For a moment Tansi’s hands covered her face. “I pushed my way inside-yes, I was dressed for the party-and stormed around. She stood there laughing. ‘Look at you, all gussied up from prancing around in a party dress that would be old on a fifteen-year-old girl.’ Stuff like that. Then she said, ‘It’s no use. I got money from that eunuch Jake. Lots of money. Men are stupid. But money can’t buy me. I have a story to tell!’ Blindly, I swear I didn’t know what I was doing, I picked up that statue and threw it. Somehow it slipped, hit her in the shoulder, and she fell and hit her head. You know, it happened so fast. I just stood there.”
“She was unconscious?” From Mercy.
An awful silence. “I could see she was dead. All that blood. Just like that. It happened so fast. I, like, woke up, Edna. And I’m staring at a dead woman. I rushed around the apartment, thinking that no one knew I was there. All that clutter, that paper. A packrat. I remembered my letter, the things I said. I just panicked, opening drawers, and I found stacks of letters, one bunch in a rubber band. And on the top was my letter, folded inside the envelope I’d left it in. She’d scribbled on it in pencil, SAVE. In capital letters. That scared me. SAVE, she’d written. I grabbed that bunch of letters and put them into my purse. And then I left. No one was around. No one.”
“And Lydia’s letter was there?”
“That was stupid of me. I burned my letter, of course, and the others, one of them Lydia’s, which I read first. And then, when we were having lunch, the subject of the letters came up, and I’m staring at Lydia who’s been drinking, and I went on about the letters to Jimmy and Warner and talked of Jimmy’s nasty letter. I said Carisa should have been used to getting threats by mail. After all, Lydia, I said, there was yours, your accusing letter. I said it right to her. I realized my mistake, I couldn’t believe the words came out of my mouth, but I kept talking about Cotton and his investigation, and Lydia got drunker and then she went home. I could have slapped myself, but I thought-no one knows.”
“Tansi, you should have come forward…”
“No,” she said. “I couldn’t.”
“What if Jimmy had been arrested?” Mercy asked.
“Oh, I knew he wouldn’t be. Warner would take care of that. It had to be Max Kohl or Lydia. Either one. When Lydia died, everyone was safe. I put the idea that it was Lydia in Nell’s head earlier and that was that. Jimmy, well, the studio would never let him be charged with murder.”
She stopped. The word “murder” stayed in the air, and she trembled. “Oh, Edna, what do I do? It was an accident. It just happened. She fell…”
“But you hid it from Detective Cotton.”
“I know, I know, but I couldn’t face it. Now what?” She sucked in her breath. “Somebody had to do something, for God’s sake. Jimmy can’t help himself. No one would ever accuse him because there was no reason for him to hurt her because it would hurt his career. And his career is who he is. He’s an actor. You watched the dailies, Edna. Jett Rink. You wrote Rink before you knew Jimmy. Like a genius.”
“What if Lydia had been arrested?” Mercy insisted, breaking into Tansi’s ramble.
But Tansi wasn’t listening. “You know what happened in Marfa? I’m running errands for Stevens, nonstop, but at night Jimmy’d sit with me, talk to me, tell me about his mother, Fairmount, his motorcycle, his nephew Marcus, his dreams. Just talk, talk, talk. The Little Koffee Kup, with two K’s. The barbershop, the drug store. And then the stupid Carisa mess started. I’d warned him when he first started looking at her. She was playing a Mexican cook and goofing off. Stevens said get rid of her when I told him. I did, gladly. But she’d already started causing trouble for Jimmy. Tantrums, crying. Once she slapped him. He slapped her back. She said she’d kill him. Then we got her out of there, shipped her to El Paso, back to L.A. Jimmy was happy, but he told me that she would be a troublemaker. And do you know what I said to him? I’ll take care of it. I had no idea what I was talking about, but I meant it. Being around him does that to people. You’ve seen it.”
I watched her eyes get cloudy, dreamy. “The night she was gone, everyone was playing Monopoly or playing records or something, and Jimmy said let’s go for a ride. He took your old rattletrap car, Mercy, since Stevens took away his car for speeding. And we drove out under the Texas night sky, way out among the brush and the jackrabbits, and we sat in the car and talked and talked and talked. For hours. I mean he talked-the way he does. I just sat there. I couldn’t take my eyes off his face. And he had this six-pack of Lone Star beer, and we drank them all in Coca-Cola cups, there, under the stars, and munched on boxes of crackerjacks he got from someone. When I started to hiccough from that beer, he leaned over and kissed me on the mouth. He just did it. Once, quick. There I am hiccoughing like a fool, and he kisses me on the mouth. James Dean. Jimmy. And I smelled his stale tobacco breath, his beery breath, that raw smell, and then, you know, he just started up the car, glanced at me with a sliver of a smile, and he dropped me back to the hotel.”
Chapter 22
I’d been sitting at Mercy’s kitchen table for hours, a lazy afternoon spent watching her make dinner. Outside it was raining, a drizzly L.A. rain, a foggy low-lying mist settling over the lemon grove I could see just beyond the kitchen door. I found it tremendously relaxing, this drifting afternoon, as Mercy deftly chopped glistening stalks of celery, garish carrots, red potatoes, overripe tomatoes, tossing the colorful piles into a large cast-iron pot, already simmering on the stove with crackling, diced onions in lemony butter. Mercy’s soup-“my passion,” she told me, “my love.” A concoction to be blended with chunks of blood-red beef cubes, heated until the flavors merged, announced themselves to the small room, and served with a loaf of dark bread rising in the oven.
I started to cry. For three days, since the arrest, I’d been in a trance, airless, hidden away.
Mercy turned from the stove where she was dipping her nose to breathe in the oregano and garlic she’d just tossed in. “Edna.”
I shook my head. “No, it’s all right.” And it was. It was all right because justice, though relentless, had been served.
How close Mercy and I had become! The company of women, I thought. How do men do it, with their distances, their reserves, their denials? Civilization needs forthright, strong women. How else to survive, to guarantee the passing on of feeling, caring, passion, decency? They do have madness to deal with, women do. I looked at Mercy: a woman half my age, with the throaty whiskey voice, a woman not beautiful but whose face held such character, such resonance. We understood each other. Tacitly. Deliberately. Exquisitely.
I smiled.
“Now what?” Mercy smiled herself.
“I’m feeling a bit melancholy. These past days have been so sad.”
Yesterday I sat in the Blue Room, guarded by a nervous Jake who seemed lost without his feisty ally. I smiled at George Stevens who thanked me. He was happy. Jack Warner was away at a meeting but Jake handed me a note. I told you there was nothing to worry about. In Hollywood there’s always a happy ending. Furious, I crumpled it up. There was a note from Rock, away at the same meeting with Jack. I was wrong. I’m sorry. That note I folded and tucked into my purse.
Liz Taylor, dressed in a puffy white linen dress with an apricot scarf around her neck, slipped into the room so softly she seemed a wispy summer cloud. Her violet eyes flickered, and she leaned in, touched me on the shoulder. “It wasn’t supposed to end like this.” I couldn’t interpret the look on her face; the delicate corners of her mouth drooping melodramatically though her eyes-that almost unreal violet tint-seemed faraway. I said nothing. Was this the actress in one more final scene? I didn’t understand Hollywood, never would, didn’t want to. Not this world where lines were scripted for you, collectively rewritten: polished, deleted, giddily celebrated. Just like the people who spoke them. Who were the people who delivered them?