Ava had promised me a Southern fried chicken dinner. She called to remind me, her voice a rumbling whisper on the phone. “I told you I’m a damned good cook, at least of chicken.” She paused. “I know you’re feeling down about Sol. I heard it was a quiet funeral.”
I didn’t answer. I’d been lying on my bed, eyes closed, the radio playing Tony Bennett’s “Cold, Cold Heart” over and over, the DJ intoxicated with the song.
That afternoon, haunted, I hailed a taxi and sailed into the hills, an aimless ramble that let me ponder the sprawling, ungainly city spread before me. The cabbie, at first confused by my vagueness, kept quiet after a while, simply nodding at my directions, probably believing a maddened lady was in the back seat. But no: the spacious landscape allowed me to think, making me more determined than ever.
“Don’t be alone tonight, Edna. Tonight at my place. Just you and me. No one else. I promise. Cozy, relaxed.” A pause during which I heard her sighing deeply. “No one talks to me about poor Sol, Edna. I don’t know anything but what I read in the papers, and that’s drivel. A photo of Gertrude Berg weeping. Max…and now Sol. I need someone to talk to me about it. Francis avoids the subject.”
“Just the two of us?”
“I promise. I’ll come get you. Tonight.”
I didn’t know what to answer. The splash and tumult of Sol’s sudden death laced all my brief conversations with Alice and Lorena. Worse, I’d spotted Desmond Peake lingering in the lobby of the Ambassador earlier, then having a drink in the cocktail lounge; but when I approached him, he made a rapid exit, nearly colliding with a woman with too many shopping bags. My nerves frayed, my disposition sour-and my suitcase already opened in my room, a few items dropped in-I didn’t want to stay in the suite listening to the radio all night. Every song-now I was subjected to Tony Bennett’s “Because of You”-reminded me of loss.
“Yes,” I told Ava. “Yes.”
***
We sat in a long sunroom filled with plants, clinging vines twisting around posts and inching over the window sills, pots of red geraniums and lavender phlox, a gone-to-mayhem spider plant, its shoots dangling over a wicker table covered with movie magazines. Issues of Modern Screen and Flirt and Titter with Ava on the cover. “I don’t know why I can’t stop buying magazines about myself,” she confided. A lived-in room, welcoming. Wide wicker chairs with overstuffed floral cushions. The late day sun peaked through the simple white-cotton dimity curtains, but the room was refreshingly cool.
She sat opposite me, her feet bare and cozily tucked under her legs as she reclined on the chair. “The tobacco field girl at home. Artie Shaw had a fit when I sat like this. Or walked barefoot in the house.” She grimaced. “Or, in fact, when I opened my ignorant mouth in front of his friends. John Steinbeck, I remember, kept saying, ‘I want to hear her voice, Artie. She has a great voice.’ Like I was a wind-up toy they bought at a fair. William Saroyan wrote a limerick about me after I did The Killers. The girl silhouetted against a chiaroscuro moon.”
“You look happy sitting like that.”
She looked surprised. “And I don’t look happy other times, Edna?”
“Not so happy, I suppose. Out in Hollywood”-I pointed nonsensically out the sunlit windows-“you look…modeled. You know, stylized.”
She grinned. “That’s Ava Gardner out there. The girl who is nervous when the cameras roll. Acting is…well…embarrassing for me, you know. Here is…Avah Gardner.” She pronounced her name with a Southern twang, the vowels exaggerated and harsh.
She served iced tea, heady with wild mint she insisted had taken over her back yard. The glass had beads of water on it, cold to the touch. “Good.”
“Sol.” Ava’s sudden mention of the dead actor was stark, abrupt. “Tell me what you know.”
I told her about the funeral. “How close were you to him?”
“Through Max, of course. He’d visit here with Max. We met for lunch when he was back from New York. He lent me jazz records. He was a private man who got nervous around me. He’d stammer and bumble, and that made me tease him horribly.” Her eyes got moist. “But a man who caused no trouble for anyone, a decent guy who liked to make people laugh. Since the blacklist nonsense, he never laughed again. He took it so hard, Edna.”
We sat with our tea and watched the sky darken, the leaves of the ice bushes brushing against the windows, rustling in the slight evening breeze. “My sister Bappie was very fond of him. After her marriage fell apart, she was footloose, scattered. Some summers back, when he was out here, they found each other, not romantically, I mean, but like two wandering souls who bump into each other in the night. They’d go to the movies, plays, stuff like that. Then she met a new guy and they drifted apart. Sol, being Sol, didn’t resent it, though I think he was lonely much of the time. I know he spent more and more time with Max. And then Max and Alice.”
“Another life shot down.”
Ava stood and peered out the window. “Remember back at The Coffee Pot with Sol? How we waited for the rain that never came? Sometimes I pray for rain at night, especially lately. You know, that drumming on the roof, on the windowpanes. When I was little, I slept under the eaves of the attic, the rain drumming ping ping ping all night long, and I’d drift into a blissful sleep.” She turned to face me. “Nothing has ever been that good, Edna. The rain riled the flies trapped under the shingles, and they’d buzz around me. Ping ping ping. You know, I can’t sleep out here in this land of perpetual sunlight. I stay awake all night long.” She tapped the windowpane. “Sometimes when the breeze starts up at night I stand in the dark and wait for rain.” She smiled wistfully. “Help me with dinner, Edna.”
I hadn’t planned on constructing my own meal that evening, but, led by Ava’s rhythmic direction, I found myself bustling about her kitchen, shrouded in one of her full-length aprons with so many ruffles I feared I‘d become one of the Floradora girls in a vaudeville song-and-dance routine.
“Now drop the pieces in that flour mixture there, Edna, because it’s filled with special spices my mama told me about. Secret spices.” Then: “Edna, you need to let the butter melt first, otherwise…”
The two of us moved in curious syncopation.
Slowly, wonderfully, thrillingly, the meal took shape: chicken sizzling and popping in the hot oil, potatoes mashed and garnished with parsley, green peas-“I grew them myself, but no one will believe me”-gleaming in salted water, a loaf of sourdough bread rising in the oven. Aromas flooded the room, the inviting tang of bubbling yeast, of crispy chicken skin, of peas slathered with butter, a conflicting war of tantalizing smells. Dizzying, the sum of it, but totally satisfying.
There I was, dressed in my fine black silk dress with the filigreed lace collar, covered now from neck to knee with Ava’s own apron, my hands caked with flour, my eyes watery from the boiling water and the diced pearl onions.
“Edna, too much salt. What are you thinking?” She moved me aside and tasted with a spoon. She nodded: yes. Yes. And yes. Yes, indeed, I thought. I was flabbergasted by it all, and rapturously intoxicated with her.
By the time we sat at the kitchen table, side by side-“Not in the dining room, for heaven’s sake, we’re friends”-I found myself smiling with a kind of mindless delirium: I’d rarely had so satisfying an evening as this.
The sex goddess Ava Gardner-and me, the aging novelist, the world’s finickiest eater, culinary martinet. Delightful, marvelous. I ate everything on my plate and Ava sat back, her eyes twinkling, and watched me. “Good Lord, Edna. You have the appetite of a fifteen-year-old boy.”
Darkness had fallen outside now, lights switched on. A coziness here, safe haven.
Of course, it couldn’t last. Ava started talking about Frank’s moodiness lately. “He sulks now. Everything gets him down. His career, Max, Columbia Records.” The wrong conversational turn because, as my old Negro housekeeper liked to say, we talked him up. She made him appear on her doorstep. A car stopped on the gravel driveway as Ava rushed to the window. “I told him not tonight and he promised me.” For a second she shut her eyes, biting her lower lip. “Damn him.”
I stood next to her as we watched the occupants tumble out of the flashy car. “Damn them.”
Frank and the Pannis brothers stormed in, resentful that I was there, my arms folded over my chest as though I were a threatening schoolmarm, my cheeks sucked in-my most practiced look of disapproval.
“Christ, I forgot,” Frank said. “I’m sorry, angel. I did forget.”
She looked ready to slap him.
“Tell her,” Tony bellowed.
“Tell me what?”
“Calm down, boys,” Frank muttered. “Both of you are making way too much out of this.” But the news obviously bothered Frank himself because his reassuring words were yelled out, rushed. When he looked at Ava, his face seemed to collapse, the blue eyes downcast and troubled, his chin bobbing up and down. Frank suffered out loud, I realized, the public groaner. Taking care of him when he had the flu would be a battlefield assignment. “All right, all right.” Anger in his tone. “The bastards. I should have expected this.”
Ava walked up to him and placed an arm around his waist. “Tell me, darling.”
Tony blurted out. “The cops took him in, Ava. Frank Sinatra, the hottest singer on the planet. They took him downtown. They questioned him like a street thug. Frankie boy. Where’s the respect…”
Ethan was burning. “Shut up, Tony.”
Frank eyed him. “I can do my own talking, Tiny.” Said with white-hot anger, his words punched the stage name. Tiny. Dismissal, mockery, the fat slob in the schoolyard made fun of one more time by the class lover.
Tony shot him a look, not a happy one. He looked ready to cry.
Ethan nudged Tony into a chair but I noticed he didn’t seem pleased with Frank’s treatment of his brother. Frank was oblivious, his arm around Ava’s waist, his face nuzzled in her neck. “Baby, the way things are in this damn town.”
Ava tightened her hold on him. “I don’t know what’s going on, Francis.” Loud, insistent. “Tell me now.”
Frank glanced at me, a look that communicated his desire that I be elsewhere, preferably out of town: the ancient dowager back among her lavender and old lace, her white curls under a Mother Hubbard bonnet. “Yes,” I said, “tell us.”
“Max’s murder.” The two words hung in the air, ominous. “Can you believe it?”
Tony joined in. “Just because they can’t solve it and can’t pick up the nut out there who’s popping off the Commies in town…”
Ethan poked his finger into Tony’s side. “Could you let Frankie tell…”
Frank rushed his words. “They never talked to me about that incident when I threatened Max at dinner, that stupid squabble, the shoving. Yeah, Louella Parsons and the gossip sheets had a field day, but that’s nonsense for the lame-brained knucklehead readers in Hollywood. Yeah, I had my publicist talk to someone at the precinct-and nothing happened. I never thought the cops would pay any mind to it. But I guess there’s been a few pushy calls to the police, you know, folks who can’t stand me, resent me, and today they made me go downtown.”
Tony sputtered. “We drove him there.”
“They wanted to know my alibi. My alibi? Jesus Christ! I got none. I was in the desert all night.”
Ethan was matter-of-fact. “The matter should end now. Finished. Your word is good.”
No one paid him any mind.
“The police have a job to do,” I offered.
Ethan pursed his brow and eyed me. “Frankie doesn’t lie.”
Frank let go of Ava, dropping into a chair, his elbows on his knees, his hands cradling his head. “I guess I lost it a little down there. I played the wise guy at the precinct.”
“Oh, Francis, no.”
“I told one cop who pushed me around-‘You’ll get a belt in your stupid mouth.’ I don’t like cops.”
“So now what?” From Ava.
“I gotta make a statement. Go back with my lawyer tomorrow.” He looked at me now, hurt in his eyes, disbelief. “They might charge me with murder.”
“I think that’s premature,” I began.
But Tony roared over my words. “Christ Almighty.”
“I didn’t kill Max, Ava.”
“I know you didn’t.”
Frank eyed Ava. “You and me, baby. They don’t like us. The hillbilly and the guinea.”
No one spoke for a while. Finally, Ethan broke the dead silence. “We need to identify the murderer.”
We all stared at him, flabbergasted.
Ava smiled. “And just how do we do that, Ethan?”
“I mean, offer the police possibilities.”
Again she said, “How? Do you have a list?”
He ignored her, staring directly into Frank’s face. “It seems to me a simple scenario. Sol Remnick killed Max. Then, remorseful, he hung himself.”
Clamor in the small room: Ava gasping, Tony choking, Frank whistling. Except for me, sitting there in stunned, dreadful silence, as cold as a meat locker. I was surrounded by dinghies, I thought suddenly, all loosed from their moorings.
Ava stammered, “Are you out of your mind, Ethan? Do you really believe that preposterous story?”
A long pause. “Well, no, of course not. But it works. We plan a story, make believe it’s true, and at least it gets the police thinking…maybe, maybe.”
I flared up, the hair on the back of my neck bristling. “Have you people all lost your minds out here? Is that all you can do? You fashion clever storyboards for real life, like you’re sketching out the next scene of a Metro thriller? Do you hear yourself, Ethan? You’re talking about peoples’ lives here.”
He looked at me with cool deliberation, eyes shiny. “They’re both dead, Miss Ferber. Let them solve a situation that implicates…Frank.”
Ava covered her face with her hands, muttering, “Why do I put up with this?”
Tony bubbled over, excited, rolling in his seat. “Maybe Sol did kill Max. Maybe Max screwed up his career, too. He killed himself because…”
I stood, raised myself to my full five-foot height, and my voice cut through the blather in the room. “Enough. You’re maddened…all of you. Frank”-I cast him a steely eye-“do you agree to something so absurd and deleterious?”
He waited a long time. Finally, he sputtered, “No, of course not. I’m not crazy… I may be a lot of things but…not crazy. It’s nonsense.” Another pause, a heartbeat. “Sol loved Max.”
It was, I thought, a simply beautiful statement, and took me by surprise.
Ethan broke in. “People kill folks they love.”
Frank held up his hand. “Come on, gang. No.”
Ava snarled, “Why don’t you turn in Sophie Barnes? You always made fun of her, the crazy secretary with the hots for Max. Maybe she got tired of her pain, her loneliness, and…and she shot him. Remember Harry said she stormed out of the Paradise Bar in a fury, sending the candles flying. In a rage. Maybe she killed Max because…” She stopped.
“She did run out of the restaurant. We saw her.” Tony glanced at his brother.
Ava screamed, “Francis, stop them. Now. The police are doing their job, just as Edna said. You know that. Nobody is going to arrest you. You’re allowing these fools to enflame you. Come off it.”
Frank nodded at us. “Let’s get out of here. Screw this!” He pointed at the brothers-bang bang, as though he had a gun-and turned away. The brothers leaned into each other, their voices overlapping, doubtless formulating other outlandish suspects: perhaps the headwaiter at Chasens’…or Greta Garbo…or…Lana Turner. Why not? Eleanor Roosevelt, sneaking into town…I imagined their scrambled minds teeming with such absurdities.
“I think Alice did it,” Tony blurted out. “Before she left for the Paradise.”
“No,” I said. “Remember Lorena called from the bar and spoke to Max. He was alone. Someone knocked on his door. He hung up. Alice was on the way to the restaurant.”
“I don’t care,” Tony said. “She snuck back in.”
His words suddenly made me wonder about that knock on the door. Who did arrive that night? Sophie before she joined the party at the Paradise Bar? A mysterious woman, this Sophie Barnes. Blighted love, anger, passion, a volatile temperament.
“How do we know Lorena’s even telling the truth?” Tony added. “Maybe she was there first. Maybe. You see how she’s weeping for Max, Frankie. Like she’s out of control. She was always so friendly with him. Maybe an affair…maybe he turned on her…” He was counting off the reasons on his fingers, the none-too-bright schoolboy trying to do sums.
Ethan glared at his brother. “Leave my wife out of this.”
“She ain’t your wife anymore.”
Ethan raised his voice. “You heard me, Tony. Lorena isn’t part of this. She spoke to Max, and she then told you to call him. I was there. You mean she’s making that up about the job he’d get you?”
Suddenly, Tony crumbled, his eyes tearing up. Looking at Frank, he blubbered, “Liz told me to get out-now that I lost that job at Poncho’s. She’s leaving me, Frankie. I thought that if I can get another job, she’ll…you know…take me back.” He faced his brother. “I promised her I won’t drink. I got nowhere to go.”
Ethan softened. “Tony, I told you. She won’t leave you. She won’t.”
Tony smiled at him. “She used your favorite word, Ethan. Failure. I’m a failure. She called us both failures. Me and you, Ethan.”
“Me?”
“You ain’t got your dreams, she said. Nobody does…except some. She wants to be rich and famous and I’m a…a burden.”
“She called me a failure?” Ethan looked stunned.
“Because you came out here to make millions, and you took that job in accounting at Metro.”
Ethan was furious. “I will be rich. Someday. Why else come out here?”
His eyes narrowed, Frank mimicked him. “I want to be rich, too, boys.” His voice became mocking. “Why else come out here?”
Why else come out here?
It was brutal imitation of Ethan’s whiny declaration, and Ethan glared at him. I expected him to say something but he watched, eyes slatted. “How can I become rich when I got to support Tony? Lenny left us nothing.”
Frank sang in a silly singsong voice: “I wanna be rich. I wanna be rich. Listen to the two of you. Your brother Lenny knew the game. He had smarts. That’s what Lenny had that both of you don’t. He built a fortune out of grit and sweat. That man understood honor and loyalty. I wouldn’t be alive if he hadn’t stepped in. They were gonna take me out. You two are pale imitations of that pal of mine.”
“All right, Francis. Enough.” Ava was blinking wildly.
Tony sagged into his chair, moody, hunched over. Looking up at Frank, he moaned, “You’re rich, Frankie.” At Ava. “You’re rich, Ava.” At me. “Even she’s rich. Show Boat fills her pockets with gold. She doesn’t even have to work anymore.” He turned back to his brother. “We’re the only two poor people in this room, Ethan. You and me.” He started sobbing and wiped away tears with the backs of his hands.
“Oh, Christ,” Ethan muttered. “Stop it, Tony.”
“Are they smarter than me? Frankie? Ava? Her?”
Her had already answered that question some time ago, but decided now silence was preferable. Why articulate the obvious? Let them rattle on, I thought, these destructive hangers-on.
Ethan snickered. “Actually they are, Tony.”
“No, they ain’t. Mr. Adam and Miss Ava. You told me Frankie was just plain lucky. Luck is the game in this town.”
Ethan squirmed. “Not everyone is lucky, Tony.”
“You deserve to be rich, Ethan.”
“Okay, enough, Tony.” He stared at Frank, nervous.
I broke into the brotherly keening. “Who gains from Max’s being murdered?”
My startling outburst, intentionally off the subject, silenced the brothers’ inane bickering. All eyes landed on me.
Sitting up, Tony started to say Alice’s name, but Ethan reached out and touched his sleeve. “Not now. Haven’t we embarrassed ourselves enough tonight?”
Ava whispered to Frank. “Get them out of here.”
Frank smiled. “Did you hear them, though? They don’t think much of my brain, Ava. I’m just a lucky so-and-so…”
Ethan pleaded, “Don’t listen to him, Frankie.”
Tony looked helpless. “Do you really think Max found me a job? Lorena said she talked to him.”
His shoulders stiff, Ethan walked to the door. “Maybe Lorena lied, Tony. Maybe she made the whole damn thing up. We’ll never know, will we? Maybe Lorena was trying to make Max look good. Good old Max, unselfish Max, no-hard-feelings Max.”
“But Lorena did speak to Max that night,” I added.
Ethan frowned. “But who knows what that conversation was about? The only part I heard was when she asked for Alice.”
Tony burbled, “I need a job.”
Ethan turned the doorknob. “Good luck.” He focused on Frank. “We need a lift back to civilization, Frankie.” He waited until Tony was at his side. “We’re going back to New Jersey. I’ve had it out here. Lenny is dead. He was murdered, too. It’s too dangerous out here in Hollywood land. God knows when one of us”-His hand swept the room-“will face the barrel of a gun. Little Alice-sit-by-the-fire did him in. It’s you and me, Tony. Back home. People come to Hollywood to die. I’m not ready for that.”
Ava and I sat alone in the quiet room, sipping iced tea and eating slabs of chocolate cake. Frank had driven the brothers away, begrudgingly, annoyed with them. We’d watched him careen out of the driveway, nearly clipping some bushes. I surmised the ride back would consist of silence, and a whole lot of groveling.
“I keep failing at my promises to you, Edna,” Ava finally said.
“Not true.” I smiled at her. “You came through with the magnificent fried chicken.”
“Which, you remember, you had to fry yourself.”
I breathed in. “Listen to me, Ava. These things happen, and I suppose they happen more with volatile people. You and Frank are a train wreck, but there’s nothing that can be done about that. You have to play that love game out. You have no choice, toppling chairs in restaurants, knocking over drinks, screaming at each other. And everyone watches. Neither of you is ready to jump off that speeding train.”
She leaned over and poured me more tea as I gazed out the window into the pitch-blackness: no moonlight, no stars.
Quietly, “I know.”
“I don’t like it out here,” I said.
“Who does?”
“But you stay here. I can leave. New York may be a lot of things, but there’s a gritty, hard-nosed reality about it. New York tells me the truth. New York slaps you awake every day of your life. Out here in the constant sunshine with wide boulevards and sparkling cars, well, people come to believe they can reinvent themselves, their failed lives. That’s always been the promise of the West, of course-new beginnings, second chances, new blood pulsating through the anemic body. And, I suppose, it can be true. But not for L.A., not this oasis that looks to Hollywood for answers. Make it up and see if it flies. If it doesn’t, make something else up. A culture of sandboxes with children restacking the blocks that keep falling down.”
Ava had been staring at me, mouth open. “God, Edna. Stay away from the Chamber of Commerce. They’ll crucify you. Tar and feather you and ride you out of town on a rail.” She started giggling.
“And it would be filmed for a scene in some celluloid epic.”
She looked to the ceiling. “But I wanted to come out here.”
“It’s your career.”
“I know, I know. I make my money here. Lots of it. Tons of it. But most don’t. A Tony Pannis. Liz Grable who waits for that talent scout every time someone walks into the soda parlor where she waits and waits, perched on a stool. We keep lying to them.”
“Otherwise there’d be only desert and orange groves. L.A. circa 1900.”
She sipped her tea. “Sometimes I dream of going back home. I wanted to be an actress-I wanted to shine in Show Boat, get fantastic reviews-but I don’t want it. You know what I mean? Francis doesn’t believe me. For him it’s everything. Hoboken is grubby and horrid…and over. L.A. is…is the flashy Cadillac convertible, the big house in Palm Springs, and the screaming girls. I dream of North Carolina because no one bothered me there. Yes, I like the fame, I guess, but I feel owned here. Eaten alive.”
“You are so good in Show Boat.”
A wide grin. “Keep telling me that. I don’t like myself most of the time.”
I sipped my tea. “What do you want, Ava?”
“I don’t know. Right now, I want Francis. But I also know that he’s…Hollywood. Exciting. He’s L.A. He’s Palm Springs. He’s beautiful at the moment but he’s temporary. Everything out here-even people-are rented for the short term. Ironically he’s probably the love of my life. Paradox, no?” She chuckled. “I learned that word from Artie Shaw. He described me that way.”
“Well, you are.”
“Everyone is.”
“True. But some more than others.”
She drew her bare feet up under her legs, snuggled into the cushions. “I will always make movies. I’m supposed to.” She struck a pose. “‘The most beautiful woman in the world.’” Said with a bittersweet wistfulness. “But I want to live in Europe. Spain, probably. When I was there, I felt…comfortable. Everything is old and they like it that way.” Now she grinned. “And the bullfighters wear such tight pants, Edna.”
I ignored that. “Does Frank know about this dream of yours?”
“I’ve told him, but he’s not one to listen. He thinks Hollywood is paradise on earth. El Dorado. The seven cities of Cibola, acres of gold all contained in one big movie contract. You know, he’s so…soft a man, Edna. He’s afraid he’ll break.”
“He reminds me of a mischievous little boy.”
“Exactly.” Her eyes got merry. “It must be illegal to go to bed with a little boy in Hollywood.” She laughed outright, long, full.
My mind wandered. “Ava, I go back home in days and Max’s murderer is still at large.”
Ava leaned into me and smiled. “But you’re doing something about it, no?”
Startled, “How do you know?”
“I see the way you look at folks, Edna. You know, I’ve watched you at the cocktail party and at dinners and the public melees that Francis and I stage for Hedda Hopper and her ilk. This is a puzzle you’re working on. You got a bag of pieces and you’re shaking it.”
I nodded. “I owe this to Max.”
“You know all the players in this little costume drama.”
“How do you know it wasn’t a stranger?”
“Of course not. This was a deliberate killing…and personal. Somebody had something against Max. Some vendetta. No Commie nonsense. That was a convenient excuse, used by someone. Think about it, Edna. Someone took advantage of the moment to kill poor Max.” She locked eyes with me. “We agree about that, don’t we, Edna?”
“I know that.”
“It’s about timing here. Timing.”
I sat back. Everybody in Hollywood talked about timing. The glib catchphrase covered a multitude of sinning. The players. Who gained by Max’s death? I asked that question over and over. What satisfaction did someone have in seeing him dead?
Ava got reflective. “The night he died, Edna. Think about it.”
Yes, I thought: the night he died. Where were all the people? I counted them in my head. Who?
“You know the answer, Edna. I suspect you know most things before they happen.” She smiled.
“Tiki voodoo, Ava?”
“What?”
“Nothing.” I pointed a finger at her. “There’s always black magic in paradise.”