Suspects

by David Thomson

  After the war, Marie heard about a “club” being run near Muroc Air Force Base by a woman known as “Poncho” Barnes. She had been a flier herself and had taken over a desert property for the rest and relaxation of the men at Muroc, many of them test pilots. Poncho put in a pool, there were horses, and a bar with a row of bungalows next to the main building, where private parties could be held. Poncho was hiring young women, and she naturally favored anyone with aeronautical connections.

  So Marie moved up there to the Mojave Desert, and she started to have a good time. Poncho was the law on her property: the air force let her be, and the pilots had nowhere else to go in the vicinity. Marie took Pard with her, and somehow out in the desert she began to collect stray dogs. Poncho called them “the hounds” and some nights a group would go out hunting rattlesnakes with flashlights. Marie fell in love with one of the pilots, a kid named Bobby Kaufman. They had been married four months when he crashed, out in the desert, in 1948. Killed.

  Marie stayed on at the club until 1954, when it closed down. She moved into the nearby town of Lancaster; she liked the desert, and she had plenty of friends on the base—the name of which was changed to Edwards in 1948, after another pilot who was killed. Marie opened a kennel in Lancaster, a way of making a business out of her dogs. And she settled to the life there. She died in her house in the summer of 1969. She lived alone, with only the dogs, and her body was not found for a week. The dogs had begun to eat her, but I don’t think the worse of them for that.

  Yet in a movie, dogs are pals or killers, never unknown. In movies, this garden path and that picture on the wall are all poised with meaning. Everything in the frame seems chosen, asking us to work out why it is there. Is there nothing spontaneous?

  HENRY OLIVER PETERSON

  Robert Morley in Beat the Devil, 1954,

  directed by John Huston

  “I was, I fancy, thirty years or so ahead of my time,” H.O. told Michael Parkinson on British television in a merry interview of 1973, the year before his death. “Until the age of about fifty, you see, my life was as spotty as your handkerchief—no offense, I trust. But after that I became quite respectable, and I am pleased to feel today that a modest amount of affection and gratitude flows towards me from people I have never met and who—should that be whom?—I daresay would be thoroughly dismayed if they did meet me. This little talk of ours will probably blow my cover for good. Still, I have enjoyed myself, and that’s the thing, isn’t it?”

  He had been born in 1908 in an upstairs room of the Leg of Mutton and Cauliflowers, a public house in Leatherhead, Surrey, run by his parents. He grew up there, amid the smell of beer, a fat little boy too much accustomed to finishing others’ meals. He was, apparently, a natural, fluent liar from an early age. “My father thought I was a scoundrel, but my mother was fond of me and I took gross advantage of everyone. That sounds horrible, doesn’t it?” he said to Parkinson. “But such candor seems to be expected of one nowadays. Shady characters are so much more popular now.”

  The boy was sent to Whitgift School and expelled in 1925 for cheating. His father had an interest in a garage on the A24, and as a young man, H. O. Peterson built up a secondhand car business on its premises. “I never knew the first thing about motors, but neither did the customers. I could sell with style and, in those days, you know, most people thought it was such a serious thing to have a car that they became very solemn in the selling. I treated a car like a new hat, and people liked it.”

  The business flourished, but in 1932 Peterson was given a six-month sentence in Brixton for petty fraud: “Checks or something, I can’t remember. It could have been any one of a dozen naughtinesses.” He was a cheerful prisoner who spent the time learning contract bridge—“Best thing that ever happened to me.” The day of his release, he saw a vacant property at the top of Brixton Hill—“I saw that the hill was a very hard pull for cars, and I twigged”—he bought it and opened H. O. Motors. Success again: “Streatham was getting very posh then, and I had a special thing—colored cars, pretty ones. They’d all been black or gray before. There were gangsters then in the flats by Streatham Hill, and I did very well.”

  But in 1937, the Inland Revenue called for an audit, and eventually the business was wiped out by fines and confiscations. “Seemed a shame at the time, but I really should have gone to jug for it. I had to sweeten a few pots to stay out.”

  In 1938, he took a steamer to Rio de Janeiro, having recently been hired by Sebastian, the coffee merchant. “South America then was heaven. I stayed there all the war years, happy as a sandboy.” He dabbled in coffee and beef, in minerals—“all manner of minerals”—and he resided in Santiago, Chile, where he once more went into the business of cars. He also made friends with St. John O’Hara. The couple were All-Chile Bridge Champions in 1942 and 1944: “We’d have had forty-three too, but O’Hara was on cocaine the entire time. He opened three spades once on a hand you could have played misère ouverte. Dear fellow, though.”

  After the war, it was bridge that brought Peterson back to Europe. He and O’Hara were defeated only in the semifinals at the Lisbon Competition of 1948, on a hand that is regarded as a classic. Their opponents were Gutman and Cairo:

  The bidding went to 6♣, with Peterson playing the contract. (On the very first round, West had ventured 2♥—unjustifiable, but a shot in the dark that would prove effective.) West led the 10♠ and Declarer won with the ace. He then led a low club from dummy and was not surprised to see the ace and the king collapse on it together. At this point, West led a small heart. Peterson recalled the earlier bid and decided that West had the king. He therefore played the queen from dummy. That disclosed the king with East, won in hand with the ace. But now there was a heart loser—whereas, if he had played the ten from dummy the queen was still a winner. One down. “That’s what makes the game a joy,” said Peterson, as Gutman and Cairo advanced to the finals.

  His reputation in competition bridge brought forth an invitation from the Daily Telegraph to be their bridge correspondent. Peterson accepted, and he became known for his astute analyses derived from fictitious and sometimes fanciful hands that were being played amid some Agatha Christie-like intrigue—“It was all done in the space of a column, taxing sometimes, but such fun.” This approach was regarded as showy and frivolous by many cognoscenti, who noted that Peterson’s own prowess at the tables had suffered accordingly. “Bridge is a very strict regimen if you mean to succeed. Too grim for me, I fear.”

  Nevertheless, Peterson and O’Hara still played in Europe, and it was shortly after the Trieste tourney of 1953 that they found themselves in Ravello, near Naples. Peterson claimed later that the British East Africa Uranium Company had been meant as a jest and that the death of Paul Vanmeer had had nothing to do with him. “There was this major, you see, Ross he called himself. And he simply had to be killing people. I think it was brain damage.” The ugly voyage of the Nianga, the ordeal in north Africa—“too sadly true,” sighed H.O.—and their eventual arrest by the Italian authorities were fit for a romance. The charges were eventually dismissed, but Peterson was left at a low ebb, especially when the final, piteous disintegration of O’Hara—long anticipated—occurred in Ravello prison. “He was a sweet little fellow, but unless he had drugs and a few women before lunch there was nothing you could do with him.”

  Peterson wandered unhappily for a few years, dismissed by the Telegraph and shunned by old friends. Then, one summer, he was laid up in the Dordogne with gout and, in the space of six weeks, all from memory OF imagination, he wrote Some Pleasant Hotels on the Continent—casual but shrewd, and an unexpected hit when published by Constable in 1958. Another publisher approached H.O. to do a more thorough work, and so in 1962 there appeared the first edition of Peterson’s Guide to Touring in Europe. So far the book has had eighteen revised editions, it has survived H.O.’s death, and it continues to be researched and compiled from offices in Fetter Lane. Reliable, courteous and opinionated, “A book for ladies, ge
ntlemen and their vehicles on the loose with a low budget and higher hopes”—to quote from H.O.’s first foreword.

  GWEN CHELM

  Jennifer Jones in Beat the Devil, 1954,

  directed by John Huston

  There is a statue of Gwen Chelm on the northern plains of Zimbabwe, striding toward the west. It is larger than lifesize. Her hand is arced above her eyes so that she can look toward the sunset. Sometimes the tall wiry grass waves around the plinth, but the statue is itself windswept or agitated by her own romantic ardor. The stone folds of her skirt are blown back, and the fine intricacy of her hair stands out from her head like the depiction of electricity in a comic book. She would have loved the statue, and although the woman is forty or so—Gwen Chelm’s age when she died—it is a statue of a girl ablaze with eagerness and hope.

  Gwen Perkins was born in Budleigh Salterton, in Devon, in 1928, the daughter of a clergyman. It was a quiet, industrious upbringing, with Gwen a faithful follower of the Allied war effort: there were maps in her bedroom, with flags to show the progress of every campaign. In 1944, her last year in school, she put on a pageant that traced the events of D-Day, as if it were a miracle play. She herself played a Joan of Arc of the Resistance who heard the voices of saints and turned the tide of battle in Normandy by crossing enemy lines.

  It was in 1946 that Gwen went to London, to work in a team of young women who composed verses for greetings cards. She was known for her notices of bereavement. But the limits of the job became oppressive and in 1949 she joined the magazine Picturegoer, writing the synopses of films and reviewing them. It was in this capacity that she met Harry Chelm, a buyer for W. H. Smith’s. He was the son of a newsagent in Earl’s Court. The couple became engaged in 1950, and married in 1951, the year of the Festival of Britain.

  Harry Chelm was a decent, straightforward man, stupid and reliable. But he did all he could to keep up with his young wife’s romantic inclination, and he felt excited by the rapture with which she told and lived out entirely false stories about themselves. He supposed this process was dangerous, but he never denied the stories in public, and blushed if they seemed to require a nobler Harry than he could be.

  It was in 1953 that the Chelms set out for Africa. Harry had an uncle in Kenya who was too old to run his small farm, and he had written to England asking if the young couple would care to take it over. It was in Italy that the Chelms encountered Billy Dannreuther, H. O. Peterson et al. Gwen insisted on an affair with Billy, and she furnished every evidence of illicit carnal relations despite her own determination to remain virtuous. It was only later, in Africa, that she regretted her abstinence. Harry loyally believed that she had been unfaithful, and that she was passionate and impetuous.

  In fact, Gwen never shook off her sensible approach to all matters. Her vivid fantasy life deceived others, but it did not convince her. The days in Africa were long, hard and tedious, but Gwen worked on the farm and took care of the accounts. Harry became more caught up in politics—this was the process that led to him being knighted in 1967 and being called “the obliging Chelm” by Jomo Kenyatta.

  The farm spread; it became prosperous. Managers were hired, and Gwen Chelm was freer to travel. She went to visit a cousin in Rhodesia in 1961 and became fired with that country’s political dilemma. Secretly, she worked as a friend to the freedom fighters, a fund raiser and the author of several of their pamphlets. This work led first to her affair with Winston Ntali (assassinated in 1969) and then to her own death in 1971 on a guerrilla raid in the rolling grasslands where her statue now stands with this inscription: “Gwen Chelm, a great believer and a citizen of Zimbabwe.” There is a small plaque in the church at Budleigh Salterton and, sadly, there is the six-hundred-page life, My Wife, by Sir Harry Chelm, which nearly smothers her gentle turbulence in detail.

  I read about a young woman photographer. She had a face like a hook. The more she pictured others the more her pale face begged, “Know me. Remember me.” She killed herself. Someone in the book said there are two kinds of people—voyeurs or exhibitionists. Suppose we can be both at the same time? Show-people and watchers.

  ALMA McCAIN

  Tuesday Weld in I Walk the Line, 1970,

  directed by John Frankenheimer

  You may come upon a young woman sometimes in the Tennessee hills who has a sly beauty, one you recognize a second or so after you’ve looked. She’s outside a store, wearing sneakers in the mud, and you wonder, Is that something rare or just a flat, dull sensuality, with the look of a battered fifteen-year-old who has never washed properly? Then she notices you looking. A slow smile creeps up in her face and you see green eyes and lips that look swollen. There’s a real beauty, you think, a flower in the backwoods. But while you’re thinking, her face has sunk back into wariness. Oh, she’ll go for anything you dream up, but she won’t give you the pleasure of thinking with you. She’s hostile to sharing. Whatever happens, you’ll see her alligator eyes watching you do it. Her last retreat is not joining you, letting it be done to her, so you do it alone. You could go mad trying to catch the spirit of that nymph; it’s like a fish. But you will not scrape her image from your eyes.

  Alma McCain was likely born in 1951, around Frankfurt, which is between Cookeville and Knoxville in eastern Tennessee. No one knows where or when for sure. Alma was ripe at eleven, so there could be plus or minus a year. She would have been born in a cabin up a dirt road, without a doctor. Her mother would look too old already and she had had seven children, and three of them lived, Alma and her brothers, Clay and Buddy. The mother died in 1962, along with the last baby. The McCains roamed the back country, doing a little work and some second-nature thieving, following the old local art of moonshining.

  That’s how Alma met Henry Tawse, sheriff of a town called Nameless in Jenkins County. She and Buddy had gone into town for twenty pounds of sugar which their father needed in the still. On the way back, she let Buddy drive—he was eleven—and the pickup was going all over the road. So Tawse put on his siren and went after them. Buddy took off and hid in the long grass, but Alma said she’d been driving, and oh no there hadn’t been a boy, certainly wasn’t a boy. That look then, I’m sure. And he saw it because he was moldy in his own dead life. But he saw all the sugar too, and he wondered. He let her off: he was a kind man, not yet aware that he would have kissed her bare, cut feet if she had asked.

  A few days later she comes to his office and says she and Clay were going to the fair, but she had suddenly thought why not call in and say thank you to Sheriff Tawse, and Clay and his temper had said do it, you bitch, and put her out on the road by herself. So there she was, and she really was obliged to him for not making a thing about Buddy driving, and that’s all. It was getting dark, and he said he’d take her home. She let him kiss her in the police car, and she slithered over onto its big back seat, drawing him after her and just marveling to find what a load he had on him for her. He wept with gratitude on her old dress when he was done. She had a soft spot for him, whatever happened.

  Tawse lived with his wife, his daughter and his father in the sheriff’s house. But he used to haunt the derelict country place where he had lived as a boy. He took Alma there and told her how his mother and his two sisters had been killed in a crash on the Nashville road. Alma never asked him about his wife. She had never seen a marriage that worked, and she didn’t want to embarrass him. He seemed so happy playing in the deserted house with her.

  There was a federal agent in Nameless out to make a reputation bagging stills. He had Honeycutt, Tawse’s deputy, on his side. But the sheriff was not eager to disturb the McCains. He had a dream of going away with Alma, to Chicago in a plane, maybe. She had never flown. Or to California. But Honeycutt was pushing Tawse. He reckoned the McCains were up to something, and he had seen Tawse and Alma sitting together on the slope of the reservoir. He just casually let it out that Alma had a husband in the penitentiary. “Oh, that’s nothing,” said Alma, when Tawse hit her and raged at her. She had forgotten
Clem, a dumb kid who had married her when she was fourteen or fifteen and had been caught driving illegal whiskey to Chattanooga. After all, crazy lovers like her and Henry forgot their old attachments.

  Then Honeycutt went out to the McCain place. He shot their dog and was going after their still when Alma’s father came up and clubbed him to death. The family was burying the deputy when Tawse found them. He told them to get out of town, dumped Honeycutt in the river, and went to the old house, where he was expecting to find Alma waiting for him.

  But she’d gone on with her family: in danger, the animal goes back into the lair. Tawse went after them. He found them on the road and stopped them. He told Alma to come with him—he was desperate—and she said no just as blunt and factual as she’d ever said yes. He wouldn’t have touched her, but he wanted to kill her. As if she guessed his confusion, she put a bailing hook in his upper arm, his gun arm, and ripped it. He lost his job; a sheriff takes a shooting test every year, and Tawse could hardly hold a cigarette, let alone a gun.

  Alma went with the family, but she’d been upset. After a while she set off to see her uncle, her mother’s brother, in Waco, Texas. He had a barbecue restaurant, and he hired her as a waitress. But she got confused in the busy times, and he took her off the job. He made love to her one night, in his trailer, but when he told her to give him a blow job, Alma set her uneven teeth and bit off the end of his penis. She just left him there, howling and bleeding, and spat out the last shred of family.