“No other visitors?”
“No one as I can see.”
“I thought she’d be at home.”
“Well, ma’am, some folks gotta have themselves a job.”
That surprised me. I just assumed Sophie, leaving Max’s employment in a huff, had resigned herself to a life lived with early suppers and genteel canasta and Arthur Godfrey.
“And who are you?”
“The superintendent.” He nodded toward a closed door. “That’s my apartment right there. The wife is probably pinned against the door eavesdropping on us now. She’s got less of a life than me.” He chortled, his head bouncing up and down.
“Can you tell me where she works?”
Sophie, he volunteered, worked part-time a couple days a week in a real estate office around the corner. “Pays the rent,” the man muttered. “Barely.” Leading me outside, he pointed me in the right direction, though when I glanced back, he was still standing on the sidewalk, that same bemused look on his face.
The real estate office was a cubbyhole occupying the corner of a flat-roofed stucco building, the anteroom the size of a closet, where Sophie Barnes now sat leafing through a movie magazine-Movieland, I could see from the doorway. There was an office behind it, the door shut, a brass plate announcing Private. She scarcely looked up when I walked in, engrossed in her fan magazine, and she mumbled something about Mr. Janssen being gone for the day. Then, recognizing my face, she sucked in her breath and dropped the magazine on the top of others. Photoplay, Modern Screen. “Miss Ferber.”
“Hello, Sophie.” I moved closer and smiled. “You recognize me? We spoke on the phone years ago and…”
Abruptly, glancing back at the closed door, “I know you. You were at the Paradise with Alice and Lorena that night. Someone pointed you out to me.”
“That’s right. You were there with friends.”
“Yes, I was.” Brusque, unfriendly.
“Is something the matter, Sophie?”
She shuffled the movie magazines on her desk, and then neatened the pile slowly. Her fingertips drummed on the top one. Betty Grable smiled at the camera, leaning against a white pillar.
“I don’t want to be bothered.” She looked away.
“I’m here for Max.”
At the mention of his name, she flinched, and her right hand flew to her cheek. “Max.” She said his name softly. “He’s dead.”
“Sophie, someone murdered him.”
Her eyes got wet, and she rubbed them with the backs of her hands. Her words were whispered. “Who would do that to Max?”
I slid into a chair in front of her desk. “I have some ideas, Sophie.” I waited patiently. Her eyes were hard, but there was something else there now: curiosity.
“What do you want from me?” Her fingers drummed Betty Grable’s face.
“I think you can help me.”
She gasped, threw back her head. Red blotches on her neck. A hand gripped the edge of the desk. When she looked back at me, her eyes betrayed fear. “I warned him.” She swallowed her words.
“How?”
“He was playing with fire. That support of those men. Max talked a blue streak about politics, but he just…talked. I’d know if he was a Communist. I knew all his business.”
Flat out, “Of course, he wasn’t a Communist.”
“I know. He wasn’t. But he had to get involved in that brouhaha, him and Sol yammering all day long. So angry at the way the country was going. And now he’s dead.” She blinked wildly. “And…Sol.”
“Why did you leave him, Sophie?”
A long silence. She fiddled with the copy of Movieland. She held a pencil in one hand and idly doodled on the cover, black lines drawn across Betty Grable’s pristine and glossy complexion. Finally, nervous, she picked up all the magazines and dropped them into a drawer. She smiled thinly. “Mr. Janssen gets angry when I read them. He says they’re trashy. But when he’s out of the office…” She flipped her hands in the air, a devil-may-care gesture. “I spent a lifetime with Max and with movie stars.” She chuckled. “That is, people who wanted to be movie stars. So it sort of got into my blood. It’s a bad habit to break.” She rolled her eyes.
“There are worse habits, Sophie.”
She nodded. “Now I set up appointments for newcomers to L.A. to look at cheap apartments. Not quite the same thing, is it?” She stared into my face. “With Max, I felt a heartbeat away from the world of the movies.”
She lapsed into silence while I waited. “Miss Ferber, I was a very foolish woman. I’m certain you’ve heard the stories about me. I’m sure I was the laughing stock of that crowd. Ava and Frank and…Alice.”
“No, not true,” I told her. “Max worried about you, as did the others.”
“Well, I made a fool of myself. I let myself believe that he and I had closeness-but we did. We spent years as a team. But when he got married, it knocked me off balance. I felt-betrayed. I was a foolish, foolish woman. So I got bitter and I made things worse. I walked away. I’ll show him. The bastard. He’ll miss me. He’ll beg…” She waved a hand in the air dismissively. “Sometimes you do something that you know is all wrong, like you can see yourself outside of yourself and you say, stop, stop, stop, but you can’t.” Her voice was strained and weary, almost a whisper.
“You miss him. Sophie.” An epitaph for both of us.
Suddenly she was crying. “What do you think? He was such a good man. He gave me a life I thought I’d never have. On the outside it was nothing-the old maid in the front office. But we laughed and told stories and…” She closed her eyes. “He never made me any promises he didn’t keep.” She reached into a drawer and took out a tissue, dabbed at her eyes. The crumpled tissue dropped into her lap, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself, Sophie. You’re not the first woman who’s tumbled like that. You were a woman who…”
“But foolish, foolish.” She seemed surprised the tissue was not clutched in her hand.
“I need you to help me now,” I said, and she sat up, a puzzled look on her face.
“How?”
“That night at the Paradise. You were there with friends and…”
“And I had a fit, stormed out of there. A birthday party I ruined.”
“But why?”
She sighed. “Those are my friends, those three women. My only friends. We play cards together, see movies, travel to places for the day, shop and gab. But mostly we get on one another’s nerves.” Her laugh was brittle. “We’re the only friends we got. Well, that night Mina, one of them, the most annoying, spotted Alice at your table, so, of course, she had to tease me about it. I took a little of it. After all, I’m used to the cruelty of other people who get something out of hurting others. But I simmered. A slow burn, let me tell you. The party went on, but I sat there quietly, nursing this one drink I always allow myself when I go out.”
“Then you exploded.”
She shook her head back and forth. “A class act, no? You three ladies had left there by then, and my mood was getting darker and darker. Ethan was in the booth with a drunk Tony, and he sent over a bottle of wine for the birthday girl. I’d been ready to head out of there, but that wine meant I’d have to stay longer. Nobody was ready to light the damn candles. After a half bottle of free wine, Mina chided me again about Alice-chubby Alice, not even a pretty starlet to intoxicate Max. And a murdering widow, a mob wife. It was getting late. I’d wanted to leave an hour earlier. When they lit the candles on the cake, I exploded and”-she laughed out loud-“ruined the evening for everyone.”
“Well, it sounds to me like you enjoyed yourself. At the end.”
A twinkle in her eye. “It did feel good to see frosting on that beastly woman. She hasn’t talked to me since. Candles in her blue hair.” Her voice got low. “Then I learned the following day that Max was shot to death, and…and I didn’t know what to do.”