forehead was tight and between his brows was a deep crease of tension.
He leaned toward me and touched my arm. “Have I apologized for snubbing you?”
“When did you snub me?”
“At La Rue, a week or two ago… I was dining with my soon-to-be-ex-wife.”
So he had noticed me.
“You see,” he was saying, “we’ve been making some silly attempts at reconciliation, not the least of which is this film, and if I’d introduced you-my friend the famous divorce detective from Chicago-Rita might have misunderstood.”
“That’s all right. No offense taken.”
“And I was in a particularly black mood, further acerbated by alcohol. Who was your lovely companion?”
“My wife.”
“Really! Congratulations! When did this happen?”
“Not long ago. We’re sort of on our honeymoon.”
“I was given to understand you were out here consolidating your business with Mr. Rubinski-did I read something to that effect in the Examiner?”
“You read the Hearst papers?”
“I’m keeping a particularly close eye on them right now.”
“Why is that?”
Welles ignored the question, exhaling Havana smoke. “I hope your marriage is more successful than mine. I’m sure you wonder how even a ‘monstrous boy’ like me… that’s what Houseman likes to call me… could fail to make a go of it with a beautiful, kind, sensitive, intelligent woman like Margarita Carmen Cansino Welles.”
“You have a child together.”
“Becky. Lovely girl-she is as wonderful a child as I am a beastly father.”
“You don’t have to sound proud of it. Some people would think you had it made.”
“Some people are imbeciles. I’m sure you think I was running around on her-married to Rita Hayworth, and not satisfied with what he has at home. That Welles is a glutton!”
“Not my business.”
“Well, I wasn’t unfaithful, not at first, not for the longest time. But she constantly accused me of infidelity-you see, she is mentally unstable, that lovely child… She has an inferiority complex, largely due to the fact that that fiend of a father put her on stage, not in school, and that’s the least of what that son of bitch did to her… She’s an unhappy woman, my darling Nathan, and a pathologically jealous one. She wept every night of our marriage, and yet, just last week she told me that our marriage was the happiest time of her life… Can you imagine?”
“You’re saying, she accused of you cheating so often, you finally went ahead and did it.”
“As did she. I’ll always love her… and I think she will always love me.” He sat smoking the cigar, then shook his head and said, “You know what she always called me? George. That’s my first name, you know-detestable, ordinary first name-that’s what she always called me.”
“Rita always called you George?”
“Not Rita, my dear-the Short girl. This ‘Black Dahlia’ you think I may have murdered.”
Orson Welles liked to present himself as a harbinger of high culture, bringing Shakespeare, Conrad, and Kafka to the masses; but never forget that this glorious ham was also the Shadow. Melodrama was his metier.
Nonetheless, I was struck as dumb as Shorty, reeling from Welles’ cliffhanger-before-the-commercial punch to my mental solar plexus.
“I told you I’ve been following the Hearst papers especially closely these last few days,” he was saying. “I noted, with no small interest, your involvement in the investigation. I have to say I’m relieved to be talking to you, and not some Hearst reporter-or worse, one of the Los Angeles gestapo.”
“Did you-”
“Know her? Of course I knew her. Perhaps not in the true biblical sense… She was a lovely girl, one of those absolutely black-haired girls, with skin as white as Carrara marble, and eyelashes you could trip over. She rather reminded me of another Betty, Betty Chancellor, also a dark-haired, fair-skinned beauty… my first love, at Dublin’s Gate Theater, back in ’31. As for Betty Short, I met her at Camp Cooke, when we were touring the army camps with my ‘Mercury Wonder Show,’ and again at the late lamented Canteen, then most recently at Brittingham’s, where she mooched the occasional meal.”
“What I was going to ask was if you killed her.”
Welles sighed. “If I knew, darling Nathan, I would tell you.”
I studied that baby face and the haunted eyes staring out of it. “You mean to say, you don’t know where you were, the night she was murdered?”
His smile in response was seemingly guileless. “Not a clue. A blank… It’s a classic pulp premise, my dear-the man wakes up in a room, covered in blood, with a dead body next to him… and no memory of having done the dastardly deed… or for that matter, not having done it.”
“I’m guessing you didn’t wake up in that vacant lot next to that butchered corpse.”
“No… I was in my wife’s house in Brentwood.”
“Was your wife with you?”
“She was in the hospital. Exhaustion and dysentery from our Mexican location shooting. And Shorty had the night off, as did my secretary.”
“So you have no alibi.”
“None, my darling. Nor memory. In a cheap thriller, a blow to the head would have granted me the blessing of amnesia. I, however, earned my loss of memory, every missing moment of it.”
“How?”
“It may come as a shock to you-I know it does to me-but my youth is fading fast, and my energy is no longer boundless. To work for days, without sleep, requires certain pharmaceutical assistance. Similar assistance is necessary to help me maintain my boyish figure, to better perform my leading man duties. And, as you know, I do take the occasional drink.”
“Okay-so we’re talking booze and amphetamines.”
“Did you know that my family tree includes Horace Goldin-the legendary celebrated magician who invented the ‘Divided Woman’ illusion, the trick of sawing a female in half?”
“And that means you bisected Beth Short’s body?”
As if the cigar were a wand, he gestured to the dismembered limbs framing the Crazy House doorway, and to the painting of a woman cut in half, her corpse flung on a flayed cow carcass. “I needed you to see these terrible images, Nathan-these images which were, by the way, created prior to the Short girl’s murder.” He tapped his temple with two fingers; his eyes bugged out. “They were in this mind. Nightmarish visions that I sought to exorcise in this harmless fashion.”
A few terrible moments dragged by, and then he rose, without looking at me, saying, “Let’s continue this in a more reflective setting.”
He almost bolted from the hideous, hellish self-created surroundings, disappearing into the funhouse. I found him in the hall of mirrors, seated on a folding chair, staring blankly at perhaps eighty images of himself. Another folding chair, next to him, awaited me, and I took it.
“Could I have committed this act, Nathan?”
He was asking my reflections; I answered his.
“Orson, I don’t think so. Just because you’re a megalomaniac doesn’t make you a homicidal maniac.”
He continued to meet my gaze in the mirror; and almost the entire conversation that followed was delivered through the buffer of glass. The cigar had disappeared. As we spoke, it was as if I were speaking not to Welles, but his image, projected on a screen, dozens of screens.
“These Bosch-like grotesqueries,” he said, “could they have been unfulfilled wishes? Worse, images I did fulfill on a black, forgotten night?”
“With your bad back?”
That halted the melodrama and made him laugh. “Yes, that did occur to me. I’ve been wearing that damn metal brace about half the time, lately-when I’m under stress, these genetic anomalies of the spine of mine, which my weight hardly helps, make me as helpless… and as harmless… as a kitten. But what if drugs and alcohol combined to blot out the pain? And to unleash some murderous rage in me, and then blot out the memory?”
