Come Back Dead (5 page)

7

“The seven year itch,” Ella whispered. The whisper was appropriate as she was standing toe-to-toe with me, tying my tie. I'd once tied a mean bow tie all by myself, but the knack had faded when I'd married, along with several other practical talents–the ability to find the tie, for example.

“Marilyn Monroe,” I whispered back.

“I'm not referring to the movie
The Seven Year Itch
,” Ella said, not whispering now and then some. “I'm talking about the phenomenon, the tendency of an American husband's mind to wander when he reaches his seventh wedding anniversary. Our seventh is coming up.”

“I knew what you meant,” I said. “When my mind wanders, it wanders to Marilyn Monroe.”

It was bad timing on my part, as Ella had just gotten to the climactic tightening of the finished bow. She took me in half a collar size and then turned away. She was currently wearing a full-length slip cut down to the small of her back. The material glowed like old ivory in the makeup lights of her dressing table.

The slip was a little wrinkled where it fell across her hips. I smoothed it for her and quoted Dick Powell: “I only have eyes for you.”

“I'm not afraid your eyes are wandering,” Ella said. “I'm worried about a vacant look they've had lately. I'm wondering where you are these days.”

It was the second time I'd heard that complaint since I'd returned from scenic Alora. I had decided that it was too late in the day to be strong-arming John Piers Whitehead or anyone else. So I'd driven home to Doyle Heights to wash the valley dust off my car in the driveway shaded by Vilma Banky's hydrangeas. My five-year-old son and three-year-old daughter had helped me, but they hadn't cost me more than an extra thirty minutes.

I'd had plenty of time afterward to mix myself a drink before placing my call to Paddy. Between sips of gin and vermouth, I'd told him what I'd learned from Shepard and found in Alora.

“It would be interesting to know who really owns the land conservancy,” I'd said as I'd wrapped things up. “Are you still in solid with that government clerk in Sacramento?”

“Detectives in the movies do that kind of spadework themselves,” Paddy had replied.

“They don't have my active social life.”

“Or your modest attention span. I swear, Scotty, I don't know what's gotten into you lately. You haven't been this moony since the war.”

I had no way of knowing that Ella would shortly take up the same theme in a different key, or I would have been even more surprised by Paddy's rebuke. As it was, I'd been spurred to stick my neck out a little.

“See if your contact at the statehouse can come up with a connection to Ralph Lockard. He's the developer I told you about.”

“The one who wants to carve up Drury's estate?”

“I guess it is a long shot. Drury would have to be an idiot to borrow money from the front men of the guy who's after his land.”

“I'm liking this angle more and more,” Paddy had said. “Don't wear out my girlfriend dancing.”

Paddy's girlfriend was applying her eye shadow, so I wandered out to the hi-fi, which happened to be next to the built-in cabinets that served as our bar. It was a Spanish bar, the cabinets' dark wood deeply carved, reflecting the style of the house: 1920s hacienda. Ella did a little more redecorating every time she sold a script, but the house would never be the kind of low-maintenance, low-character box the Lockard Development Corporation was stamping out in the valley.

That didn't bother me. I mixed a pair of Gibsons and started a record playing, “Everything but You.” I made the selection randomly, but it had resonance for Ella.

She sipped the drink I handed her and said, “There was music recorded after 1949, wasn't there?”

There was, even new music by Duke Ellington, the composer of the song that was currently playing, but the new stuff wasn't the same. Ellington had fallen into a malaise since the new decade had started, dropping old side men, changing record labels, maybe–I was secretly afraid–losing his way. The phenomenon wasn't one I liked to think about.

“I may have a copy of ‘Doggie in the Window' around here someplace,” I said.

“Good-bye seventh anniversary,” Ella replied.

Ella–dressed in a deep coral gown–and I arrived at the Club Satyr a little late. That is, we were only a little late as far as Drury's party was concerned. We were a decade late for the Satyr. Back in the early forties, it had been one of the town's hottest night spots. After the war it had struggled on as a place where you could always get a table when the other clubs were full. Now you could rent the whole building on short notice for ready money.

The building in question was a long, low one set into the side of a wooded hill. The entryway was a little tunnel with an arched roof and blank walls broken only by a hatcheck window. The girl who smiled out at us from the window had been in grade school when they'd laid the hallway's carpet. I caught my toe on a half-parted seam of the stuff and swore softly.

For some reason the old club was hitting me square in the mood that Ella and Paddy had both noted, which I'd dubbed “Mood Indigo” as a nod to Ellington. Being the strong, silent type, I'd thought the mood was my little secret, and it bothered me that everyone but the kid who mowed our lawn had spotted it.

Ella, who'd brightened considerably at the sight of the old nightclub, had a secret of her own. She said something I couldn't hear above the growing jumble of voices and music. She tried again as we arrived at the threshold of the main room: “We've been here before.”

“Probably a dozen times,” I shouted back.

“No. I mean, we've been through this night before. Think about it and get back to me later.”

Just finding her later was going to be a challenge. The old nightclub was jammed with people, some in the black tie and evening gowns Drury had specified, others in more casual, colorful attire. Their host didn't seem the least bit put out by the variety. He'd followed his own instructions and worn a black tie, but it was big and limp and made him look like a prosperous poet. He was towering over the crowd near the center of the room, his leonine head just brushing the bank of cigarette smoke trapped by the textured plaster of the ceiling.

“They still turn out for Carson Drury,” Ella said.

And free liquor, I thought, but it wasn't worth shouting. I was scanning the room for the quietest corner when Drury caught my eye and signaled me to fight my way through to him. I waded into the crowd, Ella following close behind me with one hand on my collar, steering me gently. I didn't mind the backseat driving because my concentration was lagging a little. Ella's thumb was playing with the hair on my neck, and her body pressed gently against my back every time I paused to avoid a full glass or a lit cigarette.

Beyond Drury was a little stage whose proscenium arch was a miniature imitation of the acoustical shell of the Hollywood Bowl. I'd noted on an earlier visit to the club that the arch was a phony, a skillful painting done on the flat back wall by some set designer who dabbled in trompe l'oeil. In front of this special effect, a little combo was doing its best to sound like an orchestra. As we struggled forward, they struck up the theme from an old Cary Grant movie,
Mr. Lucky
. The song was called “Something to Remember You By,” and it gave me the answer to Ella's riddle about having lived this night before.

I couldn't turn to face her in the press of people, so I twisted my head around and said, “You're thinking of the evening we met.”

Ella rewarded me with a pat on the head, while I thought back to that first meeting. It had taken place at a party promoting a movie in progress, but that's where the similarity to the current evening ended. I remembered a bigger band and a smaller crowd and a hotel ballroom the size of a polo field. But I knew there had to be some common ground. Now that Ella had prodded my memory, I was feeling the déjà vu in spades.

I turned my head again and shouted, “What's the connection?”

Ella pressed hard against me this time so she could speak the answer in my ear: “You're the connection, Scotty. I haven't seen you so lost since that first night.”

8

Drury was in the middle of another story, his meal ticket voice easily reducing the hundred or so other speakers in the old nightclub to the category of background noise. He was reminiscing about the night he'd offered to fight Errol Flynn outside the Satyr, back during the club's heyday and his own. Drury had reached the story's payoff–Flynn marching out the front door, rolling up his sleeves, while Drury ran out the back–when Ella and I arrived in his presence. The little combo on the bandstand wrapped up their tribute to Cary Grant at that same moment, allowing Drury to greet us at his normal but still generous volume.

“You're hiding something from me, Scotty,” he said, speaking so seriously that I almost looked down at my empty hands. “Out with it.”

Before I could start searching my pockets, Drury took Ella's hand from my shoulder and guided her around in front of me. “I've been hoping to meet you, Mrs. Elliott. Or do you prefer Miss Englehart?”

“Call me Ella,” she said, leaving Drury's question hanging in the smoky air.

“I admired your screenplay for
Private Hopes
,” he said. “In the hands of a gifted director, it would have won you the Academy Award.”

Drury's gifted hands were still holding Ella's. He backed up his compliment with enough detail to convince me that he'd actually seen Ella's movie, and I wondered if she was the reason Drury had asked for me when he'd called Hollywood Security. While I considered the pros and cons of feeling jealous, Drury's previous audience–an actress who specialized in low-budget swashbucklers, her current husband, and a singing cowboy who now owned a string of hamburger stands–drifted away.

One faithful listener hung on, a moustached guy with a serious tan whose glass was half-empty and whose bleary blue eyes were half-full. His handshake was firm enough, though, and his diction exact if a touch provincial.

“Gilbert Traynor,” he said when I'd introduced myself. I recognized the name from my talk with Hank Shepard. Traynor was Drury's latest gull, the guy who was paying for the room and the band and the drink I'd yet to find. I thought about asking him whether he'd met Jane Russell yet, but kidding a drunk wasn't my idea of a fun evening. Instead, I asked after his connection to Drury, McNally the rubber company heir.

Traynor's sleek head did a cross between a shake and a bob. “Not here tonight. Wish he were. Ty and I were fraternity brothers at Purdue.”

The name of the Indiana school and the familiar, hard-edged quality of Traynor's speech allowed me to place him geographically. Tyrone McNally and his tire company were from Ohio, which is where I'd mentally slotted Traynor during my talk with Shepard. But the publicist had said only that Traynor was from the Midwest. Now I belatedly made the connection to the Traynor Automobile Company of Traynorville, Indiana, a little, one-industry town an hour north of Indianapolis.

“Your family built the Traynor Phaeton Six,” I said. “It was a beauty.”

Traynor's eyes became a little less glassy. “Yes, it was. All we make nowadays are parts for other people's cars. More money in that and less risk. Not the same as having your name across the front of a finished car, though.”

Hank Shepard shouldered his way through the Carson Drury fan club members to my left. He took Traynor's half-empty glass and handed him a full one. “There you go,” he said. He banged me on the shoulder. “What do you think? Is this great or is this great? What can I get for you?”

I looked around for Ella, but she and Drury had been squeezed out of earshot. “I'll take a Gibson,” I said.

“A Gibson,” Shepard repeated, his pug nose lifted high for effect. “And you're the guy who tried to tell me he'd never heard of Wordsworth. Be right back.”

Traynor was looking down at the drink in his hand with a slightly puzzled expression, as though the glass had refilled itself.

“Can I get rid of that for you?” I asked.

“No. It's all right. I'll nurse it. How do you happen to remember the Phaeton Six?”

I told him I'd grown up in Indiana, where I'd often heard Traynor mentioned in the same breath with Cord and Duesenberg. He shook my hand all over again.

“It's great to meet another Hoosier out here. Just between you and me, I've been feeling a little like a bumpkin tonight. I'm almost anxious to get back to Traynorville where I can actually snub people.”

I smiled at his joke, but it was easy enough to picture Traynor playing lord of the manor at some Traynorville barbershop or the local equivalent of the Club Satyr. He was handsome by small-town America standards, at least in profile. Full on, his head looked a trifle narrow, and his regular, delicate features seemed pinched together. It wasn't a major defect, but it meant that, by Hollywood standards, he was the next nearest thing to invisible.

My highly visible wife squeezed in beside me, and I did the introductions. Traynor waited politely until she had extended her hand, then he pumped it so hard that Ella had to adjust the straps of her gown when he'd finished.

“I was just telling your husband that I've spent my life dreaming of escaping from Traynorville, Indiana, and tonight I'm missing the place. Doesn't say too much for the depth of my soul, does it?”

That sounded like Ella's department, so I let her field the question while I looked over the crowd for firebugs. Most of the people I recognized were inhabitants of the permanent understory of the Hollywood forest, the writer-agent-designer-size plants that got along so well in the shade of the big trees. The trees themselves were noticeably absent. Aside from Joseph Coffin, there were only one or two genuine stars, and those were older, slightly out-of-date ones. In fact, the age of the crowd in general made the gathering feel more like a reunion than a coming-out party.

The auld lang syne flavor was reinforced by the photographs that decorated the walls of the club, blowups of publicity stills from the original filming of
The Imperial Albertsons
in 1942. The costumes that the actors wore in the photos were all turn-of-the-century, but they weren't what made the pictures seem like period pieces. It was the photography itself, the otherworldly clarity of it, a style that had been losing ground to grainy realism since the fifties came in. The subjects of the photos were also out of step with the new reality. They weren't real human beings or even meant to pass for real human beings. They were Hollywood stars from the age when the title had really meant something.

I was reminiscing so hard that I didn't notice Hank Shepard return until he handed me a Gibson that filled a highball glass.

“The large economy size,” he said. “It'll save me a trip or two to the bar. Suddenly, I'd rather be dancing–if you and Pidgin don't mind, that is.”

“Ella,” I said, but the combo had come back to life, and Shepard didn't hear me. I watched him pantomime his invitation to Ella. She seemed to remember him, but none too fondly, which pleased me. Still, she acquiesced. They headed for the dance floor together, Ella leading the way.

I looked around for Drury, thinking that I might pass the time by quizzing him on Eden and the gamble he'd taken with it. Before I could find the director, Gilbert Traynor and his bottomless glass found me. He took me by the arm and led me away from the packed center of the room, to a corner near the unused end of the bandstand. The peewee orchestra was directing its efforts toward the crowd we'd left behind, so here, on the group's flank, it was almost peaceful.

Traynor was feeling as nostalgic as I was, but over a different lost time. “Funny you should mention the Phaeton Six tonight,” he said, his hand on my shoulder. “I'd just been thinking about the old days when the family built automobiles instead of rearview mirrors. Carson got me thinking back. He told me about this movie of his over lunch.” He gestured toward the photos on the wall behind me. “
The Imperial
something.”

“
Albertsons
,” I said.

“Thanks,” Traynor said. “Carson had no idea–couldn't have had any idea–what that story meant to me. It was my family's story. The Traynors could have been the heroes of his movie, the inventors who changed the world with their automobile and put the goddamn Albertsons in their place.”

I'd gotten to know Drury too well over the course of the day to believe that he was unaware of the parallels between his movie and the sentimental Traynor's family history. I should have warned the sap–one Hoosier to another–to keep his checkbook buttoned up, but that would have been taking bread out of Paddy's mouth as well as Drury's.

“What do you do for the company?” I asked.

“I'm the president, which is another way of saying I don't do much. That's the real problem with the Traynor family. The pioneers and the inventors are dead. The only ones left are the figureheads. The hood ornaments, I should say.”

Traynor kept talking, but I stopped listening. Over his shoulder I could see the dance floor and on it Ella and Shepard. Ella had just moved the publicist's right hand upward from the small of her back where it had strayed. The big hand strayed even farther down when she released it. Ella was trying to push herself clear of Shepard as I handed my drink to Traynor. I reached them just as the grinning Shepard blocked Ella's openhanded left cross by grabbing her wrist. I grabbed his in turn and squeezed it until he let Ella go.

“Excuse us,” I said to her as I twisted Shepard's arm around behind his back. All I heard of her reply was my name.

Shepard was facing the double doors of the kitchen, conveniently enough. I shoved him forward, and we passed harmlessly through the intervening dancers as though Hermes Pan himself had choreographed our exit. Shepard stretched out his free arm to push open the swinging doors, almost decking a Chinese waiter with a tray of little sandwiches. The waiter smiled broadly as we passed him.

When the doors swung shut, I could hear Shepard addressing me. “Will you listen to me, Elliott? Let go of my goddamn arm and listen to me.”

I looked around for the exit that Drury had used on the night he'd snookered Errol Flynn, but I couldn't find it. Meanwhile, the kitchen staff–more Chinese–were taking a lively interest in us. I spotted another swinging door and pushed Shepard through it. We ended up in a walk-in pantry lined with shelves of cans and boxes. It was only five feet wide and ten feet deep, but that was big enough for my purposes.

I gave Shepard a shove toward the far end of the closet and released his arm. He twisted around to face me, still talking a blue streak.

“Get out of my way, Elliott. I'm warning you. You lay another hand on me, and you'll hear some things you'd rather not know.”

“Like what, for example?”

Shepard looked smug and said nothing.

“Things about my wife?”

The smug look became a sneer.

“Like she slept with a few soldiers she felt sorry for during the war?” I asked. “Like she fell to pieces inside when her brother was killed in France? That she was so deadened by it that after the war she'd wander home with any man who came along, even a heel like you?”

Shepard had paled steadily as I'd squandered his bargaining chips. I stepped forward, nice guy that I was, to catch him if he fainted. He took advantage of my good nature and threw a right, telegraphing his plan with a nervous glance at my idle left hand. With that kind of notice, I could have blocked the punch in my sleep. Awake I did even better, hitting Shepard square on the chin and driving him into the loaded shelves behind him.

In a movie the shelves would have collapsed, showering the publicist's blond head with noisy odds and ends and maybe even a bag of flour as a topper. I had to make do with Shepard collapsing in his own little heap, the collar of his tuxedo jacket up around his droopy ears.

Ella was waiting for me outside the kitchen doors. She didn't look the least bit concerned for my safety, I was flattered to see. No one else took any notice of my return or Shepard's absence. Certainly the musicians didn't. They were laying into “Stardust” like they held the copyright.

“Let's dance,” I said.

“I promised the next one to your friend from Indiana,” Ella said. “But now that he's seen the way you cut in, he'll probably give up his turn.”

“That'll save you from hearing about Traynorville,” I said, taking her in my arms.

“Hearing more about Traynorville, you mean,” Ella said.

We began to move to the music, but not in our old, easy way.

“I can handle guys like Hank Shepard,” Ella said. She'd meant her delivery to be matter-of-fact, I thought, but it came out sounding tired.

“Just like I can tie a bow tie,” I said. “Only being an old married guy, I don't have to.”

We struggled on, trying to find the walnut shell under which the band had hidden the beat. When Ella spoke again, she returned to the subject of Traynorville.

“Quaint little custom you Hoosiers have, naming towns after yourselves. So nice for the post office. There's an Elliottville, I presume. Or is it Elliott Town?”

“Elliottopolis,” I said. “We had to change it, though. Pronouncing it gave people the hiccups.”

“Seeing it in print would cure them,” Ella said. Then she put her head on my shoulder.