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  “I would have thought that was against the law.”

  Maury Ahearne scratched a scab on his scalp and examined the residue in his fingernails. “So make a citizen’s arrest.” More scratching, more scab. “I bust him, then he doesn’t testify when we go back inside. He doesn’t testify, there’s no case, and this guy Emmett that’s on trial walks. It’s a question of who you want on the bricks. Emmett or Jerome.” He smiled. One of those smiles designed to show how ignorant I was in the ways of his world. “Doesn’t mean a shit to me. Jerome took out a guy for a pack of cigarettes once, he’s such a solid citizen. Emmett’s up because he did a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. The reason he did him is he’s got this new gun, a Glock he stole from some white guy shoots at a target range, you know, with the earmuffs so the noise don’t hurt his ears.” In his world guns were supposed to make noise, and the noise was supposed to scare people, and people who wore earmuffs not to hear the noise were pussy hairs. “He wanted to see if it worked, Emmett.” Another smile. “It did.” The inevitability of the result seemed to satisfy him. “So Emmett stole his wallet and nine Hoovers while he was at it. A Cuban guy, the salesman. Ignorant fuck, thinking he was going to sell a vacuum cleaner to those people, you ever look at the shitholes they live in? But ‘Cuban’ means ‘white’ to the D.A. Killing white, can’t have that, he says. Waste of time. He’s going to walk, Emmett, Jerome or no Jerome.” It was like listening to an oral historian of urban carnage and anthropology. “Twelve jurors, two alternates, and ten of the fourteen are wearing shades, cool as shit. Judge loses his car keys yesterday, he was pissing and moaning about it to the court reporter, and one of the jurors raises his hand and says, ‘Your Holiness,’ I swear to Christ, that’s what he says, ‘Your Holiness,’ and then he proceeds to tell His Holiness how to hot-wire his fucking car. So I ran a check on him. What he does is work in a chop shop. Naturally. And draw unemployment. Naturally.” The detective detecting. “Forget the judge’s car, this guy could hot-wire an F-16. Then break it down and sell the spare parts to Saddam whatever the fuck that A-rab’s last name is. Bet the fucking house Emmett’s going to walk.”

  I looked around the cafeteria. On the walls were shadowy outlines of oversized graffiti cocks and cunts that custodial scrubbing had not quite succeeded in erasing.

  “So.” Another Maury Ahearne smile. “You survived.”

  No thanks to you, I thought. Perhaps he had been standing by the day before after all, ready to move in if the situation did get out of hand. I was not going to give him the satisfaction of asking. He would have answered that my murder was not worth the paperwork or the overtime. I had also bought a new tape recorder. Two, in fact. A spare in case Maury Ahearne destroyed another one. “I need some information.”

  He showed no interest.

  “I was coming back to the hotel last night …”

  “From where …”

  “Someplace out near Grosse Pointe.”

  “What were you doing out there?”

  “Getting laid.” I was learning. It was exactly the kind of answer I knew would satisfy him. “Anyway. I was in a cab, the driver got lost, the cab hit a dog, the lady that owned the dog, some kind of bag lady, she got all twisted out of shape, and the long and the short of it is she gave a cop some lip and got herself a citation.”

  “So.”

  “I’d like to know something about her. Help her out if I can. In some way.” It sounded fraudulent even to me, as I knew it must to him, suspicion being the coin of his realm.

  “You’re yanking my chain.”

  I was suddenly very sick of Maury Ahearne. “Yes, I am.” Why not admit it? It had the virtue of honesty, a virtue that had not exactly informed our relationship. “I’m curious about her. If that’s not good enough for you, go fuck yourself.”

  It was a tone he was used to, one he would work with. “So what’s in it for me?” He held up five fingers. I held up two. “Two now, three later,” he said. It seemed safer not to bargain. Five hundred for everything he could get on Melba Mae Too-late. A name I had not even known until it appeared in Walter Scott’s Personality Parade along with mine the day Lizzie was killed.

  Maury Ahearne could not resist the last word. “You’re still jerking me around. That’s okay. When I find out why, and I will, we’ll play some more.”

  Maury Ahearne had the information by the next afternoon. Melba Mae Toolate lived in the Autumn Breeze RV camp near Hamtramck, Slot 123, Forsythia Lane. She had been married eleven times, according to the records kept by the domestic relations court, she had been arrested seven times for disturbing the peace, usually for fighting with her neighbors in various RV camps over the number of dogs and cats, sometimes twenty or more, she let live in her trailer of the moment. The courts finally made her give all her animals save one to the pound. At various times she had used the names Mae Tyler and Melba Blue. In 1979 there had been a drug bust in Ypsilanti, but the charges were reduced to disorderly conduct and were subsequently dropped, without a hearing, for insufficient evidence. She was currently unemployed, and there was no record of recent employment, nor any record of taxes of any kind having been withheld.

  “That’s the funny part,” Maury Ahearne said.

  “Why?”

  “She’s not on welfare. No public assistance of any kind. I checked all the way to Lansing.”

  “Which means?”

  “Well, it’s not exactly pig heaven she’s living in out there, but she’s not on the streets either. She seems to survive without a tin cup.”

  I considered his silence. “So someone must be kicking in something.”

  The awful smile. “Unless she’s got one of those trust funds rich people like you got.”

  I vertically creased three one-hundred-dollar bills and handed them to him. “Thanks, Maury.”

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  On that I should have made book.

  III

  Imagine it:

  The Autumn Breeze trailer park and recreational-vehicle encampment, with its RVs and house trailers neatly lined up like a military armored column, tanks and APCs on parade, each mobile home with corrugated aluminum awnings, some with metal window boxes filled with plastic flowers that had long since lost whatever color they might once have had. The streets in the trailer park had been carefully laid out into lanes, and every lane was named after a flower, Camellia Lane, Poinsettia Lane, Forsythia Lane. Every RV and trailer had its own slot, with a sidewalk and a mailbox and a tiny patch of sad brown lawn that could be crossed in a stride and a half.

  Slot 123 Forsythia Lane then: The trailer was pale blue and an even paler bleached yellow. The name on the mailbox was “Occupant,” an attempt at humor that antedated the current tenant, although she said she was perfectly comfortable with the designation, an assertion one could hardly doubt, as she had by choice (as well as by circumstance) been one of the world’s missing for over thirty years. She claimed not to know the names of her neighbors, and could identify them only by their physical ailments, the randy old fart with the prostate cancer in Slot 122, I give him a semi, she said, and the old prune with Alzheimer’s in 124, and there was one in 210 over on Poinsettia that died in her sleep, and no one knew she’d gone until the smell got so bad, the mailman complained, what happened was her cat had chewed up her nose and sucked out her eyeballs, can’t blame the kitty, nothing else to eat. She said her neighbors called her Mrs. Toolate, pronouncing it Too-Late, which suits me fine.

  When the item about Blue Tyler had appeared in Walter Scott’s Personality Parade, Melba Mae Toolate said, she was living in Pontiac then, and she had said no, she was not the one, she was Melba, not Myrna Marie, like Walter said, and she was alive and here to tell about it, not like that Myrna Marie, dead and buried in Kalamazoo, anyway she was only a Toolate by marriage, but she had always heard tell that her husband’s second cousin once or twice removed had once been in show business, Your Show of Shows she thought was the program the second cousin by marri
age had been on, then she had a mastectomy and retired, she had heard, singers with one boob not being much in demand, what with the strapless gowns they all wear, and their titties all pushed up, that was all she knew about it, and anyway that branch of the family pronounced it fancy, Too-lah-tee, la-di-da. The explanation seemed to satisfy, but she moved from that RV camp near Pontiac a week or so later, so she could be closer to her daughter, she said at the time, a daughter she had never before mentioned, come to think of it, and moved to Hamtramck.

  There was foil crimped in the windows of the trailer, a precaution against the summer heat, and a skirt of heavy fabric wrapped around the undercarriage, insulation against the winter cold, and there was a fake wrought-iron fence leading to the two rickety metal steps outside the front door, and on the top step there was a worn hemp doormat on which could be made out the word welcome.

  Well, hell, yes, she said, I know who you are, you were in Walter Scott’s Personality Parade the same day I was, and if that’s not a pisser, I don’t know what is, we’re in the same newspaper column and then, what is it now, six, seven months later, you hit my dog, then you turn up the next day at Number 123 Forsythia Lane, Ms. Toolate, you say, get that, Ms., in Hamtramck, Michigan, you don’t say Ms., asshole, then the fancy-Dan Too-lah-tee, my name is Jack Broderick, shit, honey, you are big rich, richer than Mr. French and Arthur put together, of course I know who Jack Broderick is, Bro Broderick’s brother, Hugh Broderick’s son, I think I might’ve even fucked your dad one time, or it could’ve been one of those Rockefellers, maybe it was Bill Paley or Jock Whitney, whoever it was he painted his pecker with gentian violet, because he was afraid of the clap, or was that my driver on Freedom Belle, anyway, I would have gone to Mr. French and complained if some writer came up with a coincidence like that, you and me meeting the way we did when we were both in Walter Scott’s Personality Parade, and Mr. French would have said, Arthur, that was his son Arthur, Arthur was my fiancé in those days, Arthur, go get Lamar Trotti or Nunnally Johnson or Reilly Holt or one of them to smooth out the story line, Reilly Holt was Chuckie O’Hara’s boyfriend, I bet you didn’t know that, he was a big-time Commie, but you got to admit it needs work, the way we met, and there’s one thing I was always good at, that was structure, you can ask Arthur, he’ll tell you, I was the best on the lot, and it’s cold out there, isn’t it, come on in here and take a load off your feet, do I have a story to tell you, and one more thing, now that I think of it, maybe I do like that coincidence, it has a certain je ne sais quoi, and I bet you never thought you’d hear any of that French shit in some RV camp in Hamtramck, Michigan, the reason is I took French at the studio school and I always had a French governess all those years I was at Cosmo, the number-one box office star in the country, that was Mr. French’s idea, Mr. French’s French idea, that’s cute, it’s a fairy tale is what it is, the way we met, and fairy tales was what the Industry was all about in my time, before you got all this Raging Bull shit, with the dirty words, they only make pictures about fat people today, and Italians, and whatever happened to tall actors, Randy Scott was tall, Cary, too, and Clark, but every one of them around today is a Singer midget, Richard Dreyfuss, Dustin What’s-his-face, Pacino, none of them any taller than an agent, that Dustin’s got a face like a dirt road, you ask me, and you out there in 124, stop listening, she’s loony, and what’s-his-face in 122, he wants to get in my pants, and I want to tell you, if he ever knew whose pants he wanted to get into, he would cream in those polyester jeans he wears, he probably beat off in the balcony when he saw me in Little Sister Susan, and you know something, I didn’t know this at the time, because the publicity department handled all my mail, I never saw it except when President Roosevelt wrote me, or someone like that Chiang Kai whatever his last name was, the Chinaman, but some of my fan mail had come in it, Arthur told me that. Jism, can you believe it?

  God, she was on.

  A motor driven by an energy that had been bottled up, capped like an oil fire, for decades. Did you ever bang your finger in a car door? The blood wells up under the nail, the pain is excruciating, throbbing, then the doctor drills a hole in the nail, the pressure is relieved, it’s like coming, you feel so good, the blood spurts like a geyser.

  She was that geyser.

  Old Faithful.

  Or Old Unfaithful.

  As the case may be.

  Imagine again, this time the interior of that recreational vehicle in Slot 123, Forsythia Lane, Hamtramck, Michigan 48212:

  One large space cut into three sections by two accordion room dividers. A king-sized bed, covered with an Indian blanket, so completely filled the rear third of the trailer that there was no room to maneuver on either side of it without risking a barked shin. Next to the bedroom a small bathroom with a shower, a chemical toilet, and in the medicine cabinet, along with the over-the-counter pills and the Medicare prescriptions for calcium deficiency and for bloat (yes, I looked, of course I looked), an unopened package of twelve ribbed Trojan-Enz condoms. The living space was in the center section. An ancient Sylvania television set, vintage 1950, with a circular screen. An artifact, it turned out. Un objet trouvé, she said in her best French-governess French, but where it was found she did not offer. Two VCRs, Mitsubishis with twin digital autotracking, and a 30-inch Panasonic color TV set with wraparound sound, cable ready, 156 channels. A couch with bad springs from Goodwill. Four wooden kitchen chairs, none of which matched. A portable Royal typewriter with the question mark and the dollar sign missing. Oilcloth curtains, once pink, now faded by the sun. Worn and patched diamond-pattern linoleum floors.

  The final section contained the kitchen, with its Mr. Coffee coffeemaker, a six-slice toaster, a gelato maker, a Cuisinart, a microwave oven, a two-burner stove, and a Sub-Zero freezer crammed full of packaged food, junk food, but that’s another story, it’ll have to wait, in due time, don’t worry, it explains the top-of-the-line appliances, those two VCRs, the giant TV, the Cuisinart, and the gelato machine as well. Empty half-pint bottles of supermarket-brand vodka were lined up along the baseboards like so many ducks in a shooting gallery. The glasses had all once been jam or peanut butter jars. Stuck to the freezer with a miniature magnetized naked woman was a mimeoed list of weekly events at St. Anton the Magyar Roman Catholic Church in Hamtramck—a get-together for new converts, prayer sessions for divorced parishioners, a meeting of the Shut-in Committee, Mrs. M. M. Toolate, chairperson. There was a two-shelf bookcase, its only volumes movie star biographies—Marilyn Monroe and Carole Landis and Lana Turner and Joan Crawford and Hedy Lamarr and Elizabeth Taylor and Marlene Dietrich. No men, two suicides, and a million and a half fucks and blow jobs. Her description of her library, not mine. On top of the bookcase a quilted tea cozy, and under the cozy not a teapot but the pint-sized special Oscar given her in 1939 by the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences for being the Industry’s top box office draw three years running, all before she was ten years old.

  And everything neat as a pin.

  Baby, she said, I just fell off the planet earth.

  IV

  Who was she?

  What was she?

  That, I think, the more difficult question.

  Genius. Whore. Individualist. Iconoclast. Liar. Free spirit. Bag lady. Madwoman. Spoiled. Willful. Pathological. Self-indulgent. Self-destructive. An eternal child. A fantast willing to sacrifice everything—fame, career, and fortune—to satisfy her need to flout convention. A case of severely arrested development whose first priority was always the maintenance of her own interests. A moral force more honest and uncompromising than her contemporaries. Everyone living or dead seemed to have an opinion about Blue Tyler, whether they knew her or not. Even Maury Ahearne, who claimed not to care about her, weighed in with “crazy cunt.”

  So.

  Take your pick.

  All the above would be my choice. Including the verdict of Maury Ahearne.

  Her filmography, which I diligently gathered over time via computer modem from new
spaper morgues (The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, in particular, although the tabloids and the penny press in both cities, most of them no longer publishing, contributed their own particularly raffish take, too); from an assiduous search-and-save of Winchell and Hedda and Louella and Kilgallen and Jimmy Fidler and Jack O’Brian, all gone to their eternal reward now (skewed views, but dramatically interesting, adding primary colors, the softer tones in the historical palette not coming naturally to gossip columnists); from interviews with those who it turned out knew her less well than they claimed, and with others (more interesting) unwilling (in some instances with good reason) to share easily their considerable fund of memories; from delving into the archives of mainstream motion picture libraries and the dusty files of college film societies as well—all these many sources yielded few clues, and the ones they did yield were conflicting, contradictory, and in some cases shamelessly fabricated, the irony being (as I was to learn) that the fabrications did not do justice to the real story; or the real story as I (another fabricator: an added spin) began to imagine it, with inductive leaps (mine) and addenda (these much later) from long-forgotten rap sheets and criminal-investigation files still open after nearly fifty years because the capital crimes reported therein remain unsolved. Meaning murder, P.C. 187 in the California penal code, on which the statute of limitations never runs out.

  Ah, yes. Murder is part of the mix. Something I had not anticipated. My mistake.

  Caveats:

  I admit a certain impatience with Hollywood and all its orthodoxies. I hear that film is truth at twenty-four frames a second, Godard’s formulation, and I want to grab an AK-47 and spray the room. Try it this way: truth at sixty words a minute. I like writing movies. I am good at it, quick and always in demand. Movies provide me a good living that I don’t actually need, with more laughs than in most businesses; the heartbreaks, such as they are, are generally carnal. I don’t get all twisted out of shape by the law of nature (Hollywood division) that says a director who gets paid twice as much as I do is therefore twice as smart as I am. I like the Marty Magnin types I work for, and am willing to entertain the idea that I like them in part because they give me something to which I can feel superior. I have no particular enthusiasm for the masters who used to be called directors and are now called filmmakers, Hitchcock, for example, and Ford, and only occasionally do I warm to Chaplin. Nor am I won over by the argument that black-and-white is the real cinema (that shit word; they shot in black-and-white because color was clumsy and expensive and washed out, it was certainly not for any artistic reason) and that movies (a far better word) took a turn for the worse when sound came in. I do not haunt the rerun houses to see Garbo in Queen Christina, I have never gone to the Cinémathèque Française in Paris to see Pandora’s Box at four in the morning (have never gone to the Cinémathèque at all, in fact), and I have no position on the importance of Gregg Toland’s lighting to the films of William Wyler, or William Cameron Menzies’s sets on the success of Gone With the Wind.