Reluctantly, I slid into the plush, deep seat, sunk in low, felt immediately foolish, and tremendously old. He jumped in, boyish, turned the key, slipped the sleek, expensive vehicle into gear. I tapped him on the wrist. “Wait, Jimmy. I can’t do this. Where are we going? Stop.” It was night; it was chilly; it was late. I was…well, I was Edna Ferber, septuagenarian, playing sidekick to a hot rodder. Dragster. Rebel. Part of his wolf pack.
He stopped. Reaching behind, he grabbed a thick wool blanket and quietly wrapped it around my shoulders, my neck. I started to say something, but he whispered, “Ssshhh! You’ll spoil it.” And then he found a scarf, draped it over my hair and around my neck, and tied it snugly under my chin. His deft fingers moved quickly, and I found myself enthralled by his movements, his touch, his gentleness.
“I’m too old for joyriding.”
A raspy cigarette voice. “You’re not. You know you’re not.”
Secured, I sat there, and he sailed off. Down the boulevards, around corners, up the steep roads into the Hollywood Hills, speeding, speeding, the car edging near dark borders of eucalyptus, bowers of bougainvillea, boxed hedges. Speeding, speeding; the car sailing into air that seemed blue and smoky, headlights beaming on distant trees and roads that suddenly were behind me. I closed my eyes, frightened, then relaxed. It was as though his body and his mind were part of the well-oiled smooth machine-a oneness, I told myself. Nothing bad would happen to me, impossible. On and on, up into the shadowy hills, blazing around the hairpin corners, the occasional car ahead soon left behind. Approaching cars were small dots of yellow enlarging into moon-wide bursts of light that suddenly disappeared behind us. And then, seeming not to break speed, he stopped, spun the car downward, and we sat on the edge of a hill, a wooded, thick land, and below me spread nighttime L.A., blocks of light and blackness set against low-hung blotchy clouds in an indigo sky. I heard the hum of an airplane, far above, and saw the flickering of some aerial lights in the distance. Down below, L.A. was a gem to be swallowed, white, delicate, awful, yet magnetic.
He pointed, an impish grin on his face. So I looked.
“I wanted to be the one to show you this,” he said. “It’s the only way to imagine this world.”
I started to say something but realized it would come out garbled, gobbledygook from a fairy-tale character. My head swam; my throat was dry. So I just sat there.
He took off his horn-rimmed eyeglasses and stared, and I realized how intense, almost possessed, his face became: a new beauty to him, this squinting myopic boy. “Sometimes the world is better if you can’t see it,” he whispered.
Still I said nothing.
“You know, Miss Edna, in Beverly Hills there are no cemeteries. None. People there think they’re going to live forever.”
For a while we sat there, Jimmy without his glasses on, with me staring at his profile. Silence.
Then, nodding, he put the sports car in gear, drove back down the hills, slowly now, as though the thing he’d feared he might lose had been safely won; and the rest was indifference. At the hotel, I uncovered myself from the layers but realized I had not been touched by L.A.’s night chill. Carelessly he tossed the blanket and scarf behind him. I opened my door. He tapped me on the shoulder. When I looked back, still numb and under water-for some reason I found myself crying-he seemed to be muttering something, but it was his familiar halting, stumbling talk.
“What?” my mouth said, though I knew I vocalized no words.
“You only get to do most things once.”
Chapter 13
The next day, spent on the arm of Jack Warner who rushed me through some meetings and tete-a-tetes with Very Important People (I capitalized the phrase in my mind, though, I told myself grimly, they were decidedly lower-case people), I’d nodded, smiled, bowed, and babbled thank you, yes, very nice, quite, lovely lovely lovely, so many times that I thought I was nineteen again, and begging for employment in Appleton, Wisconsin. Finally, I retreated to my hotel, where, within minutes, Jimmy called me, his voice light and airy, boyish.
“Where were you? I’ve been calling all day.” He paused. “Breakfast tomorrow at Googie’s, at eight. Meet me there. Please.” The line went dead.
So the following morning, still basking in the glow of that delicious climb into the Hollywood Hills, I had the studio car drop me outside the busy eatery, filled at that hour with sloe-eyed locals. I paused, tentative, on the threshold, a clanging bell announcing my arrival; but no one took notice of the matronly woman standing there, dressed that morning in a youthful sun dress, daffodil yellow, with a rhinestone brooch suitably placed over my heart. I thought I looked, well, twenty years younger.
Already there, surprising me, Jimmy rose, rushed over, and squired me back to a booth, where a cup of coffee rested on my side of the table. He ordered food, and I chose an English muffin with boysenberry jam and more coffee, please, and piping hot, if possible. Jimmy smiled. “You don’t eat enough.”
“And you, so slender.”
“The camera puts weight on me.”
I breathed in. “And you wanted to see me for what reason?”
He laughed. “Right to the heart of things.” He sat back. “Actually, Miss Edna, no reason. I’m treating you to breakfast. My spies in the house of Hollywood report that you and Mercy have chosen my cause. The maiden taking over the quest from the knight.”
I pursed my lips together. “I seem to recall a young knight making a heartfelt request for assistance one grim, heavy night.”
There was a twinkle in his eyes. Really, I thought, a twinkle. Strangely, I’d heard that tired expression all my life-indeed, had employed it generously in my fiction-but now, perforce, I seemed to experience it for the first time. Twinkle in the eye: a brightness, a sparkle, a flash that suggests life unsullied by nagging worry, and, truth to tell, a world away from murder.
“Then,” I said, “if my purpose here is to consume ham and eggs, let me play interlocutor.”
“A minstrel show, and me in it.”
“Tell me, Jimmy, why did you hold back information from the police?”
He made a clicking sound. “I never really thought about the letter to Carisa. I didn’t forget it, but it just seemed unimportant.”
“Come on, Jimmy. Really? With all the scuttlebutt about her letters to you and Warner?”
He shrugged.
“But Jimmy, Detective Cotton asked you if you wrote to her.”
“How do you know that?”
“He told me.”
“Whose side are you on?” But he was smiling.
“Yours, and you know it. Sooner or later, everyone is on your side. It’s a dangerous talent you have, young man.”
“I lied to him. The question took me by surprise. Police make me nervous.”
“What else have you lied about?”
“Nothing, I swear. I wouldn’t lie to you.” He took a sip of coffee.
“You’d better not.” I knew I sounded schoolmarmish, a little arch and pompous, but I didn’t care. Murder it is, I thought, and I’ll say what I damn well like. In fact, I say what I like, no matter what. I don’t need a murder to make me blunt.
“You know, Miss Edna, I’ll tell you something. I find that I don’t even think much about the murder. I think about her all the time, but not the murder. Carisa alive and laughing and saying weird stuff. To me she’s still alive. It’s like, well, it’s over-a scene shot, in the can, edited. The film over. I’ve done three movies in about a year, more or less, and everything I do is filtered through this phony prism of celluloid.”