Lone star

that warmed the mouth. Our boy of perpetual surprises.

Jimmy purposely changed the subject and chatted about Lydia who, he announced, had called him the night before, somnambulant, in a narcotic haze.

“What did she say?” I asked at the same moment Tommy did. We waited.

“It was hard to understand her, you know. She said she was alone. She felt that Nell leaving her without warning, roommates and friends no more, was too much.”

“What do you do when someone you know is taking narcotics?” Vaguely, I thought of a Chicago jazz saxophonist I once befriended, who died one night at the apartment of a friend. And a book I’d read as a young woman: Thomas DeQuincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater. And Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” That’s it. My knowledge of drugs is literary. Sometimes it’s safer that way.

Both men stared at me, and neither answered.

Jimmy went on. “She said she was scared. Really frightened.”

“Of what?”

“She didn’t say. I think because Carisa was murdered, and they were friends. After a while I realized she was still on the line but saying nothing.” He shrugged his shoulders. “So I hung up.”

“That’s it?” I asked.

Jimmy smiled. “I had to go to bed.”

Late that afternoon I sat with Jack Warner in his office, and I was certain I knew why. Tansi had cornered me, predictably frantic, saying Jack requested a brief meeting. “Of course, I told him you’d be there,” she said, overlapping my stuttered one word “Why?” But I dutifully went, and sat there, uncomfortable in a straight-backed chair, while he fiddled with a stack of memos on his desk. I cleared my throat. “Tansi’s tone suggested some immediacy.”

He looked up, but didn’t smile. “Tansi assumes everything I say is urgent.”

“And it isn’t?”

For a second I saw wariness in his eyes. That thin sinister moustache twitched. This dapper man in the pristine blue suit, with the sensible no-nonsense haircut, the manicured hands idly leafing through the memos, didn’t know how to read me. A humorless man, unfortunately; a man who decided comedy had no rewards. “It is the way I run my business.” Said levelly; matter-of-fact, with the slightest of edges.

“Well…” I began.

“Jimmy,” he said, and the slender fingers stopped drumming the memos.

I waited.

“Well?” he asked, tilting his head.

“I didn’t realize it was a question.”

He leaned back in his chair, swiveled left and right, folded his hands behind his head, and contemplated me. “I’m assuming you know, deep down, that he probably killed that woman.”

“I know no such thing, Jack.” I sat up, rail stiff. “And she had a name. Carisa Krausse.”

He shook his head back and forth, impatient. “This has to go away, Edna.”

“But a murder…”

“It has to go away. Look, I don’t know if Jimmy Dean killed her-Carisa-but you’re a little too close to the fire, Edna.”

“What does that mean?”

Cloudy, unblinking eyes: “I don’t care, frankly, about Jimmy’s private life because, to tell you the truth, he no longer has a private life. None of them do-Jimmy, Liz, Rock. All of them.”

“We all have private lives.”

“Not stars like those three. Jimmy is young. He doesn’t understand what’s at stake here. Maybe he killed her, maybe he didn’t. It has to go away. You don’t understand…”

I interrupted. “You think I’m meddling? That’s why I’m here?”

He sat forward. “We can’t have you traipsing around Skid Row.” He stopped. “Look, Edna, we’re friends, the two of us. We’ve put in place a vast ungainly machinery, you and I. Giant is a huge bestseller and soon to be a blockbuster movie. An epic. It’s what Hollywood does best. Romance, up there on the screen. It’s beyond private lives now. This isn’t just James Dean here, some haywire hayseed messing up. James Dean is a creation, a slick glossy face that looks good on the cover of Photoplay. Rock Hudson-last year Magnificent Obsession. This year’s most popular man in Hollywood. Number one. Liz Taylor, one of the great beauties. My job is to cultivate the dream. In movie houses all over America people stare up at that screen and see a world they’ll never have, can only imagine. Bigger than life Texas romance, oil millionaires, furs, cars, beautiful people like Rock and Liz and Jimmy. Real people don’t look like that, Edna. Look around you.”

“It’s all a lie, then?”

“Of course it is. It’s the grand illusion. Cinemascope and Technicolor-a moviemaker’s palette. We paint dreams.”

“And what about the nightmares?”

“You don’t understand.”

“But I do.”

“Edna, it’s fantasy writ large.” He sighed. “Hollywood is a star factory. Rock and Liz, they understand this. The game. Liz smiles and weeps and flashes her eyes and thinks, I’ll be a beauty forever. The world’s oldest ingenue. The little girl from National Velvet. Rock thinks his granite chin and rugged physique will stay chiseled forever. What other choice do they have but to believe this? But Jimmy has to learn that Hollywood is a big fat sow sloshing through the mud, moving, never stopping, effortlessly. And all about her flies swarm and buzz and hum and dip and flutter. Liz and Rock and Jimmy are the flies right now: they get all the attention. But the sow always moves on, plodding, and after a while there are new flies overhead.” Suddenly, he stood up. “Enough. I didn’t mean to get into all this. It’s just that it all,” he waved his hand in the air, “has to go away.”

I stood up. “I still don’t know why you called me in here,” I grumbled.

His baffled look suggested I was a slow-witted old lady. “Let me put it this way. We’ll handle the Jimmy business.”

“Of course.” I turned to leave.

“I don’t think I’ve convinced you.”

I looked back. “Did you really expect to?”

That surprised him. “Well, actually, no. I don’t have you under contract.”

I fiddled with my purse, a little nervous, and started to walk out.

“Edna.” I turned back. He was opening a small jewelry box, tan leather flecked with gold. The overhead light caught the chaotic glint of diamonds on a sleek gold band. Good God, I thought, is the man trying to buy me off with riches?

“Lovely,” I said, backing up.

“It’s just a bauble,” Jack said, flashing it before me. “A present for Liz. She likes presents.” He snapped the case shut. “She likes to feel wanted, appreciated.”

“Don’t we all,” I snapped, and left the office.

Chapter 14

That weekend, on a crisp, brassy Saturday afternoon, Mercy and I drove back to Carisa’s apartment. I had one purpose in returning: Connie Zuniga, Vega’s fourteen-year-old granddaughter.

“But why the need for surprise?” Mercy asked.

“I don’t want her rehearsed story. In Hollywood everyone talks like they’ve memorized a script.”

Mercy glanced at me as she pulled up to a light on Fifth Street. “But she’s already told her story to Detective Cotton.”