Ava gave me directions to the commissary, one building over, and I headed there, though my steps dragged. Ethan and Tony. Tony/Tiny. He wasn’t supposed to be there. Falstaff in sequins, begging for pennies from a miserly brother. But then, I thought wryly, neither should I be strolling the hallways, the wandering novelist shuffling through Metro with an I.D. badge and a purpose.
My progress was interrupted by an aide to Dore Schary who’d heard I’d invaded the hostile territory. She waylaid me as I turned a corner, standing in my path with a clipboard and pencil, her face grim. Trying to smile but failing at the simple human act, she questioned whether my being there had to do with tomorrow’s premiere of Show Boat at the Egyptian Theatre.
“No,” I said quickly, “I’ve already been accosted by Desmond Peake.”
I tried to move around her.
“Did you see Miss Gardner? Where are you headed now?”
“To the commissary.”
Suddenly chatty and bubbly, she confided that Dore Schary was out of town-“a man who respects you”-and would be unable to see me.
“I don’t expect to see him.” I raised my voice. “I’m leaving L.A. You will not see me tomorrow.”
She looked relieved, jotted something on the clipboard-what? confirmation of my travel schedule? — and scurried off. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted Peake waiting for her. My, my, such clandestine intrigue: Edna Ferber, the Show Boat herself, lumbering through the sanctified Metro hallways. Alone, 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 this.”
“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 refused to see: real concern. And despite what he said, that look also communicated something else-fear. He looked nervous, his fingers opening and closing quickly. All right, then. My rogue companion, though uninvited. The wisecracking man with the sarcastic tongue and the flippant attitude-the brazen brawler-the nasty man-all eclipsed for the moment by a young man who wanted to come out on the side of justice. I looked at this crooner with a kind of wonder, not certain if I trusted this gangly Galahad. An intriguing soul, this Francis Albert Sinatra, Ava’s lover. A man who could surprise me. Even old ladies welcomed surprises.
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 spent long hours talking about it. Sol made an interesting observation before he died. The so-called-patriots don’t murder; they torment, they deprive folks of income and reputation. Their cruel and unusual punishment is slow and deliberate. Desmond Peake, a leader in America First, got me to believe this, too. For all their absurdity and their misguided patriotism, his group believes in redemption, admittedly after coercion and appropriate public humiliation.”
“Max was a Commie,” Ethan seethed.
“No, he wasn’t. And you know it, Ethan. When you said that one night, it made me wonder. You pride yourself on logic, precision, all the orderly trimmings you’ve manufactured for living your own life. Everything in its place. Regimented truth. So that remark made no sense. You knew better, though you’d like others to believe Max courted his own death.”
“So how did I do it?” Cocky, he threw back his head.
“Just a minute. This is my script now, my storyboard. You’re a man who prides himself on control, but that wasn’t always the case. A drinker, a wife-beater, you reformed yourself, true, something that must have taken inordinate discipline. Severe, authoritative-a life lived with rigidity. Why? I wondered. Why so keen a transformation? Because, I suppose, you burned with a deep-seated anger, a desire for vengeance.”
Tony made a blubbering noise, and for a second we all stared at him.
I went on. “It was clear the other night when you and Tony fell apart at Ava’s house-you resent Frank and his success. It should be your success. Tony told us your comment about Adam and Ava-how they don’t deserve what they’ve worked for. I listened to a man who is craven, bitter, seething. And thus dangerous.”
“Your scenario is missing some elements.” He gave out a false laugh. “Missing pieces.”
“Circumstantial? You bet, Ethan. So far. But you resented your own failure. That’s your word: failure. It burned you, ate you up. Ava and Frank, success, money, cynosures whose lives are documented in the magazines. Hollywood, the land of dreams and money and fame-it all eluded you. So close…but gone. Fame, power, money-they eluded you. And with Frank now disappearing from both your lives, you despaired. Hence the business of heading back to New Jersey. That’s admitting failure, no? Back to staring faces, folks who’d point and remember the boy who left to meet his dreams.”
Tony started to say something but stopped when Ethan shot him a look.
“To you, Max was the instrument of that failure. Tony’s career was over. But yours never started. That script you gave Max-the one you’ve mocked and played down and cavalierly dismissed-it was the touchstone of your failure. In Max’s journal today I found his summary of your final conversation, a description of how you fell apart, weeping, a little drunk then, when Max told you it was worthless. You blamed him, irrationally-then Hollywood, then, bizarrely, Frank. Three lines stayed with me. ‘I have to do it for Lenny. He won’t like it if I’m a failure.’ Awful words. Max told you to get out and what did you say. ‘I’ll be back, Max.’ An innocent enough threat, idle, but one you took seriously. You did go back.”
“Crazy lady.” Tony was sweating.
“You believed in the puerile script you peddled, sadly. It was your ticket to your name in lights. After Max’s rejection, you played it down-mocked it with Lorena. But inside you seethed. Max squelched your most important dream. You were left with a penny-ante job and a life on the fringe of Frank’s glory.”
A whine, high and thin. “I make money in real estate…”
“Then Lenny died, the catastrophic event in all your lives, and you accused Alice of murder. That became your mantra. Alice the black widow. You let Tony believe she’d taken all the fortune Lenny bragged about, but you, the numbers man who probably laundered cash for his brother, knew there was little left after the government stepped in. But it served your purpose to let Tony believe and whine and spout his nonsense. Because, frankly, at that moment you made a decision: you stopped drinking and like the Iago character you sometimes quote, you plotted revenge. Or maybe it solidified when Alice married Max-the ultimate indignity. Max, the man who single-handedly killed your dream of fame and fortune. It all comes together, no?”
Ethan opened his mouth but nothing came out.
“You also decided to make Tony your unwitting dupe. The genial comic, plodding, a little funny, the social drinker, a soft-hearted soul though not so dumb as everyone thinks he is-he became your tool. You whispered murder in his ear. Words like betrayal, dishonor, family. And Tony fell apart, losing himself, gaining weight, losing jobs, a binge drinker. I don’t think you thought he’d get so out of control, and it might have scared you-this dissolution so quickly. So you coddled him, sheltering him at the Paradise where he could get plastered and not bother a soul. Except maybe Liz, who still cared for the young man she remembered fondly.”
Tony started to say something, but stopped.
“You decided on revenge. Kill Max, and somehow blame Alice who got away with murder one time but perhaps not a second. Leave the pistol on the hall table so that Alice, returning, might pick it up, thinking Max had been careless with his gun. A possibility. Relying on chance. Alice feared guns, and, unfortunately for you, gingerly picked it up with index finger and thumb so that the cops immediately had doubts about her as suspect. She was still, of course, a possible killer. Chance.”
“Alice did…” His voice trailed off.
“No, that plan failed. Lenny is gone, the brother revered and loved. A decision by you to avenge-cool, calm, collected. A deliberate man, waiting, waiting. Timing. Always timing, you said. And that night at the Paradise the stars came together. Alice is out of the house. You watched her having a drink and leaving for the movie with Lorena and me. Max, nursing his wounded jaw, at home alone.” I looked at Frank who was entranced by my voice, barely blinking. “It was a crime of opportunity.”
“Preposterous,” Ethan growled again.
I shook my head. “You left the bar, headed down the street to Max’s, a short drive, rang the bell, followed him back to his workroom on some pretext, and when Max sat down, you shot him in the head.”
Silence at the table, Tony breathing hard. Frank’s hand, I noticed, rested on Tony’s shoulder.
Ethan’s voice was thick with venom. “Ask Tony. Ask Harry the bartender. I never left. When you all stopped back for a nightcap, I was there, watching over a drunken Tony, our usual night at Paradise.”
“Not so,” I said, checking off one more point in my head. “One thing bothered me later that night. You spend a lot of time stopping Tony from drinking. I’d seen that before at Ava’s. Yes, that night Tony was morose, having lost his comedy spot. But you let him drink. You seemed to encourage it. All right, let Tony drown his sorrows this one night. You knew Tony would drink until he passed out, which he sometimes did, slumped there in the booth until closing when it was time to drive him back to Liz’s. That bothered me.”
“Ask Harry.”
“I don’t have to ask Harry anything. I talked to Sophie Barnes today. She recalled Tony slouching in the booth, crumpled in a corner, snoring. And you’d disappeared. She considered you’d gone into the kitchen or backroom, which you probably did. But she recalled that she glanced back as she stormed out-some fifteen or so minutes after she’d first looked-and only Tony was still in the booth.”
“You’re right. I run a bar. I was in back.”
“At one point Liz Grable came looking for Tony, walking in and spotting him drunk and passed out. She backed out, headed home. She’d had it with both of you. She told me this afternoon that Tony was by himself.”
“I told you…”
“But I pushed her and she remembered that your car wasn’t in the parking lot in its usual spot. She knew it because Tony doesn’t drive and relies on you-you always brought him home. On the nights when she met Tony there your car was in its usual spot, right of the back door. Well, that night it was gone. But she paid it no mind. After all, you weren’t inside with Tony. She wasn’t surprised to see Tony by himself. Disgusted with him, she went home.”
“I was…” He clammed up.
“Something else. When Larry Calhoun was handing you the papers for the sale at the Ambassador, he sniped that he’d chosen not to hand them over at the Paradise to a drunk. I wondered, by chance, if he’d stopped in that night and you weren’t there. Desmond Peake is putting in a call to him and…”
He held up a hand. Spittle at the corners of his mouth. “You got it all figured out, right?”
“Yes, I do. You slipped out and murdered Max. You could accomplish the deed in less than a half hour. Considerably less, in fact. It was a question of timing, Ethan. You’re right on the money. Timing in Hollywood is everything.”
Ethan was biting his lip like a frenzied chipmunk. He reached for the empty coffee cup and rattled it.
“Ava told me to look at the players and where they were situated. And that led me to you, Ethan.”
Ethan shot a fierce look at Frank. “Is that why you’re here, Frankie boy? To take me in? To play the tough guy one more time? To catch a murderer and hand him over? The boy from New Jersey who made it big slapping handcuffs on the boy who never got a chance? Is that it? High muck-a-muck Frank Sinatra. Boozy kingpin. Shoot-‘em-up crooner.” He raised his voice, shrill, metallic. “I didn’t come out here to pick up crumbs off your table. Lenny told me…it…it was all ours for the picking. I hoped they’d arrest you, Frank. Haul your ass off to prison. You, who threatened to kill him. Maybe Alice, but I thought…you. You or Alice-I didn’t care. Big shot. You and Ava, two drunks. Alice killed Lenny and what did you do? Nothing. She murdered him. You let it go because Ava told you to. Alice got away with murder. Murder! At that moment I knew what I had to do.”
“All right, stop,” Frank said slowly.
“I hated Max. He is everything Hollywood did to me that is rotten. He dashed my dreams-made light of my script. My blood was in there.”
“Oddly, Ethan, in this dreamland out here, where everyone makes up stories, you still couldn’t make anyone believe in you.”
He smiled. “And there was that Commie sipping cocktails with Frank and Ava. Like he was one of them. It was all perfect, really, so logical. The pieces of a puzzle coming together, piece by piece. Exquisite, mostly. The stars in alignment. For once…with me.”
Suddenly Ethan swung into me, a jack knife move, but Frank stood, moved behind me, and placed his hands on my shoulders. I could feel his touch, his fingers pushing into my flesh. A comforting move, and welcome. He simply stood there, not saying a word, as Ethan glared.
“Sure thing, Frankie boy. You know how you call everybody a bum? Well, you’re a bum.”
Frank measured his words. “I may be a bum, Ethan, done my share of rotten things, but I also know that Max didn’t deserve to die.” He lifted one of his hands while the other still rested on my shoulder. “Sometimes you gotta do the right thing. Right, Edna?”
“Yes.”
Frank pointed at Ethan, a bony finger aimed at his chest. Ethan stiffened and wrapped his arms around his chest. “Edna’s a smart cookie, wouldn’t you say?”
Ethan spat out his words. “I would have gotten away with it if she’d stayed in New York where she belongs.”
Frank’s hand grazed my cheek affectionately. “Hey, welcome to Hollywood.”