Dial H for Hitchcock (8 page)

M
usso & Frank is the oldest restaurant in Hollywood, a wood-paneled shrine to the finer pleasures of tobacco, red meat, and booze. Back in the day you couldn’t go there without bumping into somebody who was somebody, or somebody who used to be somebody, or somebody who was going to become somebody, and I’m not talking about the waiters.

Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, and Douglas Fairbanks would race each other down Hollywood Boulevard on horseback, the loser picking up the tab. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and Raymond Chandler, good citizens all, walked over from the Writer’s Guild, located on nearby Cherokee. William Faulkner held court in one of the high-backed red-leather booths, which were almost as picturesque as a green lawn in Mississippi, not to mention they let you mix your own mint juleps.

Nowadays, Musso’s is frequented by the sort of people enam
ored of Hollywood history, as well as those who like meals that start with jellied consommé and end with Postum.

I walked up to the bar and found a seat. The bartender appeared with a discreet clearing of the throat. He was about eighty. He’d probably mixed drinks for Faulkner himself.

“Madame would like?”

I ordered a mint julep, then had a look around.

There was a redhead at the far end of the bar drinking alone, always a bad sign.

A plumpish guy with a goatee in a motorcycle jacket, also alone, sucking down a glass of beer.

A woman next to me who looked exactly like the woman next to her, if you added twenty years of sun damage and an equal number of pounds. They were nursing matching tumblers of vodka and bickering affectionately, the way mothers and daughters do on television, even though this was real life.

The bartender set down my drink.

I took a sip. “Delicious. Thank you.”

“Thank
you,
Madame.”

He wiped down the counter, polished a few glasses. I popped some nuts in my mouth and glanced at my watch. Ben wasn’t coming for ten more minutes. The mother was asking the daughter about a date she’d recently had. The daughter was telling the mother to mind her own business. I stared at the empty place on the third finger of my left hand where my engagement ring used to be. Then I put my hand in my lap and sighed.

“Madame would like another?”

I was supposed to be killing birds here. “Not yet. But I would like to ask you a question.”

He was good. I barely saw him cringe.

I leaned forward, lowering my voice. “Was there a guy here a few days ago, waiting for someone, kind of sitting around, acting hostile?”

“Yes, Madame. Now would you excuse me?”

He went to pour a drink for the redhead. Miss Lonelyhearts. When he was finished, he came back over to where I was sitting.

“Will there be anything else, Madame?”

“What exactly did he look like?”

The bartender gave me a knowing smile. “Every night they look different. Some are young, some are old. Some come alone, some with friends. See the gentleman over there?” He shifted his head in the direction of the guy with the goatee. We watched him pick something out of his teeth with a toothpick. “That gentleman will be making a fuss shortly. One spots them early in the evening. One tries to slow them down, but more often than not they are determined to self-destruct. Ready for that mint julep now, Madame?”

It would’ve been rude to say no.

Then I heard a voice behind me. “You started without me.”

I wheeled around in my chair.

“
B
is for Ben,” I said. “How are you?”

He was wearing a dark suit, crisp white shirt, and expensive loafers with tassels. Gucci, if I had to call it. He was taller than I’d remembered, and older—late forties, say. And sexier.

“
C
is for Cece,” he said. “I’m good.”

Time would be the judge of that.

He slid into the seat next to mine and took off his jacket. “How about you?”

“How about me what?”

“Are you good, Cece?”

I crossed my legs. Dr. Heilmann would undoubtedly have a few things to say about that. I uncrossed them again. “I like to think so.”

“Maybe that’s an unfair question. Good is relative.”

“Actually, I believe in black and white.”

“Yet you’re wearing red.”

I decided not to mention it was the color of defloration.

The bartender appeared in front of us. “For the gentleman?”

“I’ll take a gimlet.”

There was a six-pack of beer in Anita’s Sub-Zero. Budweiser. “I would’ve pegged you for a beer drinker, Ben.”

He grinned. “I’ve been known to enjoy a beer now and then.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Budweiser, right? No pretentious foreign stuff, just good, all-American beer, the kind you grew up drinking in your little house on the prairie.”

“I grew up in a split level on a cul-de-sac in Tarzana,” Ben said. “Never even seen a prairie. And I haven’t had a Bud since I was fifteen and had to pay the kid down the block to buy it for me.”

Just as the bartender set down his gimlet, Ben’s phone started to ring. He pulled it out of his jacket pocket and turned down the volume without checking to see who had called. Smooth. I studied his hands. They were big and strong. The right size for pushing a woman off the side of a mountain.

I stepped down from my seat. “Will you excuse me for a minute?”

“Sure.”

“Which way to the ladies’ room?” I asked the bartender, overenunciating and blinking animatedly so he’d get the hint.

“If Madame takes this aisle and then—”

I grabbed his arm and pulled him down to the end of the bar. “Is that him?” I whispered, shooting a glance back at Ben. “The one I asked you about, sitting at the bar waiting for someone a couple of nights ago?”

“Madame, I—”

The goatee cleared his throat. “What does a guy have to do to get another beer around here? Looks like I’m shit out of luck. Bartender’s preoccupied. Yeah, I’ll take a piece of that, too, if you don’t mind.”

Here was the fuss, right on schedule.

Ben looked up. “Watch your mouth, buddy.” I could see the muscles in his back tensing through his white shirt.

“It’s okay, Ben,” I said.

“Cece,” Ben said, eyes glued to the goatee, “just go ahead to the ladies’ room. We’re fine, here.”

“Go ahead to the ladies’ room,” said the goatee in a singsong voice.

Ben got up from his seat.

So did the goatee.

I didn’t want any more blood on my hands. “Ben, let’s just go to our table.” I walked back over and reached for his arm.

“Listen to Mommy,” said the goatee.

Ben was on him in a flash, yanking him out of his seat by the collar. I backed away. Miss Lonelyhearts tossed a ten on the bar and left. The mother and daughter with the matching
drinks looked resigned—barflies, obviously. The bartender braced himself.

“I think you owe a couple of people here apologies,” Ben said.

The room went silent. Everybody knew the goatee wasn’t going down easy.

“Nah,” he said, jerking himself free, “I don’t think—”

Then the daughter pushed back her tumbler of vodka and let out a huge belch. The kind that wins contests.

“Miriam!” Her mother was shaking her head. “Did I raise you in a barn?”

The tension dissipated pretty fast after that.

“Okay, already.” The goatee looked down at his silver-tipped cowboy boots. “So I’ve got a little drinking problem.”

After inhaling deeply, he rolled his head around a few times, cracked his knuckles, and started apologizing—to Ben, to me, to the bartender, and to his mother, who’d raised him right but couldn’t stop him from getting mixed up with a bad bunch in high school. Ben accepted his apology on behalf of the group, then helped him pay his tab, including a twenty for the bartender. After that, he escorted the goatee out the back door.

When Ben returned, the mother and daughter started clapping. Ben turned red, which was unexpected for a sexy guy in Gucci loafers.

“I hate fights,” he said.

“My father was a cop,” I said. “My brothers, too. They all felt the same way.”

The next thing I knew I was kissing him on the cheek. The next thing after that we were sitting very close to each other in a small corner of a large booth.

The waiter came over and handed us menus.

I ordered cream of mushroom soup, pork chops with extra applesauce, and mashed potatoes. Ben ordered Caesar salad with anchovies and spaghetti Italienne. In homage to me, he said. Before I got carried away again, I reminded myself I was on a mission.

“So,” I said, putting my napkin in my lap, “how exactly did you wind up at the Orpheum that night?”

Turned out Bachelor Number One was a Hollywood agent. And a Hitchcock buff.
Vertigo
was his favorite movie.

“What do you like so much about it?” I asked.

This was a test.

He stopped with the fork midway to his mouth. “The beauty of the shots. The brilliance of the reveal two thirds of the way through the film. The unsettling notion that love is always perverse. Scottie transforms Judy into Madeleine just like Hitch remade all his leading ladies. That’s what makes it his most self-reflexive film. And the saddest. Hitch understood his own obsessions, but couldn’t get beyond them.”

“Salt, please?” Our fingers touched as he handed me the shaker. I felt a definite spark. “But you’re wrong about one thing.”

“What?”

“The most personal of Hitch’s films was actually
Rear Window.”

“How so?”

“It’s all about an immobilized man sitting in the dark, spying on his neighbors. It’s the perfect allegory of why we go to the movies: to watch people do things we can only fantasize about.” I guess my
Rear Window
homage doll hadn’t been a waste after all.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll give you that round. But I’ll bet you didn’t know that Hitch cast Raymond Burr as the killer because he looked exactly like the evil supermogul David O. Selznick?”

“Common knowledge. Hitch hated Selznick going back as far as
Rebecca.”

“Not to mention for what he did to Robert Walker.”

Robert Walker had given a chilling performance as the dough-faced killer Bruno Anthony in
Strangers on a Train.
He’d died at age thirty-two, eight months after the movie was released. “I’m impressed. I have absolutely no idea what Selznick did to Robert Walker.”

Ben put down his fork. “He stole his wife, Phyllis, changed her name to Jennifer Jones, and made her a star. Walker never got over losing her.”

“Ouch,” I said. “Love hurts.”

Bachelor Number One gave me a smoldering look. “It doesn’t have to.”

The rest of the evening was a blur of witty repartee, strong cocktails, and sexual tension.

And then we were standing in the parking lot. The light was dim. It was late, and the attendants had gone home. I reached into my bag for my keys. I wondered when I was going to see Ben again. He’d passed the test. He’d ordered spaghetti. I loved his shoes.

“Cece?”

I smiled. “I’m sorry, I was distracted for a second.”

He waited for me to look at him. “Do I have your full attention now?”

I stood up straight. “Yes.”

“I asked if you wanted to know what I was really doing at the Orpheum that night?”

It was at that point that I remembered I was a terrible judge of character.

“What you were really doing at the Orpheum that night,” I repeated, putting the key into the lock. “I’m listening.” When I heard the click, I opened the car door and started to get in.

He put his hand on my shoulder and turned me around. “Give me the keys, Cece.”

“I’m fine.”

“You shouldn’t be driving.”

“I said I was fine.”

“I don’t know about that.” He took the keys out of my hand. “I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”

I felt the blood rush to my face. “You still haven’t said what you were doing at the theater.”

He flashed a grin. His teeth looked sharp. “I was hoping to bump into you. Come on. Don’t you recognize my voice?”

It was him after all.

He’d dropped the hot pink cell phone in my purse.

He’d called me on the trail.

He’d killed Anita.

And he was framing me for it.

But why?

Why me?

I wrenched my keys out of his grasp. “You picked the wrong person to fool with.” My voice was quavering. “I’m leaving. And don’t try to stop me.”

“You’re frightened.”

I shook my head. “You don’t frighten me, Ben.”

“But I don’t understand. I thought we made a connection that day.”

“You’re sick.” He sounded like Bruno Anthony from
Strangers on a Train.
What, had he memorized the lines?

“Cece, I don’t know what you’re talking about. This isn’t how you sounded the other day. Crazy, I mean.”

“At the Orpheum? I most certainly did sound crazy that day. I wouldn’t even let you sit down next to me. Ask the lady in the beige cardigan.”

“I’m not talking about the Orpheum. I’m talking about the radio.”

“The what?”

“You were being interviewed on KPCC. We talked about Hitch’s marriage. I can’t believe you don’t remember.”

Oh, God.

I did remember.

I was a guest on one of the afternoon programs. Some listener had called in. It must’ve been Ben. He and I had had a long talk about how much Alma Hitchcock had sacrificed to support her husband. Sublimating her career to his. Overlooking his infatuations with his actresses. Alma had admired her husband. Respected him. Built a life with him. They’d worked side by side each and every day until he’d died, and he’d valued her opinion over anyone else’s. That was love. The whole time this caller and I were talking I was thinking I could never be the kind of wife Alma was. Or any kind of wife. Two days later, I broke it off with Gambino.

So maybe Ben wasn’t who I thought he was.

Maybe I’d jumped to conclusions.

But he’d given me ample reason.

I got into the car and slammed the door behind me. As I tore out of the parking lot, I saw his eyes in the rearview mirror.

They didn’t look angry.