End of the Tiger (11 page)

The funeral was a wretched affair. I suppose it was done as tastefully as one would expect. But great gaudy swarms of Gloria’s friends from the television industry came up from the Los Angeles area. They were dressed sedately but still managed to seem like flocks of bright birds, men and women alike, their eyes bright and sharp and questing.

They had been at the inquest too, turning out in numbers that astonished the officials. I had not been surprised. If I had learned any one thing from my marriage, it was that those people are incurably gregarious. They have absolutely no appreciation of privacy and decorum. Their ceaseless talk is like the chatter of birds, and largely incomprehensible to the outsider.

After the funeral I settled a few final details before going away. The lawyer had me sign the necessary things. Gloria had managed to squirrel away more than I expected, and she had invested it very shrewdly indeed. My own affairs were in a temporary lull. Bernard, at the gallery, made the usual apology about not being able to move more of my work and offered his condolences—for the tenth time. I closed the Bay house and flew to the Islands.

Helen’s greeting was sweet and humble and adoring. She is a small, plain woman, quite wealthy, a few years older than I. She was most restful after the contentious flamboyance of Gloria. Her figure is rather good. During the weeks we had together she made several shy hints about marriage, but the unexpected size of Gloria’s estate gave me the courage to think of Helen as a patron rather than a potential wife.

We returned to Los Angeles by ship, in adjoining staterooms, and parted warmly in that city. She was to return to New York to visit her children and settle some business matters concerning her late husband’s estate, then fly back out to San Francisco to be near me.

I moved back into the Bay house and listed it with a
good broker. It is a splendid house, set high over the rocks, but a little too expensive to maintain, and a little too conspicuous for the bachelor life I contemplated. Also, there was a silence about it when I was alone there that made me feel uneasy, and made it difficult for me to work in the big studio that Gloria and I had designed together.

After I had been there alone for five days, a seedy little man arrived in the afternoon. He drove up in a battered little car and came to the door carrying a big manila envelope in his hand.

He was trying to say he had something to show me. He was humble and nervous, and had a little recurring smile like a sudden grimace. He smelled sweaty. Something about him alarmed me. Reluctantly I led him back through the house to the studio.

He said, “Mr. Fletcher, I just want to work something out. That’s all. I don’t want you should get the wrong idea about anything. It’s just one of those things. And we can work something out. The thing is, to talk it over.”

I’d had my share of bad dreams about this kind of situation. My voice sounded peculiar to me as I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He had put the envelope on a work table. He said, “What I do, I’m an assistant manager, Thrifty Quick. My brother-in-law, he’s a doctor, got a home right over there across the way. You can’t see it today, it’s too misty. The thing is, I was laid up in April. Dropped a case on my foot, and I stayed over there with my sister. I guess I’m what they call a shutter bug. I’m a real nut on photography. It keeps me broke, I’m telling you.”

“Mr. Walsik, I haven’t the faintest …”

“What I was fooling with, long lens stuff on thirty-five millimeter. I was using a Nikon body and a bunch of adaptors, a tripod of course, and I figured it out it came to f22, sixteen hundred millimeters, and I was using Tri-X. I don’t suppose the technical stuff means anything to you, Mr. Fletcher.”

“You don’t mean anything to me, Mr. Walsik.”

“Figuring back, it had to be April tenth. A clear morning and no wind. Wind is bad when you use that much lens. You can’t get sharpness. The thing is, I was just
experimenting, so I had to find some sharp-edged object at a distance to focus on, so I picked the edge of that terrace out there. I took some shots at different exposures, and after a while I thought I could see somebody moving around on the terrace. I took some more shots. I made notes on exposure times and so on. You know, you have to keep track or you forget.”

I sat down upon my work stool. This was the monstrous cliché of all murders. I had thought it a device of scenario writers, the accidental little man, the incongruous flaw. With an effort I brought my attention back to what he was saying.

“… in the paper that she was all alone here, Mr. Fletcher, and you proved you were somewhere else. Now I got to apologize for the quality of this print. It’s sixteen by twenty, which is pretty big to push thirty-five millimeter, and there was some haze, and that fast film is grainy, but here, you take a look.”

I took the big black and white print and studied it. I was at the railing, leaning, arms still extended. He had caught her in free fall toward the rocks, some six feet below my outstretched hands, her fair hair and nylon peignoir rippled upward by the wind of passage. It brought it all back—scooping her up from the drugged and drowsy bed, walking with her slack warm weight, seeing her eyes open, and hearing her murmurous question in the instant before I dropped her over the wall. The print was too blurred for me to be recognizable, or Gloria. But it was enough. The unique pattern of the wall was clear. It could no longer be “jumped or fell.” And with that picture, they could go back and pry at the rest of it until the whole thing fell apart.

When he took the picture out of my hands, I looked up at him. He stepped backward very quickly and said a shaking voice, “I got the negative in a safe place with a letter explaining it.”

“What do you want?” I asked him.

“Like I said, I just want to work something out, Mr. Fletcher. The way I figure, if I try to push too hard what I’ll do is spoil everything. What I want is for life to be a little easier. So I could get a little bit better apartment in a handier neighborhood. And there’s some
lenses and camera equipment I want to buy. I won’t be a terrible burden, you understand. But I don’t want to sell you the negatives. I want like a permanent type thing, the way people got an annuity. I’ve got some bills I want to pay off, so the first bite, believe me, is bigger than the ones I’ll want later on. I was figuring it out. If you can get a thousand for me now, then in three or four months I’ll come back like for five hundred. I don’t see why we can’t work it out this way. I want you to be comfortable with it so you won’t try to upset anything.”

He was actually pleading with me. And obviously frightened. And I found myself reappraising marriage to Helen. She could more readily afford Mr. Walsik. I had no choice, of course. I had to agree.

He told me where to meet him and when, and I promised to bring along the thousand dollars in tens and twenties. After he had left, I had two stiff drinks and began to feel better. In ridding myself of Gloria I had saddled myself with Walsik, but he seemed a good deal easier to manage.

I found him two nights later exactly where he said he would be—in one of the rear booths of a tiresome little neighborhood bar. I handed him the envelope and he tucked it away. As I got up to leave, two burly chaps grabbed me, snapped steel on my wrist, and bustled me out to an official sedan.

They tell me that I held out for fourteen hours before I finally began to give them those answers as deadly to me as the cyanide will be in the gas chamber.

After it was over, they let me sleep. The next afternoon they brought Walsik to see me. He was not seedy. He was not humble. His voice was not the same. He had that odd, febrile, animal glitter so typical of Gloria’s friends in the industry.

“While you were on the grass-skirt circuit, Frank baby,” he said, “we borrowed your pad. We brought the long lenses. We rigged the safety net. A big crew of willing volunteers, baby, all the kids who loved Gloria. We guessed that’s how you did it. We took maybe fifty stills of Buddy dropping Nina over the wall. How did you like my performance, sweetie? You bought it good. After you bought it, we brought the law into it to watch you
give me money. Sit right there, Frank baby. Sit there and bug yourself with how stupid you were.”

I heard him leave, walking briskly down the corridor, humming a tune. Somebody said something to him. He laughed. A door clanged shut. And I began to go over it all, again and again and again.…

She was a chrysanthemum girl, slender by all sane standards, yet not gaunted to the thinness of a high-fashion model. But very useful for the consumer items. You called the agency and you booked this Lya Shawnessy, which was what the agency had named her for obscure reasons of its own, and what they sent you was this Jean Anne Burch, basically from Canton, Ohio, one and the same girl.

And useful. More useful now in the late part of spring than she had been back in the winter, because now her understanding of what Joe Kardell wanted of her was more instantaneous. Also, when he would go dry on a special problem, and Ritchie couldn’t come up with anything either, she sometimes would have a shy idea that would work. It was a good product face, the bone structure so good it could even take flat lighting. And if the deal was to enchant the people with the idea of gobbling Yum-Bars, there she was, staring out of the color advertisement, all a glowing, textured innocence of delight in the masticatory wonders of Yum-Bars. Yet in all that innocence there was a subtle additive—something in the fullness of upper lids, in the modeling of the mouth—expressing a sweet sensuous innocent pleasure in everything, symbolic of the ideal consumer.

She took color beautifully, and direction well, and had few bad angles even in black and white. Joe Kardell had started using her in the winter, using her for things exactly right for her, and he wondered at what subtle and self-deceiving point he had begun using her for jobs not exactly right, jobs where another face would have been better, jobs where he could overcome that small discrepancy through his total mastery of his tools.

At least he had avoided location work, preferring as always the big bare studio on East 35th, where he had total control, Ben on props and lights and scut work, Ritchie loading the cameras, keeping the running record of the shots, music holding the mood, the three of them
and the model working with the swift minimum of confusion of a good surgical team.

She had checked in at one on this drizzly spring afternoon, and been ready at ten after. It was one of the jobs suited to her, a college fashion thing for fall, a sort of hood and parka thing, and he was at the point where he knew he should not use her again for anything, no matter how right she was. And he knew that Ben knew it, and Ritchie knew it. All that awareness. How could they miss it?

“You beat your buddies up the hill,” he said. “You’re out of breath, waiting, smiling a little on account of you beat them, and the sun has got you squinting a little bit. Good. Now chin an inch up and an inch toward me. Good. Now you’re alone. They’ve turned back. Smile sad. Good. Now look up into the pretty trees at the pretty leaves. Good. Push the hood back a little. Little more. Good.”

It went swiftly. He made his small professional adjustments in depth of field, composition, lighting, nailing her in her beauty into the emulsion, until near the end when he knew he had it and thought himself safely lost in work, she was turned toward him and suddenly his eyes filled and he could not see her in the ground glass. There was the music and the three of them waiting, and he could not see and he could not look up. He took the shot and turned away.

“That does it,” he said.

Ritchie said, “That’s only eleven on …”

“I told you that does it!”

The rudeness shocked them. Ben cut the music.

Out of the corner of his eye, Joe Kardell saw Ritchie shrug, saw Jean Anne head for the dressing room. He did not look directly at any of them.

Ritchie took the rolls out to be marked for the color lab pickup and came back and said quietly, “We got the little kids here for the candy thing, Joe. Any ideas how we should set it up?”

“You do it,” Joe said.

Ritchie looked blankly at him. “But you were going to …”

“Do I get arguments, or do you take pictures?”

Ritchie’s face was white. “I’m not going to take this kind of …”

“I’m sorry. I’m very sorry, Ritchie. I … don’t mean any of this. I’ve just got to get out of here. I’m taking off. You’ll do a good job on it.”

“You taking off with her?”

“Don’t push it, Ritchie.”

“Okay. I work for you. But I thought I was your friend. Am I?”

“I’m not keeping track lately,” he said and walked away. He got his hat and topcoat and waited in the corridor. She came out in her rain cape, carrying her kit, and stopped when she saw him, her look startled, glad, apprehensive.

“Joe?” she said, her voice soft and tentative.

“We’ll drive around,” he said.

“All right.” Maybe she was supposed to be somewhere else. But it couldn’t matter to her. Not even enough to mention it or phone in about it. That was the way it took you. It pushed everything else out of focus, like a long lens that brought the clarity to just here and now and the dear beloved face.

They walked down the street to the parking garage and stood silent in the grubby gloom while they brought his car down. All the years of scrupulousness and he could not feel any sense of holiday out of walking away from his work in the middle of the day. He felt heavy, troubled, yet so glad to be with her.

They got into the car, and he turned the wipers on when they turned out into the slow soft rain. He went up to 42nd and west, and then up onto the highway and north, past the piers and the ships and the yellow-gray look of the river. He remembered how it was a thousand years ago, a brassy kid with a used Rollei, the first decent camera he had ever owned, taking that winter essay on the tramp ships and the men, working in the cold pearl light of dawns until his hands were too numb to set the lens. Then all the labor in the borrowed darkroom—cropping, editing, dodging, bringing it all down to fifteen pure, savage prints. Nothing sentimental. Just the hard flavor of how it was to be working on the ships in the winter.