Lone star efm-1

by Ed Ifkovic

  He pointed, an impish grin on his face. So I looked.

  “I wanted to be the one to show you this,” he said. “It’s the only way to imagine this world.”

  I started to say something but realized it would come out garbled, gobbledygook from a fairy-tale character. My head swam; my throat was dry. So I just sat there.

  He took off his horn-rimmed eyeglasses and stared, and I realized how intense, almost possessed, his face became: a new beauty to him, this squinting myopic boy. “Sometimes the world is better if you can’t see it,” he whispered.

  Still I said nothing.

  “You know, Miss Edna, in Beverly Hills there are no cemeteries. None. People there think they’re going to live forever.”

  For a while we sat there, Jimmy without his glasses on, with me staring at his profile. Silence.

  Then, nodding, he put the sports car in gear, drove back down the hills, slowly now, as though the thing he’d feared he might lose had been safely won; and the rest was indifference. At the hotel, I uncovered myself from the layers but realized I had not been touched by L.A.’s night chill. Carelessly he tossed the blanket and scarf behind him. I opened my door. He tapped me on the shoulder. When I looked back, still numb and under water-for some reason I found myself crying-he seemed to be muttering something, but it was his familiar halting, stumbling talk.

  “What?” my mouth said, though I knew I vocalized no words.

  “You only get to do most things once.”

  Chapter 13

  The next day, spent on the arm of Jack Warner who rushed me through some meetings and tete-a-tetes with Very Important People (I capitalized the phrase in my mind, though, I told myself grimly, they were decidedly lower-case people), I’d nodded, smiled, bowed, and babbled thank you, yes, very nice, quite, lovely lovely lovely, so many times that I thought I was nineteen again, and begging for employment in Appleton, Wisconsin. Finally, I retreated to my hotel, where, within minutes, Jimmy called me, his voice light and airy, boyish.

  “Where were you? I’ve been calling all day.” He paused. “Breakfast tomorrow at Googie’s, at eight. Meet me there. Please.” The line went dead.

  So the following morning, still basking in the glow of that delicious climb into the Hollywood Hills, I had the studio car drop me outside the busy eatery, filled at that hour with sloe-eyed locals. I paused, tentative, on the threshold, a clanging bell announcing my arrival; but no one took notice of the matronly woman standing there, dressed that morning in a youthful sun dress, daffodil yellow, with a rhinestone brooch suitably placed over my heart. I thought I looked, well, twenty years younger.

  Already there, surprising me, Jimmy rose, rushed over, and squired me back to a booth, where a cup of coffee rested on my side of the table. He ordered food, and I chose an English muffin with boysenberry jam and more coffee, please, and piping hot, if possible. Jimmy smiled. “You don’t eat enough.”

  “And you, so slender.”

  “The camera puts weight on me.”

  I breathed in. “And you wanted to see me for what reason?”

  He laughed. “Right to the heart of things.” He sat back. “Actually, Miss Edna, no reason. I’m treating you to breakfast. My spies in the house of Hollywood report that you and Mercy have chosen my cause. The maiden taking over the quest from the knight.”

  I pursed my lips together. “I seem to recall a young knight making a heartfelt request for assistance one grim, heavy night.”

  There was a twinkle in his eyes. Really, I thought, a twinkle. Strangely, I’d heard that tired expression all my life-indeed, had employed it generously in my fiction-but now, perforce, I seemed to experience it for the first time. Twinkle in the eye: a brightness, a sparkle, a flash that suggests life unsullied by nagging worry, and, truth to tell, a world away from murder.

  “Then,” I said, “if my purpose here is to consume ham and eggs, let me play interlocutor.”

  “A minstrel show, and me in it.”

  “Tell me, Jimmy, why did you hold back information from the police?”

  He made a clicking sound. “I never really thought about the letter to Carisa. I didn’t forget it, but it just seemed unimportant.”

  “Come on, Jimmy. Really? With all the scuttlebutt about her letters to you and Warner?”

  He shrugged.

  “But Jimmy, Detective Cotton asked you if you wrote to her.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He told me.”

  “Whose side are you on?” But he was smiling.

  “Yours, and you know it. Sooner or later, everyone is on your side. It’s a dangerous talent you have, young man.”

  “I lied to him. The question took me by surprise. Police make me nervous.”

  “What else have you lied about?”

  “Nothing, I swear. I wouldn’t lie to you.” He took a sip of coffee.

  “You’d better not.” I knew I sounded schoolmarmish, a little arch and pompous, but I didn’t care. Murder it is, I thought, and I’ll say what I damn well like. In fact, I say what I like, no matter what. I don’t need a murder to make me blunt.

  “You know, Miss Edna, I’ll tell you something. I find that I don’t even think much about the murder. I think about her all the time, but not the murder. Carisa alive and laughing and saying weird stuff. To me she’s still alive. It’s like, well, it’s over-a scene shot, in the can, edited. The film over. I’ve done three movies in about a year, more or less, and everything I do is filtered through this phony prism of celluloid.”

  “But you were close to her.”

  “We did go out, for a moment. It was nothing. You know, dating. Christ. I’d stop at her place. Yes, I know, I gave her that cheap statue because when she was at my place she liked it, but it was just having fun, you know, going out, the way young people do. It’s what young people do.”

  “Did you know she was crazy and maybe on drugs?”

  “The craziness I spotted right away, hard not to. But I’m drawn to crazy types, oddball characters, you know. I like those souls that teeter totter on the rim of the universe.”

  “But drugs?”

  “That I learned right after Marfa. I don’t mean marijuana. Reefer. That’s not drugs. I mean that stuff she did. I think it escalated when the studio axed her. It was Lydia Plummer, oddly, who told me. And then she, too, confessed to sticking the old needle in her pretty flesh. Freaked me out. Not reefer, that’s nothing. That’s not a scene I like, heroin. Back in New York, that cafe on Bleecker at MacDougal, you know, the Zigzag Cafe, the beatniks smoked, the poet and painters, even the Stalinists, you know, maybe, we all did reefer but not the needle crap. I ran away. My vices are…otherwise.”

  “But then you dated Lydia?”

  “Miss Edna, I drift from girl to girl. She…like pursued me. We’re talking a couple of weekends. That ain’t a life contract. That’s dating. But girls seemed to go too deep with me. I swear I didn’t promise anybody anything. And they want so much. Everybody wants so much from me.” He suddenly seemed to freeze up. “I look in the mirror and hate what I see. I don’t see what others see.” He paused. “I just don’t like myself.”

  “That’s foolish, Jimmy.”

  “I’m not saying this to make you feel sorry for me.” He looked into my eyes.

  “But people do feel sorry for you, Jimmy, especially when you talk like this.”

  “It’s the only way I know how to talk. You know, all my life I’ve tried to fit in, though I know I don’t. I never tried to be different. I just was. So I jump at the world, fight with it.”

  “Maybe that’s why you’re a fine actor. You lose yourself in the role.”

  “No, I don’t lose myself. That person is me. I’m only myself playing the rebels. They’re typecasting me. I get nervous about next year. Can I play the rebel for years to come?”

  “You’ll grow.”

  “Miss Edna, I’m losing my hair even now.”

  “You’ll still be James Dean.”

>   “I think I’ll be dead by thirty.”

  I got chilled. “Don’t say that.”

  He withdrew a pack of king-size Chesterfields from a breast pocket, offered me one. I shook my head. “Too early in the morning. My vices are reserved for evenings.” I watched him light one, take a puff, put the cigarette on the table, upended, balancing it, watching it. Then he picked it up, took a drag, put it down, and balanced it vertically again. I watched, enthralled. Neither of us spoke. When the ash was long and wispy, ready to fall, Jimmy picked up the cigarette, stared at the long ash, and looked for an ashtray. There was none on the table, so he stood, let the ash fall onto the linoleum floor. He sat back down, smiled. “I never can seem to find the ashtray.”

  I said nothing. Each movement he made seemed as if he just invented it.

  The boyish gleam he’d shown when I’d first sat down was gone now, replaced by melancholia, as he tucked his head into his chest. I’ve lost him again, I thought. I felt tightness in my chest. When I reached out and touched the back of his hand, he recoiled, as from an electric shook, and the touch seemed to startle him awake. “I’m doing it again,” he said. “I’m begging for love from you.”

  “It’s all right to want people to love you,” I said, and the line surprised me. It didn’t sound like me.

  “I used to own a.22 automatic but the studio took it away from me.”

  “What?”

  He stood up, embarrassed, and flicked a bunch of singles on the table. “You know, there was that cool line from that Bogart movie. ‘Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse.’”

  “Jimmy.”

  Within hours I was sitting with Jake Geyser at the Smoke House, having an unwelcome lunch, and immediately I contrasted the studio functionary with the mercurial Jimmy. Jake looked officious in a casual tan summer suit, with an apparently trendy narrow tie. He sported a fresh haircut, shorn close, military style. I noted something else. He looked away from me when he spoke, his eyes returning only when I responded. Evasiveness, perhaps; or a mannerism. Nevertheless, it was off-putting and irksome.

  Jack Warner, learning through office scuttlebutt that I was often in the company of the hirelings, was concerned. I’d been spotted at Googie’s and elsewhere, even Carisa’s tenderloin flat. “Mr. Warner wonders if you’re all right.”

  “All right?” I echoed.

  “Are you bored?”

  “Because of the company I keep?”

  “You have an inordinate fascination with the death of Carisa Krausse?”

  “And shouldn’t we all? Until it is solved?”

  He whispered, through compressed lips, “There are people who do this for a living.”

  “No matter.” I wanted to be away from him. “Tell me, Jake,” I said, stabbing a piece of wilted lettuce on my plate, “Detective Cotton tells me your prints were all over Carisa’s apartment.”

  He turned his head, as though slapped. What a dreadful man, I thought. Had he ever been attractive? I had no idea why I thought that, other than the perverse sensation of realizing his life was probably spent in the shadow of better looking, huskier boys, athletes, prep school Princetonian pampered heroes. A hanger-on, a Uriah Heap. Now, water boy to the stars.

  “Well,” he got defensive, “hardly all over.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “I stopped in once, to plead with her. Warner told me to go. Do you think I’d drive there? I told him to ask Tansi, you know, woman to woman, but Warner said no. Tansi, though obedient to a fault, made it clear she would not do that. And Warner, old school gentleman, believes you don’t ask ladies to do dirty work.”

  “How noble,” I said. I meant it as a throwaway line, but it came out harsh, unfunny. “But you went.”

  “Once, I swear.” He looked at his uneaten sandwich, mayonnaise oozing onto the plate. “Once. Inside that hell hole, moving through stacks of magazines. She either read a lot or someone mistook her apartment for a town dump.” His eyes flickered; he looked pleased with his own observation.

  “Had you sent her a letter?” I asked, suddenly thinking of it.

  “Of course not.”

  “Everyone else seems to have.”

  “Detective Cotton probably told you about the papers he found there.”

  That stopped me cold. “What?”

  “Oh!” Silence. “Oh well. Just before she died-was killed-that’s when I went there. Warner’s people made me offer her some money, but she had to sign a sheet disavowing any connection with Jimmy or the studio. Promise not to talk to Confidential. To the gossip columnists.”

  “And she agreed?”

  “Almost. I left the papers with her, and she promised to contact me. She had conditions.”

  “Did she?”

  “No.”

  “Did you go there the day of the murder?”

  “I swear I didn’t.”

  “Maybe you did, and she had conditions you couldn’t accept.”

  “And so I killed her? Good God!”

  “How much money?”

  He hedged. “Enough so that she could move out of that rattrap. Move on. Resettle. I knew she’d take it. She was…joyous.”

  “The super, Mr. Vega, saw her arguing with an older man on the sidewalk.”

  He squinted his eyes. “Good God. Yes, that was me. A few days before my visit. She was coming out of her apartment, and I pulled in front. She got frightened, and we screamed at each other. Or, rather, she screamed at me. I thought she’d hit me. She kept saying that Jimmy sent me.”

  “So it wasn’t just one visit, as you’ve said. It was at least two.”

  He looked at me. “I don’t consider that street scene a visit.”

  “You’re playing games, sir.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Who did you think killed her?”

  He shrugged.

  I smiled. “You’re a good company man. You want to believe it’s Jimmy, but your job demands that it not be him.” I glanced toward the doorway.

  Jimmy stood there, watching, and seemed angry to see me with Jake. Then, hovering a moment near our table, he slid into the seat next to Jake, uninvited, and smiled at me. “In the course of a given day, Miss Edna, you go from the sublime,” he bowed, “to the ridiculous.” He indicated Jake, but didn’t look his way.

  “Now, Jimmy,” I began.

  Jake fumed. “You know, Jimmy, you may be the studio darling, but your manners are questionable.”

  “Oh, my manners are just fine.”

  “Boorish, rude…”

  “Jake, I don’t like you.” Blunt, heavy duty, flat out.

  “And I don’t like you.”

  “You have to. Warner ordered you to.”

  “I’ll do anything in my earthly power to help you in your career, but that doesn’t mean I have to…”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Come on, Jimmy,” I pleaded.

  “You know, Warner knows what I think of you,” Jake said. “I’ve told him. He just nods and tells me to do my job. Frankly, a lot of people don’t care for you. I know Miss Ferber thinks you’re,” he paused, searching for a phrase but could only bring up an ancient one, “the bee’s knees, but I think you’re a slovenly, ill-kept brat.”

  Jimmy shot back, lamely, “And you’re a hack.”

  Fascinated, I sat back now, observing the exchange of pepper-shot vitriol, and realized, suddenly, that both men were enjoying themselves on some atavistic level. Clearly despising each other, they still delighted in some crude ritual. I imagined a schoolyard where, finally, fisticuffs would end this verbal assault. Or an irate teacher would drag the errant boys into the principal’s office. My, my, I thought. Boys will be boys.

  They were tiring. “The only comfort I have is knowing that you will be named a murderer by Detective Cotton.”

  Jimmy paused, cut to the quick. He recovered. “Interesting. You didn’t say you thought I did it, just that I’d be charged with it.”

  “I meant
…”

  “Which suggests that you know I didn’t do it.” He smiled. “Because, I suppose, you’re running from the truth.”

  “And what is that?” Smug, an old British public-school demeanor asserting itself.

  “That you’re the real killer.”

  Jake, stunned, stood, mumbled something about a meeting, and left. Jimmy yelled after him. “You gonna make Miss Ferber pay for her own lunch?” Jake never looked back.

  “Quite the show, Jimmy.”

  “Everything is rehearsal for me.”

  “You were rude.”

  “Yeah, I suppose so. That’s what I do. You know, I’m not the nicest guy, Miss Edna. People tell me that I’m gauche-I love that word-and I gotta agree. Sometimes I wonder how people can actually stay in the same room with me. Frankly, I wouldn’t put up with my antics. I can’t tolerate myself.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t tell if you’re serious.”

  “I am.”

  “Why are you here?” I asked nervously.

  “I’m meeting Tommy. He thinks I’ve been avoiding him and Polly.”

  “Have you?”

  “Yes. Tommy is too…clinging. If I want to see myself, I’ll look in a mirror. I don’t need to see him as me.”

  Within minutes Tommy arrived, out of breath, and Jimmy motioned him to sit down. I looked at my watch, stood up, ready to leave, but Jimmy shook his head. “Wait a bit.” I slipped back into my seat.

  Tommy was in a tizzy. He’d come from a fight with Polly. He was used to their spitfire battles about his future, their freakish love, his notorious lack of ambition, his life as a shadow, but, he confessed, near tears, this time something was different. Polly seemed to want to leave him. For good. Not the sporadic running away to stay with a girlfriend over night, only to return, penitent, giddy, in love again.