When filming got underway, Jack was a firebrand. They were finishing up a ninth-reel sequence in which Clara, Grace’s alter ego, faced down one of the men responsible for her murder. Horace, the chief electrician and light man, kept a shimmering lamp on her face with a warped sheet of cellophane to create a ghostly effect. The heat burned her skin, but she worked through it, with it, and stared larger and more menacingly than Theda Bara ever could. Jack was elated, but equally disappointed in her target’s level of projected fear. Against Saul’s wishes, he reshot the actor’s reaction twice before telling the cameraman to keep rolling while he strolled over to the would-be murderer and slapped him hard across the face. As the actor shook from the pain and bewilderment of the thing, Jack called action and got the take he wanted.
Privately, Grace resolved to strike back should the director ever elect to slap a reaction out of her.
After the day’s shooting, talk re-erupted of Frank laced with baseless speculations of what sort of trouble he’d gotten himself into. No one had a clue, but everyone had a theory. Grace escaped the studio as though it were on fire, desperate to avoid the nonsense.
On her way out, she was stopped by Horace, a stooped older man with a deeply lined face turned dry and craggy by the Southern California sun.
“Ms. Baron?” he called to her.
“Hello, Horace.”
“Don’t listen to ‘em, what they’re saying about Frank. He’s a good sort of fellow, I know he is.”
“I hope everything turns out all right for him,” she said, noncommittally.
“I know you’re friends, you and Frank,” Horace said. Grace broke eye contact and smiled nervously. “I don’t know what he’s got himself into, but I’m sure it’s all a mistake. Frank couldn’t do what they said he done.”
You’re wrong there, Pops, she thought but didn’t say.
“Thank you, Horace.”
“Good night, Ms. Baron.”
“Good night.”
She walked on, to the automobile Saul Veritek provided for her every morning and afternoon, and climbed into the back without a word to the sullen driver. He navigated the short drive back to her bungalow slowly, carefully, depositing her safely at the walk where she exited and pressed her key into the lock beneath the knob. She did not notice the broken window beside the door, partially obscured by a tangle of bougainvillea, but the glass on the floor was the first thing she saw when she got inside. It sparkled like diamonds in the failing sunlight, and for a moment Grace decided that Jack had finally crossed the line.
But Jack Parson was still at the set when she left; he couldn’t possibly have beaten her home. She pursed her mouth and closed the door, scanning the open space for missing items or whoever was harassing her lately.
That was when she noticed the thin smear of red on the floor, forming a sort of arrow pointing vaguely at the washroom. She followed the smear and upon reaching her bed, saw the bag she’d dropped in the street sitting on top of the blankets. She knew then it was Frank even before she pushed the door open to find him passed out in the clawfooted tub, his right eye swollen shut and his shoulder a bloody mess of red and black.
“Christ’s sake,” she told the insensate man. “Couldn’t you have found yourself a doctor, Frank?”
She kicked off her heels and opened up the medicine cabinet for iodine and a fresh washcloth. Nurse Gracie to the rescue.
He came in and out of a sweating coma through the evening and into the night, occasionally shouting out before dropping back into the pitch. The wound in his shoulder was badly infected — scabrous and ringed with yellow crust. The bullet seemed to have passed clean through without hitting bone though, so Grace simply applied liberal amounts of iodine to either side every hour or so with a fresh bandage. And while Frank slept, she tended to him, daubing his brow with a cool, damp cloth and keeping a close eye on his temperature.
It was past noon the next day before he came fully to for the first time. His dark lashes fluttered before opening completely to let the punishing light in. He shielded his face with his hand, whereupon Grace rushed to pull the drapes closed.
“What day is it?” he croaked.
“Tuesday,” she answered. “Quarter past noon, or thereabouts.”
“Shouldn’t you be on set?”
“I phoned the studio and had them tell Saul I’m having trouble with the menses. That’ll shut any man up, and quick.”
Frank half-grinned, and it looked like it took some effort.
He said, “Thank you, Grace. I mean it.”
“Here I came to Old Californy to be the next Mary Pickford and instead you turn me into Florence Nightingale. What do you take me for, anyway?”
“A friend,” Frank said. “The best one I got, too.”
“If your friends are the type to go shooting at you in the street like it’s Dodge City, I can see why. I’m going to put some coffee on the stove, and then how’s about you tell your best friend where you’ve been and what in the name of Wild Bill Hickok happened back there?”
“I’ve been hiding out,” he explained over his coffee, which he took black. “Shacked up with an old pal out in Pomona, but the heat made him nervous so he gave me the short shrift and I ended up in a damn railyard, like a hobo.”
“A railyard! Frank, why didn’t you come to me if there was no one else?”
“I didn’t want to bring that heat down on you, either. You’ve been through too much with me already. I never meant for any of that mess to happen, Grace — honest, I didn’t. You’re such a swell gal, I didn’t even have any intentions. Just a nice night, you know. And then that rotten bastard…”
“Petey.”
“That’s him. God, I’m sorry you had to see that.”
“You were defending yourself.”
“I never did anything like that before. Shoot a man, I mean. I promise you that, Grace.”
“It’s all right. I believe you.”
“It’s not all right,” Frank countered, setting his cup down on the table. His hand shook and he spilled some on the floor. “I stumbled into this gig with Horace, but it was supposed to be my way out. I’m supposed to be done with all that.”
“With all what?”
“These guys, these fellas I used to run around with. Los Angeles is all tinsel and silver for you folks, you Hollywood people, but it’s a pretty rough town, besides. All those flappers and F. Scott Fitzgerald types you read about are having a grand old time in the cities, but then there’s a million guys like me with hardly a red cent to our name. It gets hard, real hard. And sometimes when an opportunity comes along, your heart and soul tells you it’s the wrong thing but you do it anyway because goddamnit, you’re hungry and tired of humping it around town with holes in your shoes and not enough in your pocket for a short beer. So you try to be a good Indian, to do everything the right way, the way you’d be proud to tell your mama all about, but what to do when there’s nothing left? When it’s the bread line or business through the barrel of a .38?”
Grace made a flat, straight line of her mouth and regarded her coffee for a moment. She then set it down beside Frank’s, lighted a cigarette, and said evenly, “What did you do for these fellows, Frank?”