He turned to me and gave me the smile again. “There’ll be tons of publicity,” he said. “All over the country. Max used to be famous.”
6 ~ Tarnished Star
“He was Rick Hawke,” Wyl Will exclaimed, wide-eyed. A couple of years ago, after his mother died, he’d had his eyelids tattooed to spare himself the necessity of putting on makeup every day, and the combination of the heavily lined eyelids and the wide eyes made him look something like the latter-day Bette Davis.
“Humor me,” I said. “I’m a little young for Rick Hawke.”
It was ten a.m., and busloads of tourists in short sleeves were already sweltering up and down Hollywood Boulevard, reading the names in the brass and terrazzo stars on the sidewalks and stepping over the bums who keep the stars company on the concrete. Only in Hollywood can a penniless wino sleep on top of a star.
“I knew you’d say that,” Wyl said peevishly. He’d gotten to the point where he took youth as a personal insult. “But there’s cable, you know. Everything’s on cable now. I flipped on the set last night and saw I Married Joan, of all things. Do you remember how she died?”
“Who?” I was facing the window, watching a sleek, well-dressed Arab shepherd a flock of heavily robed women up the sidewalk. They may have been wrapped to their eyebrows, but the heat didn’t seem to be bothering them. The other tourists, the ones in shorts and T-shirts, were red and wet.
“Joan Davis.” He blinked fast, either tears or something in his blue contacts. “Burned to death, poor thing. Just like Gene Tierney.”
“Who?” I said again. “Oh, yeah. Gene Tierney.”
“Played a Chinese in one movie.” Wyl clasped his hands prayerfully in front of his chest. “Lord, she was beautiful.”
The Arabs passed from view, followed by two heavyset cholos in plaid wool shirts and wide black pants who looked very interested in them. The ear Spurrier had slapped had been ringing all morning, and my lower back hurt. “Rick Hawke, Wyl.”
“Well, he was beautiful, too. I saw him on TV in 1957 and thought, Well, California, don’t you know. We were about the same age, but he looked younger. I wrote him a fan letter and got a signed photo back, not that he signed it himself, I’m sure, but they did things right in those days. Imagine getting a reply to a fan letter to Madonna.”
“And then you came out here and met him.” I was the only customer in Wyl’s store, and he was seated behind the counter that ran along the left-hand side of the shop. Between me and the window, shelves housed thousands of books about show business, and tables and glass cabinets offered up boxes full of old posters and glossy studio stills.
“Decades later,” Wyl said. “The early eighties, I guess. Have you had coffee?”
“If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be standing up. How did you meet him?”
“Circles,” Wyl said airily, making a vaguely circular gesture with his right hand.
I massaged my bruised kidney. “That must have been nice, traveling in the same circles as one of your favorite stars.”
“Oh, I had no idea who he was. He’d stopped being Rick Hawke twenty-five years before that. He’d operated a charter yacht service in Hawaii and gone to India to wash some holy man’s feet or something, and he’d grown that beard and let it go all white, and he never ever talked about his career in television. No, he was just this courtly gentleman who wore too many rings and always seemed to have some odd boy in tow.”
“Odd in what way?”
Wyl dipped a finger into a mug of coffee to test its temperature, licked off the drops, and drank. “Glum,” he said eventually. “They were all glum. Monosyllabic, like two syllables might prove to be unbearable. And knobbly, not smooth and symmetrical. Some of them didn’t smell very good. Either cheap cologne or no baths, it was hard to say which was worse. They didn’t seem to have pasts.”
“A lot like Christopher,” I ventured.
Wyl blushed crimson. “Christopher is good-looking. And he can talk.”
I tried not to grin. “How many of your antiques did he take?”
“Scads,” Wyl said, his color deepening. “But, you know, they were all old.”
“Antiques generally are.”
He gave me a sharp glance with the heavily lined eyes. “You’re very clever this morning. You might at least have waited until I finished my coffee, so I could be clever back.”
“You introduced him to Max.”
He sipped again and put the cup down. “By then I knew that Max wasn’t just chasing rough trade. He saw himself as the stairway out of the gutter. Christopher seemed to be headed for the gutter, so I referred him to Max. I would have tried to help him myself, but I was running out of antiques.”
The grin won, and I turned and looked out the window to hide it. “Tell me about Rick Hawke.”
Wyl sighed: This was easier ground. “I’ve got an eight-by-ten on table five.” He rose from his stool, a slender man in his youthful seventies with silver-blue hair and a dancer’s narrow waist, set off by pleated trousers into which he’d tucked a yellow silk shirt. As I followed him to table five, the bell over the door rang and about seventeen Japanese came in, all dressed formally, as though they were about to have their photos taken, which I supposed they were.
“ Konnichiwa,” Wyl said without breaking stride.
“ Konnichiwa,” all seventeen said politely. They waited for the next step in the conversation.
“Look, look,” Wyl called, giving up on Japanese and waving his hands in the general direction of the books. “Number one store, ichiban in Hollywood.”
“ Hai,” said the oldest of the Japanese. “Famous store.”
“ Domo arigato gozaimashta,” Wyl pronounced. He sounded as though he’d learned it through Hooked on Phonics. “Look around. Buy something.” He turned to me. “If we’re going to be conquered, it might as well be by somebody polite. God, imagine if it were the French. Rick’s in here.” He started rifling through a box full of glossies, each encased in a transparent sleeve. Faces I hadn’t seen or thought of in years flipped past: Bob Cummings, Dennis Day, Red Skelton, Robert Horton, Hugh O’Brian, Faye Emerson, Ida Lupino.
“Wait,” I said.
“It’s farther back.”
“Just a second. I like Ida Lupino.”
“You do have a frame of reference,” he said. Ida Lupino gazed up at us, tough and broken at the same time, wearing the face of someone too intelligent for the game she’d allowed herself to be trapped in.
“I’ll take this,” I said, pulling Ida out.
“You’re a romantic,” Wyl said, suppressing a smile.
“That’s what Max told me. A disillusioned one.”
“Poor Max.” Wyl used a single fingernail to separate the photos and then withdrew one. “Here.”
Rick Hawke had been splendidly handsome. All the conventions of the photo-the dramatic lighting, the pancake makeup, the too-slick hair-couldn’t mute the individuality of the human being peering out through the angular face, the person sporting the silly western-style shirt and the kerchief tied around his neck. He looked faintly ill at ease, but he also seemed privately to be enjoying the joke. My memory stirred, and I realized that I recognized Max’s younger face from my childhood.
“That’s a good one,” Wyl said, eyeing it critically. “That’s what made him a star. That sense that he was laughing at himself. That bodybuilder with the impossible name has the same quality.”
I picked up the photo. “What’s this from?”
“His show,” Wyl said, masking astonishment at my ignorance. “ Tarnished Star. He played a sheriff who was really an escaped murderer. Self-defense, of course.”
“Slow down,” I said. “That was the story?”
“Imagine the conflict.” Wyl closed his eyes, looking dreamy. “There he is in this dusty little husk of a town with a badge on his shirt and this vast secret in his past, and every week someone came into town who knew who
