“Don’t let people be mean to you, Liz.”
She nodded, eyes wide. “Anyway, I decided to back off, cut my losses, you know. Especially now. It’s annoying how one day you wake up and there it is slamming you in the face: time is going by, lickety-split, and I’m wasting it with a bunch of creeps. Tony is the dirt road to nowhere. I’d thought I’d get parts by now.”
“You got Max as your agent through Tony, right?”
She rolled her eyeballs and grunted. “That’s funny. I had this here agent-at least he had a card that said that-when I met Tony. Ethan introduced us. Max was Tony’s agent. Tony started out okay, a decent stand-up comic making fun of himself. Real likeable. He ain’t as stupid as…well, he lets on like he is. It made for a funny act onstage. But he got fat and drank and started wearing those sequined tuxedo jackets with wide lapels with bells and whistles all over them, and he practiced insulting old ladies in the grocery store. Real clever, no?”
The waitress placed our sandwiches on the table, poured coffee, so Liz stopped talking, watching her intently, waiting until she moved away. She spoke in a theatrical whisper. “Waitresses hear too much, Miss Ferber. They’re phonies. I don’t want to end up in the gossip sheets.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that.”
She squinted at me. “I am with you. You’re famous.”
“Not in this restaurant.”
“Well, anyway, Max said some nasty things to me. I started hating him.”
I bristled. “Max could never be unkind.”
“Try going into business with him, lady.” She rolled her tongue out suddenly, like an anxious frog. “Lord, I shouldn’t speak bad of the dead, right?”
I shrugged. “I do it all the time. The dead are wonderful targets.”
Now her tongue rolled over her lower lip, the frog having captured the unsuspecting fly. “Not surprising to me. You got you some mouth.” She looked smug, happy with her put down.
“Go on, Liz. In a war of words, I…well, never mind.”
She leaned across the table, her pale gray eyes becoming dark marbles. “I just lied to you, Miss Ferber. Max wasn’t that bad. I mean, I used to get mad because he couldn’t find me no work. But then Max married Alice, and all hell broke out. World War Three. I mean, Tony went ballistic. Ethan couldn’t speak in complete sentences. I only met this holier-than-thou Lenny one time, but he was a grease ball, flashy suits and women and doling out those dollar bills to the dizzy boys. But suddenly everything had to change. Tony quit Max. So I did. It was a dumb move because it left me with nothing. But at the time I thought-well, Tony says Frank Sinatra is going to get him gigs. Why not me, too?”
“Was Ava around then?”
“Yeah, Ava was in the picture then. The first time we met she was real nice, which surprised the hell out of me. When Frank made fun of me, she rubbed my shoulder, like we were old girlfriends. I mean, you’d think she’d be a bitch.” She smirked. “I would if I was her. With that face. I used to be friends with a crew guy at Metro. He said she was common people. She’d eat lunch with the crew, not in her dressing room. So I thought, well, she’d help me. I wasn’t allowed to ask her. Ethan warned me-don’t you dare ask for a favor. Frank’ll go nuts.”
“Tell me about Frank.”
“What’s to tell?” Liz took a compact from her purse and checked her face. “Excuse me a sec, Miss Ferber.” She found a tube of lipstick and dabbed at her lower lip, then rolled her tongue over her lips. Satisfied, she sat back.
The waitress dropped dessert menus with us, and Liz deliberated with rapt concentration, her fingers pointing from one to the other, unable to decide. “The cheesecake,” she told the waitress. “You know, a big slice.” She checked her wristwatch. “I gotta watch the time, Miss Ferber.”
“Frank,” I repeated.
“A smug bastard. Treats me like I was a streetwalker. But then he treats all women that way, even his beloved Ava. He likes that about her. He’s got a voice and all, but so what?”
“I know. It’s amazing how the world makes excuses for people with talent or genius. The poor slob who plods along at his job is roundly upbraided for a minor mistake, while Einstein can routinely and carelessly spill his coffee on you and we’d find it harmless, if not an amusing lapse. A charming idiosyncrasy perhaps.”
Wide-eyed now. “What?”
“Do you think that he could kill anyone?”
The question stopped her cold. A giggle escaped her throat. She pointed a finger at me, a gun, while she mouthed the words: bang bang. “Anyone could. You could.” She gave me a creepy smile. “You probably have, Miss Ferber.”
I grinned. “I’ve been tempted.”
She laughed. “Ain’t that the truth.” She lit a cigarette as the waitress placed a slab of cheesecake before her. “One of Frank’s goons might. Have you seen them? They’re like…buildings. But I don’t know…”
“Yes, I’ve met one. He was very polite.”
She grumbled. “Under orders probably not to kill you just yet.”
I clicked my tongue. “Thank you, dear. A comforting thought.”
“Frank is real sick of Tony these days.” She dug into the cheesecake.
“I noticed that.”
“After a while a leech starts getting on your nerves. Ask me about it. Tony lives with me-not for much longer, though. Anyway, Frank’s had it up to here, and Tony knows it now. That’s why they’re yammering about moving back to old New Jersey again, life among the goombahs. It ain’t gonna happen. Ethan thinks he can make Frankie boy beg them to stay here. Lot of good it’ll do him. But Frank’s a savvy L.A. customer, no? It don’t work. But, you know, it’s not only Tony. Frank’s had it with Ethan, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ethan used to see Frank as a God. Frankie this, Frankie that. He got on my one remaining nerve, let me tell you. Again, you know, the coattails to a world of money and cars and Palm Springs homes and Malibu and la-di-dah stuff. But Frank looks at Ethan as Tony’s zookeeper, small fry Metro hack that he is. It finally dawned on Ethan. Suddenly Frank’s colors are fading away. There’s Ethan, grinning that empty smile of his-alone. He’s got a brain that scares me-like a machine chugging along. He said something smart-ass after that ride home from Ava’s. Frank dropped both of them at my apartment-dumped them at my place. Tony said Frank treated them like trash in the car. Ethan said, ‘Frankie isn’t worth my little finger.’ Wow! Then he said, ‘Someday somebody is gonna plug him. Whoever did Max in got the wrong slob!’ Wow!”
“An angry man.”
“Tell me about it. Inside my apartment Ethan started in on that ‘failure’ crap-how he despised failure. Failure is an awful word, he said. All around him is failure. My God, he’s a bore. He pointed at Tony. Then at me, would you believe? The bastard. Then, at a picture of Frank Tony pinned to the goddamn wall. The biggest failure of all, Frank is. He’s glad that Frank is slipping, out of a contract at Metro, you know. ‘I still got my job at Metro,’ he said. ‘And my real estate.’ And Tony, to the slob’s credit, yelled back at him, “Yeah, but you just got enough to pay the tax on the Paradise bar.”