Broken Heart (39 page)

‘That was when you asked her out officially?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And what did she say?’

‘She said no.’ Cramer halted, clearing his throat. It was a soft, gluey sound, a mix of phlegm and emotion. ‘I was shocked. I’d read the situation, gone over it in my head. I’d spent months waiting for the right moment. I thought it was what she wanted, just the same as me – and then she said no. But do you know what was worse? It wasn’t because she didn’t feel ready to date someone. It was me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It was me – or, at least, what I did for a living. She didn’t want to date a movie star. She didn’t want to be snapped every time she went out for dinner, or down to the grocery store. She didn’t want the pond life from the
National People
slithering all over the steps of her house, where a kid might be playing one day in the future, or trying to catch her with her blouse off through the bedroom window. Basically, she didn’t want to be known as some woman in the background of Glen Cramer’s life. She had bigger plans than that. She had her own life, her own ambitions.’ He swallowed again, but this time it seemed harder for him. ‘In hindsight, I can see all of that. I admire it. Why
would
she settle for being Glen Cramer’s new squeeze when she could be Elaine Kinflower, screenwriter? I understand that now, I do.’

‘But you didn’t back then?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I didn’t understand it at all. In fact, I got angry with her. I swore at her, spoke to her in a terrible way, and accused her of leading me on. She told me she never believed she’d done that, and if she had she never intended to, and that we should have some time apart from one another, so that I could calm down. She said, “I hope we can
still be friends,” and I told her, “Fuck you.” ’ Cramer looked crushed by the memory, his eyes watery and red. He let out a long breath. ‘If I could take it all back, I would. I would do it in a heartbeat.’

‘What happened then?’

‘I spent a month screwing half the women in LA, trying to get Elaine out of my system. I got drunk most nights. But, whatever I did, I couldn’t stop thinking about her – and, in my head, it was the same question, over and over: “If not me, then who?” ’ He glanced at me; wiped at an eye. ‘I was infatuated with her. If I couldn’t have her, I didn’t want anyone else to. I’d lie there at night, with some woman next to me whose name I didn’t even know, and all I’d be thinking about was Elaine. I hated the idea of her with another man. It was eating me up.’ His words fell away, laced with embarrassment. ‘Then I saw her with Bobby Hosterlitz.’

I looked at Cramer. ‘But you said he was never –’

‘Interested in women. Right. He wasn’t. But then suddenly he was. He was interested in
her
.’ He shrugged. ‘You ever heard of the picture
My Life is a Gun
?’

I’d read about it. It was the follow-up to
The Eyes of the Night
, the film that Hosterlitz had been prepping for AKI before he was forced to flee the country.

‘I’d been talking to Bobby about taking the lead in it,’ Cramer continued. ‘I’d basically agreed to it. I’d read the treatment. It was dynamite. Absolute dynamite. It was better than
The Eyes of the Night.
Anyway, I was at his office on the lot – I guess this must have been September 1953 – and we were talking, then he says he has to go, he’s got to meet someone. So I said to him, “Let me drop you.” I had this new Buick Dynaflow and I wanted to show it off. But he gets all sheepish about it and tells me not to worry. I tell him it’s
no hassle and he says to forget it – almost gets uppity about it. So I let him go. Except I didn’t. I followed him.’

‘He was going to meet Kerekes.’

‘Yeah,’ Cramer said. ‘Yeah, that’s right. I didn’t know it at the time, I was just taken aback by how he’d been with me. He seemed different, agitated. I’d known him a while by then – four years or so – and I’d never seen him react like that. I swear to you, I didn’t follow him because I even
remotely
suspected he was meeting Elaine. Hell, I didn’t think he’d be meeting a woman of
any
description. That just wasn’t Bob. I went after him because I thought, “If he’s losing his grip, if something’s wrong, if he’s sick in the head, or an alcoholic, or suddenly addicted to drugs, I don’t want to sign up to doing a picture with him and ruin my career.”
That
was my thinking. It was purely selfish.’ Cramer looked up at me. ‘But then we ended up in Venice.’

His eyes had dropped to the floor and his hands were back on his knees. ‘I parked a block away and let Bobby go in,’ he continued, ‘and then I got out and walked to the house. By the time I got there, Bobby was outside with Elaine, sitting on the front steps of that place she had. They were having lemonade, just sitting, chatting. They weren’t doing anything – holding hands or kissing. None of that. In fact, Bobby was sitting apart from her. All they were doing was talking.’

‘Because he wasn’t trying to date her,’ I said.

Cramer nodded. ‘Right.’

‘They’d become friends.’

‘Yeah. Bobby shunned the spotlight, that’s the thing. That’s why it worked. He hated celebrity. If he had to do promotion, he would, but even after
The Eyes of the Night
went big, he kept a low profile. He directed a picture that
won seven Oscars, and a lot of people – even internally at AKI – still didn’t know what he looked like. That was the way he preferred it. That was the way Elaine preferred it.’

‘That was why she let him in.’

‘She let him come to her house. I spent six months paying for coffees and lunches and organizing picnics in the park, and she never once asked me back to her place. Not once. And yet I stood there that day and watched Bobby hitting balls to her boy in the yard, like he was his fucking dad or something. She’d spent six months with me and never as much as told me the kid’s name.’

‘Martin.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, almost a whisper. ‘Martin.’ There was a heaviness to his naming of Életke Kerekes’s son, as if his guilt and shame were moored to it. ‘Thing is, I think Elaine loved Bobby. Not in the traditional way, maybe. I’m not sure she loved anyone in that way at that time. Maybe she wouldn’t have again. But I kept following him back there, day after day, watching them together, and I could see they had something. There was no lust, nothing physical. It was pure.’ Cramer flattened his lips together, the tiny blood vessels in his cheeks colouring. ‘Bobby was a part of it.’

‘A part of their family.’

‘A part of their family,’ he repeated.

As Cramer fell silent, something else clicked into place. The photograph of Kerekes on the steps of her house, the one inserted into
Kill!
– I’d wondered where Hosterlitz had got it, years after her death. He must have taken it himself.

‘I did something terrible after that,’ Cramer said.

I looked at him.

It was obvious where we were headed now.

‘You killed her,’ I said.

He started at the sound of my voice, as if he’d forgotten he wasn’t alone in this place, and then his eyes moved back to the broken curves of the empty swimming pool.

‘Glen,’ I said, ‘is that when you killed her?’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘No, I think I did something even worse.’

57

The baths were quiet and still, except for leaves fluttering downwards from the glass panels, like the broken rotors of a helicopter.

‘I temporarily lost my mind,’ Cramer said softly. His eyes were haunted. ‘I became this person I didn’t recognize. I was insanely jealous of what they had together – the innocence of it, the simplicity, the integrity. It was untainted. He knew I wanted to be with Elaine, because I’d told him. He pretty much knew I was infatuated with her at that point, which is why I think he didn’t want to admit to what they had. It was an act of kindness on his part, but I never saw it like that. I saw it as a betrayal.’ A shrug. ‘So I told him a lie.’

‘What lie?’

‘I told him she’d started making fun of him in front of me. I told Bobby she said he was weak and pathetic, that she found him creepy and isolated, and she didn’t like him hanging around her family. It just …’ He faded out, glancing at me. ‘It just poured out of me. I made it sound like I was doing him a favour, made him promise that he wouldn’t tell her because
she’d
made me promise not to tell
him
– but I could see he was devastated. He had tears in his eyes. I took what they had and I ruined it. I took the purity of their relationship and I ripped it to bits.

‘After that, I drove him to the Pingrove. Saul was having this huge house built at the eastern end of Mulholland, and while it was going up, he was staying in an apartment on the
top floor of the hotel. During that time, he conducted a lot of meetings in one of the penthouse suites there, mostly because he was lazy and didn’t want to have to drive back and forth to the lot in Burbank. Anyway, I knew that, on a Tuesday, they had a regular 5 p.m. meeting with the animation people in there. That included Elaine.’ He looked at me, but not for long. It was hard for him to maintain eye contact. ‘She was always last out. She had to write up all the notes from the meeting because she was still playing part-time secretary for the men there, even then. Bobby went up there, angry and hurt, embarrassed. He’d been belittled by her. Or, at least, I’d made him think he had. So he checked to make sure she was definitely alone, and then he confronted her.’

‘Where were you?’

‘I was downstairs in the bar. But, the day after, Bobby told me everything that happened up there.’

The heaviness of his words seemed to hang there in the darkness.

‘Did Hosterlitz kill her?’

‘No,’ Cramer said. ‘But he knocked her out.’

As he paused again, sections of what I’d read about the case online came back to me; how detectives had found bruising on Kerekes’s face, chest, arms. It had been Hosterlitz who had put them there. Or maybe not just him.

‘He lost his head,’ Cramer continued. ‘He said they had this huge fight. He accused her of belittling him, of calling him weird, and she was screaming, telling him none of it was true. And then … and then he pushed her face-first into an oak dresser and knocked her out. He tried to wake her up, and when he couldn’t, he went into a tailspin. He thought he’d killed her. A few minutes later, he finds me in the bar. He has to put on this act in front of everybody as if
everything’s fine, and he asks if he can talk to me. I thought he was going to tell me that he’d found out the truth – that she’d told him it was all a lie. But I follow him into the elevator and the operator takes us up, and as soon as we’re out, Bobby bursts into tears.’

‘And then?’

‘And then I went into the suite. Elaine was starting to come around, so I told him to go back down to the bar and wait for me.’

A breeze picked up, the old building groaning.

‘It was shameful,’ Cramer moaned. ‘I didn’t see a woman lying there on the floor with bruises on her face, I saw an opportunity to replace Bobby. I know this sounds insane, but I saw a chance to be what Bobby had been to her. I saw a chance to sit with her on the front steps of her house and play baseball with her boy. So I picked her up off the floor, not because she was injured, but because I was insecure and lonely. I see that now. I didn’t spend a single second thinking about her, really – it was all about what
she
could give
me
. But it all went wrong.’

‘How?’

‘When she’d gathered herself, she started telling me it was all my fault. She said, “I know it was
you
who put those ideas in his head.” She saw right through everything. She’d figured it all out before I’d even arrived.’

As he breathed out, his chest wheezed like a tyre losing pressure. ‘I’d never seen her so angry. She was in the bathroom, washing a cut on her face, telling me exactly what she thought of me. She didn’t seem to blame Bobby at all – that was the thing. He’d put her on the floor, lights out, and everything was about me. I’d hoped to destroy everything they had, to step into the space left behind, but I started to realize
I’d done the opposite. She just kept shouting at me, telling me what an asshole I was, and the fuzz in my head’ – he lifted a hand to his face, to the dome of his skull – ‘it just got louder and louder, until I found myself grabbing her. She shook me off, so I grabbed her again, but harder, and she pushed me against the wall. And that was when I just … flipped.’

Cramer paused and squeezed his eyes shut.

‘I slapped her. She said, “I’m calling the cops! You’re going to pay for this. No one lays a hand on me!” I slapped her again, harder, but she just kept screaming at me, and when she went for the door, I panicked and … and I punched her. I went for her face, but I caught her in the throat instead. I winded her. She doubled over, was struggling to breathe, and the whole time it was just a haze behind my eyes. I was seething. Everything had gone wrong. Even then, she was still trying to speak, and though I could barely hear her, I could hear enough: she was telling me she’d ruin me, my reputation. I’d be arrested. I’d be destroyed in the press. So I picked up the paperweight – it was the nearest thing to me; I did it without thinking – and, while she was still bent over, telling me what she thought of me, I hit her on the back of the head with it.’

His eyes opened again, finding me instantly. ‘I still remember the sound,’ he said. ‘It was like an egg cracking. She went down, just completely folded, but it was weird: she didn’t black out this time. She just sort of lay there, bleeding into her hair, her eyes all misty, and then began trying to crawl in the direction of the bed –
under
it. She was moving in slow motion. It was as if she was trying to get away from me but she couldn’t remember how to coordinate her arms and her legs. It was awful. She kept making these sounds in her throat, like she was gagging. I’ll never forget it.’

I took a breath. ‘But you’re saying you didn’t kill her?’

He shook his head.

‘So who finished her off?’

Very quietly: ‘Saul Zeller did.’