The Song Is You (6 page)

“Involved, involved. What does that mean? Far as I knew, they were just fixing to take turns, that’s all. I don’t know. I had left. I had left, Frannie Adair. I only found out the next day. And I never thought it was so bad. What I did. But now I think I may have missed something. I may not have realized what I did. Could I be the guy she said I was?”

“She? Spangler?”

“No. No.” “

“Who?”

“I’m not getting into all that,” he said, something in him whispering, Keep her name out. Keep names out. Iolene, whoever. You’ve already fucked it up enough, Hop, why can’t you stop talking? “Why am I here, anyway?” he mumbled. “I can’t believe I went over there. What a jackass. I should never drink. My head feels like a sponge full of quinine. I’m a lousy bum, Frannie Adair. Why did you let me in?”

“Listen, at lunch you said someone came to see you. Was she the girl you left the Eight Ball with?”

“No, no. Not her. Let me tell you something, baby,” he said, leaning forward. “Midge, she had the most beautiful hair. I wish I could explain. Like a … like a river of gold running down her back. Do you believe it’s all gone?” He heard the words issuing from his mouth, but they kept surprising him. It was just so comfortable there

—the yielding sofa, Frannie listening, hair rumpled, smelling like fresh sheets and open windows—he couldn’t stop.

“Who’s Midge? Is she the girl who came to see you? The one who’s scared?”

“Midge’s never been scared a day in her life. Midge is my wife.”

“You’re married,” she said, leaning back in her seat. “Sounds about right.”

“And the thing is, Frannie Adair, I never thought that I, Gil Hopkins, who everybody always loves, just loves, could make anyone —okay, a woman—so angry.”

It was true. He’d always thought of himself as the kind of soft-touch, glimmer-eyed boy who begs to be smoothed over with mother love. The kind that women just wanted to curl around the feet of, like little honey kittens. Sadly, as it turned out, he was not this kind of man at all. Somehow, he was the fellow in the cartoon, the comic strip, running out the front door, pants half on, with a frying pan zooming toward his head—zzzzing—thud. He guessed it wasn’t Midge who had started it, but it sure felt that way. Her love like a slug in your drink.

“I wonder why Jerry let her cut her hair,” Hop said abruptly.

“Who’s Jerry—her hairdresser?”

“No, Jerry Schuyler.”

“Our Jerry? At the Examiner? What’s he got to do with it?”

“You know, Frannie—can I call you Frannie?—you know what Midge said to me? The last thing before she left me. She said, ‘What, did you think you could keep throwing us together again and again, talking hot about me to Jerry and Jerry to me, practically shoving us both under the covers, and we wouldn’t end up like this?’ And yet, Frannie, here’s the funny part,” he said. “I was surprised.”

She gave him a long look, reacting to something in his voice. Something funny.

Then, gently, she said, “Jerry doesn’t seem the type to steal a fella’s girl.”

“He’s a right guy,” Hop said, meaning it. It felt funny to hear himself mean something so much. “A stand-up guy. He’d give me the shirt off his back.”

“So you gave him the wife off yours in return?”

“My, but you’re smooth.” He finished his drink and raised it above his head, saying, “There goes another potato.”

When he left (”I like to leave before I wear out my welcome”), he could no longer fight a sinking feeling, but he distracted himself by looking at Frannie as she walked him to the door. He stopped at the threshold and looked at her. She seemed to have the most open face he’d ever seen, at least since those Syracuse girls, snow nestling in their ringletted hair, skating around the pond behind church, making larger and larger circles, figure eights, twirling endlessly, smiling at him and waving.

“Good night, Gil Hopkins. Sleep it all away.” “You too,” he said and, unable to resist the urge, reached out to touch the sheet crease still faint on her cheek.

The next morning, he couldn’t remember if she’d smiled or just shut the door.

He woke up many times during the night, propelled from dreams so vivid he was sure Jean Spangler was there crouched under his tangled sheets with him. In all the dreams, she was the same blank beauty, a glamorous maw with no center. Even in his unconscious, he couldn’t imagine a personality, even a sole trait for her. She was What Went Wrong. In one dream, he crawled straight inside her gorgeous violet mouth and found himself right back where he started, listening to her flat, inflec-tionless voice issuing word after word, none of which he could really discern—it was a low, dull stream of nothing.

The cold-hot of drunken sleep covered him head to toe, shot through periodically with the slow realization of everything he’d said and done the night before. He couldn’t have possibly gone to that girl reporter’s home, could he? He, the professional juggler of newsmen, the light-and-shadows artist forever dangling, then withdrawing, promises of sexy secrets and sexier lies, couldn’t possibly have gone to a reporter’s house and held forth on the carpet, no charge, no trade, tales dark enough to kill a half dozen careers, especially his own? Not him. He was the master of keeping his mouth shut, could practically count on two fingers the number of people in this town who knew his full name. Power in withholding. It’s what every smart woman ever taught him, and the not-so-smart ones, too, by bad example-

You give anything away, you might as well give everything away.

Still, the more his thoughts took hold and he was able to distinguish his recollection from his frenzied dreams—the things he said from the things he merely thought while saying other things— the more he had to face the grim truth.

He’d told Miss Frannie Adair a lot. And he was going to have to fix it, fast.

He had no one to blame but those two girls so hard on him the last few days—Iolene and Midge weighing him down, he who so depended on being light on his feet, always moving, never sitting still.

As the sun finally crept under his blinds, Hop, half awake, forgot for a second about everything, other than a wave of brief pleasure at the flickering dream image of Iolene’s coffee-with-cream thighs. But the image didn’t wake up with him, just settled into his body, his bones and joints, nuzzled for a second, then passed. In its place twitched the memory of the Midge hubbub. That sure woke him. The clock read 7:30. He had to clear the murk from his head. He had to get out of bed. It was Saturday, right? Yes. Thank god.

Ten minutes later, he’d managed to make it to the bathroom, to the pulsing shower and then the medicine cabinet to scrape a night of bad living from his face. As the fog on the mirror slowly evaporated and the shaving cream slid away to reveal his bright, forever bright face, he began thinking straight for the first time in twelve hours. For a second at least. Then:

That goddamned wife, like a little girl, pulling off the legs of insects, one by one. First she steals his best friend for herself, then she gets him so worked up that he goes off and spills his guts to a professional megaphone.

And who was this Iolene, anyway? Christ, he barely knew the girl and she’d managed to throw his life into some kind of crazy funhouse mirror in a matter of days. She’d tapped into a tiny reservoir of guilt, of sympathy, of something, and now he couldn’t untap it. Iolene.

Still …

Facts are, Hop, you fucked up. You have to admit it: you have only yourself to blame. You gotta fix it.

First, Frannie Adair. What does she know and what does she plan to do with it?

“City desk.”

“Frannie Adair there?”

“Not yet, pal. Call back later.”

“She comes in today?”

“She’ll be in to file. She’ll be at the courthouse today. Say, who is

this, anyway?”

Okay. Okay.

He made some coffee and got dressed.

As he drank a cup, scalding and bracing, he thought hard.

Okay, I’m Frannie Adair, junior reporter out to prove my chops. What do I know? I know Jean Spangler met up with high-wattage stars Sutton and Merrel the night she went missing. I know they were looking to have a party with her. That’s it.

What don’t I know?

He thought hard about this. He never told Frannie where Jean Spangler and the others had moved on to after they left the Eight Ball. The name “Red Lily” never passed his lips, he was sure. He never said who else was there, except that there was another girl he left with. She doesn’t know who that girl was (of course, neither does he). He never said anything about his story to the police, about his lies, half-lies, and whatever else he used, because, let’s be honest, he’d used everything he had.

So if I’m Frannie, he thought, and I’m as smart as she maybe could be, what do I do with what I know? I don’t go straight to Sutton and Merrel’s people. Instead, I work the angles, the curves, the corners. I work the cops on how they missed Spangler’s evening jaunt. I work the Eight Ball. I work me. Hop, that is. Good luck there, Frannie Adair. Last night, you got the biggest piece of me you’ll ever get.

He decided to call Sutton and Merrel’s manager, Tony Lamont. Hop had met him a half dozen times, had drinks on occasion. Nice guy. Low-key. Not the fly-off-the-handle type.

“Listen, Tony, there’s a reporter sniffing around an old missing-persons case. A, uh, Jean Spangler. Trying to pull out a story.”

“What’s it got to do with me?”

“Nothing, and let’s keep it that way.”

“You wanna clue me in?”

“You know, Tony. Jean Spangler.” He knew Tony remembered. They’d made a lot of calls that week following the disappearance.

Tony paused a second. Then, “You being overly cautious or is there a reason I should batten down some hatches?”

“Nah, nah. Well, somehow this reporter found out Spangler was at the Eight Ball that night. If she talks to employees there, your boys could come up. You know.” She hasn’t talked to anyone there yet?”

Hop could hear wheels turning, knocking around, charging faster in Lamont’s head.

“I don’t think so.”

There was a click on the other end.

Three minutes later, the phone rang again:

“Hop?”

‘Yeah.”

“Problem solved. I renegotiated some arrangements, if you will. Our boys were never at the Eight Ball that night. Or any other night. No one can remember ever seeing them there. Or seeing anybody else, ever.”

“It’s amazing the place stays open for business.”

“Ain’t it? Who else we got to remind that there’s nothing to be reminded of?”

“I’ll do some work on that.” “Hell, yeah. I can’t keep doing your job for you, Houdini. Ain’t that

what our fat studio contract is for?” He was laughing now.

“Just in case, where were Marv and Gene that night?”

“They were with their wives at a show, then a late dinner at Chasen’s, and then a nightcap at my house with my wife and her sister. You can ask Freddie Condon, the maftre d’, Tino, the headwaiter who served them, Loretta, the hatcheck girl they tipped twenty-five bucks, George Thomas, their driver, who deposited them at home at two thirty a.m., at which time Jessie and Iris, their respective servants, greeted them and tucked them into their cozy little beds just about three.”

Hop smiled. “Nice. Could you run my life, baby?”

“Some challenges are too great, my friend.”

After hanging up, Hop paused. How fast Tony was able to make the story. For a night almost two years ago. And how urgent he must have seen the need. Was this an alibi they had prepared.

Knowing they might one day have to account for that night? Or was this just a ready-made excuse because occasions like this were so profuse, like lipstick on their pillows? How many lost nights in beery roadhouses with prone or pliant or made-pliant B girls? Possibly hundreds.

He shrugged. This is my bread and butter, after all. Dropping sheets over the Talent’s monkeyshines. If they didn’t have lost nights in beery roadhouses with girls like that, I’d be out of a job. Or still writing about Susan Hayward’s tips for new brides.

But the thought kept returning: Lamont didn’t even seem that surprised.

There were only a few possibilities. Either these guys do stuff like this all the time, or they know a little something or a lot about what happened to Jean Spangler. Or they don’t know anything but just don’t want their bedroom high jinks in the public record. That’s really it, of course. Stop thinking so sinister, Hop. Christ.

So if Frannie Adair is going to hit a rock-hard dead end with Sutton and Merrel, where might she have better luck? He poured himself one last cup of coffee and stared at the cornflowers on the pot. In a flash, he remembered three dozen times Midge spun around the kitchen in some fuchsia chiffon nightgown, some silky robe, that chartreuse dressing gown, twirling and tipping the pot, maybe rapping her talons on the ceramic, trying to get his attention, maybe, more than once, it was true, slamming it down in front of him while whispering, snakelike (or whimpering, soft-soft—that, too), “Son of a bitch.” Or “lousy bastard.” Always about the women, the girls, the Girl, that Woman.

But, Christ, how was he supposed to help himself when there they’d be, all jasmine and sparkling skin, like a sheen of soft dew hanging over them, dappling their faces, hands, wrists, the glint of supple pink behind pearly ears. Good God, come on. Who could really blame him, the way they leaned over him, radiating such welcoming warmth, a coal oven in winter, and their tender milky breath on his face as they pressed in to show him where to put his hat, his coat, his whatever while he waited?

Really, if they’re going to wear those darted sweaters tucked tight in those long fitted skirts cradling heart-shaped asses, skirts so tight they swiveled when they walked in them, clack-clack-clacking away down the hall, full aware—with full intention—that he was watching, even as his face betrayed nothing, not a rough twitch or a faint hint of saliva on his decidedly not-trembling lip. It wasn’t he who was unusual, so lust-filled or insatiable. It was they who packaged themselves up so pertly for utmost oomph, for him alone, really, even if they hadn’t met him yet when they slid on their treacherous gossamer stockings that morning, even if they hadn’t known why they had straightened the seams on their blouses so they’d hang in perfectly sharp arrows down their waiting, waiting breasts.