“Bail, lady, bail,” he said. “It wasn’t a felony.”
“Perhaps it should be.”
“Write your congressman.”
“Aren’t you compounding your problems, Mr. Kohl, by breaking into a crime scene?” I asked. He stared at me, open-mouthed.
“Miss Ferber,” Cotton said, “I don’t need your help.”
“I’m curious.”
“Save it for another time.”
“I need my money,” Kohl thundered.
“For what, more bail?” I asked.
Detective Cotton looked at me. “Ma’am, it’s not a good idea coming around places like this. Do you know what goes on in this neighborhood? Tourists don’t come here.”
“I’m not a tourist. I’m a novelist.”
“You might end up a dead one.”
“Well, Fannie Hurst would be tremendously pleased, then.”
“What?” He threw his hands up into the air. “You could get yourself murdered.”
“Then you’d have two homicides to solve.”
Cotton shook his head, smiled in spite of himself, which caught me by surprise. “Why do you want to make my life difficult, Miss Ferber?”
“I’m just asking questions to help a friend.”
“Go home,” he said. “Now.”
“Detective Cotton…”
“Did you hear me? Go home.”
“I happen to live in New York City.”
“Perfect. American Airlines has a midnight red-eye.”
“Sir.”
“I’ll even drive you to the airport.”
Chapter 11
I sat in Mercy’s dressing room in Burbank, the two of us sipping tea, my elbows resting on a small table, with Mercy reclining in an easy chair, draping herself over it, legs up on a small wobbly ottoman. She looked serene, eyes dreamy. “Edna, when I travel with you these days, the police tend to show up moments later.” She chuckled, almost to herself. “I haven’t had this much excitement since Marfa, the night Jane Withers beat me at Monopoly, and, crowing like a strangulated hen, walked into a wall.”
I laughed. “Only two times, Mercy. The gods work in mysterious ways.”
There was a knock on the door, and Detective Xavier Cotton walked in. Mercy looked at me, eyes bright, and sat up. “Make that three times.”
“Ah, Miss Ferber, you’re here, too. As I expected, since the two of you seem intent on becoming the Dolly Sisters of Hollywood crime.”
“Detective Cotton, I explained why we were there.”
He spoke to Mercy. “The studio has given consent,” he said it sarcastically, “to have a number of Carisa Krausse’s acquaintances fingerprinted. We’ve lifted some good prints from the crime scene. Sometime this afternoon, if you can make it downtown…”
Mercy nodded. “Gladly.”
I smiled. “Me, too?”
He tucked his tongue into the corner of his cheek. “Not yet.”
Both Mercy and I laughed. He didn’t.
“I’ve been fingerprinted before,” I commented, still smiling.
“Why am I not surprised?” Again, without humor. Cotton said lines that should be accompanied by bursts of hilarity-or at least a smile. Did he have a light side, a moment when he let go, held his sides, rolled from side to side, laughing? I wondered about his home life-marriage, children, mistresses? Hookers? Dogs and cats? Ferret? Something that looked like him? “We’ve had most of the principals down to the station this morning, quietly, unannounced, but of course you were otherwise engaged.”
“Have you spoken to Jimmy?” I asked, curious. “I understand he’s shooting today.”
“Which is why he can’t be disturbed. And no one can see him fingerprinted at the station. We have to come to him, carrying our little kit and talking happy like we’re itinerant preachers saving his soul.”
“Very funny,” I said.
“I’m never funny.”
“Sit down, Detective.” Mercy pointed to a chair. Surprisingly, he sat. He pulled at the cuffs of his shirt until the edges showed under the sleeves of his sports jacket. He evened them up, flicked a piece of lint from the sleeve, then sat there nodding his head, watching us.
“What?” From me.
“Two nosy women.”
“We try.”
A sliver of smile, forced, “And what have you learned?”
“Are we sharing information?” I asked.
“You’re trying to save James Dean’s skin. I’m trying to shore up the evidence against him.” He reached into his pocket and extracted copies of Carisa’s letters. He fanned them, dramatically. “I’ve never seen such a fascination with letter writing. You know, Carisa had a bunch of letters on her desk. But some were missing.”
“How do you know that?” I probed.
He watched me, eyes narrow. “I suspect you noticed that yourself, Miss Ferber. You were alone in the apartment for some time-you and the body.” He glanced at Mercy. “In reconstructing the scene, I surmised that you, Miss Ferber, were alone there for what? Ten minutes? Fifteen? Twenty? What did you do?”
I smiled. “I touched nothing. No prints of mine.”
“But I’m supposing you noticed the scattered letters on the table.”
“I did.”
“What else?”
“Well,” I said, “I saw a syringe.”
He smiled. “Good. Me, too. Do you know what was in the bag?”
“No.”
“Heroin.”
“As is rumored,” I said.
“In fact, the autopsy showed she had just ingested some into her fragile body. She may have been a little loopy when she let in the murderer.”
“Or,” I surmised, “she shot up with the murderer who took his own syringe with him.”
“Interesting. Maybe. Maybe not. What else did you see? I mean, besides the things you outlined in the thorough statement you’ve already given us.” His tone was sarcastic.
“A neat woman, though a packrat. She saved every scrap of paper.”
“True.” He nodded. “And what does that mean to you?”
I glanced at Mercy. “Well, it suggests that she might have saved something the murderer wanted back, probably a note of some sort. Because…because the only things in disarray were the batch of letters extracted from one of the drawers.”
“Exactly. Somebody took a letter or letters.”
“And you don’t know what letter or letters?” Mercy asked.
“Hard to say,” he said. “The letters left behind were family notes, a mother in San Francisco, birthday cards, Christmas cards, junk. She saved everything.”
I nodded. “And someone knew that.”
“Maybe. Or realized it once he was there with her. She may have mentioned something about it-which led to the murder.”
“So,” I continued, “if the murderer took a letter, then we have trouble knowing the motive for the killing.”
“We?” He raised his eyebrows and frowned. “You mean me-me.”
“I was using the royal we.”
He frowned. “In your wanderings have you two ladies found anyone who likes to write letters?”
“All literate people write letters,” I noted. “The telephone is for luncheon engagements and to berate shopkeepers.”
“Can you imagine Max Kohl writing a letter? Or, say, Josh MacDowell?” He paused. “Maybe James Dean scribbles letters?”
“I can imagine Max Kohl pasting a letter together with words cut from Coronet magazine.”
Cotton laughed a hearty fake laugh. “Good one.”
“I’m being serious.”
“You’d like to pin the murder on him.”
“I just want to clear Jimmy,” I said. “You know, I’d have thought the epistolary tradition had died in an earlier century, but, I gather, it lives abundantly, if absurdly, in modern Hollywood.”
He narrowed his eyes. “What?”
“Nothing.” I waited. “Did you get anything out of Max Kohl this morning?”
He smirked. “Not that it’s any of your business, but no. He’s a slippery one. The problem is that he seems to have an alibi for the time Carisa was killed. Or at least he’s lined up folks who lie for him. We’ve learned he knew Carisa a while back, dated her, maybe, and then disappeared. Seems he was in jail in New Jersey for a couple months, a bad check charge, but drifted back here and back into her life about the time James Dean dumped her. A troublemaker, muscle for a local boss for a time, got into a numbers racket, and, I suppose, the source for Carisa’s drugs. Biker fanatic. How he met Dean, I understand.” He stopped.