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.”
Chapter 7
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, 20th 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.