’s an ar-teest. Our man Saul doesn’t have the patience for that malarkey, not when there’s money at stake—and in the picture business, money is always at stake. You want to be an artist, go paint a picture. This is industry, I always say. We’re all cogs in the machine, but my God, what a beautiful machine.”
“Alarming that he broke into your home, though,” Eustace said. “What sort of man does that?”
“Feh,” Joe groaned, waving his hand. “That one’s harmless. Believe me. I probably shouldn’t say this in the company of nice ladies like you two, but Jack Parson hasn’t exactly fomented a reputation as a ladies’ man in this town.”
Eustace’s face paled and her cherry-red mouth formed a broad O. “You don’t mean…”
“I don’t know the old fellow that well,” Joe said. “I don’t have the hardest evidence here, but word gets around in Hollywood. You screw up and everybody knows it. And glory be, just about everybody screws up out here.”
“Some worse than others,” Grace commented, half to herself.
“How do you mean, Gracie?” Eustace leaned in, eager for something juicy.
“It’s just a strange place,” Grace said, her eyes fixed on her glass. “You hear all kinds of things that make Picture Show look like a fat pack of lies. In the magazines, everyone is just so happy to be here. Playground of the gods, and all that. But I haven’t met very many happy people, Aunt Eustace. Most of the people I’ve met seem…broken, somehow.”
“Half of ‘em are dipsomaniacs, a quarter of them faggots,” Joe grunted, shaking his head. “Sure, there’s crime. A few bodies’ve been buried. But hell—pardon me, ladies—but seriously, my old man worked the iron mines in Michigan in the nineties and you know what? The men running that show were a bunch of crooks, too. Like I said: industry. Just keep your nose clean, Gracie. You do your work and go home at the end of the day. Stay away from the vultures. You’ll be fine, darling. Just fine.”
Just fine, she mouthed. She didn’t believe it.
11
L.A., 2013
With one of my cigarettes clutched between his fingers and a thousand-yard stare ahead of him at the 101, Jake exhaled noisily and flicked his ash out the window.
“We could write a screenplay about this,” he said dreamily. “You and me. It’s some story already.”
I was driving, a rental from the last century we’d picked up for a little more than twice what I expected to pay. Good old California. I turned the volume knob down on the ancient tape deck radio and said, “Have at it—you have my blessing.”
“Sorry, man,” he came back. “I guess you’ve got a personal line in all this.”
I said: “Yeah, I guess I do.”
He tossed the smoke out the window, and I glanced in the rearview mirror, scanning for cops. Maybe Jake forgot how serious they were about tossing butts in Southern California, but I sure hadn’t. They didn’t screw around when it came to fire hazards.
“So tell me,” he said, rolling the window back up. “What the hell happened?”
“When?”
“With your wife, man. What’s the story there?”
“She left me. You know that.”
“It’s about all I know. What with all this shit, seems like there’s more to it, you think?”
There was. Plenty more. Truth was, I’d been married to a sociopath for years and pretended I didn’t know it. I did know it, though. I just didn’t want to know it.
“She’s out of my life,” I said tersely.
“Not anymore she’s not. I mean, she’s out, but she keeps cropping up.”
“We’ll be in the Valley pretty soon,” I said. “Traffic’s not bad, considering.”
“Yeah,” Jake said, taking the hint. “Considering.”
* * *
If there was a Knucklehead Hall of Fame back in Boston, I’d have a revered place on the wall. I was never a world-class fuckup—that’s a different hall of fame altogether—but I’d done my share of significantly stupid things over the years that knocked me down a peg or two to plain old knucklehead status. Marrying Helen Bryan was chief among them.
Maybe that’s not fair. Marrying her I can forgive myself for. Sticking around? That’s another matter.
After we made it official I worked on an impractical English Literature degree and she talked about all the things she wanted to do but never had the motivation to actually execute. After about six months up there, my wife clammed up on me. Stopped talking to me. Just shut me out. Then she started running around with a new friend, who happened to be male and liked to take her out to fancy restaurants and late-night movies. I complained about it, and she threatened to divorce me if I was going to make a big deal about it. I relented. See what I mean? Grade A Knucklehead.
Things went from bad to mind-bogglingly shitty from there. By then I knew damn well that I was being cuckolded, as they used to say, but I just swallowed that pill and immersed myself in my graduate work, knowing it would never amount to anything since I wasn’t planning on continuing with it once they handed me a diploma. I tried to write a novel. It didn’t go anywhere so I gave it up. I got to drinking a little more than I ought to have. Then I got to drinking a lot more than I ought to have. The booze drove me into a hole and it drove my wife even deeper into the arms of Mr. Wonderful. Then one night I got a call from the Norfolk County lockup. My bride was being held after her beau got pulled over in Brookline and the cops found a gram of blow in the trunk. A little while and a warrant later, they found an ounce in Helen’s purse, too.
I bailed her out to the tune of five grand. The charges didn’t stick. She literally begged me on her knees to forgive her, to put it all behind us. Knucklehead that I was, that’s just what I did. And when it turned out she was pregnant and we both knew, given the coldness of our marital bed those last several months, that it couldn’t possibly be mine, I turned a blind eye once again while my wife quietly took care of it. As they used to say.
The Other Guy disappeared from our lives and though things didn’t exactly go back to normal, at least she stayed around. I quit drinking. I never asked about the coke and she never brought it up. We ate supper together, watched television. Went to bed at a reasonable hour. It was tense, though, the way so much was said without either of us ever saying anything. The way she’d recoil if my leg accidently brushed up against her in our bed at night.
And then, just like that, she was gone. She didn’t take much, enough for a long vacation, but there was no note, no phone call. No warning. I got an email a week later. Helen had run off to California with Other Guy Number Two. I didn’t even know about this one. She’d been a lot more careful. The divorce papers showed up in the mail within a month. I signed the waiver and sent them back, and then I went directly to the nearest package store to buy the biggest bottle of bottom shelf rotgut in the place. Inside six weeks they knew me by name there. Good morning, Mr. Woodard. Yeah—morning.
Goddamned knucklehead.
Destroyed by love and stupidity. I can’t think of an older story than that.
* * *
Florence Sommer lived in a small postwar crackerbox house in Sherman Oaks with rotting shutters and stray cats lingering arrogantly in the small side yard. I pulled the crappy rental onto the side of the street in front and enacted that age-old L.A. tradition of trying to figure out whether I could legally park there. The signs all seemed to contradict one another and even on their own didn’t make a whole lot of sense. I threw caution to the wind and left the car where I’d stopped. There wasn’t a meter, but I didn’t much care.
A doormat welcomed us by way of smiling cat faces and the legend HOPE YOU LIKE CATS! I didn’t really have an opinion about them one way or the other but felt like it was about to swing sharply. Jake rang the bell. We heard shuffling feet and a hoarse voice politely asking someone named Mr. Kitty to move out of the way. A second later the door opened and there stood a heavyset woman, mi
d-sixties, with a terrible blue-black dye job and a hideous sweater more cat hair than wool.
“Yes?”
“Are you Mrs. Sommer?” I asked, channeling my inner Jack Webb.
“I’m Florence Sommer…” she began with no little caution.
“My name is Graham Woodard,” I told her. “I work with the Silent Film Appreciation Society?” Came off as a question. Not very firm.
“Oh, Leslie and Barbara,” Mrs. Sommer said. “Nice ladies. Well, come on in. Hope you like cats!”
Jake and I exchanged glances and he shrugged. We went on in. It smelled like cat shit and ammonia, a combination that wrestled my nostrils and won in nothing flat. Florence Sommer tottered from the door to the nearby kitchenette, where she hovered over the range.
“Tea?” she squawked. She sounded like Louis Armstrong’s little sister. When she fired up a filterless Camel, I could see why.
“You got any beer?” Jake said.
I jabbed him in the ribs with my elbow. “Tea is fine, thank you.”
He hissed in my ear: “I’m fucking sick of tea, man.”
I jabbed him again. His eyes watered and he smiled nicely at the old lady.
“I’m sorry to tell you I haven’t gone back through my father’s things since I last talked to Leslie,” she said, setting the kettle on the burner. “I’m sure she’s getting impatient, and I wouldn’t blame her one bit. Are you boys her enforcers?”
She tittered. It was like a goose choking to death.
“Ha, no,” I deflected. We hadn’t discussed whether to tell Mrs. Sommer that Leslie was dead, primarily because it hadn’t occurred to me whether we should. I was too preoccupied with thoughts of my ex-wife, which led me directly to re-experiencing all the anger I had ever had about her. Now I was in the mix and had to make the call, and fast. “Ma’am, do you mind if we sit down at the table for a moment?”
A dark look overcame her jowly face and Mrs. Sommer nodded, gesturing for us to sit down first. The table stood just to the side of the half-kitchen, the top cluttered and stacked high with magazines, unopened mail, and cans of cat food. When she sat across from us, she laced her fingers as a fat orange cat leapt up on the table in front of her. I was startled, but she just petted the animal and waited for me to begin.
“I’m afraid I have some ugly news,” I said, wincing at the banality of my wording. “Ms. Wheeler has, well—she’s passed away.”
“Oh, no,” she said, bunching her eyebrows and looking down at the cat.
Jake cleared his throat.
“It’s a little more serious than that,” he said.
I said, “Jake…”
“Look, Graham—this situation is fu—it’s dire, man. I mean, isn’t it? Now that we’re in it?”
“We’re not in it. I’m in it. You’re just here.”
My heart was starting to pound in my chest. That anger I was harboring toward my missing ex was finding a new target in Jake. As for poor Florence Sommer, her eyes were getting glassy wet and her mouth hanging open, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I dropped it.
“Leslie Wheeler was killed yesterday,” I said. I said it like we were talking about someone neither of us knew, a third-rate celebrity we vaguely remembered. Florence Sommer erupted into tears.
“Oh God, oh my God,” she sobbed. The kettle screeched. I looked to Jake, and he rushed over to take care of it. “I barely knew her, but God. God. What happened?”
Jake was pouring hot water, being domestic. I could have laughed otherwise.
“It’s all pretty hazy right now, but it certainly looks like it has everything to do with the film,” I said.
“My father’s movie? Angel of the Abyss?”
“That’s the one, yes.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, her voice even more gravelly, if such was possible.
She tamped her smoke out in an empty can of cat chow and immediately fired up another. I pulled the pack from my pocket, shook it and asked, “Do you mind?”
“No, no—go ahead. Smoke up a storm. God’s sake.”
I lit up. Filtered, which made me feel like second fiddle to her hardcore habits.
“I take it the police haven’t come around to talk to you?” I asked her.
“No, nobody. This is news to me. Dreadful news. I’m so sorry about Leslie, but how in the world could this possibly have anything to do with that old movie?”
I tightened my mouth, half-amazed at the cops’ ineffectiveness—we’d gotten to Florence Sommer before they did?—and half completely expecting it. Overworked and understaffed, maybe. Hell, it wasn’t like they didn’t have other murders to contend with. This was Los Angeles, after all.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Whatever it is, whoever it is, they’re taking it seriously enough to have killed one person already and tried to add me to the list.”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“Everything makes sense, even if you don’t quite get it yet,” Jake said, stepping slowly over with two steaming cups. I was impressed with his Zen, even if it was bullshit.
“I think what he means is that there’s an answer to all of this, we’re just in the dark now.”
“It’s crazy,” she said, accepting her cup from Jake with a small smile. “I’ve found loads of odds and ends from Dad’s estate, called all over the city to find people to deal with them. That movie was just one of them—I didn’t even know what it was until I looked it up.”
“Nobody knowing what it is seems to be a status quo somebody wants to maintain,” I said.
“But it’s just an old movie,” she muttered. It was getting to be a song I was tired of hearing despite the truth in it.
“It’s got to be more than that, given what’s been happening. I don’t know if you read anything about Grace Baron when you looked the picture up, but she disappeared shortly after the movie was made. She was declared legally dead a little while after that.”
“What are we talking about here?” she asked me. “The 1920s?”
I nodded. The cat purred loudly.
“Crazy,” she said again. Like I didn’t know.
“Mrs. Sommer, do you think we could have a look at your father’s things?”
“The estate?” she said, eager to be sure we were all on the same page as to the definition of the collection.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I don’t keep that stuff here, I haven’t got the room. There’s a storage unit I rent, in North Hollywood. That’s where it all is.”
“I’d really like to go check it out,” I said. “If you’re willing to do that.”
“Hell, honey,” she said, shaking her head. “Truth is, it’s all junk. Most of it, anyway. Half of it’s broken and most of the rest worthless to begin with. I was only reminiscing, going through some of it, when I chanced upon that old film can. Far as I’m concerned, you can borrow the key.”
Jake said, “That would be very kind.” I was surprised by his manners.
Mrs. Sommer rose from her chair, grunting a little, and wobbled back into the short hall by the front door where she rooted through a drawer. The fat orange cat followed, slaloming her legs, and was joined by another cat, this one black and thin. When she came back, she was dangling a bronze key by a plastic fob. She put it in my palm and I looked at the fob. It said JUNIOR’S STORAGE, NORTH HOLLYWOOD. The street address and phone number were printed in gold underneath.
“Thank you.”
“I’d go with you, but to be honest, I don’t really know you boys, do I?” said the lady who let us into her house and gave me a key to her dead father’s personal possessions. I shrugged and forced a smile.
“That’s all right,” I said. “I promise to bring the key back as soon as I can.”
We shook hands and she opened the door for us.
“That poor woman,” she said. “I guess I can expect the police to come around with all sorts of questions.”
“You can bet on it,” I sa
id. “One more question, if I may—what did your late father do for a living?”
“Oh, Daddy did all sorts of things, but for a few years he was involved with the picture business, booking theaters and things like that. He even owned a few small ones in the area for a while. Daddy got bored with any one thing after doing it for too long. His family included.”
I pursed my mouth and she smiled sadly. We went back to the rental, bound for North Hollywood.
12
Hollywood, 1926
The weekend came and went, replete with drinking and dancing and fighting off suitors like Fairbanks with his stage sword, and Monday Grace returned to the stage on Sauls’s little corner of the kingdom to find Jack Parson back in his chair. She paused en route to wardrobe to lock eyes with the director; he looked back, but there was nothing on his face to suggest he was even aware that he’d been neglecting his duties.
Saul worked his magic, she thought. Or put the fear of God into him.
The street from which she had been abducted the week before had been struck, replaced over the shooting break with the interior of the tavern where she—as Clara, in her living days—served wine and bread to the same sort of men who came to ruin her. While she slid into her dress and apron and sat down to have her hair done, Grace thought over the pages she hadn’t bothered to look at lately, piecing the scene together from memory before it was time to begin.
“The fly becomes the spider today,” Saul roared at her when she returned, made-up and costumed. He embraced her, filling her nostrils with his ever-present cloud of cigar smoke. “Until now you have suffered, my Grace. Now let’s have some lovely revenge, shall we?”
He chuckled and stepped aside, allowing her full view of the set and the boxy camera already situated atop its three-legged stand. The cameraman fussed with the contraption while a heavy man lingered over top, fascinated and intrusive. It was Joe Sommer.
