“Pier Angeli used to slap my face. I’d slap her back. Lord, Natalie Wood slapped Sal Mineo one afternoon. That surprised the hell out of him.”
“Why?”
“He was, I don’t know, being a pest and she was having a bad day.”
Jimmy got quiet. I watched him wither, sink back into a seat, pull his knees up and wrap his arms around them. I waited. He was staring at his knees.
The phone rang, and I jumped. It had rung a few minutes before Jimmy arrived and I’d ignored it. Now, flummoxed, I went into the bedroom to answer it. It was Tansi, eager to talk. “I’ll call you back,” I told her. “Jimmy’s here.”
“There?” Tansi exclaimed. “Why?”
“I’ll call you back.”
But when I returned to the living room, Jimmy was gone. As I sat down, I glanced at the table where I had laid Jimmy’s gift, the statue without a face. It was gone. He’d taken it back.
Tansi, when I reached her-her line was busy, and I got irritated-wanted to know what Jimmy was doing, but I dismissed her curiosity. “He dropped off a drawing he’d made.”
“Of what?’
“No matter, Tansi.”
“Stevens was looking for him. Everyone made excuses.” She waited for me to answer, but I kept quiet. “Edna, I just have to tell you about a lunch I just had. With Nell and Lydia.”
“I thought Nell moved in with you, and Lydia was angry, hurt.”
“That’s it exactly. You see, Nell is a sweetie, a little too young and naive maybe. So after she moved out and Lydia had that nasty tantrum, Nell started feeling funny about it. She doesn’t like to hurt people’s feelings, of course. So she asked me to help, and I said-how? I didn’t know what to do…”
“Tansi, get on with it, please.” I was impatient, looking at the spot where the odd statue had rested. He’d even taken the newspaper he’d used to wrap it in.
“So we three had lunch at this jazz club on the Strip. Chatting, clearing the air, Nell apologizing and saying she had to get on with her life. She wanted no hard feelings.”
“And how did Lydia take it?”
“Well, that was odd, really. At first she was cold, distant. She even made a crack about how chubby Nell is, how she could never be an actress looking like that. Imagine! Then she seemed to just relax. She said it didn’t matter any more. You know what she said? ‘We were really never friends, just roommates.’ That was a little hard, I thought, but Nell just nodded, happy to be forgiven.”
None of this was earth-shattering revelation or headline news. Lydia and Nell talk, bold face print. L.A. Times. “So they really didn’t iron out differences?” I said, bored. “Just quietly walked away from each other.”
“I suppose so.” I could tell Tansi didn’t like my facile summary.
“Seems unnecessary to me.”
“I mean-it was a bizarre lunch. I felt I was in the middle of a novel.”
The Woman in the Gray Flannel Life.
“Did Lydia talk about the murder?” I interrupted.
“Of course, we all did. But Nell said very little. You know how she told everyone she thought Lydia killed Carisa.”
“And yet you had a delightful lunch?”
“Well, she didn’t accuse her at the table. I know Nell was afraid Lydia might have heard what she’d told people, but Lydia never mentioned it.” Tansi quipped, “That would be hard for the digestive system.”
“Truly,” I agreed. “Murder while the ketchup oozes onto the table.”
“Lydia changed at the end, though. Strange. She drank too many cocktails, which I paid for, by the way. Nell and I each had a couple of their famous Manhattans. Lydia kept drinking, and the lunch ended in shambles. I mean, she was the one who brought up the murder, and then she started to sob. But then it was all about Jimmy. And it had nothing to do with Carisa. Once Jimmy entered the conversation, everything was about him. Lydia said she was afraid of Detective Cotton.”
“Why?”
“The way he interrogated her, I guess.”
“Well, is she hiding something?”
“I don’t know. But Nell, I learned, seems to have a crush on Jimmy. It’s charming.”
“So do you.”
Tansi laughed. “Of course, we all do, Edna. But I have more of a professional obligation to him. He can be very nice and…” On and on she went. Call it what you will, Tansi Rowland, I thought, but you’re as smitten as a love-starved spinster dreaming of Clark Gable sans undershirt in It Happened One Night. Which, admittedly, is not hard to do. I’d been there myself, unexpectedly, sitting in a dark movie theater in New York on a chilly fall afternoon. But that was years back. Now, ancient as dust, I could only recollect, albeit faintly. I was the lifetime spinster, by choice.
“So how did it end?” I wanted to hang up the phone.
“Lydia said she was going home to nap. She was weeping at the end but, well, that was because of Jimmy, not us.”
I considered that the only ones viewing the lunch as salutary were Nell and Tansi. Lydia, perhaps, had a different slant; a woman driven to despair by their words and their presence.
“But I think she’s getting over Jimmy,” Tansi said. Over the phone lines I heard Tansi laugh. “The last thing she said was that he’s as good an ending as any other man.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“I took it to mean she was going to forget him.”
Yet the Lydia who phoned me later that night was hardly the woman Tansi described. I heard hysteria, sputtering, inarticulate words. At first I had no idea who was calling me, until Lydia, in a moment of lucidity, mentioned that lunch with Tansi and Nell. “We talked of you,” Lydia said, “and Tansi said you were a good friend and I thought of you because I had to call someone.”
“Tansi told you to call me?”
Slurred speech, rambling. “No, she said she calls you. You’re always a comfort. Jimmy says he calls you, stops in. He told me. Everybody talks to you. You are the lady novelist.” The epithet made me wince. What was going on here? “And I just dialed the Ambassador, and now you’re on the phone with me.”
My lucky day, I thought. But maybe a good thing. I hadn’t really talked to Lydia Plummer, who seemed somehow to figure in the murder. Friend of Carisa, ex-roommate, inheritor of Carisa’s two boyfriends, Jimmy and Max Kohl. And, more importantly, famously accused of the murder itself-by Nell, charming luncheon companion. Schemes of revenge (maybe with Josh) against Jimmy.
But Lydia made little sense. I waited, hoping for something lucid to emerge, though, as the minutes went by, I despaired of that random morsel. “Would you believe…a part for me…the…only time…Jimmy said he’ll take care of it…and someone…well…just that it was…I don’t care…perhaps you know…do you know…” On and on, drunk, most likely; in a narcotic stupor, maybe. “You know…Carisa was my enemy but…but what really gets me…just think about it…Jimmy leaving me. Me. Leaving me.” She started to scramble the words, then dissolved into sobbing. “Carisa, yes, doomed…a witch you know…but me?”
I got tired of the sloppy emotion. “Lydia, perhaps you need rest. Go away. Go back home.”
“Home? I burned those bridges…bridge…Tansi told me to stop blaming Jimmy. But Jimmy is to blame…you know…you…behind every bad story in Hollywood sits Jimmy. Carisa told me…”
“What?”
Lydia suddenly seemed to focus. “You know, I thought nobody knew about the letter I wrote to her. All those threats.”
“Jimmy’s letter?”
“I said mean things about her and Jimmy. Nasty. Those lies Carisa spread. I told her to stop it. About Jimmy and his biker friends. Even Max. All the rumors about Jimmy at strange parties in the Valley. Jimmy is not like that. I wanted her to leave me and Jimmy alone.”
“You sent a letter to Carisa?”
“Max Kohl told me things, and I wanted to hurt…”
“You sent a letter?”