I savored a massive hamburger slathered in avocado and mayonnaise; the bun crisp and chewy; and fried potatoes cut so slender I thought them wood shavings, with a trace of sea salt, perhaps; and a dish of peach ice cream, speckled with huge chunks of red-gold fruit the color of a good sunset. Good food at last, I told Mercy. “In California most food, I’ve found, is filtered through sunshine and dabbled with greasepaint.”
Mercy laughed. “Edna, you have to come to my home for a home-cooked meal.”
“Well, this is a good start.” I bit into the hamburger.
“So,” Mercy began, “let’s talk about Carisa.”
Suddenly, I blanched. I’d just been thinking how restful I felt, tucked into the booth, when the image of Jimmy and his mountainous rage flooded me. “Oh, Mercy,” I cried out.
“What?” Alarmed.
“I just had a horrible thought. You don’t think Jimmy would go there
now
—to Carisa’s. He’s in such a foul mood. You don’t think…”
Mercy covered her mouth for a second, looked scared.
“We’re going there.” I stood up.
“It’s a dreadful neighborhood,” Mercy said, hesitating. “Skid Row. And it’s late.”
“It’s barely,” I glanced at my wristwatch, “eight o’clock. Civilized people are just sitting down to dinner.”
***
But Carisa’s neighborhood silenced me—blocks of sad, dilapidated buildings, seedy, ill kept. I’d glimpsed New York’s Bowery over the years, shook my head over the vacant-eyed winos bundled in mission-house overcoats. But this Skid Row was numbing, block after block of what looked like sagging flophouses, shanty hotels, pawnshops with weathered signs. As Mercy’s car cruised into the area, I observed panhandlers, hookers, lost souls leaning against walls, or hunched over. “It’s really called Skid Row, this area,” Mercy told me. “Or the Nickel, because much of it centers on Fifth Street. Los Angelinos avoid the area—notorious for crime, drugs. Look.” She pointed to a man staggering off a sidewalk. “It’s like a big stereotype,” she said. “A Warner backlot for a James Cagney movie. Angels with dirty faces.”
I frowned. “A stereotype is sometimes nothing more than the redundancy of truth.” Mercy looked at me. Third Street. Fourth Street. Street after street, fading daylight, shadows settling in.
Flickering neon sign on a corner bar: H RRYs, the A missing. That alarmed me. A cardboard sidewalk shelter, a man’s feet visible. Eight-thirty at night, the streets eerily still, souls shuffling along, trancelike; yet the night seemed noisy, violent. The echoey tintinnabulation of jukebox music from deep inside a tavern. Then, as we idled at a light, snatches of a fierce husband-wife spat filtered through thin walls. The sobbing of a child—or maybe it was an alley cat in heat, hidden behind a shabby fence. The clamoring of a distant late-night freight train; a truck bumping over a broken street, headed to the warehouse district. Mercy parked her car in front of a three-story building, and we sat there. An old man staggered by, bumped into her fender, and I started. Not the brightest of ideas, this.
Gathering my voice, “You’ve been here before, right?”
“In daylight,” Mercy said, faltering. “High noon.”
“It must look better then.”
“Well, it looked safer, shops open, traffic, you know, cops.”
“This is what Tansi warned me about?”
Mercy frowned. “Tansi wasn’t built for this patch of God’s earth.”
“And we are?”
I surveyed the adjacent buildings. A pawnshop with oversized signs: CALL ME LARRY! RADIOS & TOOLS HIGH PRICES PAID! BUY & SELL. PH. MI 2021. A storefront window cluttered with motley goods. LUCKY BOY HAMBURGERS. RUTH’S GRILL COCKTAILS.
“Well, what should we do?” Mercy asked.
I caught my breath. “Which apartment?”
Mercy pointed up. “In front. The second floor. The one with the lights on. She’s home.”
“How do we know she’s alone?”
“God, I never thought about that. I just hope Jimmy’s not there.” Mercy looked at me. “You want to leave?”
I shook my head, resolute. “I’m never coming back to this neighborhood after tonight.”
Mercy smiled. “It’s not, I suppose, dangerous. It’s just…poor.”
“Not much consolation, I fear. And we’re really not dressed for this.” We looked at our fancy dresses, the jewelry. “We look all wrong.”
“Maybe they’ll think we’re working girls.”
“We are working girls.” I grinned. “I look like an aged madam out on the town.” A pause. “Let’s go.”
“You want to stay in the car?”
“No, I wouldn’t miss this conversation. Carisa Krausse has loomed a little too large in my imagination these past couple days. I need to place a face to—to the madness.”
The building was quiet. On the first floor, a radio blared from a back apartment. A Spanish station, a soap opera perhaps, with slammed doors and breaking glass. Then a male voice, a tenant’s gruff baritone. But I was confused by the interior: the hardswept foyer, the polished but discolored old ceramic tile, with long-abused art-nouveau designs; the nicely lighted hallway, old wallpaper but clean, stairs swept and scrubbed; railings worn but glistening. The stink of old varnish and countless tenants, but also the astringent odor of lye soap, diligent cleaning, a battle against grime and decay and mites and spilled lives. I walked slowly up the stairs, holding onto Mercy’s arm.
There was music coming from Carisa’s apartment, not loud but wafting gently into the hallway. Lavish violin strings, the thump of piano keys, the light air of a girl singer. Rosemary Clooney? The Boswell Sisters? I had no idea. Music from radios, especially the plaintive crooning of adenoidal female singers, always irritates me. I consider the sentimental slurring of the Andrews Sisters tantamount to treason during the last world war. But I keep such sentiments to myself. Jerome Kern, yes; Cole Porter, certainly. Witty men, clever lyricists, jaunty confections, the Broadway ditties. Yes, I thought, Rosemary Clooney. Or maybe Kate Smith?
I didn’t like the fact that Mercy, unconsciously, was humming the tune.
When Mercy gently rapped on the door—a little too softly, I thought—the door flew open because it had not been latched, and we stood there, staring at the body of a young girl, sprawled indecorously on the floor, her head resting in a pool of blood, her body twisted.
I looked at Mercy, Mercy at me.
“Is it…?” I gasped.
Mercy nodded.
I stepped into the room. “This is not going to make anyone happy.”
Mercy frowned. “But maybe it solves somebody’s problem.”
For a second I closed my eyes. In the darkness I saw zigzag, shooting shafts of bright light, and I felt the rush of blood to my temples, throbbing, throbbing. “So it begins,” I said, my voice scratchy. “So it begins.”
Late that night, long after midnight, I lay in my bed, unable to sleep. I was trying to place events in order, categorizing, shifting the facts. I sorted through the last, horrendous hours, from the moment of awful discovery of the body to our dismissal by the police, with Mercy dropping me back at the Ambassador.
I wondered how I’d managed to stagger to the elevator, make it into my suite. In my room I’d slipped into a chair and sobbed for a half hour.
The police: Detective Cotton. What was his first name? Xavier. Detective Xavier Cotton rushed in a half hour after the beat cops arrived, Mercy having knocked on the superintendent’s first floor apartment door, startling the old Spanish man, and sputtering: Call the cops. Then everything happened so fast. Looking back, it seemed but a matter of scant minutes before the two fat, balding cops and then Detective Cotton rushed up those stairs.
I marveled at the detective, frankly. You saw a trim man in his late thirties, dark and wiry, short, a pointy ferret face; with weary dark brown eyes, dull and a little washed out. Baked-bean eyes, I considered them. Eyes that looked like they hid everything, the surface glazed over, disarmingly. That made me nervous. When he spotted Mercy and me waiting in the upstairs hallway, his eyes got large, as though trying to focus. That razor-lipped mouth was suddenly agape, reminding me of farcical cartoon characters registering shock. Of course, he was surprised, really. Here in this tenderloin building, this bitter, noisome outpost of Hollywood’s glitter-dome world, here stood these imposing and improbable women—both decked out in elegant silk dresses and pearls and diamond bracelets. Cotton stared at me as though I were Ma Barker dressed for a cotillion. Mercy stood at the top of the stairs, with arms folded, waiting, head down; and I stood near her, grande dame with my mane of white hair, my quizzical stare, my eyes darting, my curiosity volcanic. And wearing an over-sized sapphire-studded pin on my dress (a gift, I reminded myself, from Erle Stanley Gardner—and thus amazingly perfect). Two escapees from a decadent Hollywood party, detoured somehow into a Dickensian corner of the globe.
Detective Cotton nodded at us, entered the apartment, and I watched him approach the sprawled-out body and stare down at it, all the time nodding his head. He seemed out of focus, in the wrong place. I sized him up immediately: a dullard, a plodder, and therefore dangerous.
Within minutes, Jake Geyser barreled up the stairs. “I called him,” Mercy told me. “He’ll have to handle
this
.” That didn’t make me happy. Two clowns for the price of one. Why had Mercy done that? I would have nixed that notion. But Mercy understood the peculiar politics of Hollywood. Movies governed municipal law, perhaps. Oddly, Jake seemed in his element now, leaning into Cotton, whispering, even placing one hand on the detective’s shoulder, a fleeting suggestion of camaraderie, though Cotton didn’t look too happy being touched. Jake was tall, lanky; Cotton small, compact, runt of the litter. Mutt and Jeff. Jake was dressed in a ratty sweater, torn at the elbows, no socks in his black tie-shoes (very unflattering), and wrinkled pants. Where was he coming from? And so quickly? Both men conferred and looked back at the doorway, where I now stood, watching. Cotton motioned to one of the cops, and we were hustled downstairs to the superintendent’s apartment, where, minutes later, Cotton questioned us.
Upstairs, a crime team took over; and just as well. I had no desire to see Carisa’s sheet-draped body lifted onto a gurney, shuffled down the stairs, the stench of death already palpable in the apartment. I had little to say to Cotton; and with Jake there, a ghostly shadow against back wall, I believed the less said the better. What could I say? We knocked on her door, it flew open, and Carisa lay there, dead. We backed out of the room. Or, at least, Mercy said she did. I was quiet. But why were we there? To see Carisa, whom Mercy knew. And I? A writer from New York, slumming. Why the finery? Well, post-party wanderings. A visit to Carisa. Cotton eyed me suspiciously. The old lady gussied up in party silk.
“A writer? Like scripts?”
“Like novels,” I said, dryly. Curtly.
“You write anything I heard of?” he asked.
“I doubt it.”
He turned away for a second, made a note. “Why at this hour?”
Mercy shrugged. “Eight-thirty is hardly late. We left a cocktail party, got a bite at Jack’s Drive-in,” Cotton widened his eyes, staring at Mercy’s dress, “and it seemed a good idea at the time.”
“In this neighborhood?”
“We were in the neighborhood.”
He clicked his tongue. “I doubt that.” He looked at Jake. “So she worked for Warner Bros. Studio?”
“She’d been fired though. A month or so back.”
“Then why is everybody here?”
“I came because Mercy called me.”
Cynical. “The good citizen.”
“She was an employee.”
“Then what’s this crap you’re telling me upstairs about the studio wanting to handle the publicity?”
Jake leaned in. “As we speak, Jack Warner is talking to your chief.”
Said matter-of-factly, but deliberately, the line hung in the air: its power obvious, its no-nonsense ultimatum clear-cut. Cotton looked from me to Mercy, back to Jake. So this is what was happening, his disgusted look indicated. Stonewalling, movieland style. This, his narrowed eyes suggested, was no minor-league murder case. “There’s a murder here,” he said, flatly.
Jake, almost snidely, “And it’s your job to solve it.” He softened his tone. “And you will.”
Detective Cotton, equally snide, “I appreciate the vote of confidence from Howdy Doody.”
Then I spoke up. “Just why is Warner involved in this?” I looked at Jake, who stared at his hands.
Cotton looked at me. “Madam, in L. A., you learn that the studios wield a lot of power—even over the police.”
Jake cleared his throat. “The studios don’t obstruct the police, Detective.”
“Maybe not, but they do delay and hinder and…” He shrugged, then shook his head. “Hollywood corrupts.”
Mercy had been staring at Cotton intently. “Excuse me, Detective, but you look like you might have been an actor. Once?”
The comment caught him off guard, it seemed—as it did me, I have to admit—for he flipped open his notebook and reached for a pen, as though he’d just had a brainstorm that could solve this murder.
“Just out of college, UCLA, a few attempts. Bit parts.” His voice got louder: “And then I realized how—how corrupt it all was.”
So, I reasoned, that might explain some of the bitterness, the contempt for Hollywood. One more failed actor. That, and the fact that he probably faced stonewalling often—the long arm of MGM, 20
th
Century Fox, Warner Bros. Studio. Maybe even Disney. Mickey Mouse as dissembler, Minnie as stonewaller. I stared at his face. The thin manicured moustache, the slicked-back hair, shiny with cream, even the cut of his sports jacket. That was it, I realized. He’d patterned himself on some matinee idol of another decade. John Gilbert, maybe, or John Garfield. Some mannered, stylish notion of metropolitan lover. Or, maybe, an early Clark Gable. Was everyone in L.A. a one-time (or future) bit player? Was that the coin of the kingdom here—actors as loose change? And most of them unhappy. I thought of Tommy Dwyer and Lydia Plummer and even the now-dead Carisa Krausse.
Detective Cotton, noting the hour and my visible fatigue—I sat slumped at the super’s kitchen table, my hand around a cup of coffee he’d provided—let us go, but said he’d get statements from both of us later on. “But I have nothing to say,” Mercy said.
“Then say that.” He turned away.
I kept silent. After all, I’d been left in the apartment while Mercy bounded down the stairs to call the police (and, lamentably, Jake). I’d gingerly stepped into the room, touching nothing, but observing, making an inventory. A glance at the dead woman’s face. The familiar grotesquerie of features, a face contorted with surprise and astonishment. But, curiously, the eyes thankfully shut. The pool of blackened blood, swirling away from her twisted head, seeping into ancient floorboards. Short shrift there—instead, I surveyed the room: a tiny apartment, broken down, a cracked window repaired with brown tape, a ceiling molding pulling away from the wall, a cabinet door with loosened hinges. But Carisa had tried to make the place decent, with cheap draperies over the windows, small Montgomery Ward prints of flowers and star-lit fields and New England covered bridges, and a threadbare oriental carpet, ragged at the edges. But she was clearly a packrat, a woman who didn’t discard anything, stacks of
L.A. Times
, a neat pile, but ready to topple; movie magazines, too many,
Modern Screen, Movie World
,
Hollywood Secrets
,
TV Radio Mirror
, and
Photoplay
, piled everywhere, all looking pristine, unread. Orderly piles, though, the edges evened, if abandoned. But glancing into the small alcove that served as a kitchen, I saw a tiny table with one plate, one fork, one knife, an old cloth napkin, a bottle of opened wine, red. But there was no glass. I looked into the sink. Nothing. Did the woman drink out of the bottle?
Moving back toward the door, I stepped around the statue I’d seen when I first walked in. Lying perhaps four feet from the body was a chunky, weathered-green, stained object, heavy looking but cheap, maybe a foot high, lying face up. A grotesque woman, with an exaggerated protruding stomach. A fertility goddess? What? Mexican or Aztec or Indian? Something from a tourist stand at a desert reservation in Arizona or New Mexico?
Against a back wall there was a small desk with two drawers pulled out, the only sign of disturbance in her apartment—save, of course, the very obvious body. The contents were strewn onto the desktop—piles of letters, shifted through. A letter from someone in San Francisco. I dared not touch them, tempted as I was. But someone had obviously rifled through the pile, looking for something. Some letter? Someone who knew that Carisa Krausse saved everything. And that person wanted something back. One of the drawers was empty, and I surmised that it had contained the scattered letters. I stood there, a little shaky, and stared from the rotund statue to the scattered letters on the wobbly desk. And then, looking into the other open drawer, I spotted what looked like a syringe, resting on a small cloth bag. Drugs? Medicine? That, the murderer had left. Or left behind?
Then I had heard noise in the hallway, and backed myself toward the entrance. And suddenly the music from the radio, a quick-paced jingle, upbeat and advertising Pepsi-Cola, was buried under the swell of rising voices in the stairwell.
***
When I arrived at the Burbank studios just before noon, dropped by my driver at the
Giant
soundstage—I’d violated my long-standing rule of rising promptly at seven, choosing instead to lie, wide awake, in bed until after nine—I expected frenzy, if not hysteria. A foolish assumption, that. Wandering around, strolling toward dressing rooms, I found calm and silence, an eerie pall covering the conversations and movements. I learned shooting had been suspended for that day, over Stevens’ protests. So the vast expanse of Jett Rink’s ballroom looked abandoned, but I noticed production teams still fine-tuning the large banquet hall, preparatory to Jett-Jimmy’s final disastrous moment, the drunken collapse of the mighty wildcatter. In the cavernous room, an electrician cursed loudly, and his voice echoed off the high ceiling.
Unable to locate Tansi who was, I learned, sequestered with Jack Warner and Jake Geyser, I knocked on Mercy’s dressing room door, and was pleased that she was there. She was in a foul mood. “Shooting suspended, but Stevens demands we sit here, in costume. Just sitting. Liz Taylor is sleeping in her dressing room. I heard her yelling at someone. Rock Hudson is God-knows-where. Luckily I have no lines scheduled—I died in Marfa, in more ways than one.” She stood up. “I’m sorry, Edna. Come in. I’ve been itching to yell like a banshee since nine this morning.”
“I thought there’d be a flurry of reporters all over the lot today.”
Mercy pulled out a chair for me. “God, no. Reporters are only allowed on set at the discretion of Stevens—and Warner. But, Edna, word has come down that the murder is not—repeat, not—to be spoken of. Of course, when I arrived, everyone was buzzing. Lots of folks knew Carisa, and I gather there was a short piece in the press this morning. The Warner PR machinery is already in place: a short squib stating the Carisa Krausse, an actress, was found dead in her apartment last night, apparently a homicide. No mention of her connection to
Giant
. No mention of Warner Bros. Studio. One more
ingénue
going the way of all flesh, fading into the Hollywood Sunset and Vine.”
“You’re bitter, Mercy.”
“I suppose I am.” Mercy reached for her coffee. “I knew Carisa. You know, I thought her odd, maybe genuinely crazy, and I came to dislike her. No, I came to a point I thought it best
not
to be with her.”
I nodded. “Surely Cotton will do his job?”
“As much as he can, Edna. You don’t understand the power of men like Jack Warner. The folks at MGM. At 20
th
Century. All of them. All branches of government in California are contained in
them
. No, Detective Cotton will investigate, and will probably solve it, but it’s going to be done with a low profile.”
I rubbed my weary eyes. Last night’s sleeplessness still covered me.
Yes, I understand that movies are big business; the bottom line is cold cash, often ugly cash, piles of green moolah. I play at that game myself, having negotiated with musty publishers like the old-time Doubleday crew, often with tart tongue and steely eye. I like to win. I understand money. But I also understand the ethics that, I hope, underlie my reason for living: the life of the decent, socially conscious middle-class Jew that I emphatically am, especially in the post-Nazi era, in the lame-brain Eisenhower malaise that breeds a Joe McCarthy and his nefarious ilk. “I’ll speak to Warner.”
Mercy chortled. “Edna, Edna.”
“I mean it.”
“Let me be cynical a moment here. When you’re around, they’re kowtowing and salaaming and treating you like the High Priestess of God-Almighty Fiction, but Warner is a hard-nosed skinflint with a propensity to believing that folks are born evil.”