Hollywood and Levine (3 page)

“Seventeen hundred?” he asked with a shy smile. “Every week?” He laughed. “No, that's all right with me. You got a job like that?”

“No, but this guy here's got one he wants to give up.” I pointed at a fuming Walter.

“Then he's crazy.”

“That's what I'm trying to tell him.”

The busboy laughed and walked away with his tray full of filthy dishes. Walter was livid, as I knew he would be.

“What the hell was that all about?” he demanded. “I didn't know you enjoyed humiliating your friends.”

“I'll tell you what it is, Walter. I hammer at weak spots. By now it's an instinct. See, the thing is, I don't think you're leveling with me. You came into my office to feel me out and told me someone was tailing you. That was the bunk, but I can understand why you did it. But now you allegedly feel comfortable with me and you're still not leveling. That's what I don't like.”

“I
am
leveling, Jack.”

“You aren't. I can't believe that you don't have a single clue as to why Warner Brothers is out to get you. What is it, Walter, a morals rap? They catch you sashaying around in one of Virginia Mayo's outfits? You shtup someone you're not supposed to, like Warner's daughter or Minnie Mouse or The Three Stooges? What is it? A clue, a hint is all I want. Even if you're not sure, give me your suspicions.”

Walter shook his head in helplessness, not so much at my questions, but at his situation.

“It is not morals, Jack. I'm absolutely sure about that.”

“And it's obviously not incompetence, not if your pictures have been making dough.”

“A high percentage have been profitable, Jack. You can look it up in
Variety
.”

“Oh, I believe it, Walter,” I told him. “Doesn't leave much, except studio politics, personal animus.”

The writer nodded vaguely. “I have some enemies there,” he said slowly, as if diagraming his thoughts, “but don't we all? Hollywood has cliques like any place else, probably more because it's such an insular community. There are the old-timers, the old money, the progressive element….” His voice trailed off, his eyes got distant and unfocused.

“It is politics, then,” I said quietly.

Adrian looked at me and I could tell for sure that he was trying to decide how far he could go with me.

“In a general sense you might be right, Jack.” He weighed the words out, gram by gram. The calibrations were minute. “There are rumors that it might be a bad time for people like us.”

“Who's ‘us,' Jews?”

“People with progressive ideas. People who care a little about the world, about the sufferings of humanity, about the direction of government.” The writer's eyes caught fire. “Christ, Jack, don't you remember back in '27, at City, when the Sacco-Vanzetti case blew up, the anguish of our generation? It was all we could think about, it was a watershed, a dividing line. What did Dos Passos write? ‘All right we are two nations.' It was such a revelation.” Adrian leaned across the table, his face inches from mine. “We had such ideas about the way the world was going to be, Jack! God, did we ever dream! We were fools in college, of course; our ideas were unformed, undisciplined, but our instincts were right. I still make mistakes, I spread myself too thin, but I keep trying.” He shook his head thoughtfully. “Trouble is, there's so much to learn about and the world changes so quickly you can't truly keep abreast of things. But that can't stop us from caring deeply or thinking deeply about the forces that make governments tick. Particularly with these terrible weapons of war we have now. One wrong move and it's all up in smoke. And the United States won't share the secret. That's why, now more than ever, the people who want a better world can't be scared off.”

Adrian's eyes had grown bright and intense, thrilled by his own oratory. I cleared my throat.

“Stop me if I'm wrong,” I began, “but are you telling me that you spoke out too often and you're getting roasted for it?”

“I wish to God I knew.”

“Okay. Anything else to tell me?”

“There's nothing else to tell.”

“You ever do any work for Uncle Joe Stalin? Used to be very, very popular, Walter. Lot of smart people did.”

Adrian leaned so far forward in his chair that he was practically out of it.

“I've only worked for the people of the world,” he said. “Believe me, Jack.”

Which was all I needed to hear. The part of my brain that I like the best told me to get Adrian out of my life pronto. He was hazy, evasive, and trouble all around. But he was so obviously scared and such a pigeon for anybody with an angle that I knew I had to climb in the boat with him, leaky as it might be. I had the feeling he was going to need a lot of help, the kind of help he wouldn't get from his agents and managers. Besides, I told myself, it had been a dull few months: follow this guy, follow that broad, hang around that lobby. What for, to make a buck? Any shoe salesman can make a buck. LeVine rationalizes.

“Are you asking me to go to the Coast, Walter?”

He nodded. “Exactly. I want you to find out the precise reasons and motives behind all this trouble. I don't know much, Jack, but I know this is serious.”

“And you're not being cute with me—you really don't know why you're being pushed around?”

He covered my hand with his.

“Trust me, shamus.”

So I trusted him and if that doesn't keep LeVine out of the private dicks' hall of fame, nothing ever will. Adrian agreed to fly me out to the Coast and pay me three hundred dollars plus expenses for a ten-day investigation, to begin the following Wednesday, one week hence. He wrote a check covering the air fare.

“I'll get you a room at the Camino Real and have a car waiting for you there. Take a cab from the airport.”

“Fine.” I folded the check and put it in my wallet.

Adrian nodded and sat a little awkwardly, his hands bunched in his lap.

“I've never hired a detective before.” He flashed his best boyish smile.

“You'll get used to it,” I told him. “It's like hiring any menial help.”

He nodded some more and then, having nothing further to say to each other, we got up and paid the tab.

Out on the street, crowds of people streamed toward their eight-thirty curtains. Adrian and I stood with our hands in our pockets.

“You're going home now, Jack?”

“Yeah. I walk down to Times Square and catch the Flushing train.”

“Trains run pretty regularly?”

“The Flushing is pretty good.”

Adrian removed his hand from his pocket and extended it for a final shake. I shook it.

“Then I'll see you a week from tonight in California. We'll treat you like a king.” Adrian was attempting to infuse the mission with a little gaiety, but he was too burdened by fears and doubts to come very close.

“I'll be there, Walter.”

“Wonderful. I'll be flying out tomorrow.” He tightened his grip on my hand. “And thanks for helping me out, Jack. I think you know how much it means to me.”

“Don't thank me, I'm being well paid for this job.”

“I know you're not doing it for the money.”

I wasn't sure if he was right, so I kept my silence. We stood uneasily on the street, reluctant to part company but uncomfortable in each other's presence. I finally made the move.

“Take it easy, Walter. I'm sure we'll work this out for the best.”

He slapped me on the shoulder and I headed south on Broadway. One block later, I stopped at a light and turned around. Walter Adrian was still in front of Lindy's, tall and well dressed and alone.

2

I
  don't like airplanes, being a person apt to worry even when both my Florsheims are planted firmly on the earth, so you can imagine what the thirteen-hour flight to Los Angeles did for my disposition. The DC-6 was jammed to capacity and there wasn't enough room between the seats to cross a pair of adult male legs, so I spent a good deal of the trip pacing the aisles like an expectant father. My attempts at flirtation with the stewardesses were brushed off with professional ease, and a blond I had a casual eye on spent the last half of the trip straddling the armrest of a boisterous and wavy-haired Boston advertising man. She giggled and mussed his hair; he whispered in her ear and she took on the moist and serene look of someone whose glands have just said yes. The spectacle made me very unhappy, less for romantic reasons than for the fact that fantasizing about the blond had been a way of passing time. That fantasy shut off, I was condemned to spend the rest of the journey reading newspapers and worrying about Walter Adrian.

After stops in Washington and Dallas, we set down for good at a quarter past five in the afternoon. I exited the plane on legs of stone and crossed the damp and breezy airstrip at an arthritic pace. The baggage pickup was a quarter-mile away, a trek across wooden walkways that bisected construction sites of mud and timber. The L.A. airport was a jerry-built affair of squat buildings in varying states of renovation and disembowelment. Palm trees swayed in the warm wet air and it was no trick to imagine one's arrival in a banana republic whose aerodrome was being rebuilt as a monument to some national hero with a thin mustache and a Swiss bank account.

My Central American fantasy was not discouraged by the sloth of the baggage handling. I waited for a half hour in the stifling American Airlines shed while stray pieces of luggage came sliding down a metal chute, one by one. I noticed that the blond had gotten pretty drunk and was leaning heavily on the arm of the Boston ad man, who had the unhappy appearance of one whose plans for the evening were souring and out of control.

When the leather suitcase with the gold “J. LeV.” came down the chute, I grabbed it before the redcaps could and hustled outside to hail a cab. It was already six o'clock and I wanted to see Adrian before the transcontinental lag in time made me too sleepy to think straight.

A row of hacks was waiting outside the baggage shed. The first in line, a chunky, impassive Mexican with a deep scar on his forehead, signaled to me and took my bag. I said “Camino Real” and he nodded solemnly, placing my suitcase in the trunk with the gentle care of a man returning his infant daughter to her bed. He held the back door for me and I got into the cab. This was nothing, nothing at all, like New York. The hackie did not speak as he pulled out into traffic, not about the weather or politics or the Dodgers. I was in a foreign land.

That sense of foreignness accelerated as I settled in for the ride to the hotel. Palms stood full and gawky before a sky turning from pale secret blue to gaudy Hollywood sunset pink. White and salmon stucco houses, their roofs spiny red tile, glowed with a kind of doomsday phosphorescence. Windows burned off reflected pinks and oranges; behind them I supposed wives were preparing suppers for husbands but it was hard to imagine. No people sat in yards or took down wash; perhaps only fruit baskets occupied these jukebox-colored houses. I lowered my chin into a moist palm and felt that mixture of bemusement and sick-to-the-gut loneliness that comes with entering a strange city. And there is, I learned, no city stranger than Los Angeles, even to its inhabitants.

My sense of time and place was bent completely out of whack. It was that most numbing and private hour, sunset, and I stared out the windows of this cab wondering what the hell I was doing in California, so far from my small comforts. The more I speculated on the Adrian tale, the more half-baked the whole venture seemed, three hundred bills or not. I knew nothing about the writer's life or the worlds in which he moved, nothing about his friends or enemies. I didn't know the good guys from the heavies, the golden girls from the floozies. I wasn't even sure I could really trust Adrian; God knows what he might have flown me out here for. To be his alibi, to save his marriage. People with money can exercise their whims in a more dramatic fashion than can those without it.

I massaged my brain in this useless fashon all the way to the hotel, located on a residential Hollywood street called Sierra Bonita, just off Sunset Boulevard. The Camino Real was three stories of unpretentious white stucco separated from the street by a driveway which curved around a broad lawn boasting a slightly oily lily pond. I paid the Mexican, somnambulated through the Spanish-style lobby of wrought iron railings and red tile floors, and was led to my room by an elderly priss named Roy. He told me I looked like the rugged type. I congratulated him on his perception and closed the door in his face.

Adrian had gotten me a large and airy back room. It overlooked a small patio set in a grove of fragrant fruit trees, but I was too tired to enjoy it. I flopped down on the soft double bed and closed my eyes. It was a quarter to seven. What I really wanted to do was grab some dinner, go to sleep, and check in with Adrian early the next morning. But I rarely do what I want to do, who of us does? So I sat up and decided to get right on the case.

Funny thing is the case was practically over.

When I called Adrian's house a woman answered. I asked if she was Helen Adrian. She sounded guarded.

“Yes, this is. Who am I speaking to?”

“It's Jack LeVine, Mrs. Adrian, from New York.”

“Walter's friend the private eye?” She sounded relieved.

“Himself. In person.”

“Well, it's just marvelous that you're here. Walter's been raving about you.” Helen Adrian had the kind of husky and unvarnished voice that usually went with women I got silly over.

“Walter always raves. Can I speak to him?”

“Well, Jack, Walter's still at the studio. He's working late on a rewrite that was due five days ago.”

“So he's still working?”

“Oh yes. Contract squabbles or not. He's devoted to his work.” I couldn't separate the irony from the admiration. Both were present in her voice.