“But you were close to her.”
“We did go out, for a moment. It was nothing. You know, dating. Christ. I’d stop at her place. Yes, I know, I gave her that cheap statue because when she was at my place she liked it, but it was just having fun, you know, going out, the way young people do. It’s what young people do.”
“Did you know she was crazy and maybe on drugs?”
“The craziness I spotted right away, hard not to. But I’m drawn to crazy types, oddball characters, you know. I like those souls that teeter totter on the rim of the universe.”
“But drugs?”
“That I learned right after Marfa. I don’t mean marijuana. Reefer. That’s not drugs. I mean that stuff she did. I think it escalated when the studio axed her. It was Lydia Plummer, oddly, who told me. And then she, too, confessed to sticking the old needle in her pretty flesh. Freaked me out. Not reefer, that’s nothing. That’s not a scene I like, heroin. Back in New York, that cafe on Bleecker at MacDougal, you know, the Zigzag Cafe, the beatniks smoked, the poet and painters, even the Stalinists, you know, maybe, we all did reefer but not the needle crap. I ran away. My vices are…otherwise.”
“But then you dated Lydia?”
“Miss Edna, I drift from girl to girl. She…like pursued me. We’re talking a couple of weekends. That ain’t a life contract. That’s dating. But girls seemed to go too deep with me. I swear I didn’t promise anybody anything. And they want so much. Everybody wants so much from me.” He suddenly seemed to freeze up. “I look in the mirror and hate what I see. I don’t see what others see.” He paused. “I just don’t like myself.”
“That’s foolish, Jimmy.”
“I’m not saying this to make you feel sorry for me.” He looked into my eyes.
“But people do feel sorry for you, Jimmy, especially when you talk like this.”
“It’s the only way I know how to talk. You know, all my life I’ve tried to fit in, though I know I don’t. I never tried to be different. I just was. So I jump at the world, fight with it.”
“Maybe that’s why you’re a fine actor. You lose yourself in the role.”
“No, I don’t lose myself. That person is me. I’m only myself playing the rebels. They’re typecasting me. I get nervous about next year. Can I play the rebel for years to come?”
“You’ll grow.”
“Miss Edna, I’m losing my hair even now.”
“You’ll still be James Dean.”
“I think I’ll be dead by thirty.”
I got chilled. “Don’t say that.”
He withdrew a pack of king-size Chesterfields from a breast pocket, offered me one. I shook my head. “Too early in the morning. My vices are reserved for evenings.” I watched him light one, take a puff, put the cigarette on the table, upended, balancing it, watching it. Then he picked it up, took a drag, put it down, and balanced it vertically again. I watched, enthralled. Neither of us spoke. When the ash was long and wispy, ready to fall, Jimmy picked up the cigarette, stared at the long ash, and looked for an ashtray. There was none on the table, so he stood, let the ash fall onto the linoleum floor. He sat back down, smiled. “I never can seem to find the ashtray.”
I said nothing. Each movement he made seemed as if he just invented it.
The boyish gleam he’d shown when I’d first sat down was gone now, replaced by melancholia, as he tucked his head into his chest. I’ve lost him again, I thought. I felt tightness in my chest. When I reached out and touched the back of his hand, he recoiled, as from an electric shook, and the touch seemed to startle him awake. “I’m doing it again,” he said. “I’m begging for love from you.”
“It’s all right to want people to love you,” I said, and the line surprised me. It didn’t sound like me.
“I used to own a.22 automatic but the studio took it away from me.”
“What?”
He stood up, embarrassed, and flicked a bunch of singles on the table. “You know, there was that cool line from that Bogart movie. ‘Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse.’”
“Jimmy.”
Within hours I was sitting with Jake Geyser at the Smoke House, having an unwelcome lunch, and immediately I contrasted the studio functionary with the mercurial Jimmy. Jake looked officious in a casual tan summer suit, with an apparently trendy narrow tie. He sported a fresh haircut, shorn close, military style. I noted something else. He looked away from me when he spoke, his eyes returning only when I responded. Evasiveness, perhaps; or a mannerism. Nevertheless, it was off-putting and irksome.
Jack Warner, learning through office scuttlebutt that I was often in the company of the hirelings, was concerned. I’d been spotted at Googie’s and elsewhere, even Carisa’s tenderloin flat. “Mr. Warner wonders if you’re all right.”
“All right?” I echoed.
“Are you bored?”
“Because of the company I keep?”
“You have an inordinate fascination with the death of Carisa Krausse?”
“And shouldn’t we all? Until it is solved?”
He whispered, through compressed lips, “There are people who do this for a living.”
“No matter.” I wanted to be away from him. “Tell me, Jake,” I said, stabbing a piece of wilted lettuce on my plate, “Detective Cotton tells me your prints were all over Carisa’s apartment.”
He turned his head, as though slapped. What a dreadful man, I thought. Had he ever been attractive? I had no idea why I thought that, other than the perverse sensation of realizing his life was probably spent in the shadow of better looking, huskier boys, athletes, prep school Princetonian pampered heroes. A hanger-on, a Uriah Heap. Now, water boy to the stars.
“Well,” he got defensive, “hardly all over.”
“How did that happen?”
“I stopped in once, to plead with her. Warner told me to go. Do you think I’d drive there? I told him to ask Tansi, you know, woman to woman, but Warner said no. Tansi, though obedient to a fault, made it clear she would not do that. And Warner, old school gentleman, believes you don’t ask ladies to do dirty work.”
“How noble,” I said. I meant it as a throwaway line, but it came out harsh, unfunny. “But you went.”
“Once, I swear.” He looked at his uneaten sandwich, mayonnaise oozing onto the plate. “Once. Inside that hell hole, moving through stacks of magazines. She either read a lot or someone mistook her apartment for a town dump.” His eyes flickered; he looked pleased with his own observation.
“Had you sent her a letter?” I asked, suddenly thinking of it.
“Of course not.”
“Everyone else seems to have.”
“Detective Cotton probably told you about the papers he found there.”
That stopped me cold. “What?”
“Oh!” Silence. “Oh well. Just before she died-was killed-that’s when I went there. Warner’s people made me offer her some money, but she had to sign a sheet disavowing any connection with Jimmy or the studio. Promise not to talk to Confidential. To the gossip columnists.”
“And she agreed?”
“Almost. I left the papers with her, and she promised to contact me. She had conditions.”
“Did she?”
“No.”
“Did you go there the day of the murder?”
“I swear I didn’t.”
“Maybe you did, and she had conditions you couldn’t accept.”
“And so I killed her? Good God!”
“How much money?”
He hedged. “Enough so that she could move out of that rattrap. Move on. Resettle. I knew she’d take it. She was…joyous.”
“The super, Mr. Vega, saw her arguing with an older man on the sidewalk.”
He squinted his eyes. “Good God. Yes, that was me. A few days before my visit. She was coming out of her apartment, and I pulled in front. She got frightened, and we screamed at each other. Or, rather, she screamed at me. I thought she’d hit me. She kept saying that Jimmy sent me.”