The Devil May Dance

by Tapper, Jake

  “I don’t think the Founders were condoning statutory rape,” she said.

  “Those girls are old enough to know what they’re doing,” Wolff said.

  “And yet young enough to be blackmailed over.”

  Wolff sighed. “Your husband is a congressman. I’m amazed you’re this naive,” he said. “Leverage is the key to any negotiation, whether it’s a three-picture deal or tax breaks. Everyone is always pursuing leverage.”

  “So that’s why you stuffed Lola’s corpse in our car—leverage. To get us out of town.”

  “I didn’t stuff anyone anywhere,” he said.

  “My mistake.” Margaret smiled. “But that’s why you had it done, right? I mean, it’s pretty brilliant. Appeared to be a Mob hit, and we’re out here looking into Sinatra and the Mob…”

  “Thanks, I thought it was pretty inspired myself,” he said.

  “You’re remarkably smart for a former actor,” Margaret said.

  He laughed. “You interviewing me? You doing a feature for the Times?”

  “Sort of,” Margaret said. “You know how Charlie and I were working on The Manchurian Candidate?”

  “Yeah, whatever, sure.”

  “You know John Frankenheimer, the director, and Joe Edmondson, his soundman?”

  “I know John,” Wolff said. “I don’t much focus on the best boys and key grips.”

  “John and Edmondson have been trying to figure out a way to mike a scene from a distance. Keep the booms out of the shots. Wireless-microphone technology. Heard about it?”

  She watched Wolff’s face. His expression at first was confused; why was she talking about this? Then it clicked. A fire ignited in his eyes.

  “No,” he snarled.

  With her free hand, Margaret reached into her décolletage. “Edmondson’s been with us the whole time, listening on this microphone,” Margaret said as she struggled to retrieve the device from underneath her dress. “He’s been in a van outside the auditorium, recording this all.”

  “You fucking bitch,” he said.

  Margaret screamed, “Charlie Marder!” as loud as she could as Wolff grabbed her by the throat.

  Down the stairwell and outside the exit door she saw the commotion as cops were shoved aside and paparazzi approached, waving cameras. Charlie barreled through the rapidly forming crowd. Wolff sensed the congressman rushing up the stairs and turned in time to see Charlie ram him against the wall. The studio executive, stocky and strong, was temporarily winded. But he quickly shook it off and tackled Charlie, and together they plummeted down the stairs.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Santa Monica, California

  April 1962

  Charlie hit Wolff’s sturdy mass so hard that he knocked the wind out of himself. For a few seconds he couldn’t breathe and was worried a rib might have punctured his lung.

  Wolff had no such problem. He sat up on the congressman’s torso and began punching him in the face—once, twice. At first, Charlie wasn’t able to respond, and then only defensively, holding up his arms to block the pummeling. The stab wounds from last night didn’t make things any easier. Charlie could discern some sort of activity up the stairs but he wasn’t sure what it was. All he could focus on were the blows of the big man who was sitting on his chest, making it difficult to breathe.

  Margaret had fled, fueled by pure adrenaline, desperate to find help. Onstage a moment earlier, Shirley Jones had opened the envelope containing the name of the Best Supporting Actor.

  “The winner is George Chakiris from West Side Story,” Jones said as the orchestra began playing “Maria.”

  “I don’t think I’ll talk too much,” Chakiris said onstage. “I just want to say thank you very, very much.”

  The orchestra played “Maria” again, and Chakiris walked backstage, toward Margaret. He was grinning from ear to ear as two women holding clipboards greeted him in the wings. They steered him toward the door, where Margaret approached him and held out her hands for the gold statuette. He automatically handed it to her, presuming she was with the Academy.

  Margaret turned and ran back down the stairs, raised the Oscar high, and brought it down on Les Wolff’s head.

  She heard a crack.

  The studio executive fell forward, unconscious.

  Margaret wondered what had cracked. She examined the statue—there was a red smear on the edge of the base, which she wiped off with her thumb. Otherwise it looked fine.

  Charlie pushed Wolff off him.

  Margaret turned around to see George Chakiris and two women holding clipboards, all three with their mouths open.

  “Here,” Margaret said, handing the trophy back to a stunned Chakiris. “These things are heavier than they look!”

  Within minutes the Santa Monica Police had cordoned off the stairwell. A perimeter had also been established backstage, police tape demarcating the area where Fontaine had landed. The police seemed focused on keeping everything as discreet as possible. They ensured that when Manny Fontaine and Les Wolff were carried out on stretchers, they went through a back door to ambulances parked in a restricted area.

  While Charlie’s wounds were tended by a medic, Margaret guided a detective to the van where Joe Edmondson, Frankenheimer’s sound mixer, had set up shop and recorded her conversations with Fontaine and Wolff. Soon after, Charlie and Margaret found themselves seated in the back of a parked police cruiser.

  Night had fallen on Los Angeles. From the back seat, Charlie tried to look in the rearview mirror, but there wasn’t enough light for him to see. With her hands on his cheeks, Margaret turned his face toward hers.

  “Nothing permanent,” she said.

  “I think he bruised my rib.” He patted his side. “If I hadn’t fallen down those stairs, I could’ve knocked him out.”

  Margaret smiled. “I’m sure you would’ve, sweetie.”

  They turned toward a tap on Margaret’s window: Detective Meehan. She tried to roll it down but realized there was no way to do so. Likewise, the door wouldn’t open from the inside.

  Meehan smiled and opened the door. “One of the officers will be here in a minute to drive you back to the hotel, and we can talk there,” he said. “Too many ears around here.” He handed Margaret a plastic baggie of ice. “Give this to Charlie,” he said. He tried to shut the door but Margaret stopped him.

  “My friend was kidnapped!” she exclaimed. “Her name is Sheryl Ann Gold. You should see if she’s at Wolff’s house.”

  “Or Fontaine’s,” Charlie added.

  Margaret gave Meehan a description of her friend and her home address. Meehan nodded, tapped the roof of the squad car twice, and gently shoved the door closed as he turned to leave them. But Margaret subtly stopped the door before the latch locked them in. She turned to Charlie.

  “They’re not going to lift a finger to find Sheryl Ann,” she said.

  Charlie looked out into the parking lot, which was buzzing with patrolmen, ambulances, and squad cars.

  They calmly walked out of the restricted area and, ditching their car, took a back alley to the Georgian Hotel, which was about a ten-minute walk from the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Isaiah Street was waiting for them in his suite; he put his finger to his lips when he opened the door and whispered to them that Violet was asleep in the bedroom. Her mom—Margaret’s sister—would be there to take her home the next day.

  All three of them went out to the balcony, where chairs and cigarettes awaited and Charlie and Margaret could catch Street up on every last detail of the night. They had to try to figure out where Sheryl Ann was being kept and how to save her. By the time they were done, the dawn light was beginning to illuminate the scenic vista before them.

  Street opened his notebook. “I have addresses for both Wolff and Fontaine,” he said. “But…” He paused.

  “What?” Margaret asked.

  “Well, frankly, neither man is dumb enough to stash a kidnapping victim at his house,” said Street.

  “So w
here would she be?” Charlie asked.

  “Where are those documents?” Street asked. “Still in your purse?”

  “Those were taken from me,” Margaret said.

  “But I have copies,” Charlie said.

  Chapter Thirty

  Los Angeles, California

  April 1962

  Locals had feared that the shallow canyon known as Chavez Ravine would be choked with traffic for the first game at the brand-new eighteen-million-dollar Dodger Stadium, but the congestion never materialized. In fact, there were roughly thirty-five hundred unfilled seats for the Dodgers’ face-off against the Cincinnati Reds.

  Joey Tarantula cared not a lick about baseball—he was a boxing fan—but he was on hand with his camera to capture any celebrities in attendance. Henry Fonda, Milton Berle, and John Wayne had all been shuttled in right before the opening pitch at one p.m., and Mickey Rooney jumped up and down in the stands, providing Tarantula and the other shutterbugs with goofy photos.

  It was a fancy park, the first one in the U.S. in decades to be constructed with private funds. There were rumors of New York strip steak and lobster thermidor in the Stadium Club, though Tarantula wasn’t allowed access to it. But that was okay. The press box on the fifth floor had cigarette girls, not machines, and he was fine with the options of spaghetti or lamb in the press dining room. In fact, he’d had both.

  At the top of the seventh inning, the score tied at 2 to 2, Wally Post of the Reds smashed a homer into the parking lot past center field. The enthusiasm in the stadium evaporated—“You can give them a nice park but that don’t mean they still ain’t bums,” one scribe said to another—and Tarantula excused himself. Enough. Everything here was wholesome. In other words, nothing here to sell papers.

  He hauled himself out to the parking lot and wedged his frame behind the wheel of his ten-year-old Hudson Hornet. The sight of some Mexican-American vendors selling bootleg Dodgers pennants reminded him that the city of Los Angeles had land-grabbed Chavez Ravine from the laborers and their families who lived here, the city’s claims of eminent domain giving way to lying and bullying. Now, that had been a scandal.

  The public didn’t care; the victims were Mexican-Americans, and Angelenos wanted a new stadium for their new team. The snobs at the Los Angeles Times looked down on the likes of Tarantula, he thought, not only because of his appearance and coarse manner but also—perhaps primarily—because he worked for a scandal sheet. And yet, where were these would-be Jacob Riises when it came to the men, women, and children ousted from Chavez Ravine? All of the major newspapers had stood behind the Dodger Stadium project, Tarantula recalled with disgust. They fancied themselves speakers of truth to power but they quickly turned on the last holdouts, Manuel and Abrana Arechiga and their daughter Aurora, diligently regurgitating untrue claims pushed by the developers that the Arechigas actually owned many properties throughout the Los Angeles area.

  It was all a lie, Tarantula thought as he merged onto the Santa Monica Freeway. A complete hit job. The Arechigas didn’t own those other houses; their relatives did. But falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, as Jonathan Swift once said. A quote Tarantula knew well because those swift falsehoods were his bread and butter. But in this case, the folks who considered themselves true newspapermen, who sneered and grimaced at Tarantula when their paths crossed at events like this, were the ones who’d led the charge, smearing the poor Arechigas on behalf of the richest Angelenos, afflicting the afflicted, comforting the comfortable. Tarantula was so worked up over the memory, he didn’t notice the car that had been tailing him from the moment he left the parking lot.

  Other than his bosses, no one knew where Tarantula lived. Hollywood Nightlife was owned by USA Media Inc., a subsidiary of Information Technologies Ltd., which itself was owned by a larger conglomerate. Tarantula’s abode had been purchased by a shell corporation owned by that bigger entity, incorporated in the Caribbean and run by Rosselli. Paychecks were sent to his work address.

  The residents of his apartment complex, built in the 1950s, had no idea who he was. This thought comforted Tarantula every time he parked outside 301 Ocean Avenue, nondescript middle-class housing. The four dozen or so other tenants enjoyed their views of the Pacific Ocean and kept to themselves. An expectation of minding one’s own business came with the territory; at least half the tenants were women who earned their livings on their backs, almost always with a studio-boss sugar daddy paying the rent, though sometimes they had to be more entrepreneurial.

  As he walked up the stairs to his apartment, Tarantula felt like someone was watching him. He looked behind him, then resumed his climb to the third floor, breaking a sweat as he always did, beginning to gasp for air. He knew that his disgusting appearance was an asset to his desire for anonymity. Folks didn’t want to know more about him and made every effort to forget his existence.

  He opened the triple locks of the steel-reinforced door and stepped in. The television could be heard from the study. It sounded like religious programming. That was too bad; he should have done his guest the courtesy of at least putting the game on, even if the Reds were up. He peered into the study, made sure that his houseguest was still there, then waddled into the kitchen and grabbed a beer, an ice-cold Olympia, out of the fridge. After making two punctures in the top with a can opener, he plopped himself down on his armchair, took a sip, and nodded off.

  Hours later, Tarantula awoke to the sounds of a bang and heavy glass cracking.

  The window in his living room, with its panoramic view of the Pacific faintly lit by streetlamps three floors down, revealed no evidence of disturbance. He heard the smashing sound again; it was coming from the study.

  He ran in. Sheryl Ann Gold was sitting where he had left her hours before, her hands and feet tied tightly to a chair, a dishrag gagging her. Her eyes were wide open, but she looked confused. That flustered him, since he had assumed she’d been up to something. But she hadn’t moved, so there was no apparent way she could have caused the sound that—

  Crack!

  Tarantula turned to the window overlooking the alley and saw cracks in the glass spreading like a spiderweb. He dropped to the ground. Was someone firing a gun? Throwing rocks? He looked back at Sheryl Ann, who was shaking her head at him: No, no, no.

  She had been well behaved since the creeps from the church had brought her over. Once Tarantula had told his contact at the church that he thought Charlotte Goode was up to something, it had all happened so fast. After strangling Goode, they watched the house and saw Margaret and Sheryl Ann come and go from her basement apartment and then followed them to the Hollywood sign. And luckily, ever since Sheryl Ann had been taken, she had kept quiet. Didn’t act up when allowed to go to the bathroom or eat. He’d told her all she had to do was sit quiet and she’d be released as soon as Charlie and his wife gave back the docu—

  Crack!

  This time he saw what it was: an enormous black bird flying into the large bay window. It wasn’t like when dumb sparrows mistake a clean window for the sky and accidentally kamikaze into it; no, this seemed predatory, intentional. Tarantula scurried over to the huge safe where the tabloid stored the most salacious, exquisitely damaging photographs and receipts, the evidence that kept Hollywood, Manhattan, DC, and Chicago cooperative. Material far worse than what was in the files at work. He had a gun in the safe too, and he began spinning the combination lock: three times to the right to 35, twice to the—

  The window shattered as the black bird burst through, sending shards of glass throughout the room.

  Sheryl Ann looked away, but pieces of glass hit her arms and face, leaving behind a confetti of small cuts.

  Tarantula managed to open the safe. He reached for the gun but failed to grab it before the raven flew at him. He fell on his back and tried to fend it off, and suddenly there was another raven, and another, and another. Sheryl Ann watched, dumbfounded, as a conspiracy of ravens—two dozen or so—dived at Tarantula’s face and body, pecking
viciously. They left Sheryl Ann alone. Tarantula let out a high-pitched shriek as he tried to bat the birds away. It was such an insane spectacle, Sheryl Ann barely noticed when Isaiah Street appeared outside the window as if by magic, standing on a ledge, clearing the remaining glass away with a handkerchief, then stepping through the frame.

  Street looked at Sheryl Ann, then at Tarantula wriggling on the ground as the ravens continued their attack, then back at Sheryl Ann. He held up one finger—One second—then ran into the living room. She could hear him opening the front door and others entering the apartment. Her heart pounded. She had no idea how many days she’d been here.

  “Sheryl Ann!” yelled Margaret, running to her from the living room. She took the gag out of her friend’s mouth. Sheryl Ann tried to speak but her throat was dry.

  “Oh, thank God,” Sheryl Ann finally said.

  A high-pitched whistle emanated from the living room and the ravens began backing off Tarantula’s bloodied face and body. They flew obediently into the other room, where Symone LeGrue stood holding deer jerky in one hand, a large cage in the other.

  “Good job, Archie,” Charlie said to the first bird, which had assumed its rightful place on LeGrue’s shoulder. Charlie proceeded into the study, where Street was using a knife on the ropes constraining Sheryl Ann, whom Margaret was consoling.

  Charlie looked down at Tarantula’s face, which had been pecked to shreds. His bulbous throat was a mess of deep red hash. He was gurgling. Minutes left, max.

  Charlie noticed the open safe. He turned to Margaret and Street.

  “Why don’t you make sure everyone gets home safely,” Charlie said. “I’m going to have a look around.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Los Angeles, California

  April 1962