The Book of Illusions (18 page)

That was what she said, in any case, and from the stunned and horrified look that greeted him when he walked through the front door, Hector saw no reason to doubt her. She hadn’t known the gun was loaded, she said. Her agent had given it to her when she moved into this isolated house in the canyon three months ago. It was supposed to be for protection, and after Brigid started saying all those crazy things to her, ranting on about Hector’s baby and her slit wrists and the bars on the windows of madhouses and the blood from Christ’s wounds, Dolores had become frightened and asked her to leave. But Brigid wouldn’t go, and a few minutes later she was accusing Dolores of having stolen her man, threatening her with wild ultimatums and calling her a devil, a tramp, and a low-down lousy slut. Just six months ago, Brigid had been that sweet reporter from
Photoplay
with the pretty smile and the sharp sense of humor, but now she was out of her mind, she was dangerous, she was lurching around the room and weeping at the top of her lungs, and Dolores didn’t want her there anymore. That was when she thought of the revolver. It was in the middle drawer of the rolltop desk in the living room, less than ten feet from where she was standing, and so she walked over to the desk and opened the middle drawer. She hadn’t meant to pull the trigger. Her only thought was that maybe the sight of the gun would be enough to scare off Brigid and get her to leave. But once she took it out of the drawer and pointed it across the room, the thing went off in her hand. There hadn’t been much of a sound. Just a kind of small pop, she said, and then Brigid let out a mysterious grunt and fell to the floor.

Dolores wouldn’t go into the living room with him (It’s too horrible, she said, I can’t look at her), and so he went in alone. Brigid was lying facedown on the rug in front of the sofa. Her body was warm, and blood was still leaking from the back of her skull. Hector turned her over, and when he looked into her destroyed face and saw the hole where her left eye had been, he suddenly stopped breathing. He couldn’t look at her and breathe at the same time. In order to start breathing again, he had to look away, and once he did that, he couldn’t bring himself to look at her anymore. Everything gone. Everything crushed to pieces. And the unborn baby inside her, dead and gone as well. Eventually, he stood up and went into the hall, where he found a blanket in the closet. When he returned to the living room, he looked at her one last time, felt the breath clutch inside him again, and then opened the blanket and spread it over her small, tragic body.

His first impulse was to go to the police, but Dolores was afraid. What would her story sound like when they questioned her about the gun, she said, when they forced her to walk through the improbable sequence of events for the twelfth time and made her explain why a twenty-four-year-old pregnant woman was lying dead on the living room floor? Even if they believed her, even if they were willing to accept that the gun had gone off accidentally, the scandal would ruin her. Her career would be finished, and Hector’s career, too, for that matter, and why should they suffer for something that wasn’t their fault? They should call Reggie, she said—meaning Reginald Dawes, her agent, the same fool who had given her the gun—and let him handle it. Reggie was smart, he knew all the angles. If they listened to Reggie, he would figure out a way to save their necks.

But Hector knew that he was already past saving. It was scandal and public humiliation if they talked; it was even worse trouble if they didn’t. They could be charged with murder, and once the case was presented in court, not a soul on earth would believe that Brigid’s death had been an accident. Choose your poison. Hector had to decide. He had to decide for both of them, and there was no right decision to be made. Forget about Reggie, he said to her. If Dawes got wind of what she had done, he would own her. She would be groveling before him on bloody knees for the rest of her life. There couldn’t be anyone else. It was either get on the phone and talk to the cops, or it was talk to no one. And if it was no one, then they would have to take care of the body themselves.

He knew that he would burn in hell for saying that, and he also knew that he would never see Dolores again, but he said it anyway, and then they went ahead and did it. It wasn’t a question of good and evil anymore. It was about doing the least harm under the circumstances, about not ruining yet another life for no purpose. They took Dolores’s Chrysler sedan and drove up into the mountains about an hour north of Malibu with Brigid’s body in the trunk. The corpse was still in the blanket, which in turn was wrapped in the rug, and there was a shovel in the trunk as well. Hector had found it in the garden shed behind Dolores’s house, and that was what he used to dig the hole with. If nothing else, he figured he owed her that much. He had betrayed her, after all, and the remarkable thing about it was that she had gone on trusting him. Brigid’s stories had had no effect on her. She had dismissed them as ravings, as lunatic lies told by a jealous, unhinged woman, and even when the evidence had been pushed up flat against her beautiful nose, she had refused to accept it. It could have been vanity, of course, a monstrous vanity that saw nothing of the world except what it wanted to see, but at the same time it could have been real love, a love so blind that Hector could scarcely even imagine what he was about to lose. Needless to say, he never learned which one it had been. After they returned from their hideous errand in the hills that night, he drove back to his house in his own car, and he never saw her again.

That was when he disappeared. Except for the clothes on his back and the cash in his wallet, he left everything behind, and by ten o’clock the next morning he was heading north on a train to Seattle. He was fully expecting to be caught. Once Brigid was reported missing, it wouldn’t be long before someone made a connection between the two disappearances. The police would want to question him, and at that point they would begin looking for him in earnest. But Hector was wrong about that, just as he had been wrong about everything else. He was the one who was missing, and for the time being no one even knew that Brigid was gone. She had no job anymore, no permanent address, and when she failed to return to her room at the Fitzwilliam Arms in downtown Los Angeles for the rest of that week in early 1929, the desk clerk had her belongings carried down to the basement and rented her room to someone else. There was nothing unusual about that. People disappeared all the time, and you couldn’t leave a room empty when a new tenant was willing to pay for it. Even if the desk clerk had felt concerned enough to contact the police, there was nothing they could have done about it anyway. Brigid was registered under a false name, and how could you look for someone who didn’t exist?

Two months later, her father called from Spokane and talked to a Los Angeles detective named Reynolds, who continued working on the case until he retired in 1936. Twenty-four years after that, the bones of Mr. O’Fallon’s daughter were finally unearthed. A bulldozer dug them up on the construction site of a new housing development at the edge of the Simi Hills. They were sent to the forensic laboratory in Los Angeles, but Reynolds’s paperwork was deep in storage by then, and it was no longer possible to identify the person they had belonged to.

Alma knew about those bones because she had made it her business to know about them. Hector had told her where they were buried, and when she visited the housing development in the early eighties, she talked to enough people to confirm that they had been found in that spot.

By then, Saint John was long dead as well. After returning to her parents’ house in Wichita following Hector’s disappearance, she had issued her statement to the press and gone into seclusion. A year and a half later, she married a local banker named George T. Brinkerhoff. They had two children, Willa and George Junior. In 1934, when the elder child was still under three, Saint John lost control of her car while driving home one night in a hard November rain. She crashed into a telephone pole, and the impact of the collision sent her hurtling through the windshield, which severed the carotid artery in her neck. According to the police autopsy report, she bled to death without regaining consciousness.

Two years later, Brinkerhoff remarried. When Alma wrote to him in 1983 to request an interview, his widow answered that he had died of kidney failure the previous fall. The children were alive, however, and Alma spoke to both of them—one in Dallas, Texas, and the other in Orlando, Florida. Neither one had much to offer. They were so young at the time, they said. They knew their mother from photographs, but they didn’t remember her at all.

B
y the time Hector walked into Central Station on the morning of January fifteenth, his mustache was already gone. He disguised himself by removing his most identifiable feature, transforming his face into another face through a simple act of subtraction. The eyes and eyebrows, the forehead and slicked-back hair would also have said something to a person familiar with his films, but not long after he bought his ticket, Hector found a solution to that problem as well. In the process, Alma said, he also found a new name.

The nine twenty-one for Seattle wouldn’t be boarding for another hour. Hector decided to kill the time by going into the station restaurant for a cup of coffee, but no sooner did he sit down at the counter and start breathing in the smells of bacon and eggs frying on the griddle than he was engulfed by a wave of nausea. He wound up in the men’s room, locked inside one of the stalls on his hands and knees, retching up the contents of his stomach into the toilet. It all came pouring out of him, the miserable green fluids and the clotted bits of undigested brown food, a trembling purge of shame and fear and revulsion, and when the attack was over, he sank to the floor and lay there for a long while, struggling to catch his breath. His head was pushed up against the back wall, and from that angle he was in a position to see something that otherwise would have escaped his notice. In the elbow of the curved pipe just behind the toilet, someone had left a cap. Hector slid it out from its hiding place and discovered that it was a worker’s cap, a sturdy thing made of wool tweed with a short bill jutting from the front—not very different from the cap he had once worn himself, back when he was new in America. Hector turned it over to make sure there was nothing inside it, that it wasn’t too dirty or too foul for him to put it on. That was when he saw the owner’s name written out in ink along the back of the interior leather band: Herman Loesser. It struck Hector as a good name, perhaps even an excellent name, and in any event a name no worse than any other. He was Herr Mann, was he not? If he took to calling himself Herman, he could change his identity without altogether renouncing who he was. That was the important thing: to get rid of himself for others, but to remember who he was for himself. Not because he wanted to, but precisely because he didn’t.

Herman Loesser. Some would pronounce it
Lesser
, and others would read it as
Loser
. Either way, Hector figured that he had found the name he deserved.

The cap fit remarkably well. It was neither too slack nor too snug, and there was just enough give to it for him to pull the brim down over his forehead and obscure the distinctive slant of his eyebrows, to shade the fierce clarity of his eyes. After the subtraction, then, an addition. Hector minus the mustache, and then Hector plus the cap. The two operations canceled him out, and he left the men’s room that morning looking like anyone, like no one, like the spitting image of Mr. Nobody himself.

He lived in Seattle for six months, moved down to Portland for a year, and then went back north to Washington, where he stayed until the spring of 1931. At first, he was pushed along by pure terror. Hector felt that he was running for his life, and in the days that followed his disappearance, his ambitions were no different from those of any other criminal: as long as he eluded capture for another day, he considered that day well spent. Every morning and afternoon, he read about himself in the papers, keeping track of the developments in the case to see how close they were to finding him. He was perplexed by what they wrote, appalled by how little effort anyone had made to know him. Hunt was only of the scantest importance, and yet every article began and ended with him: stock manipulations, bogus investments, the business of Hollywood in all its worm-eaten glory. Brigid’s name was never mentioned, and until Dolores went back to Kansas, no one even bothered to talk to her. Day by day, the pressure diminished, and after four weeks of no breakthroughs and dwindling coverage in the papers, his panic began to subside. No one suspected him of anything. He could have gone back home if he had wanted to. All he had to do was hop a train for Los Angeles, and he could have picked up his life exactly where he had left it.

But Hector didn’t go anywhere. There was nothing he wanted more than to be in his house on North Orange Drive, sitting on the sun porch with Blaustein as they drank their iced teas and put the finishing touches on
Dot and Dash
. Making movies was like living in a delirium. It was the hardest, most demanding work anyone had invented, and the more difficult it became for him, the more exhilarating he found it. He was learning the ropes, slowly mastering the intricacies of the job, and with a little more time he was certain that he would have developed into one of the good ones. That was all he had ever wanted for himself: to be good at that one thing. He had wanted only that, and therefore that was the one thing he would never allow himself to do again. You don’t drive an innocent girl insane, and you don’t make her pregnant, and you don’t bury her dead body eight feet under the ground and expect to go on with your life as before. A man who had done what he had done deserved to be punished. If the world wouldn’t do it for him, then he would have to do it himself.

He rented a room in a boardinghouse near the Pike Place Market, and when the money in his wallet finally ran out, he found a job with one of the local fishmongers. Up every morning at four, unloading trucks in the predawn fog, hefting crates and bushels as the damp of Puget Sound stiffened his fingers and worked its way into his bones. Then, after a brief smoke, spreading out crabs and oysters on beds of chipped ice, followed by sundry repetitive daylight occupations: the clank of shells hitting the scale, the brown paper bags, slicing open oysters with his short, lethal scimitar. When he wasn’t working, Herman Loesser read books from the public library, kept a journal, and talked to no one unless absolutely compelled to. The object, Alma said, was to squirm under the stringencies he had imposed on himself, to make himself as uncomfortable as possible. When the work became too easy, he moved on to Portland, where he found a job as a night watchman in a barrel factory. After the clamor of the roofed-in market, the silence of his thoughts. There was nothing fixed about his choices, Alma explained. His penance was a continual work in progress, and the punishments he meted out to himself changed according to what he felt were his greatest deficiencies at any given moment. He craved company, he longed to be with a woman again, he wanted bodies and voices around him, and therefore he walled himself up in that vacant factory, struggling to school himself in the finer points of self-abnegation.