"You sound like a member of one of those tribes that believe if someone photographs them, they lose their souls."
She put the heels of her hands to her eyes and rubbed them back and forth. "Your story is your soul. The longer you're with someone, the more you trust them, the more you're willing to tell. I believe when you find your real partner, you tell them everything until there's nothing left. Then you start from the beginning again, only this time it's their story as well as yours."
"No separation of church and state? You even have to use the same toothbrush?"
Her voice was low but very firm when she spoke. "You buy two blue toothbrushes exactly the same and keep them in a glass so you never know which is which. Yours is mine and mine's yours."
"Those are pretty tight quarters."
The offices of Black Suit Pictures were in a modern high-rise a few streets back from the ocean in Santa Monica. You parked way below the building and rode up in an elevator to an altitude you did not want to visit in that forever shaky part of the world. Two nights before in San Francisco, a small earthquake had jolted us very much awake minutes after we got into bed. Sex that night was more "please hold me" than anything else. We laughed about it, but that didn't stop either of us from sitting up very straight any time we felt the slightest anything the rest of the time we were in California.
A beautiful receptionist was facing the elevator so that the moment the door slid open, you were blasted with one of those million-white-teeth smiles that are supposed to make you feel welcome and comfortable.
"Can I help you?"
"I have an appointment with David Cadmus. My name is Samuel Bayer."
"Would you have a seat while I call?"
I sat on a slinky leather couch and looked around. Nothing new. The place looked like every other film producer's office I'd seen: tony furniture, the requisite posters of the films the company had made. I recognized the titles of some. Two had been genuine hits.
I almost laughed when David Cadmus entered the reception room because he looked exactly as he had twenty-five years before. Same spiky porcupine haircut, square eyeglasses, white dress shirt buttoned to the top. Yet his "look" was today's ultimate cool, as opposed to ultimate asshole when we were young. Black chinos, dress shoes . . . I'm sure the labels on his clothes were Prada or Comme des Garcons rather than Dickies, but the result was the same.
I stood up. He kept his hands in his pockets. We looked at each other. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the receptionist watching us. We hadn't even said hello but were already in a High Noon standoff.
"He didn't do it."
Without thinking, I cocked my head quizzically to one side. "Excuse me?"
"My father. He didn't kill Pauline Ostrova."
According to his son, by the time Gordon Cadmus fell in love with Pauline he had forgotten how to laugh. Certainly there's a lot less to laugh at as we grow older, but that's beside the point. Here was an immensely powerful man who controlled half the crime in Westchester County. People did what he said without thinking. He had private bank accounts in countries whose names you couldn't even pronounce. He had what he wanted, he'd achieved his dream. But he was a morose sourpuss, convinced years before someone actually shot him that one day he would be murdered.
So shocking to the Cadmus family was the sound of the old man's laugh – a surprisingly deep and delighted har de har har – that both son and mother froze when they heard it. In their separate bedrooms on that Saturday afternoon, the boy had been reading Famous Monsters of Film Land magazine, the mother one of Jack Paar's autobiographies. Within seconds, both appeared at their doorways, both wearing similarly worried expressions.
"Did you hear that?"
"Yes! You think something's wrong?"
"Dad never laughs."
"Maybe we should go see."
At the top of the long staircase, they bent clown to see Gordon Cadmus at the front door, talking to a girl.
It was Pauline Ostrova who, among other things, wrote for our high school newspaper. Someone had told her there were rumors Gordon Cadmus was involved with "the mob." Being insanely self-confident, she decided to do an in-depth interview with our local gangster. She put on her nicest dress, combed her hair and rang his bell.
When he answered the door – a thing he rarely did – a nice-looking girl stood there, looking as it she might be selling magazine subscriptions or tickets to a church raffle. She said, "Mr. Cadmus, my name is Pauline Ostrova and I write for the Crane's View High School newspaper. It's well known you're associated with organized crime and I'd like to interview you."
That's when he laughed and then invited her in.
Almost three decades later, his son said, "You've got to understand that most people couldn't even look at my father without breaking into a sweat."
"Aw, come on, David. We were nosy kids. We knew what everybody did in Crane's View. How come we never knew about your father? How come we didn't know he was in the Mafia?"
David smirked. "Because on paper he wasn't. He was in waste removal and olive oil importing. He had a construction company." He could have filled a wheelbarrow with all the cynicism in his voice.
"Yeah, all synonyms for the Mafia, right?"
He smiled and nodded.
"So how did a high school girl find out who he was?"
"Because at the time, the high school girl's lover was the chief of police."
"Cristello? Pauline was Cristello's lover too? Who was this girl, Mata Hari?"
Policeman Cristello told his lover about mobster Cadmus and she went right out and became his lover too. Simple as that, or according to the mobster's son it was.
Cadmus fell for her that first afternoon. Why? Because she made him laugh. Years later, he told David the whole story. The two men had grown very close over the years and one Christmas the old man asked his son what he wanted for a present. David said the truth. He wanted to know about his father's life because he knew absolutely nothing and it mattered very much to him. In one astounding night, Gordon Cadmus told his son everything.
I didn't probe, but did ask how he felt after he'd heard his father's story. "I never loved him more."
As I was leaving, I asked David how he knew I was going to ask about his father's connection to Pauline. His answer shocked me.
"Because your pal McCabe called and said so. He's been taunting me for years about it but has never been able to find even the smallest shred of proof that Dad killed her. Because there isn't any. My father loved Pauline. He was crushed by her death."
"Wait a minute! Can I be frank? Your father could have found out who did it. He must have known people who could have found out."
"Dad believed the boyfriend did it. Edward Durant."
It made real sense. Durant killed her and went to jail. When he got there, Cadmus arranged to send in the clowns who used Edward as a sex toy until his brains were scrambled eggs and he saw no way out but a permanent necktie. What a neat and evil way to get your revenge.
It sounded plausible, but what had seemed so simple a few days before had suddenly become a surreal three-ring circus of motives, love and revenge.
David walked me out of the building into a scorching California afternoon. We talked by my car a few minutes. I noticed the heat didn't seem to bother him. No sticking shirt, no squinting against the sun.
"This is a long way from Crane's View, New York. Have you been back there recently?"
He shook his head. "I remember you and Frannie McCabe walking down the halls of the school. I never knew if I envied or hated all of you in that gang. No, I haven't been back, but McCabe keeps calling me. He's a strange motherfucker. I'd be flattered by his attention if I didn't know it was my father he still wants to get."