“That’s a good one,” Wyl said, eyeing it critically. “That’s what made him a star. That sense that he was laughing at himself. That bodybuilder with the impossible name has the same quality.”
I picked up the photo. “What’s this from?”
“His show,” Wyl said, masking astonishment at my ignorance. “ Tarnished Star. He played a sheriff who was really an escaped murderer. Self-defense, of course.”
“Slow down,” I said. “That was the story?”
“Imagine the conflict.” Wyl closed his eyes, looking dreamy. “There he is in this dusty little husk of a town with a badge on his shirt and this vast secret in his past, and every week someone came into town who knew who he really was. Everybody in the world came through that town. Sometimes good guys, sometimes bad guys. Once it was Oscar Wilde, if you can believe that, and Oscar Wilde knew. And, of course, he can’t just kill them, because he’s not a murderer at heart, so he has to-”
“Excuse?” the oldest Japanese said.
“Yes?” Wyl said, shaking his head free of memories. “I mean, Hai?”
“Dirty book about Madonna?” the Japanese man said.
“Over there,” Wyl said dismissively. “With the soft porn.”
“Excuse?” The Japanese man looked confused.
“ Poruno,” Wyl said impatiently. “ Pinkku. There.”
“ Hai, arigato,” the man said, trundling off in the direction Wyl had indicated.
I was examining Rick Hawke’s two-dimensional face. “I remember him,” I said. “It was a pretty good show.” I’d seen it in reruns as a little kid.
“It was a smash.” Wyl stared over my shoulder at the street. “Could have run for years.”
“And you say he quit.”
“In the middle of the third season.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Maybe 1957, ’58. Went to Hawaii, as I told you, and then to India.”
“Why?”
“Why’d he quit?” He drew in the corners of his mouth, sorting out his answer. It gave him a judicial air. “None of this is from the horse’s mouth, you understand.”
“He never talked to you about it.”
“Exactly. The trades said at the time it was a salary dispute. Later, people told me that it was because of the Black Widow.”
He seemed disinclined to go further, so I said, “The Black Widow.”
“You know,” he said reluctantly, “like the spider. His agent. He had the same agent as all those fifties actors whose names sounded like laundry detergents. Zip and Punch and Coit, and, oh, I don’t know, Tweak. The agent’s name was Ferris Hanks. He was a very bad man.”
“How was he bad?” A cluster of Japanese had formed around a large book that bore the bald title SEX.
“Manipulative, power-hungry, sick.” Wyl blinked the lined eyelids and opened his mouth to draw air. “Power and pain.”
“Ah,” I said. “And he made Max quit?”
Wyl shook his head. “No. He wanted Max to continue, I’m sure. Max-Rick-was a big star then. But the contracts back then were ironclad. If Max wanted to keep working, he had to keep working for Ferris. And Max wasn’t willing to have ten percent of his salary go for whips and bludgeons and star-struck boys for Ferris. So he quit. Heavens, but Ferris was mad.”
“I’ll bet he was.”
He seemed to get taller. “Are you going to continue making pointless interjections, or are you going to let me tell the story?”
I thought about it. “Should I say something?”
“A polite expression of interest wouldn’t be unwelcome.”
“Please, Wyl,” I said, “oh, please tell me the rest of the story.”
“Ferris went after him publicly.” His eyebrows chased each other toward his hairline. “ Publicly, can you imagine? In the fifties?”
“I’m not sure I follow you.”
“Perhaps that’s because you’re trying to lead,” he said. “Six months after Max quit, a story appeared in one of the scandal magazines of the day, implying quite clearly that Max-Rick-was gay. They didn’t say gay, of course. No one said ‘gay’ in the fifties. They simply suggested, quite openly in kind of a sneaking way, that Max preferred men to women, which was quite enough back then. Some of us, of course, were thrilled. I’m sure champagne corks popped all over the country. But a story like that would have finished Max, if he hadn’t been finished already. Everyone said later that Ferris had planted the story, even though it would have been suicide for him to do it.” He wound down, putting a hand over his heart as if to slow his breathing.
“Why suicide?”
“Because all of Ferris’s clients were gay. He was playing with fire, so to speak. The bad apple and all that. Contagion. Hollywood was absolutely gripped with paranoia at the time. The House Un-American Activities Committee, the Hollywood Ten and all.”
“That was communism.”
“That was rampant stupidity,” Wyl corrected, “seasoned with the most pernicious kind of cowardice. But if they can investigate one thing, they can investigate another. It was very dangerous for Ferris to have leaked that story. He must have been beside himself.”
“Why would he have done it?”
Wyl gave me a sidelong glance, Bette Davis at her most mysterious. “Wounded pride, perhaps. Hell hath no fury, and so forth.”
“Is Ferris still alive?” A boisterous laugh went up from the group of Japanese, crowded around the book.
“He couldn’t be,” Wyl said, glancing at his customers. “He’d be in his nineties.”
“I’ll let you get to them in a second. Wyl, do you know anything about Max having a new boy, just before he died?”
Wyl gave me the age-old gaze of the innocent. “How could he have? He loved Christy.”
The newspapers had taken note of Max’s death, but just barely. WEST HOLLYWOOD MAN KILLED read the headline on the third page of the Metro section of the Times. So they hadn’t yet figured out who Max had been, not too surprising when the call reporting his death came in so late. As I’d assumed they would, the cops had sat on the details of the mutilation.
I had a notebook page full of names and numbers from Christopher, and I used Wyl’s phone to call the first on the list, Marta Aguirre, his housekeeper, an illegal from San Salvador whom Christopher loathed with unconcealed intensity. A snoop and an eavesdropper and a petty thief, he called her. Everything stuck to her fingers. She sounded like just what I needed.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t home. I got an older woman who told me, in Spanish, that she was tired of people calling up and asking for Marta. I asked what time she’d be back and got hung up on.
Wyl was seated at the cash register, ringing up his entire stock of Madonna memorabilia-which included an aluminum brassiere of dubious provenance-as I tried the second number. “Shaw, Barton, and Jenks,” a woman said brightly, as though she’d thought of it herself.
“Mr. Jenks, please.” Holding the phone between ear and shoulder, I put both hands in the small of my back and arched backward. The ache in my kidney eased slightly.
“Who shall I say is calling?”
I bent forward, provoking a dry chuckle from Wyl, who enjoys seeing the aging process at work in other people. “Lysander Atwill, regarding Max Grover.”
I listened to two verses of “Under My Thumb” played pizzicato on what sounded like a pocket comb. The revolution was definitely over.
“Jenks,” said a man with an ersatz deep voice, sort of a near-beer bass. I had a feeling Mr. Jenks was a very small man.
“Lysander Atwill here,” I said, “calling from Boulder?”
“Yes?”
“I’m a partner in Atwill, Grey, and Gorgonzola. We handle affairs for Mr. Grover’s sister, Helen.” According to Christopher, Helen was the sole surviving member of Max’s family, the last Grover left back in Boulder.
“Terrible thing,” Mr. Jenks said, letting his voice ease up half an octave.
“We’re all shocked here in Boulder, of course.”
A lawyer’s pause. “How can I help you, Mr. Atwill?”
“Well, I know this sounds a bit quick off the mark, but I have a question about Mr. Grover’s will, which I understand you prepared.”