Make Believe

“Good. Now imagine everything you did-saw that night.” Slowly, methodically, prodded by me, Liz reconstructed the events of that awful night. Step by step, her voice tentative but then assuming confidence, Liz told me her story, but this time, prompted by me, she added details she’d previously omitted. I could tell, as she stammered through her memory, she had no idea the impact of what she was telling me. She paused after each sentence, trying to weigh its significance herself, but she was thinking only of one person: Tony.

She told me what I wanted to hear. “Thank you, Liz.” I stood.

“It doesn’t matter, Miss Ferber. I mean, I don’t got nothing to do with anybody any more.” She stood, smoothed her dress. “I got to get back to work.” A moment’s hesitation. “This is about Tony, isn’t it?” She waited, her lower lip trembling.

“Thank you, Liz. You’ve been a big help.”

“Tell me, please.”

“There’s nothing to tell you yet,” I insisted. “I’m just asking people some questions.”

A flash of fire in her eyes, the words spat out. “I don’t believe you, Miss Ferber.”

No one was home at Sophie Barnes’ shabby apartment complex on Santa Monica Boulevard in the flats, a third-floor walk-up over a hardware store and a green grocer. I’d taken the address from Max’s files. I expected her to be sitting at home, quiet in a small apartment, listening to Mary Noble, Backstage Wife on the radio. No one answered the doorbell upstairs and I tottered back down to the lobby. My eyes scanned the rows of mailboxes. I turned to face a tiny sunburnt man holding a broom and dustpan, a glint in his eye, amused at something, rocking on his heels.

“You seem a happy man,” I observed.

He chuckled. “You got some look on your face, lady.”

“Which communicates what?” I began to push past him.

“It says how dare Sophie not be at home.”

That gave me pause. “How do you know I’m here to see her?”

“Well, the other four apartments got lost souls inside them, including the one across the hall from Miss Sophie’s. Young folks from Nebraska or Ohio who work in diners and department stores, strutting around like they already are up there in the movies, and at night they prowl the streets hoping for dreams to come true.”

“And Sophie has no dreams?”

He didn’t answer, tucking the broom and dustpan into a small closet under a stairwell. As he straightened his body, he rubbed his lower back, groaned, stretched. “Getting old, ma’am.” He glanced up the empty staircase. “She’s got little old ladies complaining about them flights of stairs.”

“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