The Song Is You Read online

  He dialed the home phone of the head publicity secretary, Lil. As he waited for her to answer, he shook his head to himself. How far out of the big leagues was Bix to think Hop could get his bosses on the phone on a Saturday to ask for a favor?

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, its me.”

  “Oh boy, Hoppy, I got a date in an hour and I can’t—”

  “It’s nothing. Just let me talk to you for a minute. Get it?”

  “No, but since when did that stop you?”

  “I want to put in a word for a great guy.” Hop raised his voice very

  loud. Bix looked up from the booth, squinty-eyed.

  “Whoever he is, I get my own dates,” Lil said. “And I don’t do favors for publicity men. I learned how that works my first week on the job. They ask you to go to this actor’s apartment and the next day, when they decide not to sign the guy, you don’t even get the bonus.”

  “Yessir, he used to work for us and he’s doing great stuff over at Monogram and we gotta get him back,” Hop said.

  “Oh, I get it,” Lil finally said. “Couldn’t you just talk into a dead phone for this? Why you gotta take up my Saturday? First, Mr. Solomon calls me trying to find you.”

  “He did?” Hop blurted out, then, lowering his voice, asked, “What did he want?”

  “You gotta call him.”

  “Great. So we’ll talk more when you get back in town. I see big things for this fellow, sir. Big things.”

  “I’m hanging up now.”

  ‘You have a swell weekend, too.” Hop hung up and strode back to the table jauntily.

  “They’re really excited, Bix,” he said, grin foisted. “Always looking for chances to bring back the fabled fish that got away.”

  “When you gonna know for sure?” Bix said, still squinting.

  “Well, a week or two at most. They’re doing a hiring cycle at the end of the month. They’re going to get rid of some dead wood, some fellas in the department that I’ve been carrying on my back.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Before you know it, you’ll be out of the graveyard and back in the palace, baby.”

  Bix’s eyes brightened a little. Hop couldn’t believe it. This guy was

  the easiest sell this side of Kansas City.

  “Now you do me, buddy.”

  Bix finally loosened his pose and even took a smacking gulp of

  coffee. “Those guys were ticking time bombs. I had to clean up their

  messes before.”

  Hop pretended to be surprised.

  “That was the reason I was there that night,” Bix said, meeting

  Hop s eyes. “I was supposed to be keeping them out of trouble. I guess you knew that.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “That kind.”

  “What kind?”

  Bix looked around anxiously. “I gotta say it, huh? Weird stuff, Hopkins. And not just the needle and hose.”

  “No?”

  “No.” He lowered his voice even further. “Merrel rented this house out in Seal Beach. One day, the brass calls, tells me to go out there and pick up some boxes that were shipped there by mistake from his

  house back East.”

  “And?”

  “I couldn’t find the boxes at first. I even went into the wine cellar.”

  “So?”

  “No wine down there. But I did find a girl tied to a chair.” He

  waited for Hop’s reaction. Hop was too busy thinking, frantically, to do a jaw-drop for him.

  “Was she alive?” Hop asked distractedly.

  “Yes …” Bix looked at him a little funnily. “But a mess. I untied her, carried her upstairs. And when she came to, she said Merrel had left her like that for almost two days.”

  “Fuck me. You think that’s what happened to Jean Spangler?”

  Bix rode his shoulders up and turned away. “I’m not a total SOB. I put in an anonymous call to the cops about the house. I don’t know if they went there or not.”

  Rookie, Hop thought. What good is an anonymous call? Who couldn’t figure out it was you? You either cover your tracks or don’t

  play the hero, schmuck.

  ‘You’re a right guy, Bix.”

  “Sure. Sure, why not?”

  “So, when you stayed after I left—try to get a piece of Iolene?” Hop

  didn’t know why he asked it. It just came out. Bix raised his eyebrows. “If I thought I had a chance. Not the type

  to come across for day players.”

  “So why’d you stay? For kicks?”

  “Sure. You know, and …” He took a small bite of his sandwich and stared out the window. “And, you know, I didn’t want to leave her alone with them. I mean, the Spangler girl seemed up for it, not the other one. And, well” —he looked back at Hop— “those guys seemed the type to … No rules at all with spook chicks. Get it?”

  Hop looked at him. “Right.” He felt something twitch under the skin of his brow. It didn’t strike him until now that one of the reasons Iolene might have wanted Hop there had to do with being a colored girl alone with these men. If they’d do these things to a white girl, then … Momentarily, Hop felt something slip away from him, something he thought he knew about himself. Bix Noonan, fuck you for being such a schmuck and still a better guy than me.

  Bix took another sip, also lost in thought. “Gee, what do you think they did to that Spangler girl?”

  “I don’t know, baby. I really don’t.”

  Ten minutes later, Hop was ducking into Schraft’s to use the pay phone.

  “There’s my bright boy. I’ve been trying to reach you all morning.”

  It was the old man, Solly. The one who’d given him the order to woo Barbara Payton back to the studio. Hop felt his blood pound, press against his skin.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Solomon. Personal commitment.”

  “Ah, the ball breaker.”

  “You re in the ballpark.” Hop was surprised Solly would know

  about Midge. Things like that spread like—well, like things like that.

  You count yourself lucky she’s gone, bright boy,” he said with his patented imitation of paternalism, all jobbed off watching Andy Hardy movies. “Besides, since she took a powder, look at the gems

  you’ve polished for us.”

  “I do my best.”

  “When I asked you to work that little round-heels—that Payton girl

  —the other day, I, truth be told, my boy, didn’t think you stood much of a chance. Girls like that don’t settle down easy.”

  “Well, she can’t help herself any more than anyone else. But I’m not sure I sold her. Only time will—”

  “Time told, bright boy! I thought you knew. What rotten flack like you doesn’t start the day with Louella, even on a Saturday?”

  Hop stretched his arm as far as he could from the phone booth to the store counter, swiped a copy of the paper, and turned the page to Louella Parsons’s column.

  “Well what do you know,” he said, playing it cool but dancing a jig inside.

  The headline read, “Barbara Payton Over the Moon: New Bride Seals Deal with Tone in Midwest.” It seemed Barbara Payton had hopped the Super Chief to Minnesota with Franchot Tone, just minutes behind Hop’s hopeful (that is, premature), sunny press release hinting as much. Just minutes ahead of every soft-hearted columnist—both of them—whom Hop had, on a wing and a prayer, tipped off. And all the rest, too, including the studio-unit reporter Hop had sent on his own to cover it in fawning detail.

  Truth was, as much as he liked Barbara, he’d been growing weary of the type. The itchy colts, always fixing to run into a fence, a tree, anything. Barbara Payton, hell, she was all tits and mouth, and he’d been around her kind just long enough to know that no amount of “potential” in the world could save her from her deathless desire to ruin herself. In five years, maybe less, he knew there’d be crimson spider veins on that milk face, either two handfuls too much or too little on thos
e ivory-for-now, soon-to-be ashen-gray hips. These types always went to seed, you could hear it rattling around under their shiny hair every time they shook their heads.

  Was Jean Spangler one of those girls? Or would she have been had she had a little more success, a little more Stardust thrown in those fulsome eyes? He wasn’t sure. He just was glad for some good news to ward off the dank cynicism he could feel sinking into him, heavy as his hangover.

  Riding high, he got change for a ten and worked the phones for an hour, calling the columnists, ordering a room full of flowers at the honeymoon suite of Cloquet Carriage House Inn in Minnesota, arranging for wedding photos to be wired to the studio, writing up tender quotes from the presiding minister (”Never have I seen a couple more in love”) and Barbara’s parents, Mr. And Mrs. Erwin Redfield (”We couldn’t be happier for our baby—this one was written in the stars, in more ways than one”), to feed to the papers. It was a hell of an hour, during which he didn’t have to think for a second about missing starlets or bad dreams.

  Stardust Eyes

  For a short time, Hop had been able to forget about Frannie Adair. But the trepidation about what she might be digging her pretty unpolished nails into soon returned. He called the newspaper again, but whoever answered said she was on the phone. Unwilling to wait, he made the twenty-five-minute drive to the Examiner office, determined to work all his charm and see where it’d get him.

  He parked in front of the building. Then, recalling that when he’d gone to lunch with Frannie, they’d exited by a back stairwell, he double-parked the car around the corner until a spot opened up. As he sat, he ran through what he’d said to her the night before. He thought he could remember everything, just not the order in which he’d said things or the precise shading he’d given them.

  And every once in a while, he flashed to the memory of looking across at her, at the delicate line running down her face where her cheek must have pressed drunkenly into a crush of sheets, this memory mingled uncomfortably with the memory of the line of his own finger on Midge’s face an hour earlier, touching skin where her bright locks should’ve been.

  Fuck it, Hop. Get it together.

  Against all reason, his mind ping-ponged instead to the things Midge had said at Jerry’s place. How was it that she could hate him so much?

  “You have no one to blame but yourself.” That’s what she told him before she left him. It galled her that after two or more years of Hop

  pressing her and Jerry in corners together, inviting him over for her pot roast, then leaving them alone together before coffee—while he went off on some job scooping up a starlet from an opium den in Chinatown—having Jerry pick her up at nightclubs when she was too smashed to drive home, making her take his old pal shopping for new suits at Bullock’s, asking him to take his place on her birthday, buy her a steak Diane at Perino’s so he could drive to Caliente and bail a director out of jail. Could he really be surprised? Or, now that he thought about it, was he only surprised at the twinge of anger, frustration, the thin strand of regret (no, not that) he felt now that the transaction was complete?

  “Life’s touched him,” Midge had said to him at the very end. “It just rolls off you.” Like everything Midge said, there was some truth in it, and some plain malice. Jerry, he had this readiness for Midge that Hop had never had. A readiness that came from year after year of spending days covering stories of husbands strangling their wives with phone cords, of young girls leaping in front of streetcars or swallowing mercury bichloride, of little boys strangled under Santa Monica Pier, of another Miss Lonely-hearts burned to ashes from falling asleep, cigarette in hand … In the end, it turned out Jerry didn’t want any of those cool, long-necked beauties he always had on his arm, their faces as blank as their histories, who asked nothing of him but a box of fine chocolates and a civilized evening of drinks, dinner, dancing, silk sheets. Turns out, the more time Jerry spent in Hop’s house, with Hop’s wife (no blank face there, a face all too alive with anger, despair, desperation), the more he realized he wanted a house, kids tugging at his pant legs, a dog running down the driveway, a lawn to mow, and, most of all, a lovely, loving wife—a wife with so many sad stories of her own that she’d be waiting eagerly, gratefully on the front porch when he came home from the gloom of the city beat. A wife so glad to see him that he might cry. A wife like Midge.

  Hop knew when it all finally began with Jerry and Midge, when there was nothing left to happen but that.

  It had been a halfhearted attempt at best. Razor scratches on her wrist and a handful of pills. Neither would have done the job alone, and together they canceled each other out, the pills slowing her blood flow to heavy molasses. It was Midge’s friend Vicki who found her (Hop was throwing money down at Hollywood Park with another reporter, two studio flacks, and a couple of blondes from Pomona on their first tear). The emergency-room doctors made her stay in the psych ward for three days before releasing her. The doctor who signed the final papers gave Hop one long look before he left, and Hop found himself saying, too loudly, “You don’t know anything, pal. Not a goddamned thing.”

  The truth was, Hop shouldn’t have been too surprised. After all when he’d left for the track that day, the last thing Midge had said was, waving his razor, “You’ll be sorry, little man.” He hadn’t guessed she’d actually go through with it, though, and when she did, he did feel sorry—and guilt-ridden enough to go on a twelve-hour bender. But he couldn’t match Jerry, who spent every second of visiting hours all three days glued to her bedside, invoking alternately soft and firm warnings to Midge, insisting she promise that she’d never, ever do anything like that again. Hop watched from the doorway as Midge focused on Jerry’s dark hooded eyes, listening to every word, nodding and nodding, and slowly, slowly losing all interest in Hop—even in making him sorry, which had been her most favorite thing, the only thing she enjoyed, for so long.

  Later, Hop would be sorry without her even trying—sorry for Jerry when, ten months later, she moved out of their house and into his bachelor pad, consummating what was, when he thought about it, an eventuality long in the cards, a romance begun even before they’d met.

  He was suddenly jarred out of his thoughts by a loud thump on his driver’s-side window. With a jolt, he turned his head to see Jerry himself, tidiest reporter on either coast, in a finely cut blue suit—a vision of order disrupted only by three red marks on his face, three dainty curves, the unmistakable mark of Midge’s tiny, witchy little nails. He’d worn those marks many times himself.

  He rolled his window down all the way and gave Jerry a knowing smile.

  “What did the other alley cat look like?”

  “You’re too embarrassed to show your face so you stake me out like a cheating wife?”

  “Bad example,” Hop noted, grinning up at his friend, playing it jokey, wishing it were. After humiliating himself last night, he couldn’t quite look him in the eye. But the claw marks helped.

  “These, my boy, were meant for you,” Jerry said.

  “Yeah, but somehow I think they’re all yours now. It’s the price you pay for those spectacular breasts.”

  Jerry looked down at his own chest. “They’re okay, I guess.” Then,

  leaning closer to the car, he said, “You know I won’t ask why—”

  “I know,” Hop said quickly, his voice creaking strangely.

  “A drink?”

  “Ah, I can’t. Work.” He wanted to tell Jerry about the fix he was in.

  That was what he did with Jerry. But telling him anything meant telling him everything. He wasn’t ready for that.

  “Maybe later?”

  “Sure. Definitely.”

  “Musso’s at seven?”

  “That’ll work.” “Okay.” Jerry kept eyeing him, trying to get a read. It made Hop

  nervous and ashamed. “You’re just going to sit out here?”

  Hop shrugged, smiling. “Taking a minute for myself, big guy.”

  ‘You’re a lousy
liar, Gil.”

  “I think you know that’s not true,” Hop said, looking straight

  ahead. “Fuck me, Jerry. Okay, I’m waiting for Frannie Adair.”

  Jerry’s eyebrows lifted. “Oh … is that how it is?”

  “We’ll see. I think she likes me, baby.”

  “Maybe so, heartbreaker, but she just left…”

  Hop felt his chest leap. ‘You don’t say,” he said, looking over at the

  rear glass doors he’d been watching for more than an hour. Thought she was a backdoor girl.”

  “Driving over to your studio, in fact. Maybe to see you?”

  “Maybe, maybe.” Hop turned his key. “I’ll find out.”

  See you at seven.” Jerry stepped away from the car just as Hop punched the gas.

  Yeah, yeah, sweetheart.”

  From across the soundstage, Hop could see Frannie talking to Alan Winsted, a sight that made him cringe. Alan, twenty-two years old, gawky, long-necked, and dateless—wouldn’t he love the opportunity to help Frannie Adair and her fire-engine-red hair?

  He moved as close as he could, creeping over the cables and behind large sets of lights, cranes, whatever those things—arc lights?—were called. Hop knew very little about actual moviemaking (“only starmaking,” he’d told many a young ingenue, with a confident wink).

  He could just make out Frannie’s sincere tone: “. .. trying to find out what movies were shooting on a particular night two years back. Could you help me with that?”

  And Alan, sounding official: “… through the press office? They deal with reporters. I just…”

  Good boy, Hop thought. You tell her, Al. All reporters—even the ones with curves—gotta go through us. Me, to be precise.

  “… appreciate that, but I’m on a tight deadline and thought you might help a gal out… very exciting story about Mickey Cohen. You’d be playing a part in a big expose …”

  She’s taking a gamble with this tack, Hop thought. How can she know this particular lie won’t scare him off, not tantalize?

  “… gee, that sounds really important… I do know a lot of guys who know guys like that… can’t really get as far as I have in this biz and not see things…”