The Fame Thief (25 page)

The words hung there. Looking down at the center of the table, Dressler said, “Somebody who knew where she lived. Something else to think about. I come up with anything, I’ll let you know.”

The day’s events suddenly clobbered me. It was all I could do to sit upright. “So,” I said.

“A suicide,” Dressler said. “Would have made news all over the place. Would have been the second suicide in that apartment. That’s how she got it so cheap.”

“The second? Who was the first?”

“An actress, Swedish girl, back around 1940. Supposed to be the new Garbo, but it didn’t happen.”

“What was her name?”

He thought about it for a second. “Anna,” he said. “Anna Akers.”

In room 104
of the Continental Tiki Hut in Reseda, I discovered I was too tired to sleep.

I’d snapped off the light, mercifully hiding the glowering plastic Polynesian tiki statues and the Eiffel-Tower wallpaper, and flopped onto the bed fully clothed, kicking my shoes off just before slipping my feet under the covers. I closed my eyes, lay still for about fifteen minutes while I watched little retinal fireworks, and then got up again.

Thanks to the Continental Tiki Hut’s Wi-Fi, Google sure-footedly took me to a site dedicated to the memory of Anna
Akers, with an absolutely breathless piece about her last day on earth by a screenwriter named King Folden, who was with her when the final aces and eights were dealt.

Anna’s achingly beautiful face, all fine bones and long, hooded eyes in the Garbo tradition, gazed out at me in glorious Hollywood black-and-white. She looked like someone who could be sliced open with a sharp word, and as King Folden made clear, she’d suffered more than her share of them.

Her dreams of stardom were not to be
, King wrote, possibly in violet ink.
The English language defeated her. Despite months and months of drill on the studio lot, Anna’s accent refused to yield. What were supposed to be starring roles became supporting roles and then bits. Instead of replacing Garbo, who was a year or two away from retiring, Anna entered the floating battalion of Hollywood rejects, accepting “gifts” from prominent “gentlemen”—as if there were any gentlemen running the Hollywood studios—and eventually becoming a pass-around for the powerful
.

August 14, 1940 was a Wednesday. The day of the week is important because Wednesday was, by strict agreement among the all-male membership, “Mistress Day” at the Elgin Club, an “exclusive” watering-spot for studio power players at the Sunset Tower Hotel on the fabulous Strip. As far as the wives knew, the Elgin was closed on Wednesdays, but for the sunglasses-and-jodhpurs-set it was the day to parade the latest conquests. At ten past five on that day, just as I was getting ready to go home, Max—

I looked up
to the top of the piece and found that “Max” was Max Zeffire, the head of Zephyr Pictures, a grade-C outfit ranked somewhere between Warner Brothers and Republic that
had fought its way out of Poverty Row on the strength of some unusually good B pictures. I remembered Dolly saying Zeffire had taken her virginity, and I flipped open Rina’s notebook and found that Dolly had made her first two films for Zephyr and had been given her name there. Just for the hell of it I looked up Max Zeffire and discovered he’d died in the crash of a private plane in 1956. So I went back to King Folden:

… Max came by my office and said to come with him so we could talk about the story problems on
Queen of the Moon,
which was
all
story problems. I got into the car, and there was a beautiful girl whom Max introduced as Anna Akers. I said hello, and she nodded, and Max said, “She doesn’t speak English so good,” and then he ignored her and we talked about the script. Anna looked out the window. After we’d failed to solve any of the problems and we were a couple of blocks from the Elgin, Max said, “Get this picture right, King, and we’ll give it to Anna.”

She turned from the window and smiled for the first time. “You won’t,” she said, but she kissed his cheek. There was something—and I don’t think this is just hindsight—broken-hearted about her. Despite the beauty, she knew she wasn’t going anywhere. She probably knew that Max went through women so fast he got their names mixed up, but she still smiled again when Max said, “We’ve got to do something for Anna.”

Anna made a reproving tsk-tsk sound and said, “We are here.” Her English was heavily accented, but she had a beautiful voice, low and sweet as a cello. The car pulled to the curb, and the driver hopped out to open it. We went through the lobby and down the stairs to the Elgin, with Max scanning the crowd as he always did, although this time he was probably making sure he didn’t see anyone who knew his wife. Anna turned a lot of heads, and once Max was satisfied he was safe, he grabbed her
hand like a boast, just making it clear to everyone who she was with. At the door to the Elgin, Gottfried, the maitre d’, looked flustered. He was waving his hands and getting in our way, trying to say something, but Gottfied had the most imitated stammer in Hollywood, and he couldn’t get it out. Max shouldered him aside, saying, “Later, Gottfried, when I’ve got a week or two,” and opened the door from the anteroom into the bar and dining area
.

The first thing I noticed was how quiet it was. Normally, people were laughing and talking, but if I’d gone in with a blindfold on, I’d have thought the place was empty. Second thing was that most people were on the edges of the room, as though someone in the middle was holding something that might explode. The third thing was Max’s back, because I walked straight into it. He’d frozen, about a quarter of the way into the room
.

And there they were, the explosives, right where they shouldn’t be on Mistress Day: four wives, and one of them was Lenore Zeffire
.

They were all dressed to the nines. It looked like Oscar night. The clothes were top of the line, the jewelry glittered, and their hair was perfect. All around the room, mistresses peeked around the men they were hiding behind. Max started to say something, but he sounded like Gottfried. It was the only time I ever saw him tongue-tied
.

Lenore Zeffire was taller than Max was, which wasn’t unusual, but I’d never seen her look taller than she did at that moment. “We can go now, girls,” she said, stepping forward. “You were right. There’s nothing here but whores.” And she pushed past us toward the door, slowing just enough to spit in Anna’s face. Then she and the other women filed out
.

I’ve never been in a more silent room. Nobody looked at us. We might as well not have been there
.

When he came to his senses, Max turned to Anna and said, “Let’s get you cleaned up, darling,” but Anna backed away from him, all the way to the door. When she felt it behind her, she said, “I will go home now” in that accent, and left. Max said to me, “Go after her,” and I did, but I have to admit I didn’t try very hard to catch up with her. I had no idea what I could say that would have comforted her
.

At about nine that night, Max sent some of the boys from the studio over to the Wedgwood to check up on her, but by then she’d climbed up onto the dining room table, thrown a long sash over one of the ceiling beams, tied both ends around her neck, and jumped off the table. The police doctor said the sash was long enough, and Anna was tall enough, that she could have stood on the floor on tiptoe with the sash around her neck without choking. He theorized that she’d hugged her knees to her chest, like someone doing a cannonball into a swimming pool, when she made her leap. “It’s almost impossible,” he said in his report, “not to straighten the legs and try to stand. The urge to survive is the most powerful instinct of all. She wanted very badly to die.”

I yanked my
eyes from the screen and turned all the lights on. The plastic tiki gods and the Eiffel Tower wallpaper looked pretty good. For the first time in years I felt like crying—for Dolly, for Anna, for all the beautiful and not-so-beautiful girls everywhere who lose their way in the world without stumbling over anyone kind. But I was too tired to sleep, too tired to cry.

Somehow, though, I did sleep. In the morning I woke up with my head on the desk beside the laptop. I brought the machine out of standby mode and went to the
LA Times
site, and there was a photo of Dolores La Marr from about 1948, with Chester Morris in the famous scene from the “Boston Blackie” movie,
and the headline
FORMER STAR MURDERED IN
“
CURSED
”
APARTMENT
. Below that, relegated to smaller type by the death of someone who had been billed just below the title, was a story on Pinky’s murder, complete with a photo of the devastation in Edna’s room. Much farther down, almost at the bottom of the page, was yet another headline, this one reading,
VETERAN HOLLYWOOD DIRECTOR KILLED
.

During the night, someone had cut Doug Trent’s throat.

The chain. Dressler had sent me to Dolores La Marr. Dolores La Marr had sent me to Doug Trent. Doug Trent had sent me to Pinky Pinkerton. Other than Dressler, I hadn’t mentioned Trent to anyone.

Except for Pinky Pinkerton; I’d told him that Trent sent me. He’d sounded terrified when he called me. The man with the knife had plenty of time to learn how I’d found my way to Pinky’s office.

On one hand, I thought, not liking myself very much for considering it from this perspective, the news meant that Trent wouldn’t be calling the cops to point them in my direction. That left the shoe, which would only be useful once the cops already had me, since my DNA and fingerprints weren’t, so far as I knew, on file, or at least not on any legally available file.

On the other hand, what did the news mean for Edna? Edna, who hadn’t been in the office, alive or dead, when the bomb went off.

It used to
be that only cops and the phone company had access to reverse phone directories, but with the advent of the Internet, anyone can use one. Problem is that many of the free sites
are just honey traps—plug in a number, and a demand for paid membership pops up. Others have special relationships with law-enforcement agencies, carefully preserving the IP addresses and names of the curious and relaying them to the cops. Someone attracts the wrong amount of attention; some nerd cop hits a keyboard, and there it is: whoever that person requested info on, or whoever requested info on that person.

No, thanks.

A year or so back, a plausible—a con man—who specialized in defrauding the estates of the recently-deceased rich had made the mistake of trying to dip into the postmortem arrangements of the late father of a friend of mine. I’d put a pin in him, and as part of his settlement—in addition to returning everything he’d swiped, plus 20 percent interest—he’d shared with me a short list of Web resources that could be accessed with confidence by those of us who live outside the narrow focus of the law. One of them was a reverse-directory service. A membership cost $1,200 per year, a bargain for an active burglar.

I brought up the site and entered the “after-hours” phone number on Edna Frayne’s business card, and there we were.

Edna lived about ten minutes from Pinky’s office, in the hills near Beechwood Canyon, up above Hollywood Boulevard. The houses in the area had been built mainly in the twenties and thirties, probably priced originally at five or ten thousand bucks, now running in the low seven figures. If Edna changed houses as often as she changed her hairstyle, she’d probably paid less than fifty thousand, back in the early fifties.

I drove past it, waited fifteen minutes, and then drove past it again, in the opposite direction. There were no patrol cars or likely plainclothes cars sitting out front. Still. The cops had to have been here.

And they had to be coming back.

It was a vaguely European-style cottage, probably designed in the thirties by someone moonlighting from the studios, gray stucco with cheesy bits of exposed timber and brick and mullioned windows, topped by a sharply-pitched roof that curved up at the edges and seemed to cry out to be thatched. A ficus hedge obligingly hid most of the place from the street, and Edna’s driveway ran obediently right past it, allowing me to park the car and get out without disturbing the view from her neighbors’ windows.

The morning was slate-gray and cold by LA standards, but the drizzle of a day or so earlier was still evaporating from the ground, raising the humidity and dulling the edge of the chill. I turned my collar up anyway. I was too tired to resist the cold, and it seemed to blow straight through me. As I looked at the side of the house and saw the yellow crime scene tape, something in me relaxed a tiny bit. Even if bad things had happened here, the worst of it would have been cleared away. And I could
sense
that nothing was wrong inside. I’ve learned to trust my senses.

I made a note, as I walked around to the front door, to review my belief systems and see how I might be able to account for Anna.

Behind its crime-scene tape, the door was locked. I knocked earnestly several times, the knock of someone confident in the unimpeachable innocence of his errand. The doorbell worked, giving out the classic
ding
-dong tune. Nobody answered, which is what one would expect from a clearly identified crime scene. Still, I earnestly rang again, counted to twenty, and walked around to the back of the house.