Lone star

promised Home-Cooked Meals. “I have a feeling somebody wants to tell me something,” I’d told Mercy earlier. Polly had phoned, telling me the name of the restaurant and the time. Now I spotted the back of Tommy’s head, and for a second thought Jimmy had arrived: that sandy-colored hair, styled into a gentle pompadour, but, lamentably, the red jacket as well. The red badge of slavery, I thought. Hester Prynne wearing the symbol of sin-and, ironically, love. Tommy, suited up for servile fancy.

Polly, spotting us, waved. “Oh, I’m glad you came, Miss McCambridge.” She turned to Tommy. “This is a pleasure. An Academy Award winner. A Pulitzer Prize winner. Both at our table.” Tommy looked confused. “Awards, Tommy,” she said, irritated. “At the top of their profession.” Polly was dressed in a polka-dot dress with a lime- green sweater, buttoned at the collar. She looked cute-little-girl now, wandering from schoolyard hopscotch. She’d even styled her hair-not cinnamon tonight, but a sensible auburn-into a ponytail.

Of course, we talked about Lydia, and Tommy shared his inanity. “The wages of sin are death.” He spoke in a preachy voice, didactic as all hell. Polly frowned at him and delivered her own practiced line: “I always felt sorry for her-she seemed to be always running into trouble.”

Mercy asked, “Were you surprised at her death?”

A pause. Then Polly spoke in a small voice. “I don’t think about people dying.”

We delayed ordering because Jimmy hadn’t arrived, and eventually Polly, glancing one last time at the doorway, drummed her index finger on the menu. “I don’t think he’s coming.” That made everyone nervous, as though Jimmy were the glue that held everything together. His absence meant vacant lots of stalled conversation.

“Just like him,” Polly griped.

“I sense that you asked me to dinner for a reason.” I waited.

Polly and Tommy looked at each other, and Tommy cleared his throat. “That last dinner we had, you know, well, I…we…think that we left you with some wrong impressions. I said some things…”

“Or,” I said, blithely, “you gave me some very clear impressions.”

“No, the whole thing with Carisa,” Tommy began.

Polly spoke over his words. “Miss Ferber, I know that Tommy slept with Carisa.”

“I told her,” Tommy said. “Detective Cotton told her my prints were there. We had a fight, and I confessed. I lied about going with Jimmy, there. I mean…you know…”

Polly leaned in, nodding. “It’s a sickness.” She sighed. “I sort of suspected it all along, you know.”

“Tell me, Tommy,” I began. “Did you go to Carisa’s apartment the day she was murdered? That night, in fact?”

“Why?” Tommy looked at Polly, who seemed frozen in place.

“You see, the super’s granddaughter said Jimmy was there twice that day, within minutes. Once, she sees him up close. A little later, riding on a bus, she sees him running out the door. Jimmy said he was there once. That second time was you, Tommy, right? Connie, the super’s granddaughter, caught a glimpse of someone that looked like Jimmy-red jacket, the look…”

He nodded, unhappy. “Yes.”

“You went then?” Polly blurted at Tommy.

Nervous, looking at Polly, he explained, “I lied to Detective Cotton. Told him I wasn’t there.”

“Why were you there?” Mercy asked.

“Well, she phoned me the day before. She was crazy, you know. She thought she could blackmail me. She was gonna tell Polly I slept with her. You know what she wanted from me? I mean, real crazy. She wanted me to talk to Jimmy-make him come to his senses. She wanted him to say he was the father of her baby. Real nutty. So I stupidly went there, you know, to plead my case.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Nothing. She came to the door, started yelling about Jimmy fighting with her, abusing her, calling her a whore, just minutes before, I guess, and if I thought I was gonna come and abuse her, well, I had another thing coming. She’d call the cops. I got real scared and ran away.”

“Connie thought you ran to a woman waiting for you in a car.”

That stopped him cold. He looked at Polly, nervous. “No,” he stammered. “I parked around the corner.”

“There was no woman?”

Tommy glanced at Polly again. “I just wanted to get away. I thought she’d call the cops. So I ran.”

“Did you see a woman?”

He shrugged. He was starting to sweat.

“So you lied to Detective Cotton?” Mercy said.

“Are you going to tell him I was there?”

“No,” I said. “You are.”

“But he’ll think I murdered her.”

In the awful silence that followed, Polly spoke up, her voice laced with venom. “Well, did you?”

Chapter 17

Irritable, suffering from the lack of a good night’s sleep, I wandered the Giant soundstage aimlessly, avoiding entreaties by Warner’s staff that I rest, read magazines, have coffee. When I spotted Detective Cotton, who was lolling near a stairwell, jotting something into a small loose-leaf notebook, I grunted, got his attention. I wasn’t happy with my own attitude, to be sure. Certainly the law had no obligation to fill me in on every myriad detail of the case; certainly not. I was a civilian, an East Coast interloper no less; and, frankly, a little too nosy sometimes. Yet Cotton had confided, or seemed to. He had proffered information and seemed to respect me as a confidante. No, I told myself, I feared I’d misread him. I’d thought I might like him. But now I was back to disliking the self-assured, smug warden of the law. He nodded at me, still intent on his jottings.

“Sir,” I said, drawing myself up to my imagined height. “Good morning.”

“Miss Ferber, a pleasant surprise.”

“I don’t know what’s pleasant about it.”

He tucked the pad into a side pocket of his sports jacket. “Something wrong?”

“Frankly, yes. You see, Detective Cotton, when we had that little tete-a-tete in my suite, I thought we’d established a rapport that suggested trust and-” I stopped. The look on his face was slack- jawed, almost comical, a little like that of an excessively loose-flapped hound dog.

“Madam, I did share with you. Honestly.”

“I sense that you mete out morsels of information to designated parties with the hope that one will spark some reaction.”

He laughed. “Miss Ferber, I’m not that complicated.”

“You deny it?”

He looked away, and then back at me. “All right, a little. It’s a technique an old-timer taught me. But must I share every idle speculation I have or every trial balloon I send up?”

“Yes.”

He laughed. “What are we really talking about here?”

I decided to shift the subject slightly. “I have information for you.”

“That’s why I’m here.” He waited.

“I know you’ve been told that James Dean made two appearances at Carisa’s apartment the evening she died, one just before the murder…”

“Or,” he interrupted, smiling, “during the murder.”

“I learned last night that you’ve been lied to. Tommy Dwyer, who, as you know, dresses like Jimmy, admitted to me that he made a visit to the apartment. It seems to me you would have garnered that information from him earlier.”

Cotton laughed. “Miss Ferber, I must tell you that I just assumed all along Tommy was lying to me when he said he wasn’t there. He’s a shifty, unreliable man, not too bright, and he doesn’t know how to lie persuasively.