Cast the First Stone

by James W. Ziskin

  “So you’re the one who got him the expensive lawyer?”

  She seemed vexed that I knew that, as if she’d wanted to spring the news on me herself.

  “I arranged it,” she said.

  “How did you manage that? With the ten dollars I gave you in Barstow?”

  She smirked. “Funny. But I’ve got something that’s worth a lot of money to some people. And they were only too happy to help me out in exchange.”

  “Must be something really special,” I said.

  “It is. And don’t bother asking, because I’m not telling.”

  “Is it bigger than a breadbox?”

  “What?”

  “Or as small as a thermos?”

  The color drained from April’s already fair cheeks. “What? What are you talking about?”

  “The thing you’re exchanging for Tony’s pricey lawyer. It wouldn’t be something in a thermos bottle, would it?”

  “Clever. Too bad you’ll never find it.”

  “Already did,” I said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  After picking up some provisions—ground beef, potatoes, bread, milk, and eggs at the Hollywood Ranch Market—I dropped Mickey and my suitcase at his place. I was grateful for his offer to take me in, but I still didn’t feel ready to open up completely to him. And I was feeling desperate to talk to someone about what had happened to me that morning. The weight of my questions and doubts was crushing me. I needed someone who wouldn’t lie to me. Someone who would listen. Gene Duerson was glad to hear from me.

  “I owe you a drink or two for those bets,” he said over the phone. “And some money.”

  “What money?”

  “For the Times article. Half of it is yours.”

  A drink sounded grand. There were only a few drops left in the bottle in my suitcase. But remembering how he’d been struggling to make ends meet, and knowing that my share would not mean a great deal to me, I suggested he stand me to a simple dinner instead, and we agreed I’d pick him up at his apartment.

  “A word of warning,” he said. “My place isn’t fancy. I’m not as rich as I look.”

  Gene lived on the second floor of a five-story building southeast of Hollywood. He apologized for the state of the place, which, in truth, looked as though he’d given it a quick brushup before my arrival. Books and newspapers everywhere, but stacked in piles. Secondhand furniture, a telephone on one end of the kitchen table, a boxy Motorola portable television set on the other, and a couple of exotic landscapes in frames on the papered walls. Two closed doors off the main room must have led to the bathroom and the bedroom. I couldn’t tell which was which. There were two windows that opened to the alleyway that ran between Third and Fourth Streets below. That was where Gene had told me to park behind the beaten-up blue De Soto. He hadn’t been kidding. The car was a mess. A tarpaulin stretched over half of it. Dents and scratches, a mangled front bumper, and oil all over the floor of his parking space.

  Gene invited me to have a seat on the small, lumpy sofa.

  “Is everything okay with you? You look worried,” he said, offering a glass of whiskey from a freshly opened bottle of White Label. I was sure he’d run out to buy it just after he’d hung up the phone.

  “That’s why I called you. I need to talk to someone I can trust. Just talk, even if it’s just for a while.”

  “Sounds like fun. Tell me what happened?”

  I recounted how my room had been invaded by three men looking for evidence. For the moment, I left out the part about what the evidence was.

  “I have a terrible secret, Gene. It’s burning a hole in my chest. I’ve just got to talk about it with someone.”

  “Go on.”

  “Do you know who Dorothy Fetterman is?” I asked.

  “Sure. You told me about what happened in Barstow.”

  “But did you know who she was before I told you?”

  “No. But as a matter of fact, she contacted me a couple of days ago. She wanted to know about the party at Wallis’s place. I was there that night, after all.”

  “And let me guess. She offered you a job.”

  He nodded.

  “And in exchange, you’d help her find something?”

  “Not exactly. She wanted me to spy on you. To get something from you. Maybe it was your terrible secret.”

  I gulped, and it wasn’t the Scotch.

  “I turned her down, of course,” he said. “I need money, but I’m not a rat.”

  I barely knew Gene, of course. If he’d wanted to, he certainly could have betrayed me to Dorothy Fetterman for the cash he so desperately needed. But I hadn’t heard from him in days, so I doubted he was spying on me. And Dorothy already knew I had the photographs. Those had been her goons in my hotel room, after all. So I thought I could trust him with my secret.

  But at the same time, a different doubt crossed my mind. Was Dorothy, by chance, onto my ruse? Had she realized that Chuck Porter only recovered one fairly innocuous photograph? An image that might well be explained away as a famous movie star horsing around at a drunken party with friends. Not that anyone involved would have wanted it to be seen, but it wouldn’t have spelled the end to said heartthrob’s career either. Dorothy had been a step ahead of me from the start, so the odds were good that she’d figured it out.

  “Hello,” said Gene, interrupting my internal ramblings.

  “Sorry. Just worried about things.”

  “I won’t betray your confidence, Ellie. I’ll keep whatever secrets you tell me.”

  My intentions were good. I certainly didn’t want to splash such offensive pictures on the front page of the New Holland Republic or any other newspaper, for that matter. What I truly wanted was my story back. I wanted to see Tony Eberle doing the twist on a sandy beach in a real Hollywood picture. My fondest wish was for a young man I’d met only once to become a movie star. Because that would work out for me, too. I knew I intended to use those photographs to achieve my goal. Safely locked away in a bank, they represented my insurance. Dorothy Fetterman wouldn’t dare harm me, physically or otherwise, as long as I had the dangerous evidence in my possession. And she knew I had the goods. So I told Gene. I told him the entire story, even the name of the actor, which prompted him to show the most emotion I’d witnessed from him to date. A raised eyebrow and a short sniff.

  “Well, I’ll be blowed,” he said with his characteristic phlegm.

  “What should I do?” I asked, refusing to give him the satisfaction of laughing at his bawdy humor.

  “About what? Do you want to convert him back to women?”

  “Don’t joke, Gene. I mean about the photographs.”

  He thought a moment. “Where are they now?”

  “In a safe place. No one can touch them but me.”

  “You’re sure?”

  I nodded. “So what should I do?”

  “There’s always the cops.”

  I didn’t see the utility in that. That would only result in blackening the name of a famous man and ruining his career.

  “I wanted to ask you if it would be wrong to use them for my own ends.”

  “Like getting them framed and hanging them in your parlor?”

  Okay, that made me laugh. “Come on, Gene. Enough. I need your advice. Would it be wrong?”

  “That depends. What did you have in mind?”

  “Would it be wrong to use the photographs to convince Dorothy Fetterman to give Tony Eberle another role in a major movie?”

  “Sounds like blackmail.”

  “I was thinking quid pro quo.”

  “Paramount would take him back?”

  “She promised me, yes.”

  “Then why do you need the photographs?”

  “Because I don’t trust her. The pictures are his ticket to stardom. What would you do, Gene? What if you were holding the photographs? What if they could fetch you enough money to live off of for the rest of your life? Would you use them for your own ends?”

  “I
n a heartbeat,” he said, reaching for my empty glass. “Let me get you a refill.”

  Gene returned a few moments later with my drink and a glass of his own. We talked about other things. Everything but Bertram Wallis, Dorothy Fetterman, or photographs of famous actors caught in flagrante. We reviewed the weather. When was the ceaseless rain going to stop? He said he didn’t worry about things he couldn’t change. We discussed the Cuban embargo and the Space Needle being erected in Seattle. And books, classics and current best sellers. It was all a relief to sweep the dark clouds and pornographic pictures from my mind.

  When Gene got up to refresh our drinks a third time, I felt cheered enough to stand up and stretch my legs. I wandered across the room to his desk. A typewriter, newspapers, stacks of documents, phone directories, reference books, and dictionaries. I glanced at the top of one of the piles of paper. It was the article he and I had written together. I smiled, happy for him. Maybe it would lead to other assignments.

  He reentered the room and joined me at the desk.

  “Are these your scripts?” I asked, pointing to the shelf above the desk.

  “Yes,” he said, taking one down. It looked to be about a hundred typewritten pages held together by a couple of brass fasteners. “I’ve written seven of them. This one is a western. Caissons across the Prairie. And this is a biography of Anatole France.” He chuckled as he flipped through the pages. “I got paid to write it, but they never made the movie. Is it any wonder? Anatole France. They’ve never made any of these into movies, as a matter of fact.”

  “Keep at it, Gene. You’re a smart fellow. You’ll break through.”

  He shrugged and replaced the Anatole France on the shelf with great care. An almost loving gesture.

  “Tell me about . . . Twilight in the Summer Capital,” I said, reading the title of the last script in the row.

  “It’s a coming-of-age tale. End of an era, and all that. Set in India during the war. Another that’ll never get made. Here, look at this one. It’s a war picture set in Burma, called Jungle Battalion. The story of a small corps of American and British soldiers in the jungle fighting the Japs.”

  He reached for the script just as a knock came on the door.

  “I’ll show you later,” he said and went to answer.

  “Andy,” I heard him say from the entry.

  “Geno,” said Andy. “I was in the neighborhood and thought you might like some company, you old loser.”

  I could tell he’d been drinking. Gene showed him inside, reluctantly it seemed. Andy stopped in his tracks when he spotted me by the desk.

  “Ellie?” he asked with a grin. Then he looked back at Gene. “What’s going on here? Am I interrupting something?”

  “Not at all,” said Gene. “We were just having the drink I owe Ellie.”

  Andy sauntered in. He was carrying a wet paper bag under his arm.

  “I owe her a drink, too,” he said, producing four bottles of Lucky Lager. “But it looks like you two already have things figured out.”

  Gene sighed. “Yes, we polished off a banquet, drained a barrel of wine, and made a couple of large deposits in the vomitorium before you showed up. And you missed the orgy. Sorry.”

  “Still, you could have invited me.”

  “You’re welcome to join us for dinner,” said Gene. “It’s my treat. We got paid by the Times for our piece.”

  Andy turned sullen. “No thanks. I had some tamales on the way over. And a few beers.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “We were just talking about Gene’s movie scripts,” I said brightly.

  “But not about using my pictures in your Times piece.”

  “Come on,” said Gene. “I already told you. There wasn’t any time, and you didn’t have the pictures we needed anyway.”

  “It’s okay,” he mumbled, but I sensed that it wasn’t. “You and Ellie have your own little thing going. I understand.”

  “That’s out of line,” said Gene before I had a chance to respond.

  “Sorry,” repeated Andy. “Forget it. Let’s have a drink.”

  We settled in, Gene and I on the sofa, Andy slumping in the armchair. He started out nice enough, but after a few minutes he was grousing about everything from the weather to the state of his apartment, which was disgraceful. After he’d cracked open his second beer, he was complaining about how there were too many Negroes and Mexicans in Los Angeles.

  “But you eat half your meals at taco stands,” said Gene as he puffed on a cigarette.

  Andy shrugged. “They make good food, but there are too many of them. We don’t have any beaners in Davenport, and I say that’s a good thing. Some of the coons are okay. The ones who know their place.”

  “Maybe you’ve had enough, Andy,” I said.

  “Enough of beaners and coons? Sure.” And he laughed.

  “And I’ve had enough of that,” I said. “I won’t sit here and listen to such awful talk.”

  “Take it easy, Ellie. I’m sorry. Sorry. Sorry.”

  We sat for a long moment, all of us uncomfortable with the exception of Andy, who was grinning like a sot and muttering under his breath. Finally he broke the silence.

  “Sorry,” he repeated in a messy slur. “It’s not like I said anything about the kikes.” And he laughed again.

  He stopped laughing when my drink hit his face. And it was a full glass, ice and all. He sat there in his chair, stunned, Scotch dripping down his cheeks and chin. Then he started to cry. Gene hustled him out the door before I could throttle him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  “Andy’s drunk. And an ass,” said Gene, handing me a fresh drink. “If I say something wrong, you can throw this in my face. Just wait till the ice melts before you do it.”

  Suddenly I felt sick. I took a sip of my drink and experienced a remarkable sensation. I swallowed the Scotch, and a familiar, spreading warmth washed down my throat. I felt I’d found an old friend. The comfort startled me, if two such opposing actions and reactions can coexist. And though I realized in that moment that the palliative of the whiskey might have been nothing more than a rationalization for my love of the stuff, I gave myself over to soaking up as much of it as I liked, because it felt like a miracle cure.

  Our dinner plans went down the drain, replaced by a couple of whiskeys and some pork cracklings that Gene produced from the cupboard. He avoided the topic of Andy and his bigotry—I avoided the cracklings—and we discussed our losses instead. Gene lent a patient ear as I shared the sorry tales of my brother, mother, and father’s recent deaths. He comforted me, questioned me with the skill of a seasoned reporter, and made me laugh just when I was on the edge of tears. And he told me how he’d buried his own father after the harvester accident. Just fifteen, Gene quit school and went to work in a rendering plant to support his mother and sisters.

  “You’d think I’d have lost my taste for pork,” he said, popping a rind into his mouth.

  “Those things make me want to keep kosher.”

  “My daddy used to eat these. We all did. Momma would fry up a mess of ’em on Sunday, and we’d eat ’em throughout the week. She never made any after Daddy died. Said she never much cared for them.”

  “Did you eat anything?” Mickey asked.

  I admitted that I’d eaten nothing, if you didn’t count half a pork crackling. Mickey boiled an egg and toasted some bread. He’d made up the Murphy bed for me and served me the meager repast that tasted like a feast. Afterward, we sat and talked as Mickey washed the plate and glass. I sipped the last of my Dewar’s on the Murphy bed.

  “You drink too much,” he said.

  “It’s my medicine.”

  “Don’t joke. Between your whiskey and your cigarettes, I worry about you.”

  “Thanks. I worry about you, too.”

  It was almost eleven. I was tired, but I sensed Mickey wanted to talk.

  “You said you hated April. I saw her at the police station today.”

  “What did she say
?”

  “That Tony didn’t need my help. Or yours. She was taking care of everything.”

  Mickey scoffed at that. “She thinks she can do anything. But she can’t change the past or the present. Never mind the future.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He frowned. “She thinks Tony is her ticket to the top. But she’s just an average nobody like the others. Maybe less than average. She tied herself to Tony’s star and wants to ride it like a rocket to the moon. She’s a girl from nowhere with no prospects. No matter how many . . .” He caught himself and shut up. “Forget it.”

  “I want to believe you, Mickey,” I said, after I’d let his words hang in the air for a moment. “I like you. I want to be friends.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “I want all those things. But I can’t accept any of them if you don’t level with me. You’ve got to treat me like a friend, or else I’m just someone who took you in on a rainy night.”

  He stared at me long enough to make me uncomfortable. Finally he told me that he wanted the same thing. Didn’t I think he wanted to trust someone? Didn’t I know that he’d had enough of lying to people? To me?

  “You have no idea how lonely lying makes you feel,” he said. “To have to hide what you are.”

  “Explain it to me. I want to know.”

  “Really? You want me to tell you what it’s like to be a degenerate? A pervert?”

  “You’re not those things, Mickey. You’re a sweet boy.”

  “I’m twenty-four years old,” he said. “And I’m a faggot.”

  I froze on the bed. The misery on his face broke my heart. I wasn’t sure which he regretted more, having shared his pronouncement or the fact that he was what he said he was. Either way, I didn’t know how to respond. He spared me the embarrassment of untangling my tongue.

  “Does that shock you?” he asked. “I can’t help it, you know. I can’t make myself be different. And no psychiatrist is going to cure me. I’ve tried.”

  I shook my head, still unable to summon a response.