Stardust (28 page)

Bunny peered at him. “Are you trying to get me to say something unpleasant? Why? I’m sorry for your loss, all right? Let’s leave it at that.”

“All I wanted was to talk to her. I knew there’d been someone.”

“And do you feel better now? Any more skeletons in the closet or are we ready to move on?”

“I don’t know, are there?”

But Bunny didn’t rise to this. “Usually. People are disappointing once you get to know them. I find. You’d do better remembering the good times. I assume there were?”

“A few.”

“Well, hold on to those,” he said archly, patting Ben’s upper arm. He glanced through the door. “Now let’s let her have her party in peace. Anyway, I’m late.” He began to move away again.

“Why’d you make the call?”

Bunny was quiet for a second. “
Les frères Kohler,
” he said finally, rhyming. “One was trouble. Now two.”

“You didn’t answer.”

“All right. What call?”

“The one you made to the police.”

“Again? You’re like a record with a skip. Back and back.”

“The one Riordan asked you to make. Why you?”

“Did he? Tell you what, now that you’re chums, why don’t you ask him?” he said, an end move. He let out a breath with an audible weariness. “Look, we’re stuck with each other for a while. Mr. L insists. Let’s make the best of it.” He nodded toward the sound stage. “For a start, we’ll keep Rosemary to ourselves, shall we? What’s done is done. No need to upset anyone. There’s the grieving widow to consider.”

“Is that why the screen test? Something for the wronged party?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Bunny said, genuinely put out. “Screen tests aren’t favors. Not mine. You think we’re all Sam Pilcer?” He looked up, feeling the drizzle begin again, cooling his mood. “I think she has something.”

“Besides an accent.”

“So did Bergman, when she started. You can work with an accent, if there’s something there.” He looked again at the sound stage. “Whatever it is. Some quality.”

“And you think she has that?”

“Haven’t the faintest. She moves well, that’s what I noticed. But you can’t know anything until you see film. It’s not what you see, it’s what the camera sees. What quality it brings out. You have to have that.”

“What was yours?” Ben said.

Bunny looked at him, then smiled, amused. “Innocence, I think.”

A
FTER BUNNY
left, Ben stood for a while watching the party, invisible in the dark outside. There was a cake, somebody’s birthday, with candles to blow, then whoops and applause. He wondered if Bunny had had a cake on his set, eleven candles, surrounded by beaming grips and the family closer than family. Years like that, closing the world out with a door, until he was outside, too.

He darted back to Admin B, then sat at his desk looking at the photos in the manila envelope. Riordan peering over someone’s shoulder, maybe already planning how to clean up. Not a stranger to it. You’d see things at the Bureau, maybe another informer, tired of it. Except Danny had stayed with Riordan, not yet tired, wanting to—what? Protect the country? From whom? What names had he actually given? It was possible, wasn’t it, that he’d just told them things they already knew, some nimble card shuffle to protect his own flanks and bank a favor or two. But there he was, lying facedown in the alley, evidently not harmless. The same boy who’d been in the bed across the room, talking late into
the night. Ben looked at the pictures again, feeling a heaviness in his chest. An informer.

And what about the boy in the other bed? No longer all ears, the eager audience. Now he’d seen things himself, stacks of bodies, a shocked face watching blood gush out. Not a boy anymore, either. Someone who knew the camp guards might be anybody, might be us— and where did we go from there? Now that we were capable of anything? They’d both done things they’d never imagined they’d do. Who was he to blame Danny, making love now to his wife? Maybe he would have helped Riordan, too, done the same thing under the circumstances—which were what exactly?

He shoved the pictures back in the envelope and put them in the drawer. Who knows what Danny’s reasons had been, some twisted apostasy. The point was he’d ended up in the alley. Nothing he could have told Riordan deserved that. A career jeopardized, a reputation? Not a real war, with real casualties. You didn’t kill people yet for name-calling.

Hal had asked him to stop by the cutting room on his way out, a quick check-in, he assumed, but some of the enlarged clips had come back from the lab, so a few minutes became an hour, then two. By the time he headed out to his car, he was already late for the roast chicken, the sort of absentmindedness they wrote into the Blondie series, cut to a scolding or an exasperated sigh at the door. He opened the car door. What were they doing? It’s too soon, she’d said, but done it anyway, gasping. If he thought about it, things flooded in, all the awkward questions. But if you didn’t think about it, it was simple again—the feel of skin. He wanted her because he wanted her. And she clutched him when she came, him, not someone else. No need to go deeper than skin. You could feel alive in it.

“Thank god.” An out-of-breath Lasner, upset, his eyes slightly frantic. “Where the hell’s Bunny?”

“He went off the lot.”

“Where? There’s nobody home. I tried. What, does he have a
date
for chrissake? Henry took Fay to her cards. So now what? Call a cab?”

“What’s wrong?”

“Your car?” Lasner said, eyeing it. “You mind? I appreciate it.”

“You need a lift?”

“Hurry,” Lasner said, opening the passenger door. “Come to think of it, you can talk to her. If she can talk. They didn’t say.”

“Who?” Ben said, getting in.

“The cops called. There’s a crash. The Buick. Lorna said Genia took it out. I didn’t even know she could
drive
.”

Ben started the car and backed it out. “Where?”

“Go out Sunset. The Palisades. So who does she know out there? She doesn’t know anybody. What’s she doing there?”

At the gate, Lasner leaned over Ben to talk to the guard.

“Carl? Henry comes, tell him I got a lift home, will you?”

“Sure thing, Mr. Lasner,” he said, saluting, a Dick Marshall–army gesture.

“He takes Fay to the cards,” Lasner said to Ben, “and then she likes him to stay. I’m here late anyway, so what the hell. Then something like this happens.”

They went up Gower and made a left on Sunset.

“They got the name off the registration. Lucky Fay’s not home— you imagine, she gets the call? So Lorna says call here. Now the car’s a wreck, I guess. Not that you mind the car. I mean, family. I don’t know, you try to do something nice for somebody and she just sits there. Then it rains, she takes the car out. A night like this.”

“Maybe she was going to see somebody.”

“Who does she know?”

They had passed through Hollywood, then the long featureless stretch before Fairfax, slowing now as they came to the heavier traffic on the Strip, bright from the neon signs over the clubs.

“Who knew she could drive? Who has cars over there? Look at this,” he said, indicating the slick street. “She goes tonight, roads like this.”

“What about the other car?”

“They didn’t say. Maybe she went into a tree, I don’t know. Just come. It’s serious.”

Lasner was quiet for a minute.

“It’s a hell of a thing, isn’t it? You get through all that business, survive
Hitler,
and then you come here and—bam.”

“They didn’t say she was dead, did they?”

“No. Just there was an accident. But they don’t on the phone, do they? Christ, imagine how Fay’s going to feel—”

“Let’s wait till we get there.”

Lasner fidgeted as they snaked around miles of houses. When they climbed into the Palisades, he pulled a note out of his pocket.

“Paseo Miramar. On the north side, they said. After Palisades Drive, into Topanga.”

“I know it.”

“What do you mean, you know it? You just got here.”

“Feuchtwanger lives there. A friend of Liesl’s father. I had to drop him off there.”

A Mediterranean villa spilling three stories down the cliff.

“And that’s where she goes for a drive? Christ, look at it.” They had started up the narrow, twisting road, slowing on the sharp curves. “And they put houses here.”

“For the views. That’s the ocean.” He nodded to the string of highway lights in the distance, the dark sea beyond.

They passed Feuchtwanger’s house, dark except for a single light in the study, not expecting visitors. But why even suppose they knew each other? A convenient turnoff up into the hills, maybe even picked at random. He imagined her at the wheel, deliberate, her eyes still blank, the light left somewhere in Poland.

“She comes up here? You know what I’m thinking?” Lasner said, a kind of echo. “It’s a hell of a thing. To do that.” He looked over at Ben, suddenly embarrassed. “Well, I don’t have to tell you.”

“No.”

At the top there was another turn, then a swarm of lights at the end of a stretch, just before the road looped back. Ben saw an ambulance and a cluster of police cars, lights trained on a splintered section of a wooden barrier fence at the edge of the cliff. One of the policemen was holding back a group of curious neighbors, the same extras, Ben
thought, who’d appeared in the Cherokee alley. A flashbulb went off— maybe even the same police photographer. Now a few more shots, catching the group of ambulance workers carrying a litter up the side of the hill and onto the road.

“I made the call,” the policeman in charge said. “Sorry to bring you out, but we need an ID on her. It’s your car.”

Another cop drew back the sheet. Lasner looked down at the body, his face growing slack, then turned away, squeamish.

“A friend?”

“Cousin,” Lasner said, almost inaudible.

“You’re next of kin?”

“My wife.”

“Close enough. You’ll need to see the ME over there, make the ID. I’m sorry, but we need to do it.”

“What happened?” Ben said, staring at her face, torn by shards of glass where she must have hit the windshield, her hair matted with blood. Her eyes were closed but her mouth was open, as if it were still saying “oh.”

“She went through there,” the cop said, pointing to the broken fence. “Into the canyon. The car didn’t catch fire, so that’s one thing, but a drop like that, be a miracle you survive it. You just get knocked to hell.” He looked up at Lasner. “Sorry.”

Ben looked at the length of road, almost straight after the hairpins coming up.

“What do you think?” he said. “She swerved to avoid another car?”

The cop shook his head. “No sign of that. No skid marks either side. Course the rain didn’t help there. But you get a slippery patch here, you take it a little fast—” He raised his hand, letting them fill in the rest. “We had a hell of a time getting her out. The door stuck.”

But the curve wasn’t sharp, a gradual arc that anyone should have handled easily—unless you hadn’t driven a car in years, or never intended to turn. He looked down at the body again, trying to imagine the last minute, through the fence and then suspended in nothing, waiting
for it to be over. Something no one else ever knows, the desperation for release. But what prompts it? Ben wondered, an awkward second, whether he had been part of it, the unexpected reminder, ghosts coming back.

“Reuben, it’s you?”

He turned to find Feuchtwanger, a raincoat over his jacket and tie, the slicked-back hair and wireless glasses formally in place.

“Herr Feuchtwanger.”

“Such a commotion. We saw the lights.” He looked over at Genia’s body, clearly not recognizing her. “Poor woman. Oh, these roads. Marta says it’s no worse than the corniche but me, I think a death trap.” He paused. “But what are you doing here?”

“She’s a cousin,” Ben said, indicating Lasner, huddled now with the ME.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Would you like to come back to the house? Some coffee?” A ritual courtesy.

“No, no, thank you. We have to—” He spread his hand to the accident scene, policemen still moving idly around. “Stay with the body. Sign things.” He looked down at her. “She survived the camps,” he said, perhaps a memory trigger.

But Feuchtwanger still didn’t know her. The sorrow on his face was impersonal, another victim.

“The camps, but not this road,” he said, shaking his head. “Well, what am I doing here? They say in English a rubberneck—it’s amusing, a rubberneck. So.” He looked toward the group of neighbors, still gawking. “Marta wanted to know—all the lights. If you need to telephone, please come to the house.”

Ben nodded a thank-you.

“And coffee one day. Tell Liesl to bring you, we’ll talk. She looked well. So strong. I thought it would kill her, too—the way she felt about him. But no, strong. The father’s daughter.” He looked down at the stretcher. “But so much death.”

Ben stood in the road, watching him walk away. The way she felt about him. But Lion was a romantic, his books filled with duchesses
and men in wigs and undying love. He didn’t know she could lean her head into your shoulder, soft, not strong at all. Everybody saw what he wanted to see.

Lasner was almost finished with the police. Once the ID had been made there was little either of them could do except arrange for the car to be towed. He looked again at the road. No skid marks, the policeman had said, but you didn’t need to slam on the brakes to have an accident here. Another car, with its lights in your eyes. The inky darkness of the canyon beyond, making the guard rail hard to see. The slide effect of wet pavement. There were lots of ways it could have happened, all of them easy to believe, unless you had sat with her at dinner and seen her eyes.

Still, why this road? The next turnoff would have taken her up over the coast highway itself, a more dramatic plunge off the cliff into the traffic, a spectacular end. But the etiquette of suicide could be peculiar, oddly discreet. Maybe she hadn’t wanted to make a point, just go quietly, no trouble to anyone.

“Who found her?” Ben said suddenly to the cop. They had pulled the sheet back over her face. “I mean, anybody see it happen? Stop?”