by Mary Miley
Me and dead game. Some analogy.
‘I can manage them.’
‘No,’ he said firmly, ‘we’ll manage this together. Nobody threatens my employees. There’s a way to get off the property from the back street that few know about. I’ve sent someone to see if there are any newspapermen there. If the coast is clear, you can give them the slip and be back at your house before they’re any the wiser.’
‘You want me to leave now?’
‘Listen, I have a long-term plan to deal with these bums. It’s brilliant. Remember a few days ago when you asked me about going to St. Louis, and I said to wait until we were finished filming? Well, I’ve changed my mind. Your investigation into Joe Petrovitch’s murder really should take precedence over everything else, and this is the opportune moment for you to make the trip. Two birds, one stone. And it would serve those vultures right.’
Director Parker approached but Douglas waved him away with a do-not-disturb flick of the wrist.
‘Go to my secretary first and get some money. Whatever you want. For Barbara’s sake, we want to pay all your expenses, and don’t argue with me, I insist you travel first class. Wait in my office until Blinky Jakes comes for you – he’ll show you where to slip through the back lot fence and make your getaway. Be on the next train to St. Louis. When you’ve finished your investigation and come home in a week or two, all this unpleasantness will have blown over. What’s wrong?’
‘I … uh … you don’t need me here?’
‘Of course, we need you! But I’ll talk to Julia Girone and get her to pull someone from one of Mary’s crews to pinch hit while you’re gone. Never worry about that.’
I did worry. People in film production liked to bandy about that joke warning you not to go to the lavatory or you’d find someone else in your chair when you got back. So much talent chasing so few jobs let studio bosses demand sixteen-hour days, seven-day weeks, and no vacations. Being so easy to replace concerned me more than I cared to admit at that moment, so I resolved to brood later. For now, Douglas was enjoying himself immensely, always the adventurous boy on a lark, full of plans to spirit me out of his studio right under the noses of the bloodhound press. Another triumph for the Black Pirate! I could do nothing but join the intrigue.
I ran to Make-up to tell Barbara Petrovitch where I was going and get her to fit me with a dark wig before I sneaked out of the studio. Blinky Jakes found me in the main office, my wallet full of cash, and led me through the maze of sets to a corner of the back lot I had never visited before. There, hidden behind stacks of wood, ladders, buckets, barrels, and cans of paint, was a padlocked gate. Blinky took a key from his pocket and wrenched the gate open. I squeezed through the narrow opening, emerging onto Poinsettia Street, and headed home by a different route. Luck was with me: no reporters were lurking about my house.
‘Hello … I’m home early!’ I called out as I entered the house. No one answered. I looked around for Kit, who could not, obviously, have heard me shout, but I found no trace of the child, indoors or out. Just yesterday’s newspaper scattered about the kitchen, proving she’d been there earlier. If she was leaving the house during the day, none of us was aware of it. A cautionary voice in my head told me that Kit was Helen’s cousin and none of my concern, but I was uneasy. An unchaperoned child should, by definition, be everyone’s responsibility. I left a note for Helen to let her know what was going on and went upstairs to pack for a week’s trip.
I had no sooner finished choosing the most practical clothes and packing them in my largest valise than there came a knock at the front door. To my great surprise, it was Officer Delaney. Kit was standing behind him.
‘Why, Carl, what’s happened? Is Kit all right?’
Kit sidled past him into the house, her head down.
‘Sure she is. I passed her on the street about ten blocks away, recognized her, and asked if she wanted a ride home.’ He grinned. ‘Well, I didn’t actually ask, I pointed to the back of my motorcycle, and she hopped on. Judging by her big smile, it was her first time.’
‘Well, thank you very much. I’m sorry to have troubled you …’
‘No trouble. I was coming to see you anyway. Can I come in?’
I tried to mask my reluctance as I showed him into the kitchen where Kit was rooting around for something to eat.
‘The station got a complaint about some reporters blocking the entrance at Pickford-Fairbanks, so they sent me and Brickles over to clean it up. They were waiting for you. After we shooed ’em to the other side of the street, I went inside to speak to you. Someone confessed you’d snuck out the back. So I came here to warn you. Brickles told the boys you’d be out at lunch-time, but as soon as they figure out that’s a lie, they’ll be heading this way. They know your address from yesterday’s trial.’
‘I didn’t want to give it out.’
‘But you had to, I know. They always ask a witness for name and address. I was going to suggest you go to a hotel for a few days, or move in with a friend. Just until this blows over.’
‘I’m leaving town.’
‘Well, now, I don’t think you need to go that far …’
‘Mr Fairbanks told me to stay clear of the studio for a week or two. He suggested I use the time to follow up on that Petrovitch letter, the one from St. Louis, to see if it leads to any information about Joe and who would want to kill him. I did try to find some Big Time vaudeville friends playing St. Louis this week or next, but there were none, so I may as well go there myself. I have the time now.’ I spoke that last line a little bitterly.
Carl had this way of looking hard into a person’s eyes and reading what was written on their brain. ‘You worried about losing your job?’
I sighed. ‘Maybe a little. If this dies down quickly, then no, it won’t cost me my job. By the time I return, this will be old news. I hope.’ I didn’t want to talk to Carl about David and the trial; I didn’t want to see him gloat. I knew he didn’t like David. David didn’t like him. I fancy I had something to do with that.
‘The newspapers want to turn that trial into a bigger scandal than it is,’ said Carl. ‘There are plenty who would love to link it to Pickford and Fairbanks. Drag them down a notch. Even film stars with millions of fans have enemies. And a lot of people are jealous of their success. Nothing sells papers like scandal.’
No one knew that better than I did.
Having gobbled up her bread and butter, Kit crunched into an apple with gusto. Before she could disappear outdoors, I motioned for her to clean up her plate. ‘Thank you for bringing Kit home. I don’t know where she gets to when we’re all away.’
‘You’re welcome. She’s a good kid.’
I wasn’t too sure about that, but I let the comment slide.
‘I’d better go finish packing—’
Before I could stand, he said, ‘I’d offer you a ride to the station but we’d never manage it on the motorcycle with your suitcase.’ The image made me smile. ‘When does your train leave?’
‘The next one pulls out at around 3.’
‘When does it get to St. Louis?’
‘In the wee hours of Saturday morning.’
He grimaced. ‘You got a place to stay?’
I couldn’t help but be touched by his concern. ‘Yes, Dad,’ I teased.
‘It’s just that I know a decent hotel that isn’t too expensive.’
‘You know St. Louis?’
I could feel him pull back. He had blundered into his private past – a place he clearly did not want to be. Which only made me want to hear about it even more. I glanced at Kit who was watching us intently as she nibbled her apple to the core.
‘Only a little.’
His reluctance to elaborate stemmed from shyness, not deviousness. Some people just don’t like talking about themselves, and Carl was one of those. But I had been curious about his background for some time now, and this was the best chance I’d had to understand him a little better. So I pressed ahead, as gently as I could
. ‘How do you know St. Louis?’
‘I grew up not far from there.’
‘Really? Where?’
Long pause. ‘Belleville, Illinois. No one’s heard of it.’
‘A big town?’
‘Small town.’
‘Did you live in town?’
‘No, outside town.’
This was like pulling teeth. ‘In another small town outside that town?’
‘My family had a farm east of Belleville.’
Everybody’s family had a farm. Unless you were in vaudeville. Farmers, I’d heard, went into town on Saturdays to shop and socialize. ‘So you went into St. Louis on Saturdays?’
He shook his head. ‘We went into Belleville on Saturdays. We went to St. Louis once or twice a year. Have you been there before?’
Oh, no, he wasn’t turning the spotlight on me! ‘A few times, but only to the theater district. Did you ever see a vaudeville show in St. Louis?’
‘No.’
‘In Belleville?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘My father didn’t hold with such things.’
‘Because we’re all immoral people going straight to Hell?’
‘Because we didn’t have the money.’ He looked around the kitchen, as if planning an escape route. ‘I better let you go pack …’
‘Your family lost the farm?’
‘No, they’re still there.’
‘Who’s there? Your parents?’
He gave a sigh of resignation. ‘My father died ten years ago. We struggled to keep the farm going. I’m not a farmer, never was any good at it. When my sister got married, it was my chance to leave. As soon as Betty’s husband moved in with Mom – he’s as good a farmer as God ever made – I joined the army to see the world.’
‘That’s how you got to France.’
Kit picked up her sketchpad and started drawing Carl’s face. I could feel him relax a little. This conversation stuff wasn’t as painful as he’d expected.
‘Soon as America got into the war, I was on the transport to France. Spent a year there. Not all of it in the trenches. Twice I got a pass to Paris. The only city this rube had ever seen before that was St. Louis. When I saw Paris … well, nothing compares to Paris.’ His expression softened as he gazed into the space above Kit’s head, into the past.
‘If you liked it so much, why didn’t you stay there?’
He blinked back to the present and smiled at me. ‘When you’re in the army, you don’t tell them where you’re going; they tell you. The war ended. They shipped us home. I liked the army. I wanted to stay in, but they didn’t need all of us soldiers any more, so they demobbed us at Fort Sam Houston, gave us a train ticket to wherever we wanted to go. I didn’t want to return to the farm, didn’t like Texas, and trains don’t run to Paris. So I thought, “go west, young man” and went to Los Angeles where I figured the police would be kinda like the army.’
‘Is it?’
‘Kinda.’
‘And do you like Los Angeles?’
The wistful expression returned. ‘It’s nice here. But nothing’s like Paris. One day, I’m going back.’
‘To live?’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘When I have enough money saved up, I’ll go back and see if it measures up to my memories. Maybe get a job there.’
‘You speak French?’
‘No, but I got a French grammar book. I can read it pretty good. I’m like Kit here, we can read the language but can’t speak it, isn’t that so, Kitty Kat?’ He leaned over and chucked Kit under the chin as he stood up from the table. Her poker face didn’t crack. He reached for her pencil and below his portrait scrawled, ‘I didn’t know I was such a handsome fella,’ which succeeded in making her lips twitch. ‘You’d better get packing if you’re going to make the three o’clock train. Remember, we’re partners on this case, so keep me posted if you learn anything about Jovanovitch and how he died.’
‘I promise. And I thought of something you might do while I’m gone. Put Joe Petrovitch’s obituary in the New York newspapers, English and Serbian. There must be a Serbian newspaper in that city – every immigrant group seems to have its own native-language newspaper.’
‘What do you hope to learn?’
‘Probably nothing, but maybe someone will see it and remember Joe and want to send a nice note to his widow – be sure to include her name and address. Maybe we’ll learn something about him, about why anyone would want to kill him.’
‘While I’m at it, I’ll run the same thing in Serbian newspapers in Chicago and Detroit and some other big cities.’
‘Good idea. Who knows what might turn up?’
I made it to La Grande depot with half an hour to spare before my train pulled out. I stood in line at the ticket office, booked first-class passage to St. Louis with Fairbanks money, then studied the fluttering numbers on the departures and arrivals board before signaling for a redcap to wheel my valise to track 2. Shoeshine boys vied with newsboys for my attention; a dog protested at being stuffed into a cage; travelers hollered to each other; babies wailed bloody murder. La Grande was one of the largest depots of the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe line, a great cavern of a place where the footsteps and shouts of a thousand rushing people echoed from the polished floor to the ceiling before being drowned out by the snakelike hiss of steam and the ear-splitting squeal of brakes as the monstrous engines pulled into their tracks.
I’ve heard people say that the aroma of fresh-baked bread or some other delicious cookery scent reminded them of home. Growing up in hotels and boarding houses as I did and spending every weekend in transit – jumping, as they say in vaudeville parlance, to the next stop on the route – I found the acrid scent of burning coal smelled more like home to me. Second-class passenger cars evoked a similar feeling. Very few vaudeville players could afford the luxury of first-class accommodations, with Pullman berths and elegant dining cars, which is why I have always been able to sleep as soundly sitting up as lying down. But today I was traveling like rich folks, and the Queen of England could not have felt as pampered as I did when the colored porter showed me to my seat with its pull-down berth above.
‘My name is Jackson, miss, and I’ll be your porter. May I make a dinner reservation for you? Service begins at 6.’
Settling into the spacious, leather seat, I stretched my legs out on the footrest, removed my hat and gloves, and began reading the newspaper in the hope that it would steer my thoughts away from David. Where was he now? Eating horrid prison fare while I dined à la Fred Harvey? Sleeping in a stuffy cell with murderers bunked above and below him? Leaving town felt like desertion, but staying away from Pickford-Fairbanks Studios and the ensuing bad press was really the only thing I could do to help. I had to trust that Mike Allenby would handle everything else.
As the train sped through Arizona, disturbing dreams about ventriloquism seeped into my unconscious mind, robbing me of sleep. Ventriloquist dummies with wide leers climbed off their masters’ knees and menaced the audience where I was sitting, unable to move from my seat. Their lips moved, not in the way of puppet’s lips, up and down, but like human lips. I arched backward but their heads came closer to mine, their red-painted lips moving in raucous lyrics to music I could feel but not hear.
Where had these sinister thoughts come from? I had never worked in a ventriloquist act. I hadn’t even seen one in ages. Naturally, during twenty-four years in vaudeville, I had been acquainted with several ventriloquists, so I knew how hard they practiced to perfect their speech without lip movement, I knew their tricks to throw their voices, I knew the sleight of hand they used to draw the audience’s attention to their dummies and away from their own mouths. I couldn’t imagine what had brought these images into my head at this particular time, but something about ventriloquism – lips and mouths and hidden speech – continued to devil me throughout the night.
FOURTEEN
The Chase Hotel staff was accustomed to guests showi
ng up in the middle of the night off the train, and in no time, a bellboy had whisked my valise upstairs and I had collapsed into a lovely bed with paper-crisp sheets. I slept late into Saturday morning, soaked in the biggest bathtub I’d ever seen, and enjoyed a light breakfast before heading out to track down the last known address of the late Aleksandar Jovanovitch.
The taxi driver never asked me to show him my money, something I often hear since I don’t look rich and do look sixteen. I figured he waived the requirement seeing as how I’d walked out of this swank, new hotel guarded by two doormen wearing uniforms a French general would envy. My beige wool dress with its crocheted neckline and jabot in rose-colored yarn helped with the mature look I was aiming for. The driver gave a smart salute as I climbed into the back seat and told him the address that had been on the return-to-sender envelope Barbara Petrovitch had shown me.
As we drove along, I saw in the distance an enormous industrial complex with half a dozen smokestacks puffing away.
‘What’s that big factory over there?’ I asked.
‘That’d be Anheuser-Busch, miss.’
‘But I … I thought they had closed five years ago.’
‘Most of the breweries did close back then. Threw thousands of men out of work, my brother among them. But Mr Busch, he’s the biggest brewer in the country, and he’s determined to stay in business no matter what. They had to let go most of their men, but they’ve kept going.’
‘What do they make nowadays?’
‘Oh, lots of things. Ice cream for one. And Bevo.’
‘Bevo?’
‘You never heard of Bevo? That’s one of them beers without alcohol. Busch tried it for a few years but I ask you, who’s gonna pay a dime for a bottle of Bevo? Nobody, that’s who. I think they quit making it, now that they hit on syrup.’
I was out of my depth here. ‘Syrup?’
‘You a teetotaler, miss?’
‘No, sir, I’m not.’
‘Well, you don’t know much, do you? Beggin’ your pardon, miss. Here’s how it is: syrup is malt extract. You buy it in cans from the grocer and make your beer at home. Me and the missus do it every month. You add water and yeast and wait a while and it turns into real beer, not Bevo. Of course it isn’t as good as the breweries used to make, but it wets your whistle. And it’s legal.’
