Playland (48 page)

Maury Ahearne again.

“I checked the bus schedules for the night that cabdriver took her to the bus station downtown. The dispatcher on the dog remembered a bag-lady type, not bad-looking, she only had one suitcase, and it was falling apart. Couldn’t lift it, it was so heavy, she was pulling it behind her with a piece of rope or something.”

Exactly what the cabdriver had told me.

“Got on a bus to Kansas City. I got hold of the driver finally, he remembered her, all right, she sat right behind him the whole trip. Wouldn’t let him put the suitcase in the baggage compartment. Never slept. Humming songs the whole way. They get to K.C., he had to carry the suitcase for her, and it fell apart, spilled out all over the platform …”

“He remember what was in it?”

“Shit, mostly.”

I had the feeling that Maury was holding out. “Anything that wasn’t shit?”

He waited for a moment. “You remember that dirty picture of the little girl?”

The naked child in the strangely erotic old-fashioned photograph Maury Ahearne had stolen from Melba Mae Toolate’s RV. The postcard-sized photograph Melba Mae had so many copies of. “Yes.”

“She had a bunch of them in the bag. The driver tried to cop one, and she took a swing at him.”

I got one suitcase, that’s it. If it gets heavy, I just get rid of stuff. The story of my life
.

If she was on the run, why would she bring those photographs. How did they fit into the story of her life?

“What happened then?”

“The cops came. I checked someone I know in the department down there. They wanted to book her for vag loitering, but she had over five hundred cash with her. And the bus driver didn’t want to press charges. I showed him a copy of the picture. It was the same one.”

“So it was her.”

“Looks that way.”

The trail went cold after Kansas City.

It was then that I took the photograph of the unknown nude woman from my desk and pinned it on my bulletin board alongside the two pictures of Blue Tyler, the one in the conference at the William Morris Agency with her covey of managers, and the other of her dancing at Ciro’s in the arms of Arthur French on the night of Jacob King’s funeral.

W
hen did it begin to go wrong? I asked Chuckie O’Hara.

I suppose I should have seen the signs when I went over there, Chuckie said.

Jake wanted me to see Playland, and he wanted Blue to come over too, she’d only been there once since the groundbreaking. She said it was boring, there was nothing to do, it was like watching grass grow, except there was no grass. What Jake was trying to do was run the building from L.A. He’d left that gorilla of his in charge over there …

Eddie Binhoff …

Whatever his name was, and the construction guy …

Jackie Heller …

 … and he thought that would do it, there was no real need for him to be over there all the time, he wasn’t going to take a hammer and start banging nails, after all. He kept the architect’s drawing of the place in the living room at the house on St. Pierre Road. It was the first thing you saw when you came in, and he’d tell you how it was going, this was done, that was done. It was as if he thought it was the Sistine Chapel, and he was Michelangelo. He didn’t really want to be in Vegas, there
was no place good enough to stay, and he was having too good a time being this millionaire sportsman he was supposed to be, with the croquet parties and the gin games at Hillcrest and the box at Santa Anita, and his picture in the paper all the time. So what he was going to do was rent a little plane and we’d all fly over, but after Carole Lombard died, you couldn’t get Blue near a plane, so I drove over with her and Jake. It was a miserable drive, a lousy two-lane road, six or seven hours in the heat.

How was Blue?

A pain in the ass. She didn’t like the sun, she thought it gave her freckles, like Kate Hepburn, for some reason she never liked Kate. And she hadn’t figured out a way to tell Jake yet she was going back to work …

On
Broadway Babe
?

I was supposed to direct it, it was a nice story, the script needed some work, but I couldn’t put my mind to it, because someone had told me that Irving Page, that no-talent little prick, had named me to the Committee in closed session.

He named two hundred ninety-one people.

Well, I didn’t give a rat’s ass about the other two hundred ninety, I was just worried about me. If you were named in closed session, you couldn’t find anything out, they wouldn’t tell you, you didn’t want to check too closely, and you didn’t want to get a lawyer yet, it might look suspicious, like you were guilty.

So you really didn’t know if you’d been named or not until you got a subpoena?

Right.

Who told you you’d been named?

Reilly Holt. (Chuckie paused.) The screenwriter. (Another pause.) I suppose today you’d call him my significant other. Or more significant than the others, if truth be told.

And he was in the Party?

My dear, the Grand High Poo-bah. He hated my enlisting in the Marines after Pearl Harbor. He said I was a capitalist tool and was only going to be cannon fodder in capitalism’s employ.
Reilly always did have a certain gift for prognostication. But then when I came back, he was absolutely besotted by my stump. I thought that was rather weird, even by my recherché standards.

How was Jacob on the trip over?

Sullen. And talkative. Too talkative. Dropping names. It’s an art, name-dropping, and with Jake it was always a little too obvious.

Whose names?

Sam and Frances Goldwyn, for starters. He and Blue had gone up to Laurel Lane for a screening. Or, to be accurate, Frances had asked Blue, and she brought Jake without checking with them. Frances wasn’t too happy about it, the Harrimans were the guests of honor, a pair of trophies is more like it. I bet it was the only time in his life Averell was in the same room with someone who’d made his bones. I was there that night, and Lilo was too, and Lilo said, Tell Ambassador Harriman who your biggest hit was, Jake. He could be a cunt, Lilo. Sam, of course, got Jake’s name wrong, par for the course, he thought his name was King Jacob, and he told Jake he’d met King Carol of Romania and King Victor Emmanuel of Italy, but never a King Jacob, what country was he from? Jake just laughed, he’d been around long enough by then to do that when something went over his head. Anyway, Sam gave him the name of his tailor in London, Huntsman, and pretty soon Jake was going around saying he thought he’d buy some suits in London, he’d heard Huntsman was the best, Sam Goldwyn used him. He even brought it up again in the car on the way over, but then he got sullen when Blue said be sure to have the tailor make the jackets extra large so his holster wouldn’t show. She was kidding, but there were some things Jake didn’t think were funny anymore. I thought he was going to throw her out of the car right then and there, but just at that moment we came up over a rise, and there it was, in the distance, in the dusk, Playland.

The night work lights already were on, and the night crews were unloading materials, and there was this haze of dust as the
trucks drove in and out, but you could see the shell of what would be the hotel and the casino beginning to take shape, beginning to look like the rendering in Jake’s living room. The sun was going down behind us, and it was starting to get cold, but Jake wanted to pull off the road so we could stop a moment and look down at it. We got out, and Blue put her arm around his waist and burrowed up against his jacket. She was trying to make amends, I guess, for her smart mouth, until finally, without a word, he unbuttoned the coat and wrapped it around her. It was like she was part of him. I think it was the closest I ever saw them.

“Who ordered the double crews, Jake?” Eddie Binhoff said. He was wearing a white shirt and a black string tie, the uniform he wore when he was dealing blackjack at the Bronco Club, except now his sleeves were rolled up, and in his hand he held a work schedule attached to a clipboard.

Jacob King gave no indication he had heard Eddie Binhoff’s question. In the dirt and noise of the work site, he seemed peculiarly alone, surrounded by his own presence, oblivious to Eddie and to Chuckie and to Jackie Heller, who was poring over a blueprint outside the construction trailer, oblivious to everyone except Blue, who appeared to be playing hide-and-seek with herself in the framing of an adjoining structure, nature’s child. Jacob rotated slowly, three hundred sixty degrees, taking in his new domain, missing nothing. He seemed transfixed, Chuckie would remember, as if Playland had opened for him a future he had never contemplated.

“You know what I like best about it?” Jacob King said. It was not clear to whom he was addressing the question. Perhaps only to himself.

“Jake,” Eddie Binhoff persisted, scratching the purplish bruise of the tattooed tribute to Roxanne that curled around his forearm. “Do Lilo and Jimmy know about these extra crews?”

“What I like best about it is that it’s mine,” Jacob King said quietly to no one in particular, still ignoring Eddie Binhoff. The
words chilled Chuckie O’Hara. Or was it just the cold desert night air that made him shiver? Then Jacob added a quick smile, the trance broken.

“Jake, I’m supposed to okay this,” Eddie Binhoff said. “You say it’s okay, I’ll sign, we’ll put them on the payroll. But I can’t do it on my own.”

“I don’t check things out with Lilo, you know that, Eddie,” Jacob said. He initialed the work order, then stepped through the rubble to a pile of marble Blue was now examining in the building where she had been playing. She pointed to the marble, then whispered something into Jacob’s ear. He examined the billing slip, then whistled sharply through his teeth. “Hey, Jackie, what kind of fucking marble is this?”

Jackie Heller folded his blueprint and walked toward Jacob King. “Domestic, Jake.” He looked at Blue, then at Chuckie, as if waiting for an introduction. “I showed you the samples,” he continued when no introduction was forthcoming. “You said it was okay. Eddie, Jake said it was okay, right?”

Eddie Binhoff shrugged.

Again Blue whispered into Jacob’s ear.