Blacklist

by Jerry Ludwig

  “How come you’re telling me this?”

  “Because—I don’t deserve for you to think about me in the same breath as Teddy and the others who stood up to those witch hunters. I’m not worth their spit.”

  I look at her and see the agony in her magnificent violet eyes, and I’m struck by a realization about the Blacklist that I never wanted to even consider until now. Even the winners were losers.

  As I drive away, I’m thinking about that. No one got away unscathed. The Blacklist scarred everyone it touched. Even Harry couldn’t protect her from that. And then Joe Shannon crowds my mind again. The questions to which I have no answer: What happened last night? While I was drunk, did the black rage demon get loose?

  CHAPTER

  29

  MCKENNA

  My first stop this morning is the LAPD police lab. I’m ten minutes early, but Alcalay greets me like I’ve kept him waiting:

  “Slept in, did ya? Letting the rest of us do all the work.”

  I let that zinger go by. Actually, I grabbed a quick two hours sleep on a couch in the Bureau office’s lounge. Then shaved, washed up, took a fresh shirt out of my bottom desk drawer. Gathered a packet of material for Alcalay—lists of Blacklistees still alive and in the area, a rundown on Teddy and David Weaver, plus Okie O’Connell, as promised, and Keeler Barnes as a bonus. I also threw in a set of the funeral photos I had shot the other day.

  I’m just in time for the grand opening by the lab techies of Joe Shannon’s metal strongbox. Inside there is an assortment of scorched and half-burned documents, all covered with a patina of light ash. The rubber-gloved techies extract the items with tweezers, inserting each of them in its own transparent glassine evidence wrapper and handing them one by one to Alcalay. I’m allowed to look over his shoulder.

  I see Shannon’s birth certificate and passport. A handful of baseball cards, probably from when Shannon was a boy. Personally autographed by Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, worth money in mint condition, which these no longer are. A couple of love letters from Shannon’s ex-college roommate—I recognize the name on the return address.

  “He’s a state senator now in Sacramento.”

  “Blackmail material?” Alcalay suggests.

  “Or nostalgia. Anyway, the senator is an ultra-active anti-Communist. He doesn’t fit the Blacklist profile.”

  “We’ll check him out anyway to be sure,” he says

  Alcalay and I examine a Panorama Studio stock certificate for 5,000 shares of common stock. “How much is that worth?” Alcalay asks. About a hundred-fifty grand, I tell him. There’s also some hate mail from irate movie stars over slams in his columns over the years. And a charred letter of commendation on FBI letterhead personally signed by J. Edgar Hoover for unspecified acts of good citizenship performed by Joseph P. Shannon.

  There’s also a thin metal chain with what looks like a military dog tag. The face part of the ID tag has melted onto the wall of the safe, so the markings are obliterated. “Probably Shannon’s Army dogtag,” Alcalay speculates, “I’ve got mine in a drawer at home.”

  “Shannon was in the navy,” I say.

  “Well, whatever.” Alcalay turns to the head techie, “Think you can do something with that?” The techie says they’ll give it a try.

  I’m disappointed. “What happened to the drop-dead, tell-all dirt Shannon was supposed to have on everybody and their brother?”

  “Maybe only a rumor that was good for business.” Alcalay chuckles. “Who knows, maybe there’s nothing much in Hoover’s files either. Wouldn’t that be a pleasant surprise to a lot of people in D.C. and elsewhere who lose sleep over what he may have on them?”

  I let that one go by, too.

  “Last night,” Alcalay recalls, “you said Shannon lived real high. Where did his money come from?”

  “Well, his column is syndicated and he wrote stuff for the fan mags. Rumor was that included Confidential, the scandal sheet. But not under his own name, of course. They pay well.”

  “Still doesn’t sound like it covers a hefty mortgage in Jack Warner’s neighborhood. And where’d he get the bucks for the Panorama shares?”

  “Okay,” I agree, “blackmail’s a good possibility, it could fit with the Blacklist. Maybe Shannon was selling stay-out-of-jail passes to Lefties who wanted to duck the Committee.”

  “Did he have that kind of clout?”

  “At a certain point in time. How about that ‘Informer’ sign, had a chance to run it yet?”

  Alcalay shrugs. Dead end. “Ordinary piece of cardboard, the kind comes from the laundry with your shirts, and the ink’s from a marking pen every dime store and drugstore stocks. The string that the sign was hanging from is a brand new shoelace. No prints on anything.”

  I pick up the glassine envelope containing the letter of commendation signed by J. Edgar Hoover. “Can I borrow this?”

  “For how long?”

  “How about forever?”

  “What have you done for me lately?”

  I take out the bulging packet I brought from my office and describe the contents to Alcalay. He holds the packet in one hand, Hoover’s letter in the other. He pretends to weigh one against the other.

  “Seems like a fair exchange to me.” He hands me Hoover’s letter and I tuck it away in my briefcase. Keeping Hoover’s name out of the investigation and out of the newspapers should be worth a large attaboy.

  * * *

  As Alcalay walks me out to the parking lot, he gives me an update on progress. There’s not much. The Shannon autopsy verified the cause of death as hard trauma bludgeoning. “He was dead before the smoke and fire got to him.”

  “Bludgeoning,” I say. “Like Wendy Travers.”

  I mention that, as we agreed last night, I’ve been in touch with Jerry Borison at the Beverly Hills cop shop. Alcalay and I have hit into a piece of luck: the L.A. Times printed their photo of “The Informer” sign, but cropped off the #2 marking. So I played it cool when I talked to Borison, as if I was just following up on what happened to a friend. “The connection to Wendy is still our secret,” I tell Alcalay.

  “So what do they have?” he asks.

  “Basically zip. They’re doing the usual, circulating descriptions of the stolen jewelry, monitoring missing credit cards. And how about us so far?”

  “Only new thing was, we couldn’t find Shannon’s wallet.”

  I suggest it burned up in the fire. Alcalay says there would be traces, scorched leather, melted plastic, ashes from paper money, something.

  “His watch was there, what’s left of it, an expensive piece—but no wallet,” Alcalay repeats. We both understand. The mugging element is another similarity to Wendy’s murder.

  “Okay,” he says. “Figure Shannon is fresh meat, so we’ll pound that one first, then see if we can warm up the Travers trail. I’ll divvy your list of Shannon haters among my troops and we’ll fan out.”

  “If you need more manpower, I probably can get you some.”

  He shakes his head. “One Fat Boy in this is plenty enough.” Using another cop term for FBI agents. “Where you going to be?”

  “Panorama Studio,” I say. “Collecting alibis.”

  “Don’t forget about that Weaver kid.”

  Alcalay and Hoover have something in common: they both seem to have sparked to the idea of David Weaver. It makes me uneasy. Too soon to be zeroing in on a target. I don’t want to feel like we’re starting with an answer and then tailoring the evidence to fit. Which used to happen a lot when I was a DA in Chicago. I’ve still got an open mind about the Weaver kid. Or is that just a pang of guilt because I blurted his name to Hoover for a pat on the back?

  * * *

  “There’s really no reason to assume Joe Shannon’s untimely death has anything to do with Panorama.” Barney Ott is making sounds like a studio press release.

  I’m in Ott’s spacious corner office in the executive building. Décor befitting an eastern banker. Dark wood and recessed light
ing, cushy black leather club chairs. We’ve been joined by his colleague Jack Heritage and their boss, Harry Rains. Heritage is playing cat’s cradle with a long rubber band intertwined between the fingers of his hands, but listening intently.

  “Except,” I mention, “you guys have been having a nasty public ruckus with Shannon for the last week or so.”

  “You don’t kill a columnist for printing a couple of lousy items,” Harry says. “Though sometimes you might feel like you want to.”

  They all chuckle about that. I push another button. “How about Leo Vardian? I hear he was screaming on his set last week that he’d like to exterminate Shannon.” I already worked a couple of studio sources before I came over.

  Ott takes it in stride. “Leo’s a very temperamental artist, they get emotional sometimes. But quick as it comes, it blows over.” Acting as if I just fell off the turnip truck.

  “Want to talk to someone, you might try that Weaver kid,” Heritage suggests. “He’s the one who actually mixed it up with Joe.”

  “I was there,” I say.

  “Hey, that wasn’t the first time they went at each other,” Heritage adds, adeptly manipulating the cat’s cradle.

  “Meaning what?”

  Heritage looks at me. “A hassle in the commissary blue room couple of weeks ago. Weaver and Shannon squared off pretty good, I thought the kid was gonna belt him. Right, Harry? Happened at your table.”

  “No big thing,” Harry says. “C’mon, David’s okay.”

  I nod at Heritage, point taken. But is he being helpful to me—or trying to shift attention away from Leo?

  Although I don’t ask them for alibis, they each manage to work one into the conversation. Harry was home in bed with wife Valerie. Ott was up late, alone, reading Winston Churchill’s wartime memoirs. “Hitler loses,” I say as a spoiler, and Ott makes a smile. Heritage was in bed with a hot young lady. “I’m too discreet to mention who—unless I really have to.”

  “Look, Mac,” Harry says, “anything we can do for you…”

  Ott offers, “You want to see anyone on the lot, I can have Jack take you right over.”

  “Thanks, but I get better results when I surprise ’em.” They all nod sagely. Respecting my work methods. Supposedly.

  As I walk across the lot, I think: It’s well known in the industry that Panorama is desperately hungry for a box office hit. The kind that Leo Vardian has provided in the past. They’re pumping huge bucks into Leo’s movie, so despite Harry’s joke, would they eliminate a columnist who endangers all that? Long shot. But possible. Or they might be sitting on a bigger secret I haven’t yet come across.

  * * *

  “Where were you between the hours of…” Leo Vardian intones in a portentous March of Time basso voice. Then he laughs. “I’ve written this corny scene so many times.”

  Leo and I are standing on an outdoor steel catwalk on the second floor of the editing building. Next to the open entrance to the cutting room where the editors are working on his movie. The staccato sounds of gunfire spill out intermittently.

  “Let’s do it anyway, Leo, just for fun,” I say. “From eleven last night ’til about two a.m.?”

  “I was right here. ’Til then and later.”

  Leo looks ragged, like a man who has been working day and night.

  “Who else was here?” I ask.

  “Just Keeler and me.” He yells over the gunfire into the editing room. “Right, Keeler?”

  Keeler Barnes sticks his head out the door. “What?”

  “Just telling our pal McKenna that we went real late last night. Worked here until our eyeballs were falling out.”

  “Uh-huh,” Keeler says, “that we did. And here we are back for some more. No Biz Like Show Biz.”

  “So you guys can alibi each other,” I say.

  “Why do I need an alibi?” Keeler demands.

  “As I recall, Joe Shannon was on your case pretty heavy in the old days.”

  “Was he? I forget.” Keeler disappears back into the editing room.

  I turn back to Leo. “You’ve got a long history of friction with Shannon—right up to yesterday.”

  “Hated the man’s guts. Is that what you mean?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t like to put words in your mouth.”

  “Sure you do.” Leo gives me his thinnest smile. “That’s your job.”

  The relationship, if you can call it that, between me and Leo Vardian has always been thorny. I served him a subpoena and also participated in the behind-the-scenes meetings at which the details and parameters for his HUAC appearance were negotiated. Mostly centered on which names Leo would name. Always the stickiest part.

  After his HUAC testimony, I’d occasionally run into him at industry events. Invariably, Leo cut me dead. Not unexpected. It was more palatable to blame the FBI than himself.

  Then one late night after a post-premiere party at Romanoff’s, Leo and I were the last ones left at the bar. Both drunk enough to share a nightcap and Leo was rather friendly. Also no surprise to me. After a passage of time several cooperative witnesses seemed to find it easier to relate to me. Like old soldiers who fought in the same war, although not on the same side. For better or worse, we had shared a moment of history.

  We were shnockered enough for me to casually ask Leo if he had any thoughts as to why some witnesses refused to cooperate when their destruction was guaranteed? My perennial question. Perhaps Leo had the answer.

  “That’s all in the book,” Leo said.

  “What book is that?”

  “The one I’m never going to write.” Leo clinked glasses with me as if it was a toast. Since then, we’ve chatted briefly when we’ve met, but neither of us ever brought up the Blacklist again. But now Shannon’s murder has put it back in the spotlight.

  * * *

  Our conversation outside the editing room is interrupted by a phone call summoning Leo. While we walk back to the soundstage, I say, “Question for you about your former comrades, Leo. Want to venture a guess as to who burned down Joe Shannon?”

  No sooner are the words out of my mouth than I recognize them as an echo of Hoover’s invitation to me to speculate.

  “Don’t have the vaguest,” Leo says cheerfully. “But soon as you find out, let me know—I want to nominate the guy for an Oscar for distinguished service to the motion picture industry.”

  The studio guard holds open the soundstage door and Leo disappears. I note that he wasn’t surprised when I turned up. I’d bet a dime Harry Rains dialed him ahead of my arrival.

  My take on Leo: his alibi is questionable. A flicker of hesitation on Keeler’s face when Leo tossed the ball to him. Check studio guardhouse records, see if the time they both left the lot last night was logged. Keeler could be a ticking bomb from the old days. Leo has that going for him plus new stuff. Shannon had been attacking not only Leo, but his daughter. An enraged lion defending his young. Yeah, possible. Wouldn’t that be interesting. Leo making headlines for me again.

  CHAPTER

  30

  DAVID

  Jana and I are having an early lunch in the commissary. Leo never eats here. We’re off at a rear table. As soon as we meet I want to tell her about my terror over what I may have done last night. But when I see her shaking almost like an addict in withdrawal, I just sit her down and let her talk.

  And as close to word-for-word as she can recall, she tells me about her confrontation and break with Leo. Her tears fall intermittently. I try to wrap my arm around her to ease her pain, but she waves me off. I see the enormous effort it’s taking for her to hold it together.

  So I just listen, and then she gets to Leo’s ghastly confession that he bartered not only my father’s name, but also my mother’s. The tic in my cheek fires up. Jana reaches out her hand and gently covers the twitching muscle. I press her hand to my face, and close my eyes, and we sit there. For a very long moment. A brand new bloody wound, after all this time. Zacharias would say it’s just another truth we wer
e hiding from. It still inflicts a pain beyond pain.

  “I feel—shell-shocked, you know?” she says.

  “I know…,” I say. Then, as if doing triage among the wounded, I whisper, “But—are we okay?”

  “We’re fine. Definitely. Eternally.”

  That’s what I’m longing to hear. “Want to move in with me? I’d love that,” I suggest.

  “Thanks, but not yet. I need some time to think.”

  Jana’s already made arrangements with her pal Carol to house-sit while she’s on location in Durango for two months.

  “I’m going to see a shrink,” she says. “A woman named Sarah Mandelker over on Camden Drive. Rowan says she’s real good. You went to one, didn’t you, David?”

  I tell her that I had two of them. One in Tokyo at the Army hospital. Then later another in Rome. Once France gave Teddy his permanent resident card, we shuttled between Paris, London, and Rome, like fruit pickers going wherever the work was.

  “Did the shrinks help?” Jana asks.

  I explain that the Army doctor kept saying what happened to my buddies in Korea wasn’t my fault. He kept after me to say I agreed. So I did because I knew then he would discharge me. The one in Rome was smarter. I couldn’t just pretend to see the light with him. He was very good.

  “What’d he tell you?” she persists.

  “They don’t tell you, they let you figure it all out for yourself.”

  “So what did you figure out?” she asks.

  “That I was massively angry. Of course I knew that before I walked in. I was itching to smash someone, my problem was I couldn’t locate exactly the right person to blame.”

  But maybe last night I finally did. I desperately need to talk to her about Joe Shannon. But she’s still focused on what I got out of therapy.

  “Well, just that after losing my home, my friends, my mom, my girlfriend, and after Teddy’s banishment—after all that, I was entitled to be monumentally enraged. I got it. But … thing is, when I finished treatment, I was angrier than when I began.” I shrug. “But at least I didn’t feel guilty about being so furious.”

  Until now. Now I’m feeling guilty and fighting panic. I play with the sugar cubes on the table. Building an igloo, knocking it down, working up to the biggie: