Hollywood and Levine (26 page)

She smiled an affectionate smile and took my hand.

“You're such a dumbbell.” She kissed my fingers. “Is it immature of me to talk about doing that?”

“Maturity is highly overrated,” I told her. “We didn't stay in Albuquerque because we just couldn't, that's all. We have responsibilities, debts, friends and relatives. All that crap.”

“You don't think it has anything to do with maturity?”

“No, it has to do with vanity. How is the world going to function if we step off a train in New Mexico and disappear into the hills?”

“It could function without me,” she said. “But I'm sure it couldn't without you.” Helen rubbed my cheek. “You think the New York papers are going to run the story?”

I shrugged. We had avoided the subject until now, but there was no sense ducking it any further. It had been in the room with us since the beginning, doing its nails and yawning, waiting for us to acknowledge its troubling presence.

“
PM
might run it, but nobody else. Everybody's so scared now and the only evidence I have is that memo. But that's far from conclusive; any crackpot could steal some FBI letterhead for his own purposes.”

“But it would take someone with knowledge to use the name of Clarence White,” Helen insisted.

“Very true, except for one thing: Clarence White doesn't exist anymore. The FBI denies he was ever on the payroll—never heard of the guy, the Denver police have magically produced a death certificate for C. D. White, and P. J. Davis of the House Committee has left L.A. and nobody seems to know when he'll be back. It's what they call putting the lid on.”

“What about the L.A. police?”

“They're covered. Walter killed himself, Carpenter was murdered by a robber—case as yet unsolved, and Henry Perillo and two unidentified companions perished in a boating accident. Too much fuel, someone lit a cigar.”

“But Perillo, White, whatever his real name was—he had a bullet in his throat. How can they hide that?”

“Easy.”

“And Lieutenant Wynn,” I could hear the frustration in Helen's voice, “he knows what the real facts of the case are, doesn't he?”

“Unofficially yes. Officially, he doesn't know a thing. I let him read the White memo; he turned very pale and then told me that as far as he was concerned he'd never seen it.”

“So that's it?”

“I'll keep plugging, but the climate right now …” I shook my head. “Nobody's going to believe a New York Jew detective over the FBI, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and the L.A. police.”

“But Bogart knows the whole story. He was an eyewitness.”

“Bogart is a great movie star, but that's all. Against these powerhouses … hell, they'd ruin him. I can't let that happen.” I filled my lungs with Lucky Strike. “I don't think anybody suspects how ugly this is going to get. Wynn said something.”

“What?”

“Well, he's a smart cop, really. After he'd registered no sale on the White memo, I got up to leave but he told me to sit down. Then he lowered his voice to a peep and said that things were getting completely nuts and that for every White who got found out, there were a half-dozen others who would continue operating. Within six months, he said, a lot of people were going to be ratted on.”

“What else did he say?”

“He asked me what I thought happened in the Adrian case.”

Helen's nostrils flared in anger.

“Just out of idle curiosity?” she asked.

“Something like that.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I leveled. No reason not to. I said White was the fifth column among the Hollywood Communists and his leverage at the Warners studio came from his having collared Parker when he was a Denver cop. Parker, needless to say, did not want a forgotten rape charge brought out for an airing, so when his old pal C. D. White—in his guise as Henry Perillo, boy Communist—arrived on the lot in 1943, he pulled all kinds of strings to get him into the union and into a job. After that, whenever White wanted information, Parker gave it to him—about contracts, everything. And when White began feeling his oats, and when the climate was right, he forced Parker to put the screws on lefty writers. Walter was among the first.”

“And nobody else knew about that old rape story?”

“Not that I know of.”

Helen put her feet up on the empty seat beside me. The train barreled rhythmically along the roadbed, the double diesel engines whipping us past a horizonless sweep of mesas and cactus.

“What did Wynn say to all that?” Helen asked.

“He said ‘uh-huh' a few times. Once he said ‘mmn-mmn.' But the eyes gave him away; I know that he bought it.”

“What did you tell him about Walter?”

“I admitted that I'd gone through the case believing that Walter had been murdered on the Western Street over a discovery that he had made, but that there were loose ends I couldn't tie up until the evening you suggested the possibility of an accident. That jelled it for me; it made sense of the note in Walter's pocket about checking the jailhouse. Suddenly the mystery blew clear; it was no mystery at all, just Fate, events. Walter was working late Monday night, got stuck trying to block out a scene and decided to visit the Western Street to help him visualize the thing. Left a note in case I showed up.

“He walked around the Western Street and eventually wandered into the jailhouse. There he found his buddy Henry Perillo hyphen Clarence White, flat on his back, dropping off some information into his little drawer. Walter was naturally curious and White panicked, went out of control. He cracked Walter on the head, knocked him out, then decided he might be able to get away with murder. So he carried Walter out to the gallows, which he had helped to build—I remember seeing the initials ‘H.P.' on the underside of the scaffold—and made it look like suicide. He knew very well that people would believe Walter to be capable of taking his own life.”

Helen had leaned her head back halfway through the story; she stared blankly at the baggage rack above my head. Now she folded her hands and looked toward me.

“What did Wynn say to all that?”

“Zippo. He doodled on his blotter and nodded. But he had to agree; there's simply no other explanation for Walter's death.”

“Did he believe you about Carpenter?”

“It's all circumstantial, but it fits. The problem, of course, is that it hinges on a ridiculous circumstance, which is that both Carpenter and White had carried their written remarks to Walter's funeral in identical black leather slipcases. They rode out to the cemetery in the same limo. Sig Friedland was along, too. Naturally, they left the slipcases on the seat when they went to the gravesite, but White didn't want to leave his there, not at all. Friedland told me that he had started to carry it with him when the driver said ‘Don't worry. It's safe here.' So he was stuck; he had to leave it.”

“And they switched? I can't believe it. It's a bad movie.”

“It is terribly corny, but it might have happened. Then again, it didn't have to be an accident.”

“Dale did it on purpose?”

“Maybe. He wasn't an idiot. When White made a
me-gillah
about leaving the slipcase behind, he could have gotten curious and taken a gander inside. Friedland told me he was the first back in the car.”

She smiled.

“You've been doing research.”

“I had to do something while you were drying out.”

Helen made a face.

“Meanie. So Dale looked inside the slipcase and saw the folder, correct?”

“Correct.”

“Why was White carrying it around? It seems idiotic.”

“Not only seems idiotic; it was idiotic. But he had a reason. Apparently White had taken the Parker folder-containing clippings, arrest sheets, the works—out of the jailhouse the night he killed Walter, figuring the cops might tear the place apart for one reason or another after the ‘suicide.' Cops don't need much urging to tear a place apart; it's their only exercise, aside from lifting drunks, and who would know that better than an ex-cop like White? Anyhow, he intended to return the folder after the funeral because he didn't like to keep anything like that in his house. I went through his house and I know.”

“So Dale saw the folder with the material on Parker and ran over to see him?”

“And White immediately figured out what had happened and sent his muscle over to stake out Parker's house.”

“Which is where you got beaned.”

“Which is where LeVine got beaned. The brilliant twist to remember, of course, is that by this time White had assumed command of the investigation of Walter's death and was spinning a Moscow assassination plot out of whole cloth. He had the L.A police stymied and the House Committee wallowing in every memo he wrote. It was pure genius.”

Some Indian children waved at the train. They were coaxing a mule down a cracked and dusty road, but stopped to stare at the silver blur of passenger cars. I waved back and watched their forms recede.

“But why did he want to kill me, Jack?” Helen asked. “I didn't know a thing.”

“I've been trying to get that straight in my head. There are a couple of explanations. One, he was looking for a scapegoat. He had murdered two people and was bright enough to realize that his usefulness as an undercover man was coming to an end. My guess is that after leaving that memo and killing you, he would have cleared out.”

“So he just wanted someone to blame for the killings?”

“Sure. He had to nail someone for it. On top of that, he might have suspected you had learned something from hanging around with me.”

“But then why didn't he kill you?” She smiled as soon as the words were out. “I don't mean that he
should
have, Jack.” Helen bit her lip. “It sounds awful every way I say it. You know what I mean.”

“Sure I know what you mean: why didn't he just kill me and spare you? Well if you remember from our last broadcast, boys and girls, he did try and kill me. Twice. The first time when I started walking to the jailhouse the day after Walter's death—and that was an enormous mistake on his part because I was just wandering around in a state of blissful ignorance at that point. The shots let me know that Walter had definitely been murdered and that the jailhouse had something to do with something. Then, of course, he tried to finish me off on Pacific Way, but the hired help screwed that up.”

“After which he figured you were unconquerable,” Helen said with a wry smile.

“It was the logical conclusion. Anyhow, he had incriminated me in his memo as some kind of Commie minor domo and one-man goon squad. By the time I had finished kicking and screaming and trying to prove I was just another small-time shamus, he would have disappeared.”

“If he had disappeared, you would have tracked him down, Jack. I know it.” Helen leaned forward and stroked the hairs on the back of my hand. “You would have nailed him.”

“Me and Bulldog Drummond.” I tried to imagine C. D. White succeeding in tossing this lady to the sharks. “The man was evil. Not just crazy; flat-out evil. To insinuate yourself into a group of people like that, people whose politics were just a kind of self-righteous charade, for the express purpose of ruining them….” My anger outran my eloquence. “It's fucking incredible.”

Helen got up and tumbled gently on top of me, watchful of my bum shoulder. The train crossed the Pecos River; two men on horseback stood on its banks. The West.

“It's over, Jack,” she said, burying her head in my neck. “Let's try and forget about it. I know we won't, but let's try.”

It's a long way home, past the silos and feed stores and water towers of the Midwest. A long dull way, but good for composing one's thoughts, for dulling edges that have grown too sharp. For a period of three and a half days, there is no place to go, no phone calls to make or take, no responsibility. It is a gift of time, a bonus, a ticket left unpunched.

The two of us did a lot of silent musing on that trip, watching the snowy countryside roll past, the winter light gray and unpromising. Helen would lean against my right shoulder, hooking her arm through mine, and we would stare into the monotony of Kansas and Missouri as if into a mirror. Little towns and main streets, cars lined up at crossings, school buses, appeared, disappeared, and reappeared, always the same.

In the evenings we ate leisurely meals in the dining car, the waiters graciously old-fashioned Negro men skilled at small talk and railroad stories. Patches of neon small-town night life—a movie breaking, a café—flew by. Reminders of a simple country. We ate, we watched, we listened to the conversation of other diners. Helen finally said what was on both our minds. She was drinking a whiskey sour as we rolled past some Missouri hamlet identified only by Van's Bar and Grill. It was just before dinner on Wednesday night.

“I feel as if we're holding this terrible secret,” she said, “and no one out there knows.”

“Do you think they'd care?”

She considered the question, playing with her swizzle stick.

“I don't know,” she finally said. “But it's bound to affect them.”

“I hope not,” I said. “I'd like to think it was just a peculiar set of circumstances, just Hollywood, rather than a preview of things to come. If this Red hunt really gets moving, it'll take years to run out of gas. By then there's even going to be some nervous guys in Van's Bar and Grill.”

It was snowing in Chicago when we switched to the Twentieth Century Limited late on Thursday afternoon. Snowing and cold, the damp cold that blows in off the lake and cuts through whatever you're wearing. Especially if you're wearing a raincoat with a cheap lining.

“You must be freezing,” said Helen as we dashed along the platform.

I made the sign of the cross and Helen laughed. We boarded the train minutes before it pulled out, for the last disquieting leg of our journey home.