Lone star efm-1

by Ed Ifkovic

  What happened, I learned, since Tommy began talking almost immediately, without so much as a howdy ma’am (he obviously learned his manners at the James Dean academy of social decorum) was that Detective Cotton had told Polly that Tommy’s fingerprints were found in Carisa’s apartment and that angered her.

  “Why would Cotton tell her that?” Tommy whined.

  “It seems to be his way,” I said. “Tell everyone bits and pieces of evidence and hope someone reacts. He’s tried it with me.”

  Tommy frowned.

  “You hadn’t told her you were there?” Jimmy said.

  “I’d told her I went with you.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Oh, I did. Remember. That one time?”

  “No, Tommy.”

  “You forget. Most of the time I waited in the car but I did stop in…”

  “You waited in the car one time, Tommy.”

  Tommy seemed annoyed now, petulant. “She thinks I,” he glanced at me, “you know, slept with Carisa. I mean, she’s had suspicions, even accused me of it once or twice. But Cotton’s comments, like, made her nuts.”

  Jimmy’s voice was edgy. “But you did sleep with her.”

  “No.”

  “Of course you did. Carisa told me-couldn’t wait to tell me. Lorded it over me, in fact. ‘Your boy picks up your leftovers like a street Arab plucks coal from train tracks’ was how she put it.”

  Tommy blushed and stammered. “One time.”

  I interrupted. “Seems to me, if I can judge by what folks are telling me, everyone visited Carisa just once. People in Hollywood seem to do things only once.”

  Jimmy grinned. “We’re easily bored here, we box-office wonders.”

  “So I accused Polly of sleeping with you,” Tommy said, emphasizing the last word.

  I thought Jimmy might react, but he simply sat there, unperturbed, it seemed, relishing the moment. “I don’t need your girlfriends, Tommy.”

  I could see that Tommy was testing Jimmy, watching, hoping for something. But then he backed off, saying with a half-hearted giggle, “I knew it was nonsense. Sorry, Jimmy. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  I expected Jimmy, the troublemaker, to announce, “Yes, I did. I admit it. And Polly has a crush on me.” But Jimmy, looking a little sad, seemed suddenly to pity the sycophantic boy from his hometown. “Tommy, don’t worry. Polly’ll get over it. She always does. She loves you.” Said, it was a wistful, almost melancholic line, with Jimmy lingering on the word loves as though he’d discovered a new sensation, a wet confection that warmed the mouth. Our boy of perpetual surprises.

  Jimmy purposely changed the subject and chatted about Lydia who, he announced, had called him the night before, somnambulant, in a narcotic haze.

  “What did she say?” I asked at the same moment Tommy did. We waited.

  “It was hard to understand her, you know. She said she was alone. She felt that Nell leaving her without warning, roommates and friends no more, was too much.”

  “What do you do when someone you know is taking narcotics?” Vaguely, I thought of a Chicago jazz saxophonist I once befriended, who died one night at the apartment of a friend. And a book I’d read as a young woman: Thomas DeQuincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater. And Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” That’s it. My knowledge of drugs is literary. Sometimes it’s safer that way.

  Both men stared at me, and neither answered.

  Jimmy went on. “She said she was scared. Really frightened.”

  “Of what?”

  “She didn’t say. I think because Carisa was murdered, and they were friends. After a while I realized she was still on the line but saying nothing.” He shrugged his shoulders. “So I hung up.”

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  Jimmy smiled. “I had to go to bed.”

  Late that afternoon I sat with Jack Warner in his office, and I was certain I knew why. Tansi had cornered me, predictably frantic, saying Jack requested a brief meeting. “Of course, I told him you’d be there,” she said, overlapping my stuttered one word “Why?” But I dutifully went, and sat there, uncomfortable in a straight-backed chair, while he fiddled with a stack of memos on his desk. I cleared my throat. “Tansi’s tone suggested some immediacy.”

  He looked up, but didn’t smile. “Tansi assumes everything I say is urgent.”

  “And it isn’t?”

  For a second I saw wariness in his eyes. That thin sinister moustache twitched. This dapper man in the pristine blue suit, with the sensible no-nonsense haircut, the manicured hands idly leafing through the memos, didn’t know how to read me. A humorless man, unfortunately; a man who decided comedy had no rewards. “It is the way I run my business.” Said levelly; matter-of-fact, with the slightest of edges.

  “Well…” I began.

  “Jimmy,” he said, and the slender fingers stopped drumming the memos.

  I waited.

  “Well?” he asked, tilting his head.

  “I didn’t realize it was a question.”

  He leaned back in his chair, swiveled left and right, folded his hands behind his head, and contemplated me. “I’m assuming you know, deep down, that he probably killed that woman.”

  “I know no such thing, Jack.” I sat up, rail stiff. “And she had a name. Carisa Krausse.”

  He shook his head back and forth, impatient. “This has to go away, Edna.”

  “But a murder…”

  “It has to go away. Look, I don’t know if Jimmy Dean killed her-Carisa-but you’re a little too close to the fire, Edna.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Cloudy, unblinking eyes: “I don’t care, frankly, about Jimmy’s private life because, to tell you the truth, he no longer has a private life. None of them do-Jimmy, Liz, Rock. All of them.”

  “We all have private lives.”

  “Not stars like those three. Jimmy is young. He doesn’t understand what’s at stake here. Maybe he killed her, maybe he didn’t. It has to go away. You don’t understand…”

  I interrupted. “You think I’m meddling? That’s why I’m here?”

  He sat forward. “We can’t have you traipsing around Skid Row.” He stopped. “Look, Edna, we’re friends, the two of us. We’ve put in place a vast ungainly machinery, you and I. Giant is a huge bestseller and soon to be a blockbuster movie. An epic. It’s what Hollywood does best. Romance, up there on the screen. It’s beyond private lives now. This isn’t just James Dean here, some haywire hayseed messing up. James Dean is a creation, a slick glossy face that looks good on the cover of Photoplay. Rock Hudson-last year Magnificent Obsession. This year’s most popular man in Hollywood. Number one. Liz Taylor, one of the great beauties. My job is to cultivate the dream. In movie houses all over America people stare up at that screen and see a world they’ll never have, can only imagine. Bigger than life Texas romance, oil millionaires, furs, cars, beautiful people like Rock and Liz and Jimmy. Real people don’t look like that, Edna. Look around you.”

  “It’s all a lie, then?”

  “Of course it is. It’s the grand illusion. Cinemascope and Technicolor-a moviemaker’s palette. We paint dreams.”

  “And what about the nightmares?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “But I do.”

  “Edna, it’s fantasy writ large.” He sighed. “Hollywood is a star factory. Rock and Liz, they understand this. The game. Liz smiles and weeps and flashes her eyes and thinks, I’ll be a beauty forever. The world’s oldest ingenue. The little girl from National Velvet. Rock thinks his granite chin and rugged physique will stay chiseled forever. What other choice do they have but to believe this? But Jimmy has to learn that Hollywood is a big fat sow sloshing through the mud, moving, never stopping, effortlessly. And all about her flies swarm and buzz and hum and dip and flutter. Liz and Rock and Jimmy are the flies right now: they get all the attention. But the sow always moves on, plodding, and after a while there are new flies overhead.” Suddenly, he stood up. “Enou
gh. I didn’t mean to get into all this. It’s just that it all,” he waved his hand in the air, “has to go away.”

  I stood up. “I still don’t know why you called me in here,” I grumbled.

  His baffled look suggested I was a slow-witted old lady. “Let me put it this way. We’ll handle the Jimmy business.”

  “Of course.” I turned to leave.

  “I don’t think I’ve convinced you.”

  I looked back. “Did you really expect to?”

  That surprised him. “Well, actually, no. I don’t have you under contract.”

  I fiddled with my purse, a little nervous, and started to walk out.

  “Edna.” I turned back. He was opening a small jewelry box, tan leather flecked with gold. The overhead light caught the chaotic glint of diamonds on a sleek gold band. Good God, I thought, is the man trying to buy me off with riches?

  “Lovely,” I said, backing up.

  “It’s just a bauble,” Jack said, flashing it before me. “A present for Liz. She likes presents.” He snapped the case shut. “She likes to feel wanted, appreciated.”

  “Don’t we all,” I snapped, and left the office.

  Chapter 14

  That weekend, on a crisp, brassy Saturday afternoon, Mercy and I drove back to Carisa’s apartment. I had one purpose in returning: Connie Zuniga, Vega’s fourteen-year-old granddaughter.

  “But why the need for surprise?” Mercy asked.

  “I don’t want her rehearsed story. In Hollywood everyone talks like they’ve memorized a script.”

  Mercy glanced at me as she pulled up to a light on Fifth Street. “But she’s already told her story to Detective Cotton.”

  “Yes, right after it all happened. Now, days later, she’s got that story perhaps, but maybe she can recall some other things.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t have a clue.”

  As Mercy’s car stopped in front of the apartment building, I spotted Vega at the curb, shuffling garbage cans. Up and down the street, curbs were dotted with broken-up pails, dented tins, lopsided cardboard containers, overflowing with debris. The junk in Carisa’s apartment would fill dozens of such containers. But was there one tidbit of useful information in those mountainous stacks of L.A. Times, Collier’s, Movie Life, Stardom Magazine, movie scripts, rehearsal notes, cards and letters and bills, paid and unpaid? The important letters-maybe just one letter? — were gone, taken by the murderer.

  Vega watched us step from the car. He was perspiring, his face flushed; and he wore a stained Hawaiian shirt over white linen trousers, rolled up above his ankles, showing bare feet tucked into sandals, unstrapped, the leather worn.

  “Ladies.” He bowed, one hand gripping his lion’s-head cane. He wiped his brow with a large white handkerchief. “A surprise.”

  “We apologize for intruding, Mr. Vega,” I said, “but we were hoping your granddaughter Connie might talk to us. You said weekends…”

  He looked behind him, back to the house. “She’s inside, in the kitchen, supposedly peeling avocados, but I suspect her nose is buried in Modern Screen.” He grinned.

  “A favor, sir. Would you mind if we had a word with her?”

  “Still the same story?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid. Has Detective Cotton been around?”

  “Again and again. He has the persistence and stubbornness of a deadly bull dog that keeps coming at you.”

  Quietly, he led us into the kitchen. With the curtains drawn over tattered blinds and the only light coming from a dim-watt bulb over a table, the room was a surprise: cool, serene, monastery-like, the street noise distant, not even a ticking clock. I heard the rhythmic scraping of a knife against avocados, each lifted from a wicker basket and then sliced into, the rough-knotty green skin deftly peeled back, and the lush, overripe green meat turned quickly into an earthenware bowl, and another lifted up. Green, slimy fingers attached to a skinny little girl who sat at the table, her eyes faraway, her movements mechanical. At the other end of the table, pristine and untouched, a copy of Photoplay, unopened.

  “Connie,” her grandfather said, rousing her. “Will you please share your story with these two fine ladies?”

  “Story?”

  “The day Carisa Krausse died.” He paused. “They’ve come just to see you.”

  The young girl nodded, stood, wiped her stained hands on a towel, and then sat back down, facing us, hands folded on the table. She smiled.

  Vega set glasses of lemonade before us, and I was pleased. I remembered the exquisite drink. I sipped mine, and resisted the temptation to smack my lips.

  Connie was a beautiful child, with something of her grandfather’s rich mocha coloration; the high cheekbones, the slender nose, the round black eyes, deep and clear; the long straight black hair, so shiny it looked greased, touched with abundant and rich oils. Aztec girl, I thought. Mexican girl. Oddly, I thought of the statue that had been hurled at Carisa: that grotesque green replica of an Aztec girl, with protruding belly and flattened features. A far cry from this ravishing girl; this untouched girl, so innocent, sitting among avocados and kitchen shadow; yet overwhelmingly exotic, sensual. Handmaiden at some ancient shrine.

  “Thank you, Connie.” I stopped, looking at the girl’s moving lips. “What?”

  “Have they caught the murderer?”

  I realized the girl was afraid, living there in the house. “No, not yet.”

  Mercy said, quietly, “Did you like Carisa Krausse?”

  The girl shook her head slowly. “Not really. Abuelo,” she pointed to Vega, “doesn’t want me to bother the tenants.” He nodded at her. “But we’d say hello. I always wanted to ask her questions because she’s like an actress, and I wanna be in the movies someday. Only one time I saw her after James Dean left, and I had to say something. She said she was gonna marry him. But after that, well, she didn’t talk to me. She was, you know, strange.”

  “Strange?”

  “She’d yell at nothing, like a little wild, she’d…” Her voice trailed off.

  “You ever see who visited her?”

  She nodded. “Sometimes lots of people. Movie people. I figured. Some not so nice.”

  “Why?” From Mercy.

  “Loud, rough. Scary.”

  “But not all.”

  “No.” Her face brightened. “I started watching the first time I saw James Dean come in. I couldn’t believe it.”

  “How did you know him?”

  She shifted in the chair, got up and poured herself lemonade. She was wearing a simple blouse, but she had on a poodle skirt lacking the appliqued poodle at the hem. Instead she had a hot rod car embroidered there. A long skirt, neat and pressed, over saddle shoes with bobby socks. I smiled. I could be looking at a girl in New York City or Tampa or Keokuk, Iowa.

  “Maybe he came before but a lot of good looking, you know, guys came to see her. But then I saw East of Eden and he was in the movie magazines and suddenly everybody is talking about him. And then he was here. Here!”

  “You talked to him?”

  She blushed. “Once. I bumped into him in the hallway, and, and he said, ‘How are you?’ I didn’t say anything except mumble, but he just looked at me, he smiled at me, and I couldn’t move.”

  Vega said, from across the room, “Since then, she has his pictures on the walls of her room, and she buys the magazines, and she waits by the window when she’s visiting me…”

  “Abuelo!” she blurted out, mortified. “He’s a star. All my friends want to hear my story. They ask me everything…”

  “Was he here the day Carisa died?” Mercy asked softly.

  For a moment she seemed confused. “What?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to get him in trouble. He’s not in trouble, is he?”

  “No,” I answered. “Just tell us what you know.”

  Warming up, excited: “Well, I saw him that afternoon.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t remember the time. I told Detectiv
e Cotton I couldn’t remember the first time but it was late in the day.”

  “The first time?” That surprised me.

  “Yeah, well, he was here twice that day. He came back.”

  I looked at Mercy. “Early? Late?” From Mercy.

  “I told you-the first time was late afternoon.”

  “Before five?” I asked. The cocktail party, from five to seven. Jimmy’s brief appearance, his leaving at-what time? Six or so?

  “No, after. I was watching TV before that. I was talking on the phone with my friend, and she was going to the movies.”

  “What did Jimmy do?” I went on.

  The girl grinned. “Jimmy. You call him Jimmy?”

  I nodded, feeling schoolgirlish: the president of his fan club.

  “I’m afraid so.” Mercy caught my eye. She was amused.

  “Nothing. I saw him on the sidewalk, coming onto the stoop. So I cracked the door and stared into the hallway. He ran up the stairs.”

  Vega grumbled. “Connie, I told you not to intrude.”

  “He never saw me.”

  “He was alone?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “In that flashy car of his?”

  “Oh, no. I didn’t see a car. The only time I saw him in a car, well, he was in a big, like, station wagon. With wood panels on the side. Brand-new.”

  I turned to Mercy. “Jimmy drives a station wagon?”

  Mercy grinned. “A Ford station wagon, designed for the modern family of four. Mommy, Daddy, and the kiddies. It’s a side of Jimmy you don’t know.”

  “I gather.” I shook my head. “And then what happened?”

  “I heard him yelling at her, and she was yelling back. In the hallway. I got scared.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He was swearing, calling her names. She must’ve done something bad to him.”

  “Did he go into the apartment?”

  “I dunno. He wasn’t there long. Yelling like crazy. I just stayed by the door and waited.”