Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 Read online

  “Aw, it’s just paint, Mr. Heller.”

  “Make it ‘Nate.’ ”

  “Naw, that’s okay. I’m ‘Shorty,’ but you’re ‘Mr. Heller.’ The boss likes certain respect paid. . . . He says you’re an old friend.”

  “That may be overstating, Shorty. But he was barely out of that prep school in Woodstock when I first met him in Chicago.”

  “Jeez, was the boss the boy genius they say he was?”

  “Shorty, he still is.”

  Shorty opened the door for me and I stepped into the mostly darkened soundstage, and what I saw gave me a start: out of the gloom emerged another giant head—not another hunchbacked dwarf’s, something even better, even stranger . . . the profile of a wild-eyed, vaguely Chinese dragon, hovering above me, perhaps forty feet off the floor, the head itself thirty feet high, angled skyward, a shiny slide extending from its open mouth like an endless silver tongue snaking its way up into the darkness where the ceiling presumably was; disturbingly, the silver slide also exited the back of the beast’s head, emptying into a vast pit.

  “Christ!” I said. My eyes adjusting to the near dark, I could see that the whole preposterous serpentine affair was constructed on roller-coaster-style scaffolding.

  Shorty was shuffling around in front me, saying, “Watch your step, Mr. Heller. The boss had ’em dig that pit right through the cement. . . . Ya shoulda heard them jackhammers!”

  We skirted the edge of the mini-abyss, which was a good eighty feet long, and half again as wide, perhaps as deep.

  “The boss made the cameramen slide down that thing on their stomachs,” Shorty was saying. “Put the camera on a mat. So you could get a whaddayacallit, objective view.”

  I figured he meant “subjective,” but I never argue with hunchbacked dwarfs, particularly on soundstages dominated by dragons. Just as a general policy.

  Moving past the towering slide, I followed the little man, the movement of his body seeming more side-to-side than straight ahead, to a door in the midst of portable walls that were clearly the back of a set—about a third of the soundstage was blocked off behind these “wild” walls, which could be moved to facilitate filming from varied angles.

  Shorty opened the door and revealed a black-haired man in baggy black trousers and loose white shirt and loosened black tie, a big man at least six two and easily pushing two hundred and fifty pounds, standing at a small work table, dabbing red paint onto the wide grin of a grotesque clown mask which lay like a shield on the table. The lighting—provided by occasional work lamps hanging like fruit from extension cords vanishing up into the same darkness that swallowed the ceiling—was harsh and spotty and shadow inducing. The walls were decorated with a scratchy black-and-white mural replete with nightmarish, violent images—medical-text anatomical diagrams and grinning clown faces juxtaposed with the death smiles of dancing skeletons.

  The black-haired man smiled over his shoulder at me, puckishly, dark hard eyes melting in a soft baby face where strong cheekbones struggled to be seen, dark slashes of eyebrow expressed constant irony, and an upturned nose seemed to thumb itself, all punctuated by a dimpled chin.

  “Nathan, darling,” he said, in that sonorous voice radio listeners all over America adored, including many who disliked the young man who possessed it, “what do you think of my Crazy House?”

  “What was that remark that got you in so much trouble?” I asked, moving next to him as he reddened the clown’s grin with a Chinese brush. “Something about a movie studio being your personal train set?”

  “Well, now it’s my personal erector set.” He flashed me that raffish smirk of his that seemed to invite you in on every private joke. “Did you know that the definition of one word has kept our two noble unions from coming together? And what is that single word over which our carpenters and painters and set dressers and other skilled artisans have, shall we say, come to blows? Erection, my dear.” He sighed and smiled and lifted his eyebrows as he bent over the clown mask, touching it up skillfully.

  “Erection?”

  “Yes, they can’t make up their minds—does it mean, the building of sets, or does it refer to simply assembling that which has already been built?” He gave me an amused pixie look. “Perhaps I should point out to them that, in my experience, a woman who is ‘built’ can cause an erection to quite naturally occur. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Shorty had moved in between Orson and myself, paint can in hand, tending his master like a medieval apprentice.

  “I think Mr. Heller and I may require some privacy,” Welles said gently to his factotum. “Would you mind terribly leaving us alone?”

  Shorty set the paint can on the table, gestured “o.k.,” then trundled off.

  “Why’s that little guy a deaf mute, all of a sudden?” I asked. “He was talkative as hell, all the way in here.”

  Welles twitched his tiny smile. “Yes, Shorty’s loquaciousness—even his bluntness—can be something of a problem. That’s why I’ve instituted my docking procedure.”

  “Your what?”

  “I dock Shorty ten dollars every time he speaks around any guest or business associate I’m entertaining.” He carefully set the brush across the open paint can. “Care for the nickel tour?”

  The pudgy, congenial, vaguely arrogant man showing me around his film set had, at thirty-one, already made history in theater, radio, and film. His dynamic Broadway productions for the Federal Theater Project and his own Mercury Theater had made him famous; his War of the Worlds radio broadcast, duping thousands into thinking Martians had invaded earth, had made him infamous. His Hollywood achievements included directing and cowriting three movies—two of which were already acknowledged as modern classics, if not box-office favorites—as well as condescending to star on occasion in films for other directors. He was widely considered a genuine genius—and, in the executive suites of the movie industry, a genuine pain-in-the-ass, starting with his ill-advised, barely veiled attack on press lord William Randolph Hearst by way of his film Citizen Kane.

  How Welles had come to be directing a movie at Columbia could be explained only one way: his wife, Rita Hayworth, was Harry Cohn’s biggest star . . . and she was starring in this picture.

  For perhaps ten minutes, Welles guided me through his “Crazy House,” a fully operable carnival funhouse, with sliding doors, tilting floors, slanting walls, and a seemingly endless hall-of-mirrors maze. The latter was equipped with plate-glass mirrors seven feet by four feet, one after another, dozens and dozens of them, and several more dozen of the distorting variety, turning Welles razor-thin and making a short fat fool of me.

  “I discovered at an early age,” he told me, leading me mischievously through the labyrinth, “that almost everything in this world was phony—done with mirrors.”

  Images of each other seemingly blocking our every path, I asked him how in hell he could shoot in here, with all this glass.

  “They’re mostly two-way mirrors,” he said, “and those that aren’t have tiny peepholes drilled for the camera operators. Not that way, dear! This way . . . follow me. . . .”

  Welles’ funhouse had a distinctly macabre flavor—he led me gleefully through rooms of flimsy canvas walls and spongy plywood floors that were weirdly angled, painted with skewed faux windows, creating a warped Caligari perspective. He grinned like a naughty child as he ushered me through hanging beads and drooping chains and gauzy half-shredded curtains, past black-and-white murals with STAND UP OR DIE lettered in the quaint fashion of turn-of-the-century circus posters, into areas decorated with papier-mâché skeletons and cattle skulls and grotesque grinning clown heads.

  Something sprang out at me, and I jumped—a blonde mannequin head on a bobbing spring was suddenly staring right at me; she had the bottom of her pretty face rotted away, and a cigarette in her skull teeth, through which Welles’ booming laughter seemed to emanate.

  In the next chamber, dismembered female legs dangled from the ceiling—shapely mannequin limbs, in high
heels and sometimes seamed stockings—with further ghastly images painted directly over the fake brick walls, including a trio of handle-bar-mustached gents in old-fashioned bathing attire that revealed where sections of their flesh and musculature had been cut away from the bone.

  “We’ve worked our way to the front,” Welles said, gesturing me through a passageway, “which in true movie-magic tradition is in the back.”

  The entrance was papier-mâché rock, with plywood stairs painted gray to match, as if the “Crazy House” had been fashioned within a cave, and all around the doorway, mannequin hands and reaching arms poked out from the walls, a frame of disembodied limbs. On one wall had been painted a cartoon of a woman, cut in half, a screw protruding from her left breast and dripping blood, lying atop a cow that had been flayed to the midsection.

  Welles sat on the steps and fished out a cigar from his suitcoat pocket; just above him a decapitated clown’s head grinned from within a baroque bird cage. “You don’t care for one, do you, Nathan?”

  He meant a cigar, not a clown’s head.

  “No.” I sat next to him. “No, thanks.”

  He fired up the Havana and got it going, waved out his match, and I noticed for the first time that the dark eyes in that cherubic puss were bloodshot.

  “You know, I just can’t seem to finish this set. It was the first thing I began on this picture, back in late September . . . before we went to Mexico, for location shooting. . . . I’m responsible for this strike, you know.”

  “How are you responsible?”

  He gestured to the gruesome images around us. “By doing all this painting myself, with the help of a few friends. I couldn’t turn over something this . . . intensely personal . . . to the hacks in the Columbia art department. I would have had the same artisans who bring their masterful touch to the Three Stooges.”

  “And that’s what started the strike?”

  He sighed dark, richly fragrant smoke. “It did, when members of the Motion Picture Set Painters Union . . . local 279 . . . came to this soundstage and discovered that their work had been completed by ‘nonunion’ hands.”

  “And here I thought you were such a flaming liberal.”

  “Oh I am, my dear, with a notable exception—in matters relating to my art, I am slightly to the right of Genghis Khan.”

  “You haven’t asked why I wanted to see you.”

  The rosebud mouth twitched a tiny smile. “Did I thank you for recommending your friend, Mr. Rubinski, to handle that piece of business last year?”

  “No. You’re welcome. I take it Fred handled that matter . . . discreetly.”

  “Oh yes . . . of course I had to pay the girl twenty thousand to keep it out of court, and out of the papers. I didn’t rape her, you know—that was utter nonsense.”

  “None of my business.”

  “My darling, if you had seen her—she was such an ugly thing. I would simply never rape an ugly girl. And I never seem to have to rape the beautiful ones.”

  His irony was strained, and as relaxed as that baby face was—so unformed looking, almost fetuslike—his forehead was tight and between his brows was a deep crease of tension.

  He leaned toward me and touched my arm. “Have I apologized for snubbing you?”

  “When did you snub me?”

  “At La Rue, a week or two ago . . . I was dining with my soon-to-be-ex-wife.”

  So he had noticed me.

  “You see,” he was saying, “we’ve been making some silly attempts at reconciliation, not the least of which is this film, and if I’d introduced you—my friend the famous divorce detective from Chicago—Rita might have misunderstood.”

  “That’s all right. No offense taken.”

  “And I was in a particularly black mood, further acerbated by alcohol. Who was your lovely companion?”

  “My wife.”

  “Really! Congratulations! When did this happen?”

  “Not long ago. We’re sort of on our honeymoon.”

  “I was given to understand you were out here consolidating your business with Mr. Rubinski—did I read something to that effect in the Examiner?”

  “You read the Hearst papers?”

  “I’m keeping a particularly close eye on them right now.”

  “Why is that?”

  Welles ignored the question, exhaling Havana smoke. “I hope your marriage is more successful than mine. I’m sure you wonder how even a ‘monstrous boy’ like me . . . that’s what Houseman likes to call me . . . could fail to make a go of it with a beautiful, kind, sensitive, intelligent woman like Margarita Carmen Cansino Welles.”

  “You have a child together.”

  “Becky. Lovely girl—she is as wonderful a child as I am a beastly father.”

  “You don’t have to sound proud of it. Some people would think you had it made.”

  “Some people are imbeciles. I’m sure you think I was running around on her—married to Rita Hayworth, and not satisfied with what he has at home. That Welles is a glutton!”

  “Not my business.”

  “Well, I wasn’t unfaithful, not at first, not for the longest time. But she constantly accused me of infidelity—you see, she is mentally unstable, that lovely child . . . She has an inferiority complex, largely due to the fact that that fiend of a father put her on stage, not in school, and that’s the least of what that son of bitch did to her. . . . She’s an unhappy woman, my darling Nathan, and a pathologically jealous one. She wept every night of our marriage, and yet, just last week she told me that our marriage was the happiest time of her life . . . Can you imagine?”

  “You’re saying, she accused of you cheating so often, you finally went ahead and did it.”

  “As did she. I’ll always love her . . . and I think she will always love me.” He sat smoking the cigar, then shook his head and said, “You know what she always called me? George. That’s my first name, you know—detestable, ordinary first name—that’s what she always called me.”

  “Rita always called you George?”

  “Not Rita, my dear—the Short girl. This ‘Black Dahlia’ you think I may have murdered.”

  Orson Welles liked to present himself as a harbinger of high culture, bringing Shakespeare, Conrad, and Kafka to the masses; but never forget that this glorious ham was also the Shadow. Melodrama was his metier.

  Nonetheless, I was struck as dumb as Shorty, reeling from Welles’ cliffhanger-before-the-commercial punch to my mental solar plexus.

  “I told you I’ve been following the Hearst papers especially closely these last few days,” he was saying. “I noted, with no small interest, your involvement in the investigation. I have to say I’m relieved to be talking to you, and not some Hearst reporter—or worse, one of the Los Angeles gestapo.”

  “Did you—”

  “Know her? Of course I knew her. Perhaps not in the true biblical sense. . . . She was a lovely girl, one of those absolutely black-haired girls, with skin as white as Carrara marble, and eyelashes you could trip over. She rather reminded me of another Betty, Betty Chancellor, also a dark-haired, fair-skinned beauty . . . my first love, at Dublin’s Gate Theater, back in ’31. As for Betty Short, I met her at Camp Cooke, when we were touring the army camps with my ‘Mercury Wonder Show,’ and again at the late lamented Canteen, then most recently at Brittingham’s, where she mooched the occasional meal.”

  “What I was going to ask was if you killed her.”

  Welles sighed. “If I knew, darling Nathan, I would tell you.”

  I studied that baby face and the haunted eyes staring out of it. “You mean to say, you don’t know where you were, the night she was murdered?”

  His smile in response was seemingly guileless. “Not a clue. A blank . . . It’s a classic pulp premise, my dear—the man wakes up in a room, covered in blood, with a dead body next to him . . . and no memory of having done the dastardly deed . . . or for that matter, not having done it.”

  “I’m guessing you didn’t wake up in tha
t vacant lot next to that butchered corpse.”

  “No . . . I was in my wife’s house in Brentwood.”

  “Was your wife with you?”

  “She was in the hospital. Exhaustion and dysentery from our Mexican location shooting. And Shorty had the night off, as did my secretary.”

  “So you have no alibi.”

  “None, my darling. Nor memory. In a cheap thriller, a blow to the head would have granted me the blessing of amnesia. I, however, earned my loss of memory, every missing moment of it.”

  “How?”

  “It may come as a shock to you—I know it does to me—but my youth is fading fast, and my energy is no longer boundless. To work for days, without sleep, requires certain pharmaceutical assistance. Similar assistance is necessary to help me maintain my boyish figure, to better perform my leading man duties. And, as you know, I do take the occasional drink.”

  “Okay—so we’re talking booze and amphetamines.”

  “Did you know that my family tree includes Horace Goldin—the legendary celebrated magician who invented the ‘Divided Woman’ illusion, the trick of sawing a female in half?”

  “And that means you bisected Beth Short’s body?”

  As if the cigar were a wand, he gestured to the dismembered limbs framing the Crazy House doorway, and to the painting of a woman cut in half, her corpse flung on a flayed cow carcass. “I needed you to see these terrible images, Nathan—these images which were, by the way, created prior to the Short girl’s murder.” He tapped his temple with two fingers; his eyes bugged out. “They were in this mind. Nightmarish visions that I sought to exorcise in this harmless fashion.”

  A few terrible moments dragged by, and then he rose, without looking at me, saying, “Let’s continue this in a more reflective setting.”

  He almost bolted from the hideous, hellish self-created surroundings, disappearing into the funhouse. I found him in the hall of mirrors, seated on a folding chair, staring blankly at perhaps eighty images of himself. Another folding chair, next to him, awaited me, and I took it.