Long silence now. Three women stared down at him, waiting.
Jimmy withdrew a recorder from his back pocket, waved it at us with a sheepish grin, and then, as we watched, began to play a reedy, high-pitched ballad: Sweet Molly Malone. She wheels her wheelbarrow through streets wide and narrow, c rying cockles and mussels alive alive-o! Plaintive, haunting, utterly perfect. The notes hung in the air, sweet and thin, floated, fell back upon him. Eyes closed, head inclined, he breathed into the instrument, and the song was exact, smooth and seamless. But near the end, inhaling, he missed a note, and the sour note broke the melodic flow. He paused, shook his head angrily, started over. Again the same wrong note. Quietly, he dropped the recorder into his lap, opened his eyes, and started to sob, his body rolling back and forth, his face wet with tears.
Chapter 8
At the Smoke House the next morning, just outside the studio gates, Mercy and I barely spoke. Jimmy’s late-night appearance and the melodramatic air he played on the recorder, and the awful, sloppy breakdown, lingered about us like a fog you couldn’t escape. Mercy looked tired. Jimmy, I learned, had stayed at the apartment long after Tansi drove me to the Ambassador. I stared into Mercy’s face. I sensed what she was thinking. Jimmy and the dead Carisa. Jimmy and the movie. Jimmy and the bone-marrow-deep sadness. Jimmy and the mother who left him. Jimmy and the unexpected late-night knock on the door. Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy. God, how quickly and emphatically that man-boy managed to insinuate himself into all our lives.
“Well,” I began, “I gave my statement to Detective Cotton earlier, and he kept saying: Is that it? I finally told him he was getting on my nerves, and he pouted like a brat. What’s the requisite for becoming detective in L.A.-imbecility? When I say I’ve said my say, I assume others will believe me.”
Mercy smiled. “Others don’t know you, Edna.”
“They do now. Or, at least, one quivering soul does. Cotton likes to project a hard edge, a role he’s doubtless learned from Edward G. Robinson pictures. Cell block melodramas. Beneath it all, he’s a mediocre actor playing a part. It’s just that he can’t remember the lines.”
“That’s because he has none. He’s an extra.” Mercy sounded weary.
We drifted into silence. Gazing out the window at the sunny landscape, I asked when it was going to rain, and Mercy said, “Next year, maybe.”
I pointed outside. “Hollywood manufactures everything else. Can’t they fabricate rain to break the monotony of endless, clear, and boring days?”
“I don’t think you should move here, Edna.”
“There’d have to be some climate changes first. I’d have to speak with someone.”
We lingered, dawdled, drank more coffee. A lunch crowd was filing in, and I noticed Sal Mineo walking in with another young man. Mercy followed my gaze. “A little boy, no?” she remarked.
“Another Jimmy acolyte, that boy with Sal?”
Mercy flicked her head toward Mineo’s friend. “That’s Josh MacDowell. He was Jimmy’s drinking buddy, but one of the souls discarded along the way.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, we’ll have to find out, won’t we?” I insisted. “Do you know him?”
“To nod to. He works in wardrobe. He’s not an actor. He knew Carisa, too. I remember she mentioned him to me. Or maybe Jimmy told me something. I can’t remember.”
The two men were walking by, but I raised my voice: “Hello.” Said too loudly, I realized too late, some heads turning. An old lady requesting the popular Mineo’s autograph?
Sal stopped. “Miss Ferber,” he greeted me. Respectful, nodding; the dutiful polite boy. Nice New York boy, transplanted west. But he seemed ready to keep walking.
Mercy, following my glance, took over. “Hello, Josh.”
The young man looked at her, without recognition. Sal glanced at her, then at Josh.
“I was Carisa’s friend,” Mercy continued. And the young man went ashen, his shoulders sagging. “I remember she mentioned you.”
I looked at him. Nearly six feet tall, perhaps, but pencil-thin, raw-limbed, with prominent Adam’s apple, high cheekbones and deep-set eye sockets, a cadaver-like face, fairly macabre, with an oversized jutting Roman nose. So fair of skin, parchment-toned, he easily reddened. He mumbled something back, but I couldn’t catch the words.
“What?” From Mercy.
He cleared his throat. “I still cannot believe it. When Sal called me…” He looked at Sal who seemed to be picking his nose, absent-mindedly, unhappy to be stopped there.
He reminded me of someone, this loping, giraffe-like young man, with the ladder neck and the exaggerated parts. When he turned to look behind him-for no reason that I discerned-I suddenly thought: Aubrey Beardsley, some fin de siecle aesthete. I’d known so many in another world: Paris, Berlin, Vienna, before the war. Not that war but the first one, the big one, with the Kaiser. That war.
“Would you like to join us?” I asked.
Sal rushed his words: “No, thank you.”
But Josh was already sinking into a chair, his body seeming to unbuckle itself, the joints giving way. Something, indeed, to watch. Sort of like an unglued Houdini.
“I’m Edna Ferber.” I held out my hand. He shook it.
“I know. I’m pleased to meet you. I once acted in a high school production of Dinner at Eight.” He smiled thinly. “A walk on.”
“A bit player?”
“Sort of.”
“I’m not surprised.” He narrowed his eyes, not catching my meaning, but I hadn’t intended that he do so.
“You’re part of Jimmy Dean’s circle?” I asked.
A long pause, Josh frowning. “I didn’t know he had a circle. I just know him from, you know, around. I met him when he did some television-the Kraft Playhouse. I was working wardrobe. We’d go out to the clubs. A bunch of us.”
“How did you all know Carisa Krausse?”
He cleared his throat, looked at Sal, who was shuffling from one foot to the other but finally sat down. “Well, strangely, I introduced her to Jimmy. You see, I went to high school in San Francisco with Carisa. She was Jessica in those days. We drifted down to Hollywood right after high school. She wanted to be in the movies. I just wanted to escape my family. She was escaping into escape.” He must have thought his own words clever because he stopped, widened his eyes, and grinned. But then, probably remembering the context, he sobered. “We were best friends for a long time.”
“Were you still friends?”
“No. I mean, I stopped in now and then. We’d lived together for a while, but not in that hell hole she moved to a few months back. We sort of drifted apart. But she’d be in for a fitting, and I was in wardrobe and we’d catch up on things.”
“So you introduced her to Jimmy?” I said.
“Yes, I told you that,” He looked peeved. “I mean, that probably wasn’t the best thing I could have done.” He looked at his nails, and I noted they were bitten to the quick: a thin line of dried blood on each fingertip.
“Why not?”
“Well, it’s hard to talk about. I mean, she’s dead and all. I mean, well, Carisa started getting-odd. Frantic, sort of. Jobs not coming her way. No rent money. She was always a little eccentric. You know, saying outlandish things. But then I think she couldn’t help herself. Like madness came into her. And she met some bad apples. Drugs and all. That’s when I kept away.”
“What kind of drugs?”
He looked at Sal. “I don’t know much about drugs. Just what people tell me. Like heroin, I guess. I’m not saying for sure she did it, but it was around the apartment. I saw it. She said it was nothing. It scared me. One night, I bumped into her and Lydia, when they were still talking, and then Jimmy came along. She liked him. He liked her. Sort of.”