Suspects

by David Thomson

  They were married in 1970, on board his schooner, the Aquavit, in Pailolo Channel, off the island of Maui. The couple sailed back to California and took a house in the Malibu Colony. Wade struggled to write a new book and Eileen opened a health-food store in Santa Barbara. It was not a happy marriage for very long, and Eileen started an affair with Terry Lennox, a Malibu neighbor and a former baseball player.

  It was in 1973 that Lennox’s wife, Sylvia, was found beaten to death and Terry Lennox disappeared. In fact, he had been driven to Mexico by an old friend, Philip Marlowe. Eileen stayed behind and hired Marlowe to look for her husband when he disappeared on one of his drunken binges. This was only a way of making gambler and gangster Marty Augustine, as well as the police, believe that Terry had killed himself in Mexico from remorse. Eileen flirted with Marlowe, and one night at Malibu, as they were becoming intimate, the drunken Roger Wade walked out of the house and into the Pacific, where he drowned.

  Not long after that, Eileen sold the Malibu house and went away. Marlowe played a hunch. He went to Mexico, to the small town where Terry Lennox had been certified dead and buried. He talked to the local authorities, and guessed that they had been bribed. So he waited and explored, and he talked to kids in the sunny squares and to old men in the sleepy bars. He met a drunk named Firmin who told him he had seen a blonde woman, nearly six feet tall, with hair the color of sunrise. Tequila sunrise, thought Marlowe, but he checked it out.

  Marlowe found the villa where Lennox and Eileen were living, and he went there one day when Eileen was at the market. Marlowe had liked Wade; they had sat on the beach one afternoon seeing how much they could drink. Lennox laughed when Marlowe told him the story. Nobody cares, he said. Nobody cares but me, said Marlowe. You’re a born loser, sighed Lennox. So Marlowe shot him, and when Eileen got back she had food for two with her lover floating on top of the pool.

  There has been no word of Eileen Wade since then, nothing to pin her down. She had money, but she was the kind of woman people notice. There are no charges against her anywhere. Marlowe never put in a report. Maybe Eileen went farther south. There was a story in 1980 about a white woman running a resort hotel in Sulaco. And that’s where Frederick Gould retired in 1974, the law set aside.

  DAVID STAEBLER

  Jack Nicholson in The King of Marvin Gardens, 1972,

  directed by Bob Rafelson

  Four times in ten years, different doctors have suggested he try reducing the dose. David Staebler doesn’t welcome the thought, but he has always been obedient and self-pitying enough to suffer under the system. It’s important that he treat this warning about scaling down the drug as if it came from the IRS, or some other arrangement of initials stamped into the spine of the state, an authority not to be denied or questioned. David has always expected to be taken and exploited; his tender sadness is waiting for it, and his flat, ironic voice was trained not to give any sign of the pain. You’d never know about the pain, if you didn’t notice the unalleviated morbid song in that famous voice. “This has been ‘Etcetera,’ I am your host, David Staebler …”—a calm accountant, describing disasters in the early morning hours, making them up, sometimes slipping in true horror, but no longer sure which pills kick and which are clever placebos.

  David and Jason Staebler were born in Philadelphia, in 1936 and 1938—“in that order,” Jason added for years. He was so much more convinced than David, so much more worldly, that everyone took him for the older. Yet Jason wanted to be spoiled; he wanted to cling onto the chance of being the “kid” brother. David looked at him with the gloomy awe of an innocent who has met a wizard. While they were still boys, a kind of deferential slowness overtook David so that Jason was always beating him—to the punch, the dinner table, or the dream. It was Jason who lived on the spur of moments, deciding what they were going to do; while David, with eyes like a dark pond in shadow, waited to be ruffled by the wind. David had only two advantages. He remembered everything and then gradually, over the years, he retold it all as stories. He built Jason into a legend on the radio, and it did for the poor guy, long before that set of bullets ripped him apart in Atlantic City.

  Their parents were both killed in 1938, on Sunday, October 30, when their car was in a collision just outside Grovers Mill, New Jersey. They were on their way back from New York to Philadelphia, two happy young people, not long delivered of their second child, returning from what they called “another honeymoon” in the city. They had everything to look forward to; they were listening to the car radio, spellbound in the dark, a fragile cabin buzzing along the road, touching, their hands held on the ledge of their two thighs … when a panic-stricken truck came out onto the highway. Their hands were still locked, and the radio was still playing … or so it went, according to David’s bewitched account of how radio came to be his metier.

  The boys were brought up by their grandfather, a movie projectionist in Philadelphia. He was a dour, conscientious man, ruined by the death of his daughter, their mother, who gave the boys a steady-paced routine for life, stable to a point of emphasis, that had not the least effect on them. Both Staeblers grew up crazy. They were intelligent and they could pass, but they were out of their minds and into that night in which young married lovers met their death. Jason was supposed to be the wild and reckless one; after all, he got himself killed for a reason no one could ever quite put into words. But it was David, and it is David, who has already told five different stories about how his parents died. All on “Etcetera,” all heart-rending and as arresting as a vision in moving headlights. Not one person in Philadelphia has ever called up to say, “But a year ago, you said that … ” David Staebler’s fleeing from the truth holds sway in the night airwaves of that city. People may raise their eyebrows, but they let the storyteller go on. It lets David suppose that no one’s listening—one more nail to put in the coffin of himself, his arms reaching up and tapping it into his wooden top.

  David went to Temple: he studied literature and ran the campus radio station. By his senior year, he had seven separate voices and characters on the air, he was always on the radio, those eyes so planed away of their own shining, always craving the red light, “On Air.” Jason left school at sixteen, and by the time he was twenty he was running a chain of grocery stores in the Poconos. There are still those in the area who say that Jason Staebler was a merchandising genius, that he could have been an emperor in supermarkets. But he got bored easily, he was always changing his plans, always talking about Hawaii, or Alaska, or South America. He may never have read a book, but he couldn’t abide hard facts. He wanted the melting life of fiction, and he lived out scenarios in the way David let them creep into the night air, like fog.

  Anyway, by the late 1960s, the brothers were apart. They didn’t “know” where the other one was—except that David still lived at home with his grandfather, and always worked for the same radio station in Philadelphia. So Jason knew, just as David could count on it that his brother was somewhere close but unexpected. They went years without a word or a call, always expecting to bump into each other. Jason had made a promise that they would both be big, kings of Marvin Gardens, by the time they were forty.

  David was thirty-six when the call came. He was on the air, telling a story about how he and Jason had once watched their grandfather choke to death on a fishbone. “My brother and I became accomplices forever. ‘Don’t ever say a word about this,’ said my brother.” David was drawling the story into the microphone, and the city and the grandfather were absorbing it in the same mood of stoic wondering. Then the call came from Jason: come to Atlantic City, right away.

  David went, always available for disaster, always punctual and giving of himself. Anxious to please, horrified by the possibility of not being liked. It was his need for company, his fear of being alone, that made for so much trouble. Yet he was a retiring fellow, drifting into the bathroom in the middle of the night to practice a soliloquy, a gaunt loner sufficient to inspire a young woman’s fervent insistence that h
e should have the john and all the time he needed—“I know you’re an artist.” So she peed out of the window, and David didn’t ever get to screw the fabulously pretty Jessica, the stepdaughter of Sally, to whom Jason, in Atlantic City, seemed precariously married. Though the gloomy David was sure his brother was fucking Jessica too. He only had to look at Sally’s burnt-out eyes, and see how she hacked off her hair on the wintry beach, letting the copper hanks burn in a fire that was the best reason for being out there on so cold a morning.

  Jason had this plan for a casino and a hotel in Hawaii—he had Hawaiian shirts already packed. David was to direct entertainments there: seances, charades and wakes, presumably. They were going to make their fortune. It was 96 percent finalized. But it was all bullshit. Jessica had looked to David once amid the buzz of Jason’s plans, and said, “I wish you didn’t really think I was part of all this.” “Well, aren’t you?” David had asked. And Jessica nodded and grinned, “Of course I am. We all are.”

  And just to stop him talking, just to halt the inane momentum of packing and the gravitational absurdity of “going to Hawaii,” Sally shot Jason. She sobbed in Jessica’s arms afterward—it never had much to do with betrayal. Jason’s pitching had to be stopped.

  But David went on. He took the body back to Philadelphia, he organized the funeral, and so on. And he went back on the radio, not a whit more or less fatalistic than he had been before. But friends told him he was depressed, and so he made depression his new brother. He went on drugs that slowed and blurred him, but he got used to them and he can still spin those infinitely sad myths into the night, like a kid lying on his bed tossing curve balls at the ceiling so that they bend round the light bulb, never hitting it, always missing explosion.

  JUDY ROGERS

  Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause, 1955,

  directed by Nicholas Ray

  They lived in a four-bedroom house in Altadena, after Ed Hopper came out of the army. He got a job as a salesman for an ice-cream company, and in the years between 1946 and 1955 he won salesman-of-the-year three times. Judy, the elder child, was born in 1937, a pretty girl whose looks had turned angry and suspicious by the time she entered high school in 1951. No longer did she go to her dancing lessons; on weekends, she never went riding; and she had given up her suitable circle of friends. In high school, she went with the rougher boys. She was interested in cars, movies and being out late. The happy Hopper home was filled with recrimination. Ed Hopper took to slapping his daughter’s face when roused. There was a perpetual flush of disgust on Judy’s cheeks mixed in with those ignominious pimples. With a bottomless supply of ice cream, she had always been beset by baby fat and acne, and she loathed her own weakness.

  By the time of her senior year, Judy was going with a bunch of hard-faced kids—Buzz, Goon, Crunch, Moose and so on—who looked too old for high school. That’s when Jim Stark came to the school: his family had arrived from back east somewhere. He was a weird kid, shy but bold. He made friends with Plato, the fruit; but he gave Judy a glance that let her know he was straight. And he got into a chicken-run with Buzz his first week at school after the two of them started a fight outside the planetarium.

  Judy was Buzz’s girl, not that she’d gone all the way with him yet. But others kept off. Still, just before the race began and she was giving both the guys some dust, she didn’t know which one she wanted to win. Then Buzz sailed over the cliff, like a car in a movie, and before he hit the rocks and the water she thought that she didn’t really know him. Jim looked after her then, and the two of them took Plato into L.A. to an empty mansion off Sunset Boulevard. That’s where the other kids came after them, and Plato got out this gun and shot Crunch. Then he took off and got into the planetarium. The cops came and Jim went in to try and get the gun off Plato. He borrowed the gun for a while and took out the clip, so it was empty when he gave it back. But Plato got scared when the cops put the lights on and he ran out waving the gun, so they blasted him. It was the worst thing Judy ever saw. She hated the cops more than she felt for Jim.

  But Plato’s death brought them closer together. She saw later that it was a pressure from which they were too vulnerable to escape. So when they graduated, they married. Both eighteen. A marriage with four worried smiles from the parents.

  Jim enrolled at UCLA. They lived in a tiny apartment on Gayley Drive, and Judy worked as a waitress in Westwood while Jim drove a cab four nights a week. They didn’t see too much of each other, but a son, Caleb, was born in 1958. They were hard-pressed then. Judy couldn’t work as much. The costs of child-care were high. And in his junior year Jim was put on academic probation. They fought whenever they were in together. It was plain to Judy that their teenage romance had been a brief passion encumbered by marriage. Jim had a circle of friends he never talked about. He was secretive. If Judy heard any of their names he became angry.

  In 1959, she moved out. They both called it a trial separation, because they were too hurt to face the truth. Judy moved to Anaheim, where her father had got her the manageress job at a fast-food outlet. Within three months, Jim had stopped calling. She lived with Caleb in an apartment, helped out by some money from her parents and some from Jim’s father. She vowed she’d never marry again. But in 1962 she met a doctor, Herbert Rogers. He was forty-four, divorced, with two teenage daughters who lived with him most of the time. He wooed Judy, and he talked to her about psychology in a way that impressed her.

  He offered her his house in Menlo Park, a large family and no need to work. He seemed like a good man, kind but disciplinary with Caleb. So in 1963, she married him and moved north. Three years later she walked out, sick of his greedy daughters, worn out by his tiredness and the terror with which he viewed the failure of a second marriage. Moreover, he was very conservative, critical of young people and mocking of the antiwar movement.

  The rebellion in Judy was rekindled. She took Caleb and moved into a Haight-Ashbury commune. Once there, she became active in the antiwar movement. One day in April 1966, she got a call from a voice she knew:

  “Hey,” it said. “Anniversary.”

  “Jim?”

  “Good guess.”

  “What anniversary?”

  “Day Plato got it.”

  She had forgotten. Jim wouldn’t tell her where he was, or how he had found her. Judy mentioned it to a woman in the house, and she wasn’t surprised at all, so Judy worked it out that Jim was known to the group. As time went by, she reckoned that it was a kind of anarchists’ cell, and Jim was something of a leader. He came by one day in the summer with an Oriental woman who didn’t speak English. He talked to Judy and they took Caleb to Golden Gate Park. He asked her what she thought about the war. After that, Judy got trusted with more important jobs.

  On October 11, 1968, she was killed, driving over the Bay Bridge when a homemade bomb she was carrying exploded.

  KIT CARRUTHERS

  Martin Sheen in Badlands, 1973,

  directed by Terrence Malick

  It was only as I came to write this piece, and thought to study the map of all the small places Carruthers passed, that I had a surprise. There on the Rand-McNally Road Atlas, page 77 in my edition, about fifteen miles in from the western edge of South Dakota and on a line with the Montana-Wyoming border, there is a small red square and “Geographical Center of the U.S.” It’s in there near Antelope Butte and Haystack Buttes, just to the west of a line you could draw between Rapid City and the Slim Buttes battle site. Carruthers must have gone right by it, but I doubt if he stopped to notice or think about it.

  If you consider the map of the whole country, then I don’t see how it can be called the “Geographical Center.” For a start, it’s a whole lot closer to Canada than to Mexico, and maybe only half as far from the Pacific as it is to the Atlantic. I always heard it said that Kansas City was the middle of America, or the nearest large place, and that Bedford Falls, Nebraska, was the heart of the country, the mathematical midpoint. So it came as a shock to see this red square
in South Dakota. It makes me wonder whether there may be others all vying for the honor. Not that it’s much once you’ve said it. It reminds me of a book I read about the race to the South Pole between Captain Scott and Amundsen. When they got there, both of them, they couldn’t be sure they were there. No red markers—just white as far as they could see. So they marched around for miles just to be sure that they’d stood on the damned pole itself. As for the center of America, you might have to do the same, unless you have a sure feeling where it is.

  This Carruthers was an old-time desperado, some said; I thought he was a new breed of disgrace. I knew the country was in trouble when it celebrated him so. These are the facts:

  Kit Carruthers, b. Birdeye, Arkansas, 1933, never knew his father; his mother did laundry and went in to Memphis at night

  1938–47: some schooling, yet he could barely read

  1947–50: went with a traveling preacher, named Powell, who worked the roads between Fort Smith and Nashville. Carruthers was his assistant and his advertising manager, and he often played the part of a country boy who had been struck blind, so that Powell could cure him. He was also abused sexually by Powell, until one day Carruthers beat him to a standstill and quit

  1950–54: on the road, Carruthers would say he was a wounded veteran of the Korean War. He tried to join the Army, the Texas Rangers and the state police of both Oklahoma and Kansas, but he was rejected for lack of education and psychological instability