The Song Is You (10 page)

You must really hate me. That’s what Midge always said, lips twisted like a candy wrapper. Why did you marry me if you hate me this much? And what he wouldn’t tell her, what he didn’t know the way or have the heart to tell her was that that was precisely why he had married her. He couldn’t, never could, still couldn’t separate out the heady brew of desire and contempt she elicited in him. The pouty face he couldn’t resist was the same one he often wanted to smash in with the hard heel of his hand. When he felt this way, he disgusted himself. How could a woman be so stupid as to marry him? And how could he be weak enough to marry her?

Men he knew, they’d always say, Oh, I understand. They really trick you, don’t they? You marry the fleshy beauty popping out of the strapless dress, the one who’s dolled up and ready to play, knocking back cocktails and dancing with her heaving chest pressed so close against you that you think you’ve died and gone to tit heaven. Then, three days after the honeymoon you think, Where’d that girl go and what is my mother doing here ironing clothes in the living room and yelling at me for not buying milk as her waistline grows an inch a day?

But Hop couldn’t really play along with the boys’-club patter.

Truth was, Midge hadn’t changed one bit. The same WASP waist and black underwear and chilly distaste for anything unattractive or cheap. Never was a girl to cradle your head in her lap and coo words of comfort and never would be. She still drank martinis and slid her pointy feet into spiky satin shoes, and she still had the flat white belly he’d once licked a pint of Early Times off of in a Palm Springs hotel room. She hadn’t changed at all. It was a crying shame.

Twenty minutes later, Hop had showered, shaved again, and put on a new suit. All the while thinking about Frannie Adair’s ambush. Calling his wife. Pretty low. It didn’t make him mad, exactly. He knew things would be all right. They always were. Still, something softer than the girl-reporter routine or Midge’s pointed nails would be nice.

He resisted the urge to pour some bourbon, sit down on the couch, and begin working the phone, trying to get a girl to swing by or invite him to do the same. Tonight, he’d want something sweet and wide-eyed. A Midwest girl or a ponytailer from deep in the Valley or Glendale.

Maureen. Maureen, the dark-haired file clerk in the shorts department with twitchy nose and sprightly thighs. She was always willing to send her roommate to Schwab’s for a butterscotch sundae so she could give Hop a quick tumble and an earful of studio gossip. Breasts springy as her bouncing head and the inside dope on the latest star dipping his wick at queer joints over in Silver Lake— wouldn’t that be wonderful? Hell, the hour or two it’d take, what

could Frannie Adair find out?

Before he could look up Maureen’s number, the phone rang.

“Is that Hop?” It was a juicy female voice that made Hop sit up

straight in his chair, bure is.

“This is Barbara.”

Beautiful Barbara Payton, there to remind him of all the good things coming his way if he could only … “Congratulations are in order, Mrs. Tone,” he said.

“Thanks, kid. And thanks for the flowers. Our room smells like a French whorehouse,” she said, and he could hear the smile in her voice.

“Must be the middle of the night there, B.P. Shouldn’t you be consummating or something? Got the honeymoon jitters? I promise, it’s not so bad.”

She laughed. “I kicked that butterfly out. He was drunk as a skunk and crying like a girl. I miss Tom,” she sighed.

“Gee, I’m sorry, kid.” He wondered if she would blame him. Who else could she blame?

“Hell, it ain’t so bad. There’s a lot of lumberjack types out here.”

“And your family’s good?”

“I guess so. They’re in Texas.”

“Texas?”

“They moved us all to Odessa years ago, when I was eleven. They didn’t want to come back to snowy old Cloquet for a lousy wedding. They drink like it’s 1933, you know.”

Shaking his head, Hop thought of all the stories sent out over the wire about the heartwarming family wedding. “Well, we’ll keep all that between us, gorgeous. Mum’s the word.”

“That’s what I got you for, Mr. Blue Sky.”

“That you do.”

She sighed again. “Well, good night, Hop.” She sounded far’ away.

Hop felt funny. She was lonely and he was willing to spare a

minute. “Barbara?”

“Yeah?”

“Let me ask you: you’ve been around this dirty town a few years.

You’ve never been afraid to dig your heels in.”

“Hell no.”

“You ever run into Marv Sutton and Gene Merrel out on the town?”

“Yeah.” She paused, which she’d never done once since Hop met

her.

“What’s their story?”

“Fuck if I know, Hop.”

“C’mon, Barbara. Between you and me. You don’t need to

pussyfoot with me.” There was another pause. Then, “Look, I don’t like repeating what

I ain’t seen firsthand.”

“I’m a clam, Barbara. It’s my one and only virtue.”

“Well, that Marv’s cuddled up to me a few times, but there was

something about both of them that rubbed me the wrong way. A girl gets a kind of radar.”

‘Yeah?”

“And I heard things.”

“What things?”

“Okay, here goes,” she said. “A girlfriend of mine once stripped for them at a private party at Gene’s place out in the desert,” she said carefully. “After she came back, she locked herself up in her apartment for a week, drinking and crying so loud the neighbors called the cops. She wouldn’t talk about it. Not ever. And she was the kind of girl who loved to trade fuck stories.” Barbara breathed in deeply. Hop could almost see the cigarette burned down to the nub. A shaking head worn down by everything.

“She left the biz soon after. She said, You can’t unsee things you’ve seen. Can’t undo things you’ve done.’”

“Fuck me, Barbara.”

“I never minded a little bad fun, Hop. And live and let live and all that. But that ain’t all. There’s things out there darker than all this.”

“Wish I didn’t know that. B.P.”

The wind knocked out of him, he took a short drink and stared at the wall. Little Maureen from the shorts department just didn’t seem like a possibility anymore. Did girls like that even exist in this town? Had he made her up in his head?

Why couldn’t Sutton and Merrel just have pulled your average droit du seigneur? Why’d Iolene have to drag him back into this? Why couldn’t he have kept his big mouth shut? He knew where he had to go. The Red Lily, the last place he knew Jean Spangler was. Tracing her steps from me to oblivion, he thought.

In all Hop’s experience, which involved accompanying stars and execs to Chinatown whorehouses, to dark parking lots, alleys, and motels off Central Avenue, to one Mexican hothouse that trotted out prime San Quentin tail, he’d never been to the Red Lily, never even heard it mentioned more than a handful of times and always in choked whispers late into lost nights, nights when the warm glow of eleven p.m. Had turned into something quaking and nasty by two.

He’d been half sure the place was mere rumor, black fantasy, a vision that came in the night with the sandman. The few who’d mentioned it to him had never actually been there, had only known someone who had been. Or knew someone who knew someone.

There were tales of rough orgies, of Hollywood royalty throbbing violently against world-class dock trash, floaters from faraway ports with rough faces and pliant bodies or pliant faces and rough bodies, bodies coursing with diseases from centuries past.

Dark and ancient folk who’d moved from port to port for centuries, or so it seemed, carrying a taste for sexual devolution. Their eyes held secrets back to Babylon.

Oh, it was too much for Hop.

“Hell, who needs all that brimstone poetry,” he always said. “Give me a good Tijuana whorehouse—or hell, a makeup girl from Van Nuys, any day.”

He’d discovered long ago that asking women nicely was all he’d ever needed to get whatever he wanted.

Getting into his car, he wasn’t sure he was going to be able to find the place. He had a vague sense of the area, down in a waterlogged strip of warehouses and bars on the harbor, and an impression of it being like a 1920s speakeasy with a sliding peephole and a secret password. Then he remembered, that night at the Eight Ball, the manager had given Bix directions of some kind. Had even told them to slip the folks at the Red Lily his name.

Two birds with one stone, Hop thought, as he veered north toward the Eight Ball. He could make sure everything was locked as tight as Tony Lamont made it seem and then also get directions to the fabled Lily. It’s not even ten o’clock, Hop thought. By morning everything will be sealed up for good.

Thudding along the parkway, he kept his eye on the rearview mirror the whole way to make sure Frannie Adair wasn’t on his heels. Every time he assured himself he didn’t see her, however, he wondered instead who she might be talking to, getting information from.

For chrissake, she’s probably sound asleep. It’s just a whisper of a story for her, that’s all.

He played the radio loud and tried not to think too hard, and finally the ugly old belly-burner, the Eight Ball, sprang from the horizon in all its ramshackle glory.

Stuck out in some unincorporated plot of land, the Eight Ball was one of the few places in town that had seen more than thirty years of life. Rumor had it as an old gold miners’ saloon back in the day, and it sure had the booze-swollen, dust-caked mien of the Old West.

Saturday night and the whole greasy-walled place was a crush of gamblers, drinkers, and rounders. Hop tried to keep the lowest of profiles, even ducking into the men’s room to avoid running into Van Heflin and Gloria DeHaven. You could always count on finding slumming stars at this place. And yet he’d never known a single story to slip out its front door and make its way to a solitary reporter. Or at least to a reporter who would run it. It was a bona fide tight ship, if there was such a thing.

He made a quick tour through the back poker room but didn’t recognize anyone, not even the croupiers, who may have been there in 1949. Finally, he asked the bartender if he could speak to the manager.

“It’s still Freddy Townsend, right?”

“Yeah,” the bartender said, barely listening. “Freddy’s upstairs.’

“Can I talk to him?”

“Free country for your kind,” he said, pouring a drink.

“So I hear,” Hop said, dropping a bill on the bar before making his way to the back. Stepping into a long, narrow corridor, he spotted a wrought-iron spiral staircase with a piece of twine suspended across the entry point. A handmade sign read PRIVATE.

Hop ducked under it and went up the stairs, winding around and around until he reached a small upper hallway and a door marked MGT.

He knocked.

“Better be good,” a gruff voice sounded.

Hop tried the knob and it opened. A sour-faced man in shirtsleeves sat behind a desk. He had an account book open and wore an empty shoulder holster. Hop guessed the gun was in his hand or resting on his leg behind the desk. The Eight Ball was robbed regularly, even though the word was it was protected.

“Sorry to bother you, Mr. Townsend,” Hop said, playing his cards with care. “I’m with a motion-picture studio. I bring a lot of our actors and actresses here and I—”

“I think I seen you here. I’m good with faces,” Townsend said, chewing on a splintery-looking toothpick. His tone was just agreeable enough to assure Hop that the man liked the Hollywood trade he got, liked the money they dropped, and wanted to keep it coming.

Hop took a seat in a metal chair facing Townsend. Setting his hands on the desk between them, he played it like an honest broker. Which, in a way, he was.

“I’m really just here to check on something. Something that happened here—or began here—one night back in ‘49.”

“You positive you ain’t ad vice?” He squinted.

“I may be a lot of things, but I’m not vice,” Hop said, smiling. “I’m just a studio flunkie doing my job.”

“You feed stuff to vice, though, don’t you?” Townsend looked like he was never more than 10 percent convinced of anything.

“That would be the quickest way to lose my job.”

“That don’t stop everybody.”

“My only interest in vice is in keeping them from arresting half our talent department.”

He eyed Hop for a second, then said, “So what night?”

“It was in October ‘49 and a big group was here spending on all fours. At the center was Marv Sutton and Gene Merrel.”

“They’ve been here more than once, my friend. Sutton practically gets his mail here.”

“I believe it. But they were causing quite a stir that night. They were with a colored girl and two other Hollywood numbers.”

“Keep it coming.”

“And one of the girls, you might have seen in the papers, she ended up, well, disappearing.”

“Bingo,” Townsend nodded, leaning forward. “Sure I remember it. I wouldn’t, but people keep reminding me.”

“People?”

“Tony Lamont just called me today,” he said. “And it ain’t the first time. But hey, I’ll tell you what I told him: I did my job, friend. You never saw the name of this joint in a single newspaper story, did you? And the cops never knew, either. I know how it works.”

Hop nodded. “Yeah, yeah. You were shut tight as a drum. So what

do you remember about that night?”

“Nothing other than your little gee from the studio—”

“Bix?”

“Okay. He tells me the boys want a real good time and can I help them to find someplace hot and closemouthed. And I mentioned a few places and he says we know all those places and they’re dead. What’s a place, he says, you know the kind of place I mean. And I didn’t, but whenever anybody says something like that to me I send them to the Red Lily. Because they got a corner on the stuff-youcan’t-say-out-loud market. So I told him, the Red Lily. The Red Lily can’t be beat. I even said they could drop my name, for what good it did them. Probably cost them.”

‘And that’s all you know?”

“And I ain’t saying a word about it to anyone, don’t worry. I read about the girl, sure. But I was taken care of right after it happened

—”