I, the veteran interviewer, with miles of soul-numbing Republican and Democratic Presidential Conventions under my younger belt, segued neatly into the events of the murder. After all, we sat across the street from the murder scene. So they chattered freely about their encounters with Jimmy, and nothing they offered was news to me. I was beginning to get depressed. For two inveterate watchers, they seemed to register very little. Days were blurs, times indefinite, hours merging daylight with evening; yes, that day, or was it…no…maybe…really, he was here twice…it’s hard to keep track…but he had the station wagon not the…never the sports car…On and on. I got tired.
Sitting back, my head against the plate-glass window, I kept listening.
Alva asked for another drink. I ordered it. Alva said would I mind if he smoked. I nodded. Go ahead. He offered me one. I took it, fiddled with it, and the boy lit it for me, very gentlemanly, but then I realized it was stale, and put it out in the ashtray. His sister Alyce was shaking her head. “What?” I asked. Alyce muttered something about ladies not smoking.
Ladies, I thought, need to smoke when the conversation bored so thoroughly, massively.
Alva blew smoke into my face. “That other guy is a pest, though,” he said.
I sat up. “What other guy?”
“You know, from the studio.” He described Jake Geyser, imperfectly. “He looks at you like you’re a bug” and “He talks like he’s a prince or something.”
“What about him?”
“A couple times when we waited here, we’d see this guy. Like he was checking up on James.”
“Did you talk to him?”
Alyce responded. “Yeah. He told us to get lost. He’d call the police if we kept hanging around James. He was here more than James. The guy would be around, like watching.”
“He acted like he was his guardian or something,” Alva noted.
“James has a right to go anywhere he wants.”
Alva nodded. Alyce nodded.
I nodded.
“I mean,” Alyce went on, “he looks angry a lot, like he was going to punish him.”
Doubtless he wished he could. Puritan stockades on the town green; whippings; Chinese water torture; his face on the cutting room floor.
“What about Carisa Krausse? Did you talk to her?”
“No, we don’t like James’ girlfriends.”
“Did you ever see Carisa with Jimmy?”
Alyce whispered, “No, but we knew he went to see her. We saw him walk in there. And we’d see her around the streets.”
They looked at each other, confused. “The last time we saw her was here. Right here. In this restaurant. This table.”
“You were in the restaurant?” I asked.
They shook their heads, no. “We were walking back and forth on the sidewalk and I looked in. She was sitting right where Alyce is, that seat, facing out to the street.”
“Alone?”
“No, she was talking to some friend of hers, some girl.”
“Are you sure it was Carisa?”
“Oh, yeah, she had that look, you know.”
“What look?”
“Hollywood movie star, the makeup, the hands holding the cigarette in the air, the…the…chin up, the smile.”
But Alva interrupted, “But she wasn’t smiling, Alyce.”
Alyce nodded. “That’s right. She was angry about something.”
“How could you tell from outside?”
“Because when I spotted her, I said to Alva-she’s in there. And maybe James is with her, but it was just this woman with her. But she was waving her arms, and her face was all…” She stopped.
“Contorted.” He finished.
“Contorted. You could tell she was yelling. And her girlfriend was yelling back. I could see her shaking her head back and forth, like no, no, no, no, no. You know.”
“Then what happened?”
“Nothing. We left.”
“Did you recognize the woman she was with?”
“No. It was Carisa Krausse I watched.”
“Were you here on the day Carisa died?” I asked.
They looked at each other. They nodded.
“What did you see?”
They stiffened. “Nothing. We didn’t stay. I mean, we came here because we thought we saw him driving this way, but everything was real quiet here. So we just left.”
“We wanted to get back to the cocktail party in case he went back.”
“So you saw him leave the party earlier?”
They nodded. Alyce said, “That’s why we thought he was coming here.”
Alva stood up. “We gotta go.”
Alyce jumped up.
“You’re making us nervous,” Alva looked to the doorway. “What does this have to do with James Dean?”
“I don’t know.”
“I thought you were going to tell us stories.”
“I did, didn’t I?
They looked at each other. “We don’t know if you like him the way we do.”
“Of course I like him.”
Alva, panicking, “We don’t know if we believe you.”
Chapter 19
Jimmy invited some friends to his new apartment in Sherman Oaks. “It’s not a party. I don’t like parties,” he told me on the phone. “But I got this cool new home.” I had to attend, he insisted. “You got to, Miss Edna. My new place is where I hide away from the world.”
“You’re not exactly hiding if you throw a party.”
“It’s not a party.”
He was making last-minute phone calls. He begged Liz Taylor until she said she’d stop in. She had another obligation. Mercy balked, but Jimmy persisted. I asked him if he’d invited Rock Hudson. “That famous star of I Was a Shoplifter?” To my bafflement, Jimmy explained, “One of his early classic roles.” I kept saying no. Nighttime parties, unlike the serene afternoon luncheons and the genteel dinner parties I hosted, were for the young. But Tansi, all a-titter, finally convinced me; and so Mercy picked me up at the hotel and then Tansi at her apartment on Santa Monica Boulevard.
Tansi was waiting at the curb, and with her was Nell Meyers. That surprised me. Well, maybe this party was not so bad an idea after all.
Tansi was dressed in gold pedal-pushers I deemed too young for her; a white puffy blouse, cinched at the waist by a huge gold belt; and she wore a nail polish so loud it called attention to her bony, unlovely fingers.
I smiled at Nell, who didn’t smile back. She fascinated me, this young girl new to Jimmy’s world. Script girl to the stars, the Bohemian with her all-black outfits and her Garboesque makeup, both at odds with her squat, cast-iron stove build and that bobbed Anita Loos hairdo. Had Jimmy invited her? Or had Tansi convinced her to come along, acting as her protector since she’d engineered Nell’s departure from the Studio Club?
“Jimmy said to bring Nell,” Tansi told us. “At first she said no, but I told her she can’t hide away in her room. This is Jimmy’s new apartment we’re going to see.”
Nell said nothing, but looked bored, actually yawning and staring out the window.
Tansi talked as though Nell were not there: “Nell is part of the Beatnik crowd that hangs out at some cafe near Pershing Square.
Nell said nothing. Then, out of the blue, “Jimmy plays the bongos.”
I stared, transfixed. I caught Mercy’s eye. “Bongos?”
“He’s very good.” Mercy was savoring this.
“You’ve heard him?”
“I have,” Nell answered.
I enjoyed the leisurely ride out of L.A. into the twisting lanes and woods of San Fernando Valley. It was a cool night, and the air seemed to hum. Once there, we trudged up a narrow lane to what struck me as a rustic hunter’s lodge, hidden under dense shrubbery, wild eucalyptus, sagging palm trees. I smelled ripe lemons. Jimmy rushed down to greet us, dressed in tight jeans and a white T-shirt, a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve. He gallantly took my elbow, escorting me. “My hideaway,” he said.