While I Disappear

by Edward Wright

  “Something tells me you were a better actor than they gave you credit for,” he said. “Let’s talk again sometime, all right?”

  * * *

  A wind off the ocean found its way up the canyon during the night, and Horn awoke to a chilly mist blanketing the trees. He drove down to the coast highway and had breakfast at the diner where the canyon road met the Pacific. Later, he worked around the property for a few hours, trying not to think about Rose. Then, as lunchtime approached and he began cleaning up, he felt his spirits lifting. It was Saturday, and he was going to see Clea.

  Forty-five minutes later, he drove up to an imposing white house in the Hancock Park neighborhood, and she ran out the front door, skirt flying over her long legs and saddle shoes, and reached through the window and hugged him before he even had a chance to get out.

  “Damn, it’s good to see you, little girl,” he said.

  “You’re not supposed to call me that anymore,” she said in mock anger. “I’m a senior.”

  “Oops. Pardon me.”

  He studied the seventeen-year-old. He had not known exactly what to expect, for it had been only a few months ago…. He thought back to that night on the scorched grounds among the ruins of the Aguilar estate, when Iris’ new husband had died violently, when Horn and Clea had come close to death, and when Clea herself had been forced to kill in order to save both of them. No one could come away unmarked from such a night, and he had feared for her. But here she was, looking guilelessly happy and full of energy.

  Iris came out to join them. “Hello, John Ray.” She wore a stylishly long camel’s hair coat, her hair done in a new kind of wave. She had the same strong, attractive features, but she seemed to look older. Horn wondered how much Clea had told her about that night. But Iris had been through enough, and he had decided never to ask.

  “Iris.” He leaned out to kiss her cheek. “Where do you girls want to eat?”

  “Dolores’s!” Clea shouted before Iris could speak.

  “I guess it’s Dolores’s,” Iris said. “Would you like to take the Packard?” she asked diplomatically, glancing at Horn’s cramped and dirt-streaked old Ford. “We’d have more room.”

  “Sure.” They switched cars, with Clea in the back, and he drove them to the drive-in on Wilshire, about fifteen minutes away. A car hop came out to take their orders, and Clea self-importantly specified crisp French fries and extra malt in her chocolate malt.

  They tore into the food, and he was happy just to listen to the talk of school, boys, Frank Sinatra, clothes, boys, dances, and…oh yes, boys. While he and Iris had been married, Clea was his stepdaughter. When he went to prison and Iris divorced him, then remarried, he had no reason to expect that he would ever see mother or daughter again. Now her third husband was dead, leaving behind secrets that Horn prayed his widow would never unearth. Iris and Clea were once again a part of his life. And Horn, a man not especially skilled at forming attachments, found himself immensely grateful.

  “And you,” he said to Iris around a bite of his hamburger. “How are you doing?”

  “All right, I suppose,” she answered with a small smile. “I miss Paul, of course.”

  He said nothing. For a moment he felt the urge to begin talking, to tell Iris everything he knew about her dead husband. In the next instant, he knew it would do no good. There were things Iris did not need to know, and she would only hate him for telling them. And he had worked too hard to put himself back in her good graces. She’s entitled to her memories, he told himself. And so is her daughter. Let it rest.

  “You need to move on,” he said to her, aware of how feeble his advice must sound.

  “I know,” she said. “I’m trying.” In the back seat, Clea seemed oblivious to their conversation. As she ate, she hummed along to a tune from a nearby car radio.

  “Don’t misunderstand. I’m not seeing anyone,” Iris said with a half-hearted laugh. “I’ve sworn off men forever. But I’ve been thinking of going through the house, clearing out some of Paul’s things. Do you think that’s wrong?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Paul had some nice clothes. I think he would have wanted them put to good use.”

  “You’ll think of something.”

  “How about you?” she asked. “Would you have any—”

  “No,” he said, more forcefully than he intended. He had an image of Rose’s tall, redheaded friend delivering clothing to the mission. “But I might be able to help you find a good place for them.”

  “I’d appreciate that.” She leaned back in her seat, looking as relaxed as she was capable of looking. “This is fun,” she said. “I’m glad we came here.”

  “Can I get another malt?” Clea called out from the back seat.

  As they ate, rain began to spot the windshield, and the car hops ferrying trays to and from the cars looked increasingly bedraggled. By the time he dropped off Iris and Clea and headed home, it was raining steadily, with the radio warning of a Pacific storm about to move ashore.

  Once home, he built a fire in the small stone fireplace and listened to the rain and wind outside. He poured a small glass of Evan Williams and settled on the couch with a copy of Zane Grey’s Fighting Caravans. He didn’t realize he had dozed off until the phone rang.

  “John Ray? It’s Dex.”

  “Dex?” He sat up quickly, knocking the book to the floor. “What time is it?”

  “A little after seven. You forgot, didn’t you? My feelings are hurt.”

  His mind struggled to recall. Dex was going to tell him about Rose. And now there was no need. “Oh, no.”

  “It’s not that bad. They say at your age, it’s normal to forget little things, like going to visit a friend. Now when you get to my age, you’ll find it’s going to be a lot—”

  “Listen to me. She’s dead.”

  “Who?”

  “Rose.” He let out a deep breath and sank back onto the couch. “Rose is dead. Somebody killed her.”

  There was a long silence on the other end. Outside, the wind was still troubling the trees, and every now and then he heard something skitter across the roof of the cabin.

  “Sorry,” Horn said. “I should have called you. But I’ve been trying not to think about Rose or anybody connected with her.”

  “Who did it?” Diggs asked quietly.

  “They don’t know. Police were here, muscling me a little to see if I had anything to do with it. But they seem to think it was just somebody in the neighborhood, one of the drunks or junkies that hang out around her building. They called her a barfly, Dex. It made me mad to hear it, but I couldn’t help thinking: Maybe that’s what she was. Rose was a nice lady, but she was a drunk too, and people who live the way she did sometimes wind up—”

  Diggs interrupted him. “John Ray, I know we’re friends, but I wish to hell you’d just shut up.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “That’s what I want to know. All this talk about her—”

  “It’s true, Dex.”

  “I don’t care.” He stopped, and Horn could almost hear him thinking hard. “Can you still come over tonight?”

  “What? We’ve got a storm out there, or haven’t you noticed?”

  “I promised to tell you what I know about Rose. And from those noises you’ve been making, that she deserved what she got—”

  “I never said that, Dex.”

  “You need an education in Rose Galen, even more than you did before. And I guess I’m in the best position to give it to you, and there’s no better time than tonight. If you’ll come over here now, I’ll throw in a free dinner.”

  When Horn didn’t speak, he pressed on. “Like I said, it’s important. To me, and to you too.”

  Horn sighed. “Directors. You sound like Cecil B. De Mille with his megaphone, ordering the peasants around. All right, Dex. I’m on my way.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Dexter Diggs’ house stood on an unremarkable street in the Valley a few blocks north of
Ventura Boulevard. Before going in, Horn sat in the car for a few minutes, the rain drumming on the roof of his car like Gene Krupa gone berserk. The last time he had visited here, he was married, with a wife and daughter, making good money working at a job he enjoyed. He had never been in a war, never fired a shot in anger, never seen the inside of a prison. Much had happened since then, but the little house stood just as before, half obscured by ivy and bougainvillea, like a picture postcard in the back of a forgotten drawer.

  Diggs answered his knock. “Hi, there,” he said. “Plenty wet, huh? Well, we’re going back out in it. But first, come in here with me for a minute.” He was stocky and square-featured, a little below medium height. Although close to sixty, he was tanned and strong-looking. The only detail that seemed out of place was a natty, almost delicate moustache. Over the course of a long career, Horn knew, Diggs had been an all-purpose director, as much at home doing drawing-room comedies as outdoor sagas. In his glory days, he had lived much more grandly. But those days were behind him, and he was now settled in at the B-movie factory known as Medallion Pictures.

  Diggs opened an interior door leading to the garage, stepped inside and flicked on the light. Walking around the front of his Plymouth, he stood for a moment in front of a large set of shelves that held dozens of film canisters, looking for something. Spotting the one he wanted, he lifted it off the shelf. “Open the garage door for me, will you?” he asked Horn. Moments later, they were in his car, backing out of the driveway.

  “The Bernie Romes of this world have screening rooms in their houses,” Diggs said as he steered the car down the street, wipers going furiously. “Mine’s in my garage.”

  “I know,” Horn said, remembering. “You showed me a few there. Mostly, I remember a lot of beer drinking. And Evelyn’s popcorn.”

  “I never showed you any of the old ones,” Diggs said. “When I started out, back before sound, the life expectancy for a lot of studios was a few months. Every time one of those fly-by-night companies would go belly-up, I’d try to salvage some of my work before I went out the door. When sound came in, everybody said silent film was dead, and a lot of the studios melted down their old inventory for the silver content. Meanwhile, I’d built up a pretty good collection. Be worth a little money some day.”

  “What are you going to show me?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Why not show me at home?”

  “You’ll see that too.” Although Rose’s death had darkened his demeanor, Diggs was enjoying being mysterious.

  “So where are we going?”

  “Just a few blocks. To the studio.”

  “Medallion? They won’t let me in, Dex.”

  “We’ll see.” They drove in silence for a few minutes. Then Diggs turned in at the main gate of Medallion Pictures and drove up to the guard shack. “Looks like Al’s on tonight,” he said to Horn, cranking down his window. “I thought he would be. Remember him?”

  The guard, a stocky, florid-faced man in a tight-fitting rain slicker, leaned over the car. “Evening, Mr. Diggs.”

  “Evening, Al. I’ve got a little work to do.”

  The guard looked past him to his passenger. “Hello there, John Ray,” he said hesitantly. Then, turning to the driver: “I’m sorry. He…uh, he can’t go in. You know that.”

  “We won’t be long.”

  “I can’t let him in. You know what would happen.”

  “You’re absolutely right. If you see him, you can’t let him in.” Diggs’ tone was friendly. “But if you never saw him, then you haven’t done anything wrong. Now, if I were to try to bring my friend here onto the lot, I’d probably hide him in the trunk. And if anybody asked me later on, I’d say there was no way anyone could have seen him.”

  The guard pondered this, obviously reluctant. “I don’t know.”

  Diggs had one more card to play. “Al, I hope your wife and kids had a good time on the set a few months ago. City in Danger, wasn’t it? The bank robbery scene?”

  The guard nodded. After hesitating a few more seconds, he went over and threw up the gate. “Don’t work too late,” he said.

  The lot was mostly dark, and pools of rainwater glistened on the asphalt between the structures. Diggs passed the main administration building and the commissary and guided the Plymouth between two rows of giant sound stages.

  It had been about three years since Horn had been here, but the memories went back at least a dozen. Over on the right was Sound Stage Number Three, where he had walked into his first speaking part. The movie was something called Arizona GunLaw, and it had taken them less than two weeks to shoot. Horn had only a few lines, and he still remembered them: I ain’t lookin’ for trouble, Marshal, and We’ll never catch him, boys. He’s got too much of a head start.

  Up ahead was Sound Stage Number One, where they had shot the interiors for Smoke on the Mountain, and where he had first met Rose. Number One was also where he and Mad Crow had worked together for the first time, in a movie called Vengeance Trail. Their first scene was a fight in a saloon. Over-eager, the Indian dislocated a shoulder during a fall, and Horn feared they would lose a day’s shooting. But Mad Crow wedged his forearm high up between two stair railings, put his weight on it, and popped the shoulder back in place. Then, his face impassive but shiny with sweat, he turned to Horn and said, “I love this business.” Horn knew they were going to get along.

  “Looks the same to me,” Horn said to Diggs, indicating the row of dark and bulky buildings.

  “It is, pretty much,” the director said. “At least on the surface. This place still cranks out an average of a picture a week. But not as many of those cheap westerns you and I used to make. We’re doing more crime movies now, the kind I call ‘wet streets,’ because we go for the nighttime look. Everything’s supposed to be dark and mysterious. I don’t know…. The war did something to us. It’s gotten harder to tell the good guys, John Ray. Even in the movies.”

  Diggs pulled up in front of a long one-story building. “And then there’s this television thing,” he said as he set the brake. “All they show now is junk. But it’s going to get better, and it’s not good for our business. I wonder if any of us will have jobs a year from now.”

  Horn could think of nothing to say. It was hard for him to feel any sympathy for an industry that had turned its back on him.

  Diggs unlocked a door and led Horn down a corridor past several screening rooms until they came to the last in the row. He produced another key and unlocked the door, and they went in.

  The room was medium-sized and austere, with a large screen, concrete floor, exposed pipes and ducts across the ceiling and, on a series of four elevated platforms, a few rows of bolted-together folding wooden chairs of the sort found in some classrooms.

  They shook the water off their hats and coats and laid them down. Carrying the film canister, Diggs climbed up to the tiny projection booth and busied himself inside. “This is the only old-fashioned projector I know of that’s still plugged in and running,” he said, raising his voice as he worked. “That’s why we had to come down here. This antique was used for silent films. It runs at sixteen frames per second, too slow for today’s film. If we threaded a silent onto a regular projector, it would make everybody jump around like puppets.”

  “What’s this one doing here?”

  “The old man, Mr. Rome, he keeps it for sentimental reasons. Word is, he’s still got a crush on Mary Pickford and likes to sequester himself down here every now and then with his brandy flask and run her old movies.

  “I told you I worked for half the studios in this town,” Diggs went on. “Even some of the biggies. I’d still be at MGM or Fox or one of those if I hadn’t started hitting the bottle. Only got myself to blame for that. I directed Gloria Swanson at Paramount—twice.” He stuck his head out of the booth. “You know who she is, don’t you?”

  “I know who Swanson is, Dex.”

  “Never sure about you,” Diggs said, getting back to work. “This
was before sound, when you had to do everything visually, with light and shadow and gestures and faces. Anyway, I know a few things about stars. They’re not like you and me, John Ray—”

  “You don’t think I was a movie star? I’m going to feel bad, Dex.”

  “You know what I mean. The real stars have got something extra. Maybe it gets turned on only when they step in front of a camera, but it doesn’t matter. They’ve got it. I’m going to show you somebody who’s got it.”

  Horn heard the whine of the projector. “Hit the light, will you?” Diggs asked, coming out. They took seats together as the blank leader ran through the projector, throwing a bright white square up onto the screen.

  “In the late twenties I worked for a studio named Pinnacle. The place was run badly and lasted only a few years. But while I was there, we did one called Hawk of Tramonti. This is the last reel.”

  An image sprang up on the screen. It was the great hall of a castle, with tapestried walls and towering stone columns. At the far end, a small figure stood on a balcony beyond an arched portal that framed distant, snow-streaked mountains. In the foreground, a richly robed man, back to the camera, began walking toward the balcony.

  “The duke,” Diggs said. “The actor who played him was a bit of a ham. I had to warn him about overacting all the time. But he was fun to have around. After wrapping each day, he and I hit a few bars, as I recall.”

  The small figure turned as the camera cut in to a medium shot, and Horn recognized a much younger Rose Galen.

  “She was about twenty,” Diggs said. “She plays Lucia, the duke’s daughter. This was her first big part. We weren’t sure if she was up to it, until…. Well, you’ll see. Sorry we’ve got no music, but this isn’t Grauman’s Chinese.”

  A title card flashed on the screen, and Horn began to follow the story when Diggs interrupted. “Bunch of illiterates wrote this stuff,” he said disgustedly. “I can tell it better. This is, oh, fifteenth-century Italy, if I remember. Her old man’s a tyrant, and the people hate him. She falls in love with the leader of the revolutionaries, a dashing young fellow called the Hawk, spends some time with him and his merry men in the mountains. Daddy captures her boyfriend, threatens to execute him unless she renounces both him and his cause and agrees to marry this pansy who has his own little principality next door.”