Broken Heart (25 page)

I nodded. ‘What about the movies he made in Europe?’

‘Um …’ He frowned, his fists balled up as if he was trying to force himself to remember. Or maybe he was trying to force himself to remember their titles, because it was obvious he hadn’t seen anything else Hosterlitz had made.

‘It’s okay if you didn’t,’ I said.

He let out a coarse breath. ‘I feel bad.’

‘Don’t worry.’ I pressed on. ‘I’m not sure if you know this, but he made eleven horror films in Spain between 1979 and 1984, and they all have a ninety-second scene at the end featuring his wife Lynda and some footage of a residential street.’ I paused, searching his face, but he just stared at me, clearly unaware of where this was going. ‘What I mean is, except for some tiny details, that scene is reproduced almost identically in every film he made during that time.’

Alex was frowning. ‘Are you serious?’

I nodded and we both looked at Cramer, but he was glancing between us as if this were some joke at his expense. ‘The same scene?’ he said uncertainly.

‘That doesn’t mean anything to you?’

He shook his head, a confused frown etched into his face, and he suddenly looked his age. I decided to change direction before I lost momentum.

Removing the picture of the wooden angel, and passing it across to him, I said to him, ‘This is going to seem weird, but does this photo ring any bells?’

He held it between his finger and thumb and fiddled around in the breast pocket of his blazer for a pair of glasses. He was wearing a blue shirt under it and a pair of cords, and he eventually found his glasses in the pocket of his trousers.

‘Is this an angel?’ he asked.

‘Yes. It’s carved from wood. Do you recognize it?’

‘No.’ He looked up. ‘What’s that on its neck?’

‘A black crucifix.’

Cramer tilted the photo, as if he were hoping it might form into something three-dimensional that he could move and manipulate. Eventually, he handed it back to me. ‘Did you find this among Robert’s things?’ he asked.

‘Among his wife’s. Do you recognize it?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid I don’t.’

I checked my watch. As Alex saw me doing that, she said, ‘We’re going to have to wrap this up before too long, David.’

I turned to Cramer again. ‘Do you still have many dealings with Saul Zeller?’

‘Saul? Ooh, not for a long time.’ He looked confused again by the change of tack. ‘The last picture I did for American Kingdom was
D
back in …’ He turned to Alex. ‘When was
D
?’

‘Mid nineties?’ she said. ‘Ninety-four, maybe?’

‘Yeah, 1994 sounds about right. Saul had been running things, officially, since 1970, but unofficially from way before that, and I did a lot of films for AKI during the fifties, sixties and seventies, so I got to see him – on and off – plenty of times, in that period.’ He paused. ‘But after
D
came
out … Ooh, I don’t know when I last actually spoke to Saul. Could be five years. Could be ten. I mean, I was fully retired by 2001 and, when I came back to do
Royalty Park
in 2010, it was Alex that I dealt with because the show was being made out of London, not LA.’

I wrote down a couple of notes.

He was still frowning. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ I said, dismissing it all with a wave of the hand, trying to give myself some thinking time. ‘I might get a chance to meet him while he’s over for the launch party, is all. From what I’ve read, he’s got a fierce reputation. I just wondered whether to take a flak jacket.’

That seemed to relax Cramer, who laughed gently, and said, ‘Oh, he’s not that bad. I’ve been in meetings with him where he’s chewed someone out – but that’s normal for these high-powered execs.’ He glanced at Alex and winked at her. ‘No, Saul’s okay. I’ve talked to him at dinner parties, at functions, and had lovely conversations with him. I’m sure he’ll be on his very best behaviour.’

‘So you’ve never fallen out with him?’

‘No, Saul and I have never had any cause for pistols at dawn.’ He was still smiling, seeing this as part of the same joke about Zeller’s fierce reputation.

‘What about the name Billy Egan – have you ever heard of him?’

He looked at me, as if unsure whether this was a continuation of the joke about Zeller or not. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I haven’t. Is he someone I
should
have met?’

‘No,’ I replied, making light of it, ‘just a loose end.’ I changed the subject before he could ask a follow-up. ‘Did you ever meet Robert’s wife, Lynda Korin?’

‘No, unfortunately I didn’t. I would very much have liked
to, though. Like I said to you, Bobby was a lonely soul, so for him to have made the leap in that way and commit himself to someone … well, she must have had something special.’

‘What about the term “Ring of Roses”?’

He seemed temporarily thrown and, when I glanced at her, I could see a similar expression on Alex’s face too.

‘ “Ring of Roses”,’ he repeated. ‘Like the nursery rhyme?’

‘Exactly. Does that mean anything to you?’

‘You mean,
apart
from it being a nursery rhyme?’

‘Right. Maybe it was a script you read?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

This was going nowhere. Cramer had probably read thousands of scripts over the years. I dropped it and got ready to move on.

‘We’re
really
going to have to wrap this up, David,’ Alex said.

‘Okay, just one last thing.’ I had maybe three minutes. ‘You told me earlier you didn’t see Robert for a long time after he moved to the UK. Does that mean that you
did
see him again after he left the US in 1954?’

He nodded. ‘Yeah. But only once. No, twice.’

‘Do you remember when those times were?’

He narrowed his eyes, thinking. ‘The first time was when he was shooting
The Ghost of the Plains
at Paramount, because I was shooting
Saints of Manhattan
at the same time, and I had no idea he was back making films. I don’t think anyone did, really – or, at least, Bobby didn’t announce it to the world. I think he wanted the picture to come out and speak for itself.’ A flicker of a smile: sad, distant, but then it began to warm. ‘I can’t remember all the details, but I recall I was out on the studio lot somewhere and I looked up and thought, “That guy looks just like Bobby Hosterlitz.” He was sitting there,
side-on to me, smoking a cigarette, had this great, thick script’ – Cramer indicated how big with his forefinger and thumb – ‘resting there on his lap, and he was furiously scribbling all over it. I wasn’t sure if it really
was
him or not, because he’d lost a lot of weight since the last time I’d seen him – but the closer I got, the more I realized it definitely
was
him. I said to him, “Bobby? Is that really you?” and he looks up at me, and this great big smile blooms on his face and he says to me, “Glen, I was hoping I might run into you.” ’

Cramer paused, staring off into space, absorbed by the memories. ‘He was renting this crappy apartment in East Hollywood, so I invited him to come and stay with me for a few weeks while I helped him look for something better. I did it automatically, without thinking, and then a part of me started to worry that, after however long it was – twelve, thirteen years – we might not have anything to say to one another. But, actually, it was lovely – like no time had passed at all.’

‘What about the second time you saw him?’

His face darkened.

‘Mr Cramer?’

‘The second time wasn’t quite as nice.’ His lips flattened in a grimace, and I could see he was trying to be diplomatic, trying not to paint Hosterlitz in a bad light. ‘I can’t remember when the second time was exactly. A good while after that, though. Years.’ He paused, eyes screwed up, trying to remember a date.
‘
I think it must have been a December, because I got home one night and there was this guy – this bum – slumped outside the gates of the house, beneath a tree my maid had decorated with lights.’

‘Are you saying the guy was Hosterlitz?’

He nodded. ‘It wasn’t a bum, it was Bobby. He looked terrible. He’d lost so much weight, he was so gaunt. I pull up next to him and put down my window, and I say, “
Bobby?
” – and all I can smell is booze. It’s coming off him like cologne. I say, “Come on, let’s get you inside, let’s get you cleaned up,” but then he staggers over and starts pointing his finger at me, swearing at me. It was …’ He’d already started shaking his head. ‘It was unlike him. I mean, there were rumours – especially when he returned to the States to do
The Ghost of the Plains
– that he had a problem with drink. I know the death of his mom hit him hard shortly after that too. But I’d certainly never seen him as bad as this. Definitely not as aggressive.’

‘What was he saying?’

‘Some of it was hard to make out.’

‘Can you remember anything?’

‘He was slurring a lot. But I think what sticks with me the most is him telling me I didn’t deserve anything I’d achieved.’

‘Why would he say that?’

‘I’ve literally no idea. Silly thing is, those words actually hurt. They hurt a lot. Coming from him, from someone I’d been so close to at one time, someone who was basically
responsible
for my entire career being what it was, they stung me. I’ve had a few bad reviews, and I don’t spend a second worrying about what the
LA Times
thinks of my movies. But what Bobby thought, that was different. I respected him. I don’t know what I’d done to upset him – but his words hurt.’

Cramer shrugged. ‘I don’t know if he was drunk, or high, or just confused – but whatever was wrong with him, he was seriously screwed up. Eventually, I managed to calm him down, I took him inside and he fell asleep on my couch. I’ll admit that took a fair degree of soul-searching on my part,
to take him inside like that and let him sleep it off in my home when he’d been so vile outside it. But the alternative was calling the cops and them throwing him in the drunk tank, and that just didn’t seem like the right way to treat a friend, even one who was behaving as badly as Bobby was. I remember the woman I was dating at the time – her name was Gloria – she chewed me out the next morning when she came through and found puke all over the couches, over the floor, all over the house.’

‘Did Robert apologize to you the next day?’

‘No. He was gone before Gloria and I had even got up.’ He attempted a smile, but it wasn’t much of one. He looked pained and hurt. ‘
C’est la vie
, I guess – but I can’t pretend that I wasn’t angry at the time. And that was the last memory Bobby left me with: shouting outside my house, the swearing and ranting, and my maid on her hands and knees the next day, sponging his vomit out of the couch.’

‘You didn’t see him again after that?’

Cramer shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, quiet, melancholic. ‘The next time I saw Bobby Hosterlitz was in an obituary column.’

35

A limousine came to pick Cramer up a couple of minutes later and, after he was gone, Alex and I stood beside her Range Rover, the sky dark, the stars out, the tourists and photographers long gone.

‘I’ve got some work I need to finish off,’ she said.

‘Thanks again for organizing this.’

‘Did it help?’

‘Yes,’ I told her, although I wasn’t sure if that was really true or not. I needed some time to process everything Cramer had just told me, because at the moment I was struggling to see how it all connected. Cramer hadn’t seen Saul Zeller for five years, maybe even longer than that, and he hadn’t seen him with any frequency since before Cramer did his last film with AKI – and that was over twenty years ago. It wasn’t like they were friends, or colleagues, or even enemies. They were just people who’d worked together once. Likewise, Alex spoke to Zeller at least once a week on video call, as an employee of his. I wasn’t sure what would motivate Zeller to have Alex – and Cramer – followed with a long-lens camera.

At the same time, the only reason I could come up with for Zeller having
me
followed was if he had a vested interest in what I might find during my search for Lynda Korin. But was his interest in my case to do with Lynda Korin – or Robert Hosterlitz? He’d had a working relationship with Hosterlitz once upon a time, he’d had one with Glen Cramer
until 1994, and now he had one with Alex Cavarno, so those links at least made some sort of sense. But Korin? As far as I was aware, the two of them – Zeller and her – had never met. Which was why I was starting to think that Zeller needed Korin in order to get at something in Hosterlitz’s life. Something hidden in his past.

‘So should I call the police?’

I tuned back in. The street was quiet except for a couple of birds cooing on a telephone wire high above us. Alex was standing at the door of her car, her fingers on the handle, looking up at me. From three feet away, I could smell her perfume, her eyes like embers under the orange street lights.

‘Call the police?’ I said.

‘About being followed by this Egan guy.’

‘I don’t think you need to do that yet.’

‘So you think I’m safe?’

‘I’ve got his address, and I’m going to find out who he really is, so I think he’ll be more interested in what
I’m
doing.’ I gestured to the mobile she was holding. ‘You’ve got my number, though. Call me if you’re worried.’

‘Okay.’

‘I mean it.’

She nodded, her gaze lingering on mine, and I felt that same buzz along my spine, across my chest, behind my eyes.

‘I don’t have to finish off my work tonight,’ she said.

I knew what was coming.

I just looked at her, her skin an autumnal brown, her eyes a dark amber. She looked beautiful.

‘Do you fancy getting a drink?’ she asked.

Yes. No. I don’t know
.

‘David?’

‘I can’t,’ I blurted out, and I felt the breath leave
me – relief, guilt, regret. ‘I can’t,’ I repeated, the words clearer, stronger, now that I’d committed myself to them. ‘It’s not that I don’t want to …’
Because I do.
I stopped, swallowed. ‘It’s just … I’m seeing someone else.’