adrift, and doubtless a danger in this celluloid canyon.
But I was stopped again. At the doors of the commissary, a voice shouted my name. “Edna, wait.” Frank Sinatra, his face flushed and that Adam’s apple bobbing, came hurrying up to me.
“Frank.” I was confused.
“Wait.” He stopped next to me, swung around so that his back was to the commissary door. He was out of breath, his face too close to mine. Those awful scars, those blue eyes so bright now. “Edna, Ava just told me what you said about…Max.”
Another wrinkle, this. Why would she do that? I tried to step around him. “She shouldn’t have done that. I asked her for secrecy.”
For a second he closed his eyes. “Look, I don’t want you to do this alone.”
“I do everything alone.”
“Not this.” He softened his voice. “Not
“I do not need a protector, Frank.”
He stammered, “I’m not here to…to protect you, Edna.” He smiled broadly. “Hey, I’ve heard enough about you to know you can win your own battles. But I think you need to have a friend with you.” He reflected on his words. “Yeah, a friend.”
“A friend?”
He nodded. “I can be a friend, you know. I’m not always an ass.”
Now I smiled, staring at the jumpy man, this short, scrawny scrapper with the red bow tie and the cowlick. Ludicrous, perhaps, but staring into those blue eyes I saw something I didn’t associate with him-had
Ethan and Tony looked up as Frank and I, side by side, approached the table. Tony rose, plopped back down, confused. “What the…” Frowning, Ethan kept his eyes on Frank.
“Boys.” Frank addressed them warmly. “Miss Ferber would like to visit with you.”
Ethan laughed in a high, unnatural cackle, while Tony folded his arms onto the table, hunched over, head bobbing as though he would drop his head down for a nap.
“We were just leaving,” Ethan said. “I have to get back to work. Tony filled out an application…” He stopped. “What?” The word was almost shouted out, addressed to Frank. “Frankie, I only got a minute.”
I pulled up a chair directly across from him. “Then my timing is perfect. Remember what you told me about timing, Ethan? You said everybody in Hollywood depends on timing. It’s the key to everything out here. Bam bam, hit your mark.”
A baffled look, first at Frank, then at me. “So what? You came here to remind me of things I said at a cocktail party?”
“Partly.”
Tony roused himself. “I gotta leave.”
Frank reached out and touched his sleeve. “Sit, Tony. We’re friends here. Miss Ferber has something she wants to say.” He spoke in a calm assuring voice. For a second, I thought he’d sung the words, so smooth and lilting were his syllables. The crooner, easing the way.
Tony darted a frightened glance at Ethan, who refused to look his way.
“Timing,” I repeated.
In a clipped, hard voice, with a sharp glance at Tony, Ethan demanded, “What are you trying to say, Miss Ferber?”
Tony was fidgeting, rocking back and forth, but another look from Frank quieted him. It struck me as uncharacteristic of Frank, this wistful and hypnotic smile. The seasoned keener at your funeral. Tony stopped moving and closed his eyes.
I had trouble focusing on Ethan, suddenly forgetting the questions I’d planned to put to him. Distracted by Frank’s suave maneuver with Tony, I considered how little I really knew about him, this smooth balladeer, how quick I’d been to condemn him, to draw him as a facile caricature. Yet Ava loved him, and I respected her. Indeed, so many parts of Frank failed colossally. Ethan’s word: failure. Frank nodded at me because I’d not answered Ethan, intent as I was on watching this pacific ballet with Tony.
Now, spine erect and hands gripping the edge of the table, I announced ferociously, “Ethan, you murdered Max.”
Tony squealed, flew back in his chair, nearly toppling it over, a gurgling sound escaping his lungs. Beads of sweat glistened on his face, in the creases of his neck. His eyes darted first to his brother, then to Frank, but not to me. Breathing heavily, he swayed toward Frank who put his palm on Tony’s shoulder. The effect was immediate: Tony looked at him, pleading in his eyes.
I was staring at Ethan, who watched me carefully, unblinking. I waited a long time. He sat back, his body at attention, eyes narrowed, and seemed to be sifting through his thoughts, planning his sentences…or maybe judging the value of mine. Then, finally, speaking in a low, gravelly voice from the back of his throat, he spat out, “Preposterous.”
The word hung in the air, explosive, thunderous. Suddenly he looked down at his hands, his expression troubled. I followed his eyes and saw a tremor in his right hand, a movement he tried to squelch by covering it with his left hand. He looked perplexed, as if he couldn’t believe his body operated independently of his brain.
“Preposterous!” A hiss. “I won’t sit here and take this.”
Frank glared. “Of course, you will.” The tenderness he’d showed Tony was gone now, the old spitfire back.
Ethan twisted his head slowly toward Frank, and I saw what I suspected these last few days, in bits and pieces: a fierce and massive dislike for the famous singer. I swear a sneer escaped from those tight, thin lips, and for a moment I envisioned Pete on the showboat, the vicious crew hand in love with Julie, whose love is unrequited and who turns her in to the sheriff. The dark melodramatic villain the audience rightly hissed. Ethan and Pete, two men at a moment of devastating reckoning.
Frank looked at me. “Prove it, Edna.”
Ethan, in that split second, must have believed he had an ally in his old friend, Lenny’s blood brother, because he nervously smiled at Frank. Prove it, lady.
“I shall,” I trumpeted, but paused, collecting my thoughts.
“Go ahead,” Ethan snarled.
“Timing,” I repeated. “Ava prompted me to revisit the night Max died, especially what happened at the Paradise. That got me thinking about the night before-the disastrous dinner at Don the Beachcomber, the night Frank here”-I nodded at him-“got a little drunk, resented Max’s idle flirtation with Ava, then hit him. Frank notoriously threatened to kill Max, a public declaration I gather he’s in the habit of making, unfortunately”-Frank winced-“but so be it. The following day the tabloids ran with it-Frank’s threat to commit murder. Timing. The next night Max was, indeed, murdered. The rumors grow, alarming Ava but not Frank…at first. Not until the cops took him in for questioning. It’s logical to suspect Frank, especially with his hair-trigger temper and his overweening arrogance.”
I glanced at Frank who had pulled his lips together, frowning. “Thank you, Edna.”
“You’re quite welcome.”
“Christ,” Ethan muttered, “This is…”
“Just a second,” I went on. “Someone wanting Max dead might see this as an ideal time, especially someone who’s harbored a long-standing, festering grudge that probably turned into outright hatred. Timing. It was also convenient that Max had become the poster boy for the blacklist, his name bandied about in the columns, the hate mail arriving on his doorstep. Even death threats. No one took such threats seriously, the product of loose cannons, crackpots.”
“Crackpots,” Ethan echoed me.
“But Max’s murder would not surprise some folks. Max was obsessed with the blacklist-he and Sol Remnick
