by Ed Kurtz
Anyway, all the sharp angles of the sets, the stark black and white of the costumes, and the performances—I was never one to put much stock into the hammy acting of silent-film actors, but with only their faces and bodies with which to transmit the characters, these people did some quality transmitting. When the girl got kidnapped, I felt her fear. And when they killed her…well, I jumped in my seat, honest to God. You get in a certain frame of mind watching movies that old, like you’re correcting for the times, for the severe content restrictions. Whoever was overseeing the censorship department for this baby was sleeping on the job that day. That shit was intense.
I got ushered out of the room by a nurse whose weight problem was overruled by her massive cans, a sight I would have loved to tell Graham all about. He would have rolled his eyes, told me I was a pig. He’d have been right. Christ, I was missing him already and he wasn’t even dead yet. I made my way past the bacon guarding the room to the elevator and slinked outside to track down a cab.
Since I didn’t have any biddies with more money than sense fitting the bill for my stay in L.A., I didn’t have the good digs Graham got set up with. I was staying at a no-tell motel six blocks southeast from Mann’s Chinese, which was more or less my old stomping grounds before the floor fell out from under me. With no place else to go, that’s where I had the cabbie take me. But before I went back to my room, I stopped off at the package store across the street to stock up on middle-shelf bourbon. The Egyptian clerk called me “boss.” I brought the bottle back to my room and sipped it from a Styrofoam cup in front of a late-night talk show where some lunatic pop star was trying to make her insipid record sound important. Nobody did anything important anymore, even I knew that.
In the next room, somebody was getting some action. I assumed it was bought, but I never begrudged anybody their vices. Hell, I was halfway thinking about calling up Pink Dot for some beer, hot dogs, and porno mags. Thinking about Graham in that terrible state at the hospital put the kibosh on that, but quick.
When the late show was over and the bottle was depleted by half, I was about ready to crash out had it not been for the knock at my door. I don’t know about anybody else, but anybody knocking on a motel room door is cause for alarm in my book, triply so at that hour. I didn’t have a peephole, so I cracked the filthy curtains and peered out the window. It was a ginger cop with a sour puss. He wasn’t in any kind of uniform, but the guy behind him was, and the redhead showed a badge to me through the glass.
“Detective Shea, Hollywood police,” he said, just like on TV. “Are you Jacob Maitland?”
I unlocked the guard chain and opened the door for him.
I said, “Hiya, Shea,” or something like it.
“Mr. Maitland,” he answered, putting his badge away. The uniform standing a few feet behind him eyeballed me like I was going to do something. I flashed a goofy grin at him.
“Deputy Pyle,” I said.
I don’t think he got it.
Shea pressed into the room, not waiting for an invitation. At least I knew he wasn’t a vampire.
A Three’s Company repeat was on the television. Shea switched it off.
“You like movies, don’t you, Maitland?”
I tipped my cup to my mouth, disappointed to find it already empty. As I refilled it with a few fingers, I said, “That’s kind of our game, Graham and me.”
Only half-true—Graham did actually make a living doing something film related. I sat at the front desk for a water company in Worchester writing screenplays that would never see the light of day. Kind of a game, still.
“Y’know how in the movies the cops always tell people to stay in town during an investigation?” Shea asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“Well, for one thing, that’s bullshit. We can’t make you do anything like that. And another thing, I’m going to suggest—strike that, strongly suggest—that you go on home. First thing.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “I don’t recall ever seeing that in a movie.”
“Maybe you movie people should come talk to us more often.”
“You seem pretty busy as it is.”
“You can say that again,” Shea groused. He added: “I’m really sorry about your friend.”
“He’s not dead yet.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I know you didn’t,” I said. “I’m a little drunk.”
“No law against it.”
“Used to be, you know,” I slurred. It’s hell feeling sober in your brain when your mouth and limbs don’t want to act like it. “Back when our girl Gracie shuffled off this mortal coil. You couldn’t drink back then, you know. Shit was illegal as hell.”
“Seems like I heard about that. Mind if I smoke in here?”
I grimaced, said, “Yes, I do. Sorry, copper. One nice thing about Graham being down and out is I don’t have to breathe that filth anymore. Don’t you get started, too.”
“No harm, no foul,” said Shea.
“No foul, no harm,” I stammered. I swallowed down the contents of my cup, made a face and hissed.
“You’re hitting that sauce pretty hard,” Shea said. “I’d like to talk to you some more, but it doesn’t seem much prudent now. Are you leaving tomorrow, like I suggested? I could interview you by phone, no problem.”
“Maybe I’m a suspect,” I said stupidly. “You’d want to keep a suspect around, wouldn’t you?”
“All right, go ahead and shut up now. I mean it. You don’t want to get yourself in trouble, kid.”
“I’m thirty-two.”
“I’m just telling you.”
“You’re not the boss of me.”
I filled my cup again. Shea sighed. The uniform lingering outside the open door looked ready for anything. I sneered at him.
“We’re going before you dig a hole you can’t get out of,” Shea said. He dug a card out of his pocket and laid it gingerly on top of the television he’d turned off. I wondered what shenanigans Jack Tripper was up to by now. “My info. Call me when you’re not falling down drunk, would you? For your buddy.”
“For my buddy,” I toasted, and that shot went down hot, too. My stomach roiled.
The detective said, “Christ, take it easy.”
“Free country, Kojak,” was what I said back.
I’m a terrible drunk. Shit, I admit it.
* * *
I woke up with a monster headache and no intention to return home whatsoever. It was fifteen past noon and after chugging a cup of gas station coffee I found a place that sold breakfast greasy enough to take off the edge so I could decide what was next. I wasn’t about to leave Graham half-dead in the hospital with Christ-knew-who gunning for his ass just to go back to my shitty job in Massachusetts like none of this nightmare ever happened. I may have felt a little arrogant for having considered it, but as far as I was concerned this was my problem now. Angel of the Abyss and Grace Baron and why nice old ladies had to die because of them.
And my friend with a chunk of skull missing for our trouble.
I was a long sight far from ready, but more than fucking able. I swallowed a pound of eggs, bacon, and pancakes like they were the medicine of the gods and stepped back out onto Hollywood Boulevard like a man reborn, ready for anything. This was my game, now. If only I knew the damn rules.
I paid for my meal, left a chintzy tip. Went outside. I wanted a drink and planned on having one. There were a dozen bars within spitting distance, just like I remembered the old neighborhood. I’d ask the bartender for gin, because gin was my thinking drink. After all, I had some thinking to do. About how to help my friend Graham, who didn’t deserve everything that had happened to him.
And the main thing I thought of to help him was finding his ex-wife, Helen.
That one was going to require a few rounds.
16
Hollywood, 1926
“Right before the turn of the century, just a couple years into this crazy game, the state of Maine enacte
d the first law censoring motion pictures in this country,” Jack Parson said, tugging on his bottom lip.
Grace stood behind him, looking at the back of his head with her arms crossed beneath her breasts. She had gone to his temporary office housed in the lot’s hinterlands to ask about the apprentice electrician—in the vaguest terms possible—and found her director mesmerized. In front of him, a makeshift screen made from a white sheet flickered brightly and silently as bloody mayhem unfolded atop the staircase ashore of the dreadnought Potemkin.
“It was prizefight pictures they had a problem with. A couple of fellows pummeling the sense out of one another, the oldest sport in history. Too violent, they said. And violence, as anyone knows, begets violence.”
Lines of riflemen in white tunics marched down the steps, firing indiscriminately into a fleeing crowd of hundreds. Cripples vied to avoid the running feet while a small boy was trampled underneath them to the horror of his screaming mother.
“But those were merely exhibitions,” Jack continued as the blood flowed down the Odessa steps. “The real strike came around ’15 when Ohio put together a board of censors with the power to arrest anybody who showed a picture they didn’t approve of. You know what the court said? They said that pictures ‘may be used for evil.’ Evil, Gracie. Out here in Movieland, most folks didn’t like the sound of that. So Mutual Film Corp. sued. And they lost. Because pictures are commerce, not art. That was the Supreme Court’s ruling by the way. Pictures aren’t art. Now it’s not just far-flung Ohio. Now it’s the whole of America. And here in Hollywood, we’ve got that Puritan son of a bitch Will Hayes stirring up the pot. Making sure we aren’t inciting loose morals. Mad sex. Murder and the like.”
A pretty young woman covered her infant in its perambulator with her body, panicked and faced with the marching horde. The tsar’s men shot her down and the pram went rolling crazily down the steps as an old woman in pince-nez spectacles ran to the scene, desperate to save the child. She was too late: a soldier drew his sword and smashed the blade across her face, leaving a gruesome jumble of broken glass, flowing blood, impotent shrieks.
Grace’s gorge rose in her throat, the memory of a man called Petey dead on the street still fresh in her mind. She shut her eyes for a moment and felt the sweat bead on her brow.
“There!” Jack cried, jabbing his finger toward the screen. “Did you see it? Did you see that, Gracie? That is the essence of humanity. That is the difference between entertainment and art. It shows you something, it holds up a mirror to your own ugliness. The darkness, Gracie. The art is in the darkness.”
“It’s ghastly, Jack. Shut it off.”
He went rigid for a moment, then slowly turned in his chair to look at her for the first time since she entered. His eyebrows were drawn together in a bunch; his upper lip curled into a sneer.
“Haven’t you been listening to me?” he said, his voice without inflection. “Don’t you understand? What, you’d rather be a chorus girl? Tied to the railroad tracks for Tom Mix to come rescue? Maybe when sound arrives, you’ll just sing some idiotic song?”
“I sang idiotic songs on the circuit for years, Jack. It’s where I got my chops, and I paid for it dearly.” A tiny shudder worked its way up her spine. She shook it out. “I’ve worked my tail to the bone since I was old enough to flash a little leg at a room full of slavering Shriners and I did it so I could be here, batting my goddamn eyes at a camera and not digging potatoes out of the cold ground like my mother till the arthritis turned her hands into claws.”
“You won’t be batting your eyes at my camera,” he said gravely. “That’s not the picture I’m making. It wasn’t before, and it certainly isn’t now.”
“Now that you’ve decided you’re the Da Vinci of the movies?”
“I’ll be the Bosch of the movies. The Dürer of the movies. I’ll open up the mouth of Hell and show it to everyone in America. Then we’ll see what’s commerce and what’s art, won’t we?”
He nodded curtly and turned back toward the screen. The mutineers were preparing the dreadnought’s massive guns against the approaching admiral’s ships.
“Take your place, Ms. Baron,” he said loudly over the clicking of the projector. “We shoot at nine.”
She left for the set without another word.
Frank was nowhere to be seen.
* * *
Across the table at FitzGerald’s on Sunset sat Eustace and Joe, preening over one another like a pair of kids, while Grace studied her aunt’s face and thought about killers. Joe Sommer made cheap comments about how Eustace looked a decade younger than her years and Eustace tried to force a girlish blush. Grace squinted her eyes and imagined her aunt when she was ten years younger, with a knife handle in her fist and the blade sunk deep in Billy Francis’ gut.
That was Idaho Falls, 1916. A week before Christmas, as she recalled it, where the local Elks put the woman and her young niece up in a hotel packed with all the other performers for the fraternity’s annual Christmas variety. There were whites and coloreds, aged Jewish comics and children younger than Grace with blonde ringlets and bleeding feet from the ballet shoes that maimed them. The hallway was a mad circus, replete with dogs and a shrieking rhesus monkey called Charley, which Grace knew because its owner screamed its name as he chased the animal up and down the stairs.
And in the middle of it all were Eustace and Little Gracie Baronsky, the Prodigy of Boise, fifteen years old but billed as ten, which absolutely nobody believed for a second. The plan was to work their way east, earning as much as they could from town to town until at last they’d land in New York, where the real action was. Eustace had a letter she kept like an invaluable relic from an agent who wanted to see Gracie for himself. There was talk of Ziegfield’s Follies, who could always use a premium child act—if she was good enough. Auntie Eustace meant to make sure her disciple was better than that. The road to New York was to be the starlet’s trial by fire, and if she didn’t have ‘em on their feet by the end of her every performance, Gracie knew perfectly well how much a switch would sting her rear end in the room after.
To ensure a positive reaction, it was Gracie’s own idea to capitalize upon the patriotic fervor of a country edging toward war abroad. To that end, she carefully tested the waters among locals in taverns and diners the afternoon before a show to see how they felt about America’s involvement in Europe. If they were predominantly for it, her song that night would be “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-Bag,” the popular British war song. If, however, she found the rubes in favor of isolation, Gracie had a backup song of her own composition at the ready: “Stay Home, Johnny Boy, Stay Home.” She even managed to weep real tears at the song’s finale, where she begged her paramour to take care of her rather than a bunch of foreign strangers half a world away. (Her secret was an unhinged pin in her corset that she furtively jabbed into her flesh at the right moment.) If she played her cards right, either one could bring down the house.
The trouble in Idaho City, Gracie found, was that reactions to her innocent inquiries appeared to be split right down the middle. She couldn’t decide which song would earn her ovations and which a chorus of boos—and a whipping. To that end, in a state of near panic, Eustace brought the Elk responsible for their booking to their room to confer. The audience would be filled with his brethren, after all, so who better to give them the scoop?
Billy Francis was a big bear of a man, his perpetually slick bald pate unconvincingly swept over with a length of greasy yellow hair he’d grown long on the side. He habitually patted his round belly when he spoke, and his awkward familiarity with Aunt Eustace struck Little Gracie as the ink on the contract that secured them the show. He bounded into the room, shut the door behind him, and immediately sat down on the edge of the narrow trundle bed beside Eustace where he planted a hand at the small of her back.
“The fellows have talked a lot about this,” said Billy, his words hidden in a rum-soaked mist. “Fact is, our eldest brother is seventy-tw
o and well remembers the big war in the last century. Brother Jim reminds us that we’ve bled enough on our own dirt and don’t have any need to go traipsing around the globe to bleed on anybody else’s.”
“Our feelings exactly, Mr. Francis,” said Eustace with an eye toward Gracie, who lingered awkwardly by the bureau. “That is quite the sentiment of my little Gracie’s performance this evening, so we are relieved to know we are all in agreement.”
“It’s good to see eye to eye with one’s friends,” he said, now moving his hand up and down Eustace’s back. “I can see we’re to be such good friends, all of us. How’s about a drink?”
Billy produced a large steel flask from his coat, which he uncapped before taking a deep pull. He said, “Good for what ails you.” He handed the flask to Eustace, who also drank with a sour, pinched face.
Taking it back, Billy stood and extended the flask to Gracie. Eustace moved to press down his arm, saying, “Now, Mr. Francis. My Gracie has a performance shortly, and after all she’s only a child.”
He brushed her hand away like he was shooing a fly, keeping his rheumy eyes on Grace.
“Aw, mother hens always think their fillies are still little children, even when they’re budding right well like this one here.”
Grace recoiled, her arms instinctively wrapping up around her chest.
Eustace protested, “I said she’s only a child.”
“No one believes this gal is ten years old, Eustie,” Billy said with a chortle. “Hell, even if she was, I’m just a man—who am I to argue with old Mother Nature?”
With a lumbering step, he lunged for Gracie with a rubbery grin and reaching hands. Grace let out a wheezy sigh, sidestepping the man’s advance, which only made him laugh. It was a game, and one she was terrified of playing. She squeaked, “Auntie,” backed into a corner of the room from which she could not escape. Billy Francis bore down on her, winding a thick arm around her waist and grotesquely tickling her ribs with his other hand.
