Lone Star

by Ed Ifkovic

  “Very funny,” I said.

  “I’m never funny.”

  “Sit down, Detective.” Mercy pointed to a chair. Surprisingly, he sat. He pulled at the cuffs of his shirt until the edges showed under the sleeves of his sports jacket. He evened them up, flicked a piece of lint from the sleeve, then sat there nodding his head, watching us.

  “What?” From me.

  “Two nosy women.”

  “We try.”

  A sliver of smile, forced, “And what have you learned?”

  “Are we sharing information?” I asked.

  “You’re trying to save James Dean’s skin. I’m trying to shore up the evidence against him.” He reached into his pocket and extracted copies of Carisa’s letters. He fanned them, dramatically. “I’ve never seen such a fascination with letter writing. You know, Carisa had a bunch of letters on her desk. But some were missing.”

  “How do you know that?” I probed.

  He watched me, eyes narrow. “I suspect you noticed that yourself, Miss Ferber. You were alone in the apartment for some time—you and the body.” He glanced at Mercy. “In reconstructing the scene, I surmised that you, Miss Ferber, were alone there for what? Ten minutes? Fifteen? Twenty? What did you do?”

  I smiled. “I touched nothing. No prints of mine.”

  “But I’m supposing you noticed the scattered letters on the table.”

  “I did.”

  “What else?”

  “Well,” I said, “I saw a syringe.”

  He smiled. “Good. Me, too. Do you know what was in the bag?”

  “No.”

  “Heroin.”

  “As is rumored,” I said.

  “In fact, the autopsy showed she had just ingested some into her fragile body. She may have been a little loopy when she let in the murderer.”

  “Or,” I surmised, “she shot up with the murderer who took his own syringe with him.”

  “Interesting. Maybe. Maybe not. What else did you see? I mean, besides the things you outlined in the thorough statement you’ve already given us.” His tone was sarcastic.

  “A neat woman, though a packrat. She saved every scrap of paper.”

  “True.” He nodded. “And what does that mean to you?”

  I glanced at Mercy. “Well, it suggests that she might have saved something the murderer wanted back, probably a note of some sort. Because…because the only things in disarray were the batch of letters extracted from one of the drawers.”

  “Exactly. Somebody took a letter or letters.”

  “And you don’t know what letter or letters?” Mercy asked.

  “Hard to say,” he said. “The letters left behind were family notes, a mother in San Francisco, birthday cards, Christmas cards, junk. She saved everything.”

  I nodded. “And someone knew that.”

  “Maybe. Or realized it once he was there with her. She may have mentioned something about it—which led to the murder.”

  “So,” I continued, “if the murderer took a letter, then we have trouble knowing the motive for the killing.”

  “We?” He raised his eyebrows and frowned. “You mean me—me.”

  “I was using the royal we.”

  He frowned. “In your wanderings have you two ladies found anyone who likes to write letters?”

  “All literate people write letters,” I noted. “The telephone is for luncheon engagements and to berate shopkeepers.”

  “Can you imagine Max Kohl writing a letter? Or, say, Josh MacDowell?” He paused. “Maybe James Dean scribbles letters?”

  “I can imagine Max Kohl pasting a letter together with words cut from Coronet magazine.”

  Cotton laughed a hearty fake laugh. “Good one.”

  “I’m being serious.”

  “You’d like to pin the murder on him.”

  “I just want to clear Jimmy,” I said. “You know, I’d have thought the epistolary tradition had died in an earlier century, but, I gather, it lives abundantly, if absurdly, in modern Hollywood.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “What?”

  “Nothing.” I waited. “Did you get anything out of Max Kohl this morning?”

  He smirked. “Not that it’s any of your business, but no. He’s a slippery one. The problem is that he seems to have an alibi for the time Carisa was killed. Or at least he’s lined up folks who lie for him. We’ve learned he knew Carisa a while back, dated her, maybe, and then disappeared. Seems he was in jail in New Jersey for a couple months, a bad check charge, but drifted back here and back into her life about the time James Dean dumped her. A troublemaker, muscle for a local boss for a time, got into a numbers racket, and, I suppose, the source for Carisa’s drugs. Biker fanatic. How he met Dean, I understand.” He stopped.

  “Why are you sharing this information with us?” I asked, finally.

  “I suspect you know much of it already. And I’m hoping some of it—something I say—will trigger something in you, something you stumbled on. Either of you.”

  “I don’t stumble onto things,” I said emphatically. “I uncover truth.”

  His tongue rolled over his upper lip, then disappeared back into his mouth. “Manuel Vega says you ask very good questions.”

  “Well, thank him for me.”

  Again, the tongue, a wary gesture. “Maybe you’ll hear something.”

  “And share it with you?”

  “You’re a law-abiding citizen. And, so far, the only one here I can say with any certainly is not the murderer.”

  “What about me?” asked Mercy. Cotton didn’t answer her.

  “Did the autopsy show anything else besides her being pregnant?” I wondered.

  He hesitated. “Well, yes. Seems she’d been killed some time just before you gals sauntered in. The M.E. says between seven and eight. You arrived at eight-thirty, just on the heels of the murder.”

  “Good God,” said Mercy.

  “Indeed, Miss McCambridge. The body was still warm.”

  “And was she killed with that statue?” I asked.

  He smiled. “Oh, that’s right. You were alone in the apartment. You noticed it before the cops got there.”

  “It’s hard not to notice a body and a statue…”

  “Lying right nearby. And did you note the kind of statue?”

  “It looked like a fertility goddess.”

  “That’s right. Aztlan, in fact. Aztec. Piece of chiseled stone. Weighty. Big bellied woman.”

  “A good murder weapon.”

  “But not what killed her, it seems.” He stopped, seemed to be waiting for me to say something.

  “But…”

  “Autopsy shows she died from smashing her head on the metal edge of a table. Looks like, so far’s we can reconstruct it, someone hit her with the statue, but it just grazed her shoulder, she fell, hit her head, bled to death in minutes. Being stoned didn’t help her. Traces of liquor and heroin in the bloodstream.”

  “So it may not have been a premeditated murder,” I mused.

  “Bingo. A fight, tempers flare. Suddenly she’s dead.” He paused. “And the interesting thing I learned from your favorite boy is that the statue was a gift from Mr. Dean himself. Strange.”

  “Why is that strange?”

  “A fertility statue to a pregnant unwed girl? Very Ellery Queen, no?”

  I said nothing.

  Cotton went on. “Someone threw the statue that was conveniently there. Then rifled through the drawers for a letter.”

  “And took it away,” said Mercy. “The evidence.”

  “So,” I concluded, “you need to find out which letters were removed.”

  Cotton took a long time answering. “Or, to make my life easy, which letter was not removed by the murderer.”

  “Meaning?”

  Again, the deliberate wait, the calculated staring from me to Mercy. “It seems Carisa did hide one letter. One letter she did not, for some reason, keep in that drawer with the others. A letter Carisa Krausse hid under a pillow.”


  I held my breath. “From?”

  “Well.” He paused, stretching out the word, and then melodramatically removed a copy from a breast pocket. “From your boy Jimmy. Who, when asked right after the murder, said he never wrote any letters to her. None. Zippo. Nada. Who, me? Who, when he finishes shooting, is going to be shown this copy, which seems to contradict his statement to the police. Unless, of course, someone else forged his signature.”

  Mercy and I stared, uncomfortable. I was tempted to snatch the letter from him, annoyed with his roundabout conversation, his purposeful leading up the revelation of the new letter. Silent now, I waited. After all, this was Cotton’s grandiose moment, and he wanted to work it his way. Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, American style. The debonair Rathbone in pinstriped suit, with carnation in buttonhole. Well, Cotton’s sliver of a moustache was in need of a barber’s trim: one corner was higher than the other.

  “Well…” I began.

  “Exactly.” He unfolded the sheet of paper. “And let me quote you a line from the newly discovered letter.” He skimmed what looked to be a neatly typed copy. “Oh, here it is. ‘You know this is a lot of crap from you and no one is going to take your crap seriously, you know.’” He paused. “No, that’s not exactly the line I wanted to read to you ladies. Oh, here it is. ‘You know, people can get hurt if they get in my way.’” He looked up, made eye contact with me. He echoed. “‘Hurt.’”

  “I heard you,” I said, icily.

  ***

  A half-hour later, sitting alone in the commissary, nursing coffee—Mercy left for an interview with Louella Parsons whom she deemed “that bastion of bathos”—I was in no mood for Tansi’s intense, excited assault.

  “Edna,” she sputtered, pulling up a chair. “I’ve been looking for you. Detective Cotton is all over the lot. He’s mad because he just found some letter, but Jake won’t tell me what’s it about.” She drew in her breath. “Edna, they fingerprinted me this morning.”

  I was not in the mood for Nancy Drew. “So?”

  Tansi paused for an imperceptible second. “It was so Public Enemy or something. James Cagney.”

  I was still fuming from Cotton’s surprise information; more so, his smug delivery, his toying with me.

  “I mean, in my lifetime I would not have expected it,” Tansi continued. “We all had to go, of course. Warner sent a memo. Now that memo will be omitted from the Giant archives, I’m sure. Jake protested, said it was impossible. He hadn’t gone to Princeton to be treated like a common criminal. I went with him, but he fussed and fumed. On the way back he kept showing me his stained fingertips until I exploded and said he wasn’t Christ revealing some stigmata. You know what he said? ‘I’m not made for skullduggery.’ I loved it. Then he said: ‘All the hugger-mugger stuff is bad for my digestion.’”

  I held up a hand to stop the flood. “Tansi, did Jake say anything about the murder investigation?”

  “No, why?”

  “Just wondering.”

  “Jake has decided—I guess Warner, too—to ignore me. Everything goes through Jake. The fewer people who know, the fewer the leaks to gossip sheets. Jake did say that some writer at Confidential phoned Warner, started asking questions. That threw Warner into a panic.”

  “Tansi, I just asked you if you’d heard anything, and you said no. And then you share the Jake story and Confidential.”

  “But,” Tansi defended herself, “I thought you meant evidence.”

  I was tired. “Whom did you see at the precinct?”

  “Lydia Plummer was leaving, and not happy. She was with Nell Meyers, but they didn’t leave there together.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They were both leaving when we arrived. Lydia called a cab and Nell waited at the bus stop. Jake and I watched Lydia get in the cab, and I tell you, she looked like death itself: pale, fluttery, and nervous. Nell’s avoiding Lydia now. Afterward, I asked Nell about it. You know, by the way, she’s finally listening to me. She’s leaving the Studio Club—and Lydia. Since Carisa’s death, Lydia is often hysterical, crying jags, whispered nonsense, and imagined horrors. I guess she’s told Nell some things about dating Jimmy—but she said she still plans on marrying him. Other girls are the problem, she said. It’s crazy, no?”

  “Why?”

  “Jimmy has already told Lydia to get lost.” A pause. “Nell told me she thinks Lydia killed Carisa in an argument.”

  I sat up. “What? What did you say?”

  “Well, Lydia, I guess a little out of it, told Nell that she’d gone to the apartment to see Carisa. Old roommate, you know, though they hadn’t talked in a while, some sort of fight. But I guess they started talking again. Anyway, Lydia told Nell they argued about Jimmy. Lydia was jealous. Lydia was angry at Carisa.”

  “I’m not following this.”

  “Lydia interpreted those letters Carisa was writing to Jimmy as a personal affront. A slap at her. Carisa, she told Nell, was old news, so she should leave her Jimmy alone. Lydia resented the baby threat. Lydia said she was the new girl and thought Carisa’s letters were a ploy to get Jimmy back. Nell told me she told Lydia—but now you’re the old girl. He’s got Ursula Andress. Lydia went nuts. Yelled at Nell. Scared her.”

  “Would Nell actually tell Lydia that to her face?”

  “Why not? Nell can’t stand Lydia now that I’ve made her see the light.”

  I drummed my fingers on the table. “Jimmy has to come clean about a lot of things.”

  Tansi spoke in a soft voice. “What does that mean?”

  “Jimmy hasn’t been forthright with the police.” I was thinking of Jimmy’s newly discovered letter.

  “Oh, I’m sure there’s a reason, Edna.”

  “You don’t lie to the police.”

  “He wouldn’t lie. Maybe he forgets things.”

  “No, Tansi, stop this. I like Jimmy. I do, despite some of his childish behavior. And I don’t believe he’d kill anyone. But if we’re to help him, we have to be realistic. Your idealizing him into junior-grade God is touching, but one of the dangers of elevating men to godhood is that, well, we’re forced to stare at them up there. Sometimes, when the light hits the statue, you see the pock marks, the blemishes, the…”

  “I’m not a giggly bobby-soxer, Edna,” she said, hurt, bewildered, near tears.

  “I know you’re not, Tansi. And I know you are an intelligent woman. But your protestation of Jimmy’s innocence smacks of unexamined devotion.”

  Tansi stood up, not happy. “Jimmy is the future of Warner Bros.,” she said. “And he’s a good boy.”

  “He’s not a boy. He’s a man.”

  “You know what I mean. He’s decent and…and…”

  “Then work with me to prove he’s innocent.”

  “How?” Tansi breathed in. “I want to.”

  I shrugged. “I wish I knew.”

  “He is innocent,” Tansi pleaded. “He has to be. Maybe Nell is right. Maybe it was Lydia.”

  “You can’t just say that, Tansi, without proof.”

  “How can anybody prove that? But Nell’s convinced Lydia killed Carisa in a fit of anger. They had nasty fights, really. A number of them. And do you know what Nell told me? She says Carisa probably had it coming.”

  CHAPTER 12

  I sat with Detective Cotton the next morning in my suite at the Ambassador. I’d reached him at the precinct the previous afternoon and related Tansi’s story of Nell and Lydia, and the accusation of murder. My information wasn’t news to him, it seemed. Though I considered the information of little value, I decided to create a bond with him: a mutual sharing. I was convinced he’d held back crucial bits of information, and his candid talk with me was a conscious ploy. Before he hung up, he asked if he could stop by in the morning. Of course I said yes.

  I served him coffee, and I noticed he didn’t slurp it noisily nor did he overload the hot brew with excessive sugar cubes. I smiled.

  “Nice place,” he said.

&nbs
p; “I don’t own it.”

  “Whenever I stay in a hotel, it’s one room.” He looked around. “Not a half dozen.”

  “I sleepwalk and the management is trying to avoid lawsuits.”

  “Then they should have put you on the ground floor.” He smiled.

  “You’re obviously curious about something. Otherwise we wouldn’t be sitting here.”

  “In fact, yes. For one thing, your obsession with James Dean’s innocence.”

  “It’s not an obsession, sir. I’ve never obsessed about a single thing in my life. But in my scant dealings with him, I sense…well, I sense a certain truth in him.”

  “My gut tells me he’s dirty.”

  “Proof?”

  He shrugged. “Slow train through the alleys of L.A.”

  “Sounds like a line from an old Wobbly protest song.”

  He looked baffled, but didn’t ask me to explain. “But I’ve come to believe we’re on the same side of the law here…”

  “Of course.”

  “Though your intent is more narrowly defined. And I trust you, Miss Ferber. I asked around about you, even called a cop I know in New York City. He never heard of you. And that can be a good thing. But hereabouts you have a reputation for, well, decency.”

  I nodded. Thank you.

  “So I believe anything you uncover that is relevant will come my way.”

  “Hence my phone call to you yesterday.”

  “That struck me as a little self-serving.”

  “Like your being here this morning?”

  He nodded.

  “Tell me something.” He put down the cup he’d been holding. “What do you see in this James Dean? I’ve talked to him a bunch of times lately, when he’s found or available, and he’s moody, evasive, downright rude. On top of that he hadn’t bathed when we spoke.”

  “Please, sir.” I was munching on a soda cracker.

  “Sorry. But I just don’t see the attraction. They’re telling me he’s the wave of the future. Clark Gable is passé, and Brando and Dean and Clift are in—people who talk with stones in their mouths and who thumb their noses at…at everything.” He looked angry.

  “Detective Cotton, I sense you’re a well-intended man. I also sense that you were probably happy when Clark Gable was tossing Vivian Leigh around like a sack of potatoes—that Hollywood. You have about you a hint of Ronald Coleman.”