Mirror (5 page)

He approached the mirror slowly. One thing was different. One thing that he could never
prove
was different, not even to himself. The blue and white ball had gone.

He looked toward the reflected door, half open, and the peep of the passageway outside.
It’s very like our own passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond
.

How different? thought Martin with a dry mouth. How different? Because if a ball had come bouncing into the reflected room, there must have been
somebody there to throw it; and if it had disappeared, then somebody must have walked into that reflected room when he was asleep and picked it up
.

‘Oh God.’ He swallowed. ‘Oh, God, don’t let it be Boofuls.’

Two

HENRY POLOWSKI, THE
gatekeeper at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, swore that when Boofuls was driven out of the studio that night in August 1939, he pressed his face to the rear window of his limousine and just for one terrible second he looked like a skull. Bone-white, with hollow eye sockets and naked teeth. Henry had shouted out loud.

‘You can laugh all you want, but it was a genuine premonition,’ Henry told the reporters who had been crowded all night around the Hollywood police headquarters. ‘I saw it, and if you don’t believe it, then that’s your problem, not mine.’

‘Didn’t you tell anybody what you saw?’ Henry was asked by Lydia Haskins of the
Los Angeles Times
. ‘If you really saw it, and you really believed it to be a genuine premonition, why didn’t you make any attempt to warn somebody?’

‘What would
you
have done?’ Henry retaliated. ‘My partner heard me shout and asked me what was wrong, and I said Boofuls just went by and – I don’t know – he was looking funny. So my partner said, what kind of funny? Making faces, that kind of funny? I said no, but I was sure something bad was going to happen to that boy.’

‘And that was the only attempt you made to tell anybody what you thought you saw?’ Lydia Haskins persisted.

‘Lady,’ said Henry, ‘I didn’t
think
I saw it. I saw it.’

‘How does that make you feel now?’ called out Jim Keller, from the
Hollywood Reporter
. ‘Does that make you feel guilty in any way, now that Boofuls is dead?’

‘How would
you
feel?’ Henry retorted. ‘I saw that little boy looking like a skull at 5:27 that evening, and by 6:30 he was hacked into pieces. I loved that little boy. We all did. How the hell would
you
feel?’

Jim Keller shrugged. ‘Pretty damn bad, I guess.’

‘Well,’ said Henry, ‘that’s the way I feel. Pretty damn bad.’

Martin pressed his remote control, and the video-recorded newsreel shrank from his television screen. He had watched that recording over and over during his research for
Boofuls
!. For some perverse reason, he had always wanted to believe that Henry Polowski was telling the truth – even though the gatekeeper had been fired two weeks later after the
Hollywood Reporter
revealed that he was an alcoholic and had twice been hospitalized for D Ts.

Martin had the discolored press cutting lying on his desk. ‘“I Saw Skull” Gatekeeper Saw Giant Roaches, Martians.’ Martin had some sympathy for him. Anybody would, if they had seen in their sitting room mirror the reflection of a blue and white ball for which there was no corresponding blue and white ball in the material world.

But the ball had vanished, just as Boofuls had vanished. Not just the boy, but his glory, too. Martin thought it was remarkable that so few people could recall the hysterical adulation that used to be showered on the small golden-haired boy called Boofuls. His limousine was often mobbed to a standstill in the middle of the street. Women were caught almost every night trying to break into his mansion in Bel Air to kidnap him. ‘He
needs
me,’ they used to plead as they were dragged away across the lawns. ‘He needs a mother!’

It was true, of course, that Boofuls was an orphan. He had been born Walter Lemuel Crossley in Boise, Idaho, in March 1931, the illegitimate son of Mary Louise Crossley, a nineteen-year-old stenog at Ressequie State Insurance on Fort Street, Boise.

Mary Crossley brought Boofuls up alone for two years, apparently relying on welfare and home typing and occasional
ex gratia
payments from Boofuls’ unknown father.

The day before Boofuls’ second birthday, however, Mary Crossley took an overdose of aspirin after an argument with one of her boyfriends (not, apparently, Boofuls’ father). As far as Martin had been able to make out, it seemed unlikely that she seriously intended to kill herself. She had taken overdoses before. But this time she developed pneumonia after being stomach-pumped, and died four days later. Boofuls was taken into state care for six months, then fostered for a further three months, and eventually sent to live with his recently widowed grandmother, Mrs Alicia Crossley, ninety miles away in Twin Falls.

In February 1935 – for reasons that Martin had never been able to discover – Mrs Alicia Crossley took Boofuls to Los Angeles, California. They lived for a while at the Palms Boarding House in Venice. Mrs Crossley appears to have supported them both by taking a waitressing job and then housecleaning. But in May of the following year – again for no clear reason – Boofuls was taken by his grandmother to audition for Jacob Levitz’ new musical,
Whistlin’ Dixie
. Almost miraculously, he was selected out of more than six hundred juvenile hopefuls for the part of Tiny Joe. He had no drama experience, he couldn’t tap, his voice was untrained. His only assets were his golden curls and his heart-shaped face and his sweet, endearing lisp.

Jacob Levitz, however, was thrilled with his discovery. He called him ‘the Boy Shirley Temple’. His only stipulation was that the boy would have to change his name. ‘Walter Lemuel Crossley’ didn’t sound like a five-year-old child movie star; it sounded more like a middle-aged insurance agent from Boise.

Metro held a ‘Name the Child Star’ contest in the newspapers, and the short list of names was sent to Louis B Mayer. Mr Mayer read them, hated them all, and scribbled in the margin, ‘B. Awful’. This half-illegible comment was taken by a wholly illiterate secretary to be Mr Mayer’s own suggestion for little Walter’s new name, and she typed it and sent it to the publicity office. At least, that was the way that Mr Mayer told the story, and Boofuls himself never contradicted him.

Whistlin’ Dixie
, of course, became one of the most successful musicals of all time. Boofuls’ show-stopping song ‘Heartstrings’ sold more copies that year than ‘All My Eggs in One Basket’; and when he accepted his Oscar in 1937 for
Captains Courageous
, Spencer Tracy joked that he had only beaten Boofuls for the award ‘because they thought it was too heavy for him, and he might drop it’.

Boofuls never won an Oscar, although one hit musical followed another –
Dancing on the Clouds, Suwanee Song, Sunshine Serenade
, and
Flowers From Tuscaloosa
. Boofuls appeared on the cover of every major magazine, golden-haired, shining-eyed, from
Screenland
to
McCall’s
. It was reported in
Variety
in the spring of 1938 that he was a millionaire six times over. Just before Christmas, 1938, he and his grandmother moved into a huge white mock-Gothic house on Stone Canyon Drive in Bel Air. They engaged sixteen servants, including a butler and a cook; two private tutors; a dance teacher; and a drama coach. They owned seven automobiles, including two white Lincoln limousines, one for each of them. They named the mansion ‘Espejo’.

In June 1939, Boofuls was cast for the leading role of Billy Bright in Jacob Levitz’ most ambitious musical to date – a nine-million-dollar production called
Sweet Chariot
. Billy Bright was supposed to be a dead-end kid accidentally shot dead while trying to prevent his father robbing a bank – to become (almost inevitably) a do-gooding angel.

On Friday, August 18, three days after the start of principal photography, Boofuls was driven home in his limousine from M-G-M at 5:27
P.M
., according to the log kept by doorman Henry Polowski. He was seen by a group of fans turning into the east gate of Bel Air, and he waved to them and smiled.

His head gardener, Manuel Estovez, saw Boofuls come out onto the loggia at the back of the mansion at approximately 6:12
P.M
. He was wearing a yellow short-sleeved shirt and white shorts and white ankle socks. He waved to Mr Estovez, and Mr Estovez waved back.

Shortly after 6:21
P.M
., the Bel Air police received a garbled telephone call from the Crossley mansion, a woman’s voice saying, ‘He’s dead now. I’ve got him at last. He’s dead.’ A police patrol arrived at the house just before 6:35
P.M
. and gained entry to the house through the French windows which overlooked the swimming pool. It appeared that – unusually – all of the indoor servants had been given the day or the afternoon off.

Inside the white-carpeted sitting room, they found what was left of Boofuls – ‘chopped into spareribs’, as one officer put it. Another officer said that he had never seen so much blood in his life. A quick search of the twelve-bedroom house also revealed the body of Mrs Crossley, hanging by a noose from the wrought-iron chandelier in the main stairwell, half strangulated but still alive. She died twenty minutes later without saying anything at all.

The coroner’s verdict three weeks later was that Mrs Alicia Crossley had murdered her grandson, Walter Lemuel Crossley, while suffering from temporary mental disorder and had then taken her own life. Boofuls was buried with unusual quietness at Forest Lawn. The horror of what had happened kept many people away – the thought that they were burying nothing more than a box of bits. A plain white Carrera marble headstone was erected, with the simple gold inscription, ‘
BOOFULS
, 1931–1939’. You can still see it now.

Over the years, nine books had been written about the Boofuls murder, probably the best of which was
Boofuls: The Truth
, by Kenneth Mellon. Martin had read them all; and to put it kindly, some of them were more sensational than others. All of them agreed, however, that Mrs Crossley’s irrational attack on her celebrated young charge could probably be traced back to earlier bouts of depression that she had suffered when she was younger. She had lost a little boy of her own in 1911, and after she had given birth to Mary, Boofuls’ mother, she had been warned by her doctor not to get pregnant again.

Three of the books suggested that Mrs Crossley was taking revenge on Boofuls for her daughter’s suicide attempt and subsequent death. Punishing him, as it were, for living a life of wealth and fame when her dear dead daughter had died in poverty, and known none of it.

The author of
Hollywood Hack
! claimed that she had killed Boofuls to get her revenge on his unknown father, but there was no serious evidence to support this theory, and in any case nobody had ever been able to find out who his unknown father was. Some reporters had pointed their finger at Howard Q Forbes, the vice-president of Ressequie State Insurance, but Howard Q Forbes had been balding and bespectacled, with a cardiac history, and even if it was not impossible that he was Boofuls’ father, it seemed at least unlikely.

There was an unconfirmed report that Mary Crossley had been seen one night on Kootenal Street in Boise in the passenger seat of a large black Cadillac limousine, but the supposed witness had later admitted that he might have been ‘overtired’.

Martin had collected scores of magazine articles, too – even the ridiculous ‘true life’ dramatizations from
Thrilling Detective
and
Sensational Police Stories
. ‘The tiny body desperately twisted and turned beneath her as she hacked into his snow-white sailor suit with her blood-spattered cleaver.’ Boofuls hadn’t been wearing a sailor suit, of course; and oddly enough, the murder weapon had never been found.

In spite of Boofuls’ gruesome and infamous death, however, Martin had always felt that the child had been possessed of some kind of special magic. Some incandescence that was almost unreal. His friend Gerry at the M-G-M library had videotaped all of Boofuls’ musicals for him, and he watched them again and again. Every time he saw that curly-headed little boy dancing and singing, he found it harder to believe that a seven-year-old could have such brightness and energy and wit, such absolute perfection of timing.

Every time he looked at Boofuls’ movements, listened to his breathing, watched his choreography – and in particular when he looked at his eyes – he felt as if he were watching a grown man masquerading in a child’s body.

‘He passed me by as close as this, and I wasn’t mistook. I saw it clear like daylight. He was white, white like bone, and his eyes were empty, no eyeballs, just like a skull, and naked teeth.’

Martin had played the fifty-year-old newsreel over and over. The same blurting sound track, the same flickering of flashbulbs, the same evasive ducking of the head, as if Henry Polowski had been damned by his inattention to play the same scene over and over and over again.

‘And what did you do, Mr Polowski?’

‘What would
you
do? You wouldn’t believe your eyes. You can laugh all you want, but it was a genuine premonition. I saw it, and if you don’t believe it, then that’s your problem, not mine.’

Martin switched off the video recorder with his remote control. It was almost ten o’clock; and in twenty minutes he had an appointment with June Lassiter at 20th Century-Fox. He knew June well enough to wave at her across the crowded bar of the Cock ’n’ Bull, and to be assured of a wave back; but he didn’t know how sympathetic she was going to be to the idea of a big-budget musical. Especially a big-budget musical about Boofuls.