Dead Extra Page 16

  Jack went ahead and downed his rye. He didn’t understand.

  Gertie explained it to him, slow and easy. Leslie Bell had to know how to find Lottie. She was in the same place every night. He could’ve done what Gertie’d done: opened the paper to see where Chester Ellis was playing and go there. And Bell couldn’t have thought Jack would really kidnap Lottie. They’d already explained to him how absurd that was. Even if he did kidnap her and take her to Pasadena, she could just hop in one of the several cars in the garage and come back downtown. She could catch the red line back to her apartment. Hell, she could call a cab. He couldn’t keep her there. “So what could be his motive?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jack said.

  “What’s his beef with you?” Lottie asked. “You owe him money?”

  “No. He gave me money. I didn’t even ask for it.”

  “Sounds to me like he just wanted to know where you’d be tonight,” Gertie said.

  “You gonna get jumped when you walk out of here,” Chester said.

  Jack looked at the naked ice in his rocks glass. Now this all made sense. He stood and slid into his sharp new gray jacket. The bill was paid. He pushed the keys to his coupe toward Gertie. She scooped them off the table. He asked Chester to lead him to the back door. Chester lifted himself out of his chair, took one last sip of milk, and nodded toward the stage. Jack followed him between tables, through a swinging kitchen door, and past a square grill and expo station and racks of canned food and a small, greasy refrigerator. Only one cook was still on duty. He sat smoking by the back door. Chester nodded to him. He nodded back. Chester pointed to the back door. “Take a right in the alley and head out to Traction. Run west to Alameda and catch a red car. Don’t play. Ain’t nowhere to hide around here.”

  Jack nodded. He shook Chester’s hand again. The skin was soft and meaty. Chester looked down the whole time. Not shifty. Just with the tired eyes of a man who’d played two sets already and had two more to go. Jack buttoned his coat, took a deep breath, and raced out the door.

  He stuck tight to the brick walls of the alley, dodging trashcans and scaring a shaggy white cat. At Traction Avenue, he paused to look right, look left. A dark, empty street too close to Skid Row and too far from the swells. A lamppost cast a circle of light down around Hewitt, where he’d parked. Moonlight reflected in the barbed wire along the roof of a nearby warehouse. No one seemed to be around. Jack ran for Alameda, which would be three blocks away if he stayed on open, obvious Traction Avenue, under the moonlight and streetlights, no doorways to duck into or cars to hide behind. He could also turn left on Third and take the shortcut, maybe find some people he’d blend into. His hard soles clomped on the concrete.

  He turned as soon as he hit the intersection at Third, flew past a recessed doorway, and snagged his foot on something he hadn’t seen. He fell sprawling to the sidewalk. Footsteps raced toward him. Jack rolled over and dug into his jacket for his Springfield. Before he could reach it, a brogan stomped down on his right wrist. Jack looked up to see the wrong end of a nine-millimeter barrel. He said to the gunman standing over him, “Hello, Dave.”

  Hammond looked down the barrel at Jack. “I told you to keep your fucking nose out of this.”

  GERTIE, 1943

  GERTIE SAT in a straight-backed wooden chair. Her hands were cuffed behind her back. If the room had a radiator, it wasn’t on. The cold ocean air from outside the room seemed to have drifted inside in a cloud of fog. Waves of shivers crept along Gertie’s bare arms and legs. Her nipples were hard as gun barrels. Gertie couldn’t help feeling like they made her flimsy nightgown a moot point.

  John Sr. stood behind her. She couldn’t see him but she just knew he was plenty warm in his wool suit. His son would’ve stripped off that wool jacket and wrapped it over Gertie’s shoulders. No. Check that. Jack wouldn’t have crashed into a bungalow at midnight, cuffed the twin sister of the girl he was looking for, or dragged her up to a whorehouse in Oxnard. But Jack was dead in Germany and his old man loomed in the shadows nearby.

  Ma Breedlove walked into the room with two lugs. They both looked like kids, couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen. One had a wispy mustache. The other was either clean-shaven or too young to need a razor. Gertie didn’t doubt for a second that either one would put her in a hospital if Ma Breedlove ordered it.

  Ma spun a hard-backed chair, straddled it, and sat in front of Gertie. She ran a fingernail down the length of Gertie’s cheek. “Why’d you run off on me, Wilma?”

  “I’m not Wilma,” she said. “I’m her twin sister Gertrude.”

  Ma raised her eyes to John Sr. She said, “Chesley, slap this bitch.”

  John Sr. stepped forward and cracked Gertie across the back of her head. His heavy ring dug into her crown. A cool drop of blood made its way out of the wound. Gertie could feel it weaving through her hair.

  Ma said, “Let’s start again. Why’d you run off on me, Wilma?”

  Gertie stared into Ma’s eyes. They were cloudy and brown like a palooka who’s taken one too many blows to the temple. Gertie said, “Don’t matter how many times you slap me, Myrna. I ain’t gonna turn into Wilma.”

  Ma stood from her chair. She straightened her long, woolen slacks. She spun the chair so that it rested behind her. “What’s the story, Chesley? Does the dame have a twin?”

  “Don’t buy this stupid shit,” John Sr. said.

  “I’m not asking for advice. I’m asking for information. Does Wilma Greene have a twin sister?”

  John Sr. looked to the dirty throw at his feet. He mumbled, “Yeah.”

  Ma stepped closer to him. Her young muscle followed, flanked on either side of her. “What do you know about the twin?”

  “Nothing,” John Sr. said. “Don’t matter. That’s Wilma sitting in that chair. I dragged her dumb ass out of bed and brought her straight to you.”

  Ma grabbed John Sr. by the cheeks and squeezed. His mouth puckered like a fish’s. “Chesley, I don’t hire you to think.” She let go and turned back to Gertie. The two lugs stepped between John Sr. and Ma. Ma paced in front of Gertie. “Okay, let’s say you’re the twin. What difference does that make to me? I don’t care what whore I’m selling. One warm body is just as good as another. Either you or your sister gotta pay off that debt.”

  Gertie did her best to stifle the shivers. “What debt?”

  “You made a deal with Giroux. He gets you out of the bughouse and into here. I pay Giroux for you. You work off the debt.”

  The cold seemed to come from within Gertie. She held her jaw half open to keep her teeth from chattering. Tough as she could sound, she said, “Sounds to me like this Giroux sold you a false bill of goods. You should get your money back from him.”

  Ma shook her head. “Someone sells you a car and it gets stolen, you don’t go after the car dealer. You go after the thief. Right?”

  Gertie shrugged.

  “Same as with a whore. Someone sells me a whore and she absconds, I don’t go after Giroux. I go after the whore.”

  “My sister’s not a whore.”

  Ma smiled. “She is. I have a film to prove it. Wanna see?”

  Gertie shook her head. She never needed to see that film again. She didn’t need to be sitting in this clip joint office, freezing her ass off, either. “Sit down, Myrna,” she said. “Let’s look each other in the eye and cut a deal like real women.”

  Ma looked at her two lugs and John Sr. standing behind them. She nodded to herself. No one in the room moved. Ma sat in the straight-backed chair. “Start talking.”

  “What’s Wilma’s debt?”

  “Fifty dollars a week. Five weeks out. Two-fifty. Plus ten percent for the knucklehead that brought you here.”

  Two hundred seventy-five dollars! It was like Ma had looked into Gertie’s bank account and totaled the life’s savings. Shit. Gertie painted on a poker face and said, “I can get you that.” She looked down at her flimsy nightgown and bare legs. “I don’t have i
t on me, but I can put it together by tomorrow evening.”

  Ma slung an arm over the back of her chair and crossed her legs. “Plus fifty bucks a week.”

  Impossible. Gertie didn’t make fifty a week. If Wilma went back to work and the two of them pooled all the money they earned, they couldn’t come up with an extra fifty bucks a week. Gertie tried to keep these facts off her face. She asked, “For how long?”

  “For as long as you or Wilma have that sweet little ass I could sell.”

  Gertie chewed the inside of her bottom lip. This deal couldn’t be indefinite. She ran figures in her mind. How much does a whore really make in a week? How much does it cost to feed and house her? What does that life look like? She laid it out for Ma. “Okay, let’s be realistic. Let’s take you at your word that you could make fifty bucks a week out of Wilma. How long do you think you can get that much money? How consistently? You have to figure that, if she escaped once, she’s going to escape again. You’ll keep a closer eye on her, but even that costs money. So you’d have to get her hooked on something. It can’t be booze. Wilma on booze is too hard to control. You’d need something stronger. Morphine or something. And that’s pricey. Cuts your fifty a week down to twenty-five, at best.”

  Ma shrugged. “Thirty-five.”

  “Okay. Let’s say thirty-five. But you have to get her hooked right away. And that eats up a woman. Wilma’s sweet little ass gets all skinny and bruised in no time. She gets that vacant junky look. At best, you’re getting a dime a turn out of her from the sailors down at Hueneme. And if you’re doing that kind of volume, someone’s gonna shoot syphilis or something into her. You’ll have to kick her out on the streets to die within a year from now. Right?”

  Ma twisted her mouth. She locked those muddy brown eyes onto Gertie. One of the young lugs tapped a waltz with his foot. Bum-bum-bum. Bum-bum-bum. Ma said, “You’re right. More or less. I’d get two years out of her.”

  “That last year, you’re not getting thirty-five a week.”

  Ma nodded. “True. It’ll be down to twenty-five.”

  “Fifteen, tops.”

  “No,” Ma said. “I’d work her. I’d get twenty-five.”

  Gertie ran the numbers through her head. It all came out somewhere around three grand. It may as well have been a million, for what she could put together. In the meantime, it was about what Republic would lose if she didn’t get out of this chair, back down to Highland Park, dressed, and ready by the time the director swung by the bungalow in the morning. “I can get you two-seventy-five tomorrow,” Gertie said. “And a hundred a month for a couple of years. We call that square.”

  Ma shook her head. “You’ll get three hundred tonight and one-fifty a month for a couple of years. We’ll call that square.”

  What could Gertie say? “It’s a deal, Myrna.”

  Ma smiled. “Call me Myrna one more time and I’m gonna get you a drawer in the morgue.” She looked up at John Sr. “Take this whore back home and get my money.”

  John Sr. stepped between the two lugs, reached his hand onto Gertie’s lap, grabbed her by the chain between her handcuffs, and yanked her up onto her feet.

  Neither spoke on the ride home. John Sr. rolled down both windows in his little Model A coupe. Cold night air rushed into the cab. John Sr. stuck a cigar into the right side of his mouth and lit it. The smoke filled the dead air between the windows, between him and Gertie. Gertie turned away from it and looked at the city lights along the Ventura Highway. Somewhere out there was a scheme to drum up three grand.

  The first three hundred was the easiest. When they got back to Wilma’s bungalow, John Sr. flung Gertie onto the loveseat and told her to stay there. He ripped Wilma’s mattress off her bed. A nest of folding money lay scattered about below. He gathered it up. He charged into Wilma’s closet, threw all her hats out into the bedroom, found the hat box in the deepest recess of the top shelf, opened it, and pulled out another clump of bills. Wilma’s last stash was under a loose floorboard in the bathroom. John Sr. knew about that, too. He must’ve turned this bungalow upside down while Wilma typed at the Studio Club and Gertie worked on the sets.

  He sat on the chair across from Gertie and laid the money out along the coffee table, divided according to denomination. Gertie counted while he counted. Wilma’s life savings amounted to four hundred thirty-two dollars. John Sr. put a hundred thirty-two into one pocket and three hundred into the other. He told Gertie, “Stand up and turn around.” Gertie did. John Sr. took the cuffs off.

  “I’ll be here next week for my hundred sixty-five dollars.”

  Gertie almost corrected him. Then she did the math and realized, as long as John Sr. knew about the deal, he’d get his ten percent.

  Two nights later, Gertie swung by Musso and Frank’s in hopes of raising the ransom. A platoon of Hollywood writers had assembled along the bar in the early evening. The studios kept them like factory workers, requiring them to clock in at nine and out at five. All the time in between, the writers were expected to have their ass in the chair and their fingers on the typewriter. Most didn’t work that way. Some didn’t work at all. Gertie was looking for those guys.

  They hung out in the back room of Musso and Frank’s: the writers who still dreamed of big literary prizes and thought everything about the studio system—save the paycheck—was beneath them. They gathered around small, round tables in their tan flannel suits and with their ink-stained middle fingers wrapped around some kind of double neat. Every other conversation was some has-been waxing melancholic about his talents going to waste.

  Gertie knew from the Studio Club gossip that she’d find Meta and Bill here. Bill would be on his first public bourbon of the evening. Gertie would have to catch him before the bourbons replaced dinner for Bill, before he started singing slave songs and slapping anyone who tried to stop him.

  Bill sat with Meta at the table closest to the cocktail waitress’s station alongside the back bar. He wore a Harris Tweed coat and a wide tie tucked into a V-neck sweater. His brown hair was combed to a neat side part. His mustache was small and immaculate as always. He sat next to Meta with the straight-backed dignity of a Mississippi landowner. Meta wore a cream-colored work dress, one of the few items in her scant wardrobe. Gertie had seen her leave the Studio Club wearing it dozens of times. Only the accessories changed. On this evening, Meta had added a silk ribbon tied into a bow just above the top button. Gertie could imagine the pair in some antebellum ballroom for a niece’s debutante party, downing one too many mint juleps and having to stagger home under a canopy of live oaks.

  Gertie barged into their little twosome. She pulled out a chair and got straight to business. She said to Bill, “Rumor has it you’re working on a new novel.”

  “Why, of course, Wilma. We talked about this.”

  “I’m Gertie,” Gertie said. “Wilma told me about your new project.”

  Meta set her hand atop of Gertie’s. “Wilma has been such a joy to have at the Studio Club.”

  Gertie looked at Meta’s hand and didn’t move her own. Meta’s warmth radiated down onto Gertie’s fingers. “We all love Wilma,” she said. “Now, about this novel, Bill. How’s it coming along?”

  Bill lifted his bourbon to his lips and gulped it like water. He set the empty glass down. “Slowly.”

  “Hard to write a novel when you have Columbia breathing down your neck?”

  Bill nodded.

  Meta said, “They want him to write a swashbuckling picture. Sailors and pirates and ports of call. It’s ghastly.”

  “Way below a man of your talents, eh, Bill?”

  Bill raised his hand to call for the cocktail waitress.

  Gertie asked, “Have you thought of subcontracting the work?”

  “Watch your tongue,” Meta said. “Bill writes all his own scripts.”

  Gertie crossed her arms and leaned onto the table. Bill mirrored her actions. He tilted his head like an old hound trying to hear a far-off rabbit. “You don’t have to, Bill.�
�� Gertie spoke in a low voice, the kind that doesn’t drift to nearby patrons. “I’ve been working for Republic for seven years. I’ve written more scripts than half the drunks in this room combined. Ask around. I’m professional. I work quickly. I’m discreet.”

  In a whisper like a dagger, Meta said, “This is highly inappropriate.”

  Bill waved her off. “What do you charge?”

  “What does the studio want from you? How many pages per week?”

  “Twenty.”

  Gertie paused to run numbers through her head. She knew that, at one point, Columbia had paid Bill somewhere in the ballpark of twelve hundred a month. He’d had some shameful moments since signing that salary. A couple of flops, a bender that cost the studio a grand in wasted time. By now, his pay would be lower. But a man like Bill wouldn’t accept less than a grand a month. Gertie figured she could chisel out twenty percent of that. She said, “Fifty a week. Two-fifty gets you the whole script. Meta can do rewrites as always.”

  Meta gasped. “Now, Gertie.”

  Bill raised a hand to quiet Meta. He leaned back in his chair. “Miss Greene, we have a deal.”

  The waitress dropped off Bill’s bourbon. He ordered a third while she was there and made quick work of his second. He asked Meta to give Gertie the treatment.

  “What treatment?” Meta wouldn’t even look at Gertie while she spoke. “It’s a swashbuckler. I already told you. Sailors, pirates, ports of call. Keep old Will Hays in mind and make all the sex a subtext.”

  Gertie stood and offered her hand to Bill. Bill shook it. Gertie rubbed Meta’s shoulder. She said, “I know the score. I’ll get you twenty pages by Friday.”

  JACK, 1946

  WHEN JACK was a boy, six or seven at the oldest, still in knickers and barely able to read, his father enlisted him in a caper. At the time, the old man was making most of his living recovering stolen money and getting a percentage. A pair of yeggs from the Central Valley had been knocking over post offices. Jack still remembered their names. Joe Lanagan and Fast Eddie Carr. The old man was commissioned to find them and reclaim the loot. He’d put out feelers around Highland Park and was waiting for word.