Playland (68 page)

“Why?”

“That accident.”

“What accident?”

“You didn’t hear the sirens?” He pronounced it “sireens.”

“What accident?” I repeated.

“Some old lady, out on 160, on the way to Kayenta, over in Arizona. There’s a stoplight there at the airport turnoff …”

I had seen it coming into town. I could feel a chill in the pit of my stomach.

“… after that it’s bye-bye, baby, nothing but open road all the way to Kayenta.”

“What happened?”

“This old lady, waiting there at the light, well, she just ups and puts herself and her suitcase under the rear right wheels of this eighteen-wheeler refrigerator rig stopped at the light, the light goes green, and the driver takes off, he feels this bump, and pulls over to the side, to see what’s wrong, and there’s this old lady, my boy, Neal, Jr., saw her, she’s flatter’n a goddamn pancake …”

I felt as if the breath had been sucked out of my lungs.
A good visual
, Melba Mae Toolate had said to me in Hamtramck when I had read her the story about the elderly woman in Chicago who had placed herself under the wheels of a transcontinental moving van on Michigan Avenue. I began to hyperventilate.

“You okay, Mr. Broderick?”

“Fine, Neal, fine.” I did not know what else to say. “I have some things I have to do, so why don’t you and your boy grab a ride into the Ramada, we’ll meet up later, okay?”

“Okay by me, Mr. Broderick, it’s your tab.”

I identified the body. She was a mess.
A good visual
. Sweet Jesus. Every blood vessel in her head seemed to have ruptured, and it was as if she was wearing a purple fright mask. I tried to comprehend why she had run from the Days Inn when the safe haven Arthur had offered was so close at hand. I could only think it was because she had been running for forty years, and running had become a habit too ingrained to break. Chuckie had once said that Blue Tyler movies always had happy endings, but Blue Tyler could never escape Melba Mae Toolate, and Melba’s life was never destined to end with a walk into the sunset, slow fade to black. I console myself that she had finally become totally unbalanced, but I also know that I wanted to abjure responsibility for reading her the item about the woman on Michigan Boulevard. As she considered her options out there at the airport turnoff, I can only suppose that seeing the
refrigerator truck stopped at the traffic light caused some flickering brain cell in her memory bank to flash suddenly, and thought was translated into demented action. If it were not that, I wanted to believe, it would have been something else.

We always want so much to believe the unbelievable.

After I left the medical examiner’s office, I called Arthur in Los Angeles. He listened without a word, then asked if I could call him back in five minutes. It was Arthur’s way; he would not ever let me hear him cry. When I called back, he was perfectly composed. He would charter a jet in Denver, and he wanted me to fly to Los Angeles with Blue’s body.
We were the only family she ever knew
, he had told me a short time before, and now the sole surviving member of that family was bringing her home.

The press arrived the next morning. I was no stranger to celebrity death. I could say “No comment” in every possible way, and not take offense at any offensive question. Why had she picked so grotesque a way to die? I was asked; I said I had no idea. As suicide is a criminal offense, Blue’s suitcase would have to remain in the property room of the Montezuma County sheriff’s office until it was released by the county attorney. I was surprised at how little was in it. A few of the Meta Dierdorf photographs, a framed snapshot of an almost boyish Arthur in black tie, laughing. Clothes. Sensible shoes. An uncashed money order for seven hundred fifty dollars. An annotated copy of Raul Flaherty’s
Messenger of Death
, the annotations mainly “B.S.” in large block letters. A few pieces of jewelry, one or two of which were perhaps valuable. Three cans of Chicken of the Sea tuna fish. Her tapes. Her tiny special Oscar. And a will leaving all her possessions to Arthur French.

When the paperwork attendant to Blue Tyler’s death was completed, a hearse took her casket to the airport, and the two Neals and I flew her to Denver, where we picked up the chartered G-3 to Los Angeles. To avoid the press, the plane landed at Ontario, and the casket was transported to the Heyer & Sobol Funeral Home & Mortuary in Studio City.

There was no service, only a laying to rest of Blue’s ashes. It was Arthur’s idea to put them in the crypt with Jacob’s. Arthur, who always tried, and sometimes failed, to do the right thing. Years before, Jimmy Riordan had seen to it that the name on the crypt was changed from Yakov Kinovsky to Jacob King, and that Jacob’s name, his dates, and the inscription were all in brass letters. Arthur, Chuckie, and I were the only mourners. Somewhere in his Cosmopolitan Pictures memorabilia, Arthur had dug out an old Tiffany calling card with the name Blue Tyler printed on it, and under her name he had written “1927–1991.” Arthur’s instructions were that Blue’s name and dates would have the same brass lettering as Jacob’s, and as the inscription, “But westward, look, the land is bright.”

I read about Arthur’s death in the international
Herald Tribune
a year later. I was in Spain scouting locations with that season’s new genius director, and saw the headline on the obituary page:
MOGUL’S SON
, 78. Poor Arthur. Dead of a heart attack at the ranch in Nogales, but at seventy-eight still identified as J.F.’s son. Chuckie flew down for the funeral. It was so butch, he said when I called him from Madrid, everyone was on horseback. He and Arthur had become close that last year as a result of everything that happened. Friends, Chuckie said. Arthur and Aunty Charlton, can you believe it? But when you reach our age, Jack, you take your friends where you find them.

In his will, Arthur left me the unfinished portrait of Jacob King, the one his body came to rest against the night he was killed. The accompanying letter said that Blue had taken the portrait after Jacob died, and that he had bought it from her when she went to Italy to evade her subpoena from the Kefauver Committee. The painting was basically worthless, but it was a way of giving her money.

I’m sorry I had so many secrets, Jack, Arthur wrote in his letter, but thanks for everything. He signed it, An Athlete Dying Old.

The picture was exactly as I had heard, Jacob in jodhpurs,
laced boots, beige shirt, and a polka-dot ascot, a fantasy aristocrat in an imaginary land, an America of privilege that in some odd way could have been imagined only by people like J. F. French, and desired by people like Jacob King. Reality was the small dark blotch at the lower right-hand corner of the picture, where Jacob’s blood had leaked against the canvas.

I put the picture in storage. I imagine that someday when my effects are itemized, someone will find it and wonder who the subject was.

Chuckie died.

The bugler at his graveside blew the Marine Corps hymn, slow tempo, then taps.

I cried.

I
think of Blue often. Think of the life she led, and try to understand why she turned out the way she did. Sometimes I comfort myself with the idea that Blue Tyler had a better life, even with all its turmoil, than she would have had if she had remained Melba Mae Toolate, but such speculation is idle, academic, perhaps even dishonest. When she was a newborn infant, her mother, the lady who dropped her the way an animal does, as she said in the tape she had sent Arthur, sold her to a stranger for a bus ticket. Her father she never knew; if there was a stepfather, he never appeared. Her life until the age of four, when she went to the open dance call at Cosmopolitan Pictures, was a blank. She remembered always being on the move with Irma. She remembered Needles, and San Bernardino rang a bell, but she remembered little else. Where she learned to dance she could not recall. How Irma learned about the open dance call at Cosmo she did not know. Why Irma thought she had talent remained a mystery, but she did, and her life was forever changed. Melba Mae Toolate became Blue Tyler, named after the allegedly favorite color of Chloe Quarles, J. F. French’s lesbian wife, and after John Tyler, allegedly J.F.’s favorite president, whose birthday he claimed to share, but did not.

We were the only family she ever knew
, a mixed blessing, at
best. Irma was pensioned off, Chloe was discouraged from being alone with her, her education was entrusted to studio spies and to governesses named Madame. She not only could not name the forty-eight states, she very probably did not even know that there were forty-eight states. By the time she was seven, she was making six thousand dollars a week. When she was fourteen, she should have died in a plane crash, but she did not because she was on her knees fellating her benefactor in a Las Vegas hotel suite. The lesson she absorbed from that encounter was never ever to let anyone take advantage of her again, and if her formal education and her vocabulary seemed inadequate to the demands of the world beyond the one she knew, her cunning was infinite. Her only yearning was to meet someone, anyone, who wanted nothing from her. Jacob King wanted nothing from her, and she fell in love with him; that he had been a murderer, without remorse, many times over was for Blue Tyler only incidental information. Meta Dierdorf also wanted nothing from her, except the secrets they shared, and Blue fell in love with her as well; that Meta was murdered by a person or persons unknown only increased Blue’s suspicion of the world at large. Beyond Meta and Jacob, there was never anyone who did not want something from her.

Not even I.

She was a star.

She never really learned to be likable, except on camera.

Considering her life, how could it have been otherwise?