Cloquet

“Hop, you have no idea how rough it is,” the actress said, lighting a match off the bottom of her shoe like the slickest of New York bookies.

“I know, Barbara. Believe me.”

“Here I got one guy in love with me—Franchot—he reads Zigmund Freud to me while my head’s in his lap, and I got another guy, Tom, muscles like poured concrete, who’d just as soon gut Franchot as give up one night with his chin nestled in my thighs. Why make it either/or? Why not both?”

Her lips curled into a smirk and he couldn’t help but laugh. She did, too, like a horse. On her it was inexplicably sexy.

“I understand, Barbara. I really do. More than you know. But you got a dozen columnists chasing this story.”

She tapped her cigarette on one silky knee. “Fuck, Hop, what do I care? I’m having a ball. It’s not like I compete with Loretta Young for parts. I play hookers, molls, pinup girls.”

Gil Hopkins, late of Cinestar, had been at this new job for twenty months or more and it was getting almost too easy. From movie-mag reporter to studio publicity man in one easy step. And now his days were spent stroking actors and actresses, working the press, attending premieres, tape cuttings, and champagne-bottle breakings at every place from Grauman’s to the Queen Mary to grocery stores in Van Nuys. He’d spent just three weeks knocking out press releases before proving to the big guys how smooth his tongue was. Now he was the one they went to. Or one of them, at least.

This case with Barbara Payton was standard issue. Her two actor-beaux—past-his-prime FranchotTone and B-movie-nobody Tom Neal —engaged in an embarrassing dust-up on the front lawn of her apartment building. The “Love Brawl” made headlines everywhere and was only the most recent in Barbara’s string of public incidents —the affairs with married actors, the romance with Howard Hughes that led Universal to cancel her contract, and the capper: her grand-

jury testimony providing an alibi for a dope dealer accused of murdering an informant. Things were getting pretty complicated for Barbara. And Hop’s studio had her on loan for a just-wrapped movie, Wronged Heart. Before the Tone-Neal fracas, they’d considered buying out her contract and had promised as much. But not now. Hop’s job was to oh-so-gently push her back to Warner Brothers.

Hop hadn’t bothered with Tom Neal, a side of beef in tight pants. But he’d worked Franchot Tone a bit. Over the last week, he’d carried on several soulful late-night conversations with the long-faced, highbrow actor.

“What do I care what they say?” Tone had confided. “Don’t you see? I love her. Love that darling girl.” And it was no surprise to Hop. Tone had long had a taste for beauties whose hems were still wet from the gutter. Even Joan Crawford, whom Tone married when she was Hollywood royalty, came with the richly thrilling backstory of a pre-fame gold-standard stag film, a seven-minute loop Hop himself had seen at more than one Hollywood party. It had been shown so many times at so many different gatherings that it had taken on the quality of a ho-hum home movie trotted out one too many Christmas mornings.

When he’d talked to Tone, the studio was still weighing their options vis-à-vis La Payton. But today they said, Give her the air. Hop’s mission was simple: Cut ties, but do it sweet and soft enough to avoid lawsuits, and keep the door open in case the scandal dies or takes a nice turn.

“Promise nothing. Let her know her future isn’t with us. But don’t tip your hand,” Hop’s boss had told him, with a wink and a nudge.

Not one to skimp on the kiss-off, Hop escorted Miss Payton from his two-by-four office to a nearby nightspot, ushering her to one of the small, round mahogany booths in the back, the ones with the small baby spotlights that dropped onto the center off each doll-size table. The restaurant was so dark and the tables so low that you had to crouch forward from the tufted leather seats: to see each other or, with its high ceilings and Nat King Cole vibrating, to hear each other. It was a place tailor-made for fugitive encounters.

Barbara’s button nose, pert and bunnylike as any Midwestern cheerleader’s, curved into the baby spot and above it her incomparable white-lashed black eyes batted.

“Bringing me here, Hop, what’s a girl to think? Are you trying to screw me or to screw me?”

“Exactly,” he said, and smiled, resisting the urge to tweak her nose as it crinkled in amusement. He was still practicing his approach in his head and she was already pushing him to the windup. What the hell, here goes:

“All I’m thinking is this, my girl, all I’m thinking is you and me: we understand things. What I’ve always admired about you—even back in the day, when I made you for Cinestar and gave you that big ‘Next on the Horizon’ spread and christened you ‘Queen of the Nightclubs’—the one that got you that plummy part in Trapped— even back then I thought, ‘Here’s a girl who knows the score, knows it even better than the gray suits at Universal who try to stuff her into every two-bit Tex Williams oater they can find.’ You and me, Barbara, we got that same grand tangle of ambition and battle smarts—like the pep squad,” he said, dabbing her nose with his thumb, “for the nastiest, blackest-hearted team there is: Hollywood. We, B.P., we would and would and would, right?”

“Would, could, should, whatever you got, Hop. Life’s for the living,” she said, downing her gimlet and running her delicious pulpy tongue across her Minnesota-farm-girl teeth, thick and white as a bar of Ivory soap.

“Amen and all right.” He signaled to the waitress for another round.

“So what’s the bottom line, then, pretty boy? For the ruckus? What did my wayward boyfriends cost me?”

“You see, that’s what I’m talking about.” He jabbed his finger in her direction. “Straight to the chase.”

“No finery for me. Besides, your tie looks too spanking-new. Like your shirt still remembers the rayon Woolworth tie that sat there a year ago. Right, Hop?”

“Actually, gorgeous, the shirt’s spanking-new, too. But the baby-soft flesh underneath sorta recalls, wondering where the Sears Itch went.”

“Sears Itch. Sounds like something you catch from a sailor on leave.”

“Scout’s honor, I never met the guy.”

She laughed with her whole face jumping and reached out to drag her new drink across the tiny table and into her hands.

“You, Mr. Slick, may be good at the soft touch, but I still want to hear the verdict. Am I kaput, all for an honest affair of the heart?”

He flicked his finger along the sheen of sweat on her glass. “No way, sis. It’s simple. You clean it up for a little while, close those lily-white gams on set and everything’s apples and ice cream again.”

“What does that mean exactly, Mr. Slick?”

“It means we like your face and your voice and your chops and your honey-round bottom. You’d have to fuck all of Actors’ Equity to cancel that. ‘Course,” he said, pretending to look for the waitress as he took a silent breath, “it’s really for your home team to deal with. And we don’t want to interfere with Warner Brothers’ business.”

He forced himself to meet her eyes and gave her his jolliest smile.

She nodded her head slowly, trying to read the brush-off. “You’re saying everything’s fine but not so fine that I’m worth the heat. Send me back to Poppa Warner, thanks, it’s been swell.”

“Not at all,” he said, waving his hand. “We love you, kid. We’ve loved having you here, loved loving you, love to have you back. It’s just that your poppa’s got the gate locked so tight, it’s out of our hands”—he slapped one palm on her leg under the table, light and teasy, there and gone—”as eager as our hands may be.”

“Gate, huh?” She grinned and placed one drink-wet finger on his wrist. “Feels more like a chastity belt. I didn’t know Poppa cared so much.”

“Like your old man on your prom night, B.P.”

“Not my old man,” she said, fingers dancing along the bottom of her empty glass. He signaled for another round. He hadn’t realized he’d be going belly-to-the-bar with a longshoreman.

“Oh?” he said. This was good. Subject changed easily, no mess, no fuss, and she was already onto that old actress saw-horse—the “my father never loved me” soliloquy. If only he was as good at the kiss-off with the women in his own life. Or maybe he was, really.

By round five, the cherries-in-snow lusciousness of Miss Barbara Payton practically shimmered with I’m-easy appeal. Thankfully, with drinks, she grew not more soulful but more filthy, like a slurry baton twirler, every red-blooded American man’s deepest dream.

“So I’m a little slip of a fourteen-year-old and Joyce and I are doing each other’s hair, big sausage-roll curls at the hairline like Ginger frickin’ Rogers in Kitty Foyle. And Joyce’s folks are having a big party downstairs, all fast jazz and roll up the carpeting, a big bowl of Planter’s Punch. Joyce falls asleep just before twelve and I’m lying there in the trundle bed, gotta pee like a racehorse. But I’m scared stiff to go down the long hall to the bathroom in my bitty white nightgown. What if the grown-ups see me? I would just die. Takes me all of a half hour to work up the nerve.

“Finally, I decide to make a mad dash. So I throw on Joyce’s chenille robe and run quick like a bunny down the hall. Lickety-split.

“And wouldn’t you know it? Motherfucker, the bathroom door is shut, latched, occupado. I thought I’d piss my pants on the spot. But the door opens and it’s Joyce’s dad, Mr. Magrew. All Brylcreem, Arrow shirt, and smelling like the rubbing alcohol my momma pats on my skinned knees. He’s got a sliver of a mustache like Robert Taylor. He’s a fine one. But he’s got a big red stain on the front of his starched shirt. He laughs when he sees me, says Mrs. Corrigan pressed too close to him on the dance floor and jostled her own drink out of her glass and onto him. Awfully sticky, he says. Planter’s Punch. Maybe you can help me, he says.

“I’m such a dumb cluck,” Barbara said, shaking her head. “I walk in, he shuts the door behind me. The bathroom is so small that I feel half pressed against him myself. I’m handing him this wet washcloth and stamping his chest and he’s pulling my nightgown up over my legs, past my little hips. Bathrobe—his daughter’s—falls to the floor. I start to push him away. He smiles and grabs the washcloth and tucks it in my little-girl mouth. You hear me, Hop?

“So he backs me into the tub and fucks me for five minutes, my head hitting the faucet over and over again like a freaking knockout bell. Petals whacked off the rose one by one. I was sure the whole house could hear the clanging. Then he got up, pulled the cloth out of my mouth, ran it along the inside of my legs until it was soaked-through red.

“And you know what he said, buckling his belt as I lie there, limp as my own rag doll? ‘You’re a delightful girl,’ he said, ‘and I’d like to do this again.’”

Barbara burst into a peal of hard-won laughter. Hop, one finger around his tight collar, joined her, gulping his drink as she did.

“Do you believe that fucker? Like we were saying good night after the homecoming dance.”

“So did he? Do it again?” Hop said, smiling a little queasily at the picture in his head of quavery pubescent and prone Barbara.

“Three times a week until Lent,” Barbara said, lighting up a cigarette.

Hop nodded. Then, after a pause, he smiled widely. “You almost had me.”

Barbara laughed. “Okay, okay. I graduated to captain of the varsity football team after him. He looked like he could take old Magrew. But,” she said, sighing long, “you never forget your first.”

He’d heard this story—really, this exact story—a hundred, a thousand times before from just about every doe-eyed, apple-breasted starlet he’d ever interviewed, drank martinis with, or taken to bed. Still, it always had its own surprising deathless power to arouse. As it was meant to, even if they didn’t know it (some of them, like Barbara, did). So he’d allowed himself the churning pleasure and waited for a new twist or wrinkle in this rendition—at first waited in vain (hell, he’d even heard the best-friend’s-father-at-a-party story before). Then, she introduced the bathtub. Picturing black-eyed, cotton-haired, puberty-flowering Barbara Payton with her downy legs pressed against the shower, her superb feet squeaking along the tiles as Mr. So-and-So throttled drunkenly away, well, it was… so sue him, accuse him of sexual deviancy, it was awfully nice.

“You have a phone call, Mr. Hopkins.” A waiter suddenly appeared at his side, shaking him from his reverie.

Excusing himself, Hop made his way to the restaurant’s secluded coven of mahogany-walled phone booths. The waiter directed him to one, where the earpiece nestled, waiting for him.

“Turns out we wanna sign her, Hopkins. Fix it.” Solly, assistant head of production. So high up he rarely acknowledged Hop’s existence, even when he was stepping on his feet.

“Sign her? Sign her? Even if, Solly, even if she wasn’t tramping her way through every production she’s on, she’s on contract with Jack Warner.”

“We’re gonna buy her. The big guy wants her.”

“Yessir. But you know, I can get you ten like her in your office in ten minutes.”

“Listen, kid, the big guy’s decided she’s an ice-cream blonde like he ain’t seen since Thelma Todd first gave him a hot one twenty

years ago.”

“What the boss man wants, the boss man gets.”

“Clean up the mess, kid. Clean it all up nice and pretty. We got

things waiting for her. She don’t even know.”

“Making a late-night date, Hop? I do all the warming up and some other girl gets the hot payoff?” Barbara grinned widely, stirring her drink with one ladylike finger.

She’s not interested in me, he reminded himself. Sometimes, with these actresses, after a cavalcade of getting-to-know-you drinks, he’d forget. Barbara Payton, for example, had two tastes: dull-eyed muscle men and flush, faux-ivy debonairs. He was a long way from either. Eyes as shifty as a door-to-door and vocab straight out of the Rust Belt—all patter, but hell, his shoulders still resembled the high school running back he’d once been, didn’t they? Fuck. Better switch to beer.

“Oh no, you know me, B.P. I’ll be tucking in for a night of Rachmaninoff and the latest Edna Ferber,” he sighed. “But, I had this thought… That call was from Doris Day. You know Doris? Well, back in my reporting days, I interviewed her for her part in a little picture called Romance on the High Seas. Knew she’d be big. She just got married a few months back to a hell of a guy. Before, she was always blue over some no-good louse. Today, she sounds like the happiest fucking clam this side of the Pacific.” Easy boy, don’t force it.

Hurrah for Doris … ,” she said, shimmying a little in her seat to the calypso tune. And far enough gone not to demand too much finesse.

“It got me thinking about you. You big beautiful doll and the damage that this hit parade of Hollywood types could do to you and that ridiculously beautiful face.”

“I like damage,” she cooed absentmindedly. “It tingles.”

“But for how long, B.P.? You’re from what, Wisconsin? Land of milk and … milk.”

“Minnesota. Cloquet, Minnesota. Land of a thousand lakes. Didn’t you write the studio bio?” she said, straightening in her seat, eyes focusing a little.

“Right, right. You’re the all-American dream girl, Miss Dairy Princess and pine needles in your hair. Summer picnics and autumn hay rides and winter sleigh rides and spring bike rides and Our Girl of the Frozen Midwest.”

“You want I should break into ‘By the Light of the Silvery Moon’?”

“A girl like you,” he began, moving right past her sarcasm, confident he was on the right track. Something in her eyes. “A girl like you, she’s not meant for the bruising ride through the darker corners of the Hollywood Hills.”

“What, you’re saying I should go back to Cloquet? After fifteen years of clawing my way out of that town? I wasn’t going to spend a lifetime of Saturday nights watching my gandy dancer husband trying to win the logrolling championship.”

“Oh no, no. You can’t leave. We need you, kid. You’re a star in the making, if you can stomach the What Price Hollywood? Cliches. All I’m saying is, there must be a better way for you to live here. Someone to team up with, someone who’ll understand the life and

also look out for you, and your interests. And you.”

“I’ve done the sugar-daddy gig, hon. Maybe you heard.”

He had, of course. Twenty-two-year-old Barbara Payton had taken forty-six-year-old Bob Hope for a rumored thirty grand plus a fabulous, fully furnished duplex apartment on Cheremoya Avenue— all in less than six months. She was no dumb bunny.

“I don’t mean a sugar daddy, sugar lips. I mean a man who will do right by you. Bells and whistles and rice and the bouquet.”

“Yeah?”

He saw the look and knew he’d finally stumped her and her pushed-out siren-red lower lip.

“And I think Franchot is the fella to do it.”

“Since when were you hot on him? I thought you wanted me to close my lily-white legs and all that.”

“I picture something majestic, Babs. You know what I’m seeing?” He grabbed her arms with one hand and gestured widely into the imaginary horizon with the other. “I’m seeing little Barbara Payton in a white lace dress, full skirt, train, the fringe of Minnesota-white bangs peeking out from beneath your grandmother’s Belgian lace veil. I see her walking down the aisle in a little country church, the finest Methodist—”

“Presbyterian.”

“—Presbyterian church in all of Cloquet and the county. The townspeople are assembled, Granny in her best Sunday bonnet, the mayor, hell, the governor, and that glorious early winter light streaming through the stained glass.

“And who should be at the altar, all sophistication and double-breasted dash, and certainly the biggest star to hit Cloquet since Maude Adams did her Peter Pan tour in ‘07? Franchot Tone, of course. And who does he see, through the blinding sunlight, but his bride: this hazy vision in eggshell white, this dark-eyed, sparkling American beauty. And the moment, the locking of eyes between the dapper groom and too-lovely, petal-white bride, is so perfect, so exquisite that many of the guests—even grouchy old Mr. Carnahan, the druggist, and bossy young Miss Harley, the librarian—find tears falling from their disbelieving eyes.

“It is, Miss Barbara Payton, a moment that will be talked about for years to come, passed down at knitting parties, quilting bees, church socials, and football games until it takes on the sheen of Arthurian legend. The movie king and his rising movie queen.”

Damn if he couldn’t almost picture it himself. He was half ready to volunteer as best man.

“Fuck, Hop. You play rough.” A hot tear sprang to Barbara’s eight-ball eyes. And Hop couldn’t hide his smile.

Driving home, head soft like a melon from all the drinks, he was still smiling. His first opportunity to impress the big brass and it might be a home run. Everything was falling into place.

Where the fuck did he get that bit about the Belgian lace, anyway? You’re a natural, kid. A natural. The way a shot of a girl’s sandalwood musk could send him into a two-hour single-minded dance of a lifetime for the chance to press his face into the center of that smell—it was the same on the job. He was always ready to take the chance, make the play, show the fellas upstairs that he could plunge his hands straight into the dross for them and still come out clean. Just like when he was a kid, always caught with his mouth on the old man’s bottle of Wild Turkey, fingers in Momma’s purse—she called him Little Jack Horner, forever caught with his thumb in the pie. But why pass up a hot prospect, a sweet deal, all on the chance he might get caught? After all, even then, his baby face, fast tongue —these things could be parlayed. He hadn’t yet faced a punishment so bad it made even the riskiest proposition not worth his trouble.

At least that’s what Hop thought about himself. His soon-to-be ex-wife, Midge, however, who’d spent close to three years on the blunt end of this worldview, saw things differently.

“All I see is a guy awfully hot to take knocks,” she’d say. “You just let the punches keep on coming. Don’t flatter yourself by mixing that up with ambition or smarts or charm.”

His pal Jerry, with far more affection, called him “Slap Happy—or Slap Hoppy.”

He was feeling so good he thought he might drive by Gloria’s place, say hello. She might be out on a date, but who knows? Worth a try. He owed her a visit anyway, hadn’t seen her in weeks.

Of course she might be irritated when she saw him. Last time, he’d also come late at night, high and pushy, and even though she was glad to see him, she couldn’t believe it when he got out of bed afterward, buttoned his shirt and pants, and started for the door. Her face knitted together, puckered like a thread, had been pulled too tight. She threw her telephone at him and knocked over her own new chaise lounge from Madame La Foux.

So maybe not Gloria.

He could go to Villa Capri, or to Chasen’s for a hobo steak, make the rounds a little. There was a waitress at Villa Capri, Bernadette something, whom he’d taken out a few times. Gorgeous Italian chick

with big, black-olive eyes and tits like Yvonne De Carlo.

Yeah, that’d be okay.

Or he could try to meet up with Jerry, coming off the evening shift at the Examiner. At least four nights a week, he knocked back a few with Jerry Schuyler, his closest friend, with whom he worked side by side through three years of churning out copy for Yank and Stars and Stripes. Over scotch, sometimes a martini, they’d swap stories from the front, just like they’d done during the war. Jerry was the only person in his new life who knew him before he came to Los Angeles. Just possibly, Jerry was the only person who even knew where he was from, or that he was from anyplace at all.

But then Hop remembered he probably couldn’t see Jerry after all. Jerry was getting pretty hard to see these days, with the new lady in his life. It would have to be Bernadette to help celebrate. He wanted to celebrate all night.

Sweet Iolene

The next morning, Hop arrived at his office with fingers crossed about the Barbara Payton deal. Today he’d have to see if what he’d set in motion had any life of its own. This girl wasn’t the most reliable kid in the pen, and he wouldn’t be surprised if she had ended up eloping overnight—with the bartender, Howard Hughes, the Negro parking lot attendant. That one could get into a fresh world of trouble between midnight and seven a.m.

The press-office secretary, Lil, handed him his morning trade clippings and a few pieces of late-and early-delivery mail. Nothing more about Barbara but a few small fires to put out. An item in Sheilah Graham’s gossip column hinting at an on-set fling between the square-jawed adventure hero and the married actress with twins at home. More “tales of woe” in Louella about poor Gail Russell— thankfully, one troubled actress who was not with his studio. Still, there were a few unnamed “friends” cited in the column that he’d have to check on.

“Someone’s waiting for you,” Lil said, nodding over to the set of chairs facing her.

Hop turned. “Iolene,” he said, with a start.

There she was. Just as filled with slouching, dark-eyed glamour as the last time he saw her, nearly two years before, a different decade.

“Remember me?” she said, standing.

“Always,” Hop said, surprised at the itch in his voice. “Follow me.”

Pressing her copper-colored skirt flat, she sat down in the chair across from him. He gave her a broad smile. Maybe she wanted to charm him into helping her get a job. He hoped that was it, and if it was, he was ready to be charmed. It wasn’t until she lifted her eyes to him, the crinkly veil on her hat rising over her forehead, that he knew what this visit was really about. She didn’t bother to hide the spiny fear in her face.

“Been a while. You’re over at Columbia now?” He smiled, kept smiling, suddenly self-conscious of everything, from his new shirt and sterling movie-reel cuff links to the picture window behind him, the polished dark oak desk on which he rapped his fingers.

“You could say so. Not working much these days,” she said, tilting her head and lowering her long lashes.

“No? You on contract? Because maybe I could call—”

“Look at the king of Hollywood. Sure look like the Jack now, don’t you?” she said icily, twisting her lips into a knot.

Hop just kept on smiling,

Slanting her eyes, she shifted forward and asked in a confiding tone, “What is it exactly you do here, Mr. Hopkins?”

Hop leaned back in his chair and, out of the corner of his eye, looked out his small window at the back lot. He felt a twitch in his eye.

Putting on his game face, he looked her in the eye

“I’m a fireman.”

“Come again.”

“I put out fires. I start fires,” Hop said, warming up to the line. “A

little of both.”

Iolene gave him nothing, not even a glimmer. The shiny clicks and levers that moved so easily for him with the likes of Barbara Payton were useless here. Instead, she snapped back, “Not the same fires?”

“Not usually, no. Ideally, at least.”

“Tell me, Mr. Hopkins, would you start a fire just so you could put

it out?”

“Now that’s an idea.”

She paused a second, as if deciding whether to tussle or not. Then

something unfolded in her eyes, something unpleasant.

“You’re really hitting on all eight now, eh? I know all about you, Mr. Hopkins. I got you coming and going. What I could tell—it got you far with your bosses, but maybe other people would be less impressed.”

“Oh.” Hop set his hands on the edge of his desk to keep himself steady. Something felt funny, something he could just about taste. “That’s it, huh? Looking for a touch?” he said, as tough as he could, although he couldn’t seem to stop himself from swiveling back and forth in his chair.

“No touch, Mr. Shark Skin. That’s not me. And you don’t get off that easy.”

“Who does, Iolene?” he said, treading water, unsure where she was going but wanting to play it for all scenarios.

“You remember what happened that night. You were there, right in

the middle of it. I saw you, and you saw everything.”

Of course he remembered.

“Okay,” he said, nodding, businesslike. “Let’s talk. Meet me at the

bar around the corner, the one with the green menu board out front. Twelve o’clock.”

She agreed.

For the next few hours, Hop tried to get work done, made his calls, filed some press releases. But his mind kept pitching back to Iolene.

He used to see her all the time back in his Cinestar days. As many times as they ran into each other at the studio or at nightclubs, she wouldn’t let him make her. Iolene, lips like tight raspberries. The girl who wouldn’t spread her fine legs, not ever, not for him. What could be better than that? He felt her caramel skin in his sleep nights after he saw her. She’d pretend, even, not to get his meaning (Sure can’t be your hand there on my new belt, can it?). She liked to play it, but only so far. She wouldn’t come across. Even if she was the type—and maybe she wasn’t, but let’s face it, in this town, they all were, himself included—she wouldn’t lay for a Cinestar reporter, a lousy feature writer. A columnist, maybe, if he had some jingle, but not a schmuck like him. Not when she could get a three-line walk-on by laying for Otto Preminger just once.

That night back in ‘49, the night she was talking about, well, he’d been playing craps, minding his own business and losing his rent money, when Iolene and her friend Jean approached him. Sure, he’d offered to take Iolene and Jean out on the town. Sure, he’d talked them into swinging by his apartment first for a cocktail. They’d had whiskey sours and Hop, mostly joking, angled to try to begin and end the evening right there on his sofa. Jean had yawned and wondered aloud if he really had any idea at all where the interesting people would be. That was what she’d said, “interesting.”

“What she means is famous,” Iolene had said, sitting back and raising one sparkling leg over the other.

“What I mean is important,” Jean corrected. With another yawn, she looked over at the side table and the set of framed photos on it. Nodding to one, she said, “This is your wife?”

“Can’t say I know any important people,” Hop said, talking over her question. “But I know they like to roll in the mud as much as the rest of us. More, really. So let’s go to the mudhole, ladies.”

Because he did know of a place that, thanks to a backroom betting parlor and hash den, was lately drawing some of the biz’s more adventurous types.

“Make it happen for us, big boy,” said Jean, smiling for the first time. And, as she did, she was suddenly jaw-achingly pretty. Well, gosh darn.

It had been late, later than late, and they’d racked up quite a tab at the Eight Ball, a sweat-on-the-walls roadhouse in a dark stretch of nowhere just east of civilization. By eleven, they’d collected a shabby but starry group. Iolene and Jean—Jean and Iolene, one of the men sang drunkenly—seemed to know everyone. But Jean never seemed satisfied, was always looking over heads, even famous heads. At one point, Sammy Davis Jr., bandleader Artie Shaw, and director Howard Hawks were all crowding into their table, pushing drinks on the girls, including a new fetch, a knockout white-blonde. Iolene, drinking only a few sips of Rose’s lime juice and soda all night, mostly sat, smoking Julep cigarettes one after the other. Jean imbibed at a more social pace and played it bright-eyed, leaving the full-on sprawling party-girl routine to the blonde who, Jean confided, was a burlesque performer at the Follies Theatre, where her stage name was Miss Hotcha. “What else could it possibly be,” Hop had sighed, shaking his head and smiling wistfully at her.

Jean kept flipping her matchbook over and over in her hand.

“Who you waiting for, Legs?” Hop had said to her, winking. “Clark Gable don’t make it out to places like this.”

She’d looked at him long and slow and it was as mean and sexy a look as they could give, these girls. It was scorching.

“She’s waiting for her new fella,” Iolene whispered in his ear, lower lip nearly pulsing against it in the crush of the booth. “She thinks he might come.”

Before Hop could ask who the fella was, Miss Hotcha had pushed her tight little thigh against his, leaned on his shoulder, and began singing “Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl” in his ear. It was a very good night, he thought. Very good night, boy-o.

It was close to one o’clock when the biggest stars yet strode into the creaking, blaring roadhouse. Marv Sutton and Gene Merrel. Hollywood’s premier song-and-dance duo. Suave Sutton with his buttery baritone and dreamy-eyed Merrel, voice like sweet ice cream, both of them acrobatic, athletic dancers with pretty faces that could be plugged into any picture formula: two Broadway hoofers and one luscious blonde, two baseball players and one sultry brunette, two cadets and one fiery redhead. It was simple, and it worked over and over again. Sutton, the charmer who got the girl, dancing in glorious tandem with the angel-faced Merrel, who watched him get her. Seven, eight years ago, they were swinging it for peanuts in East Coast nightclubs. Next thing, they’re movie stars.

Drinks were now on the house, bottle on the table, thanks to Sutton and Merrel’s own personal studio press agent, Bix Noonan, who kept the liquor flowing freely, kept the boys happy. Hop might well have stayed were it not for Miss Hotcha. Before he knew it, he was caroming along the Arroyo Seco with the burlesque blonde in the seat next to him. He’d always been a lucky fella.

The next day, when the brunette Jean went missing, Bix called and Hop helped him out.

End of story.

After Iolene left his office, Hop tried to conjure up every detail he could still recall about that night. But by noon, when he was supposed to meet her, he had distracted himself out of the memory. He hadn’t heard a Barbara Payton update yet, but Louella Parsons had called, saying she’d heard rumblings of Barbara sending her maid to Union Station for a train ticket.

When he walked into the bar, the kind of quiet, no-questions-asked place where colored women and white men could both get service, Iolene was already there. They ordered prairie oysters and carried them to a booth in the back.

“Okay, Iolene. What’s it about?” He wasn’t going to bother with charm or finesse. She wasn’t buying, anyway. She never had.

She leaned back in her chair and glared at him.

“What you did, Hop, it wasn’t right.”

Hop’s eyes widened. “Hey, I think you got the wrong guy.”

“You sold Jean Spangler up the river to get your lousy job.”

She’s so angry, he thought. Why is she so angry? What did he do that was so wrong? She was looking at him like he was something stuck to the bottom of her shoe.

“I could make trouble.”

“Jesus, Iolene,” Hop blurted out. “What did I ever do to you?”

She looked at him. She was thinking hard. Weighing things.

“Listen, did you want the police at your door?” Hop said. “I kept your name out of it.”

“Don’t pretend you did it for anybody but Gil Hopkins,” she snarled.

“Listen,” he said coolly, “I don’t know what you think I know, but it’s nada, baby. Remember, I left. You didn’t. You got more to account for than me.”

She didn’t say anything for a minute. He could see her eyes working. The hostility began to sink visibly from her face and turned into something else. Something like resignation.

“I didn’t see anything,” she said, looking down at the place mat, the damp spot where her drink sat. “Not really.”

“We saw nothing, you saw nothing. So what are we talking about here then, Iolene?”

“Should have guessed the way things would go,” she whispered, almost as if to herself.

Something in her voice told Hop to summon the waiter and raise the stakes. “Rye,” she said, not even looking up. Hop signaled for him to make it two.

When the drinks came, she tucked into the corner of the booth and laid it out for him. And it was like this:

After Hop left the club with Miss Hotcha, Iolene could see that the song-and-dance men, Sutton and Merrel, the stars, were working something. Were hot on Jean. Iolene slid over in the booth, wanting to take Jean aside, let her know. But Jean said, Don’t worry, and her eyes were wide, pulsing a little from the jump she’d taken. Jean, you have enough trouble without getting into it with them, Iolene had said. You got more trouble than you can handle now. Those fellows are bad business. I heard stories.

Jean grinned broadly at her, a grin that split her face in two, eerie like a ventriloquist’s dummy, dark on a stage. She grinned broadly and in that grin she told Iolene, All the stories in the world and I wouldn’t pass this up—I’ve seen bad things enough to shake the word “bad” loose from its roots. I can go to the far end of nothing with the best of them. I can pull the pin and roll. At least that’s what Iolene saw in the grin. She saw it and she shrugged and she figured, Her funeral, but she didn’t mean it like that. Not like that. She just decided Jean, all colt legs and showgirl grit, could handle herself, was a big enough girl to know the danger signs and beat it, time come and things turn wicked.

So she and Jean agreed when Bix Noonan invited them to come along to a hot club down by the docks.

So they went to the Red Lily, an awful, awful place. A place women shouldn’t be. And things began to happen. Gene Merrel just hung in the corner, smoking brown cigarillos and twisting his cufflinks. Sometimes he’d smirk a little or take a sip from his scotch, but he wasn’t the one in the center of things. That night, no crooning plantation ballads, no strumming jumpy songs on his ukulele or launching into a vaudeville softshoe. He watched as pretty-faced Marv Sutton, all pomaded pompadour and dark-eyed Jew looks that drive the girls crazy, poured champagne and, when the champagne ran out, white creme de menthe, all along Jean’s now bare, golden legs. Everyone watched as Marv, who rarely shifted out of slow motion in their movies, who had nary a crease in his suit or a spot of shine on his tanned face on-screen, now walked on his knees on the sawdust floor, nudging along like a crab, sliding a dark pink tongue along every curve and shoot in Jean’s endless gams. You couldn’t take your eyes off the show because it gave the promise of the kind of group debauch always in the Hollywood rumor mill but rarely available right before your eyes.

Bix Noonan asked Iolene if she wanted to leave the trio alone in a private room and go play cards. She agreed. She agreed.

Hop listened. It wasn’t so much new information as a new way of telling it. Should he have stayed with them? Don’t go, he remembered Iolene saying to him, hand wrapped around his arm, first time, the only time she’d ever touched him.

But there was Miss Hotcha, silvery purple satin pressed tight against her silvery skin, a long whisper-thread of blue vein running from the beginning of her jumbled cleavage to the flutter of her neck. And there was, after all, no heat or promise in Iolene’s grasp. She just didn’t want to be a third wheel, a set extra in the evening. Was he really supposed to give up the cancan girl to sit out the action chastely with this cross-legged champagne pearl? How could he have known? A million nights like this in Hollywood, every night in Hollywood, and only a few turn out like this.

“Hop,” Iolene was saying to him now. “Listen. Bix offered to drive me home. But I didn’t want to leave her with those two. I knocked on the door to that back room to try to get Jean to leave with me. I waited and waited at that door, Hop. Then Jean said through the door, ‘Go on, honey,’ she said. ‘Go on.’ So I did.”

She looked up at him, eyes glassy, spun toffee.

“So, angel face, what’s the sin there?” Hop said warmly. Maybe, after all, she just wanted reassurance. He could give her that in spades. That he could do. That he did all day long.

“Bix said, ‘You know what things people say about those two.’ And Merrel—he had a habit. Bix said he’d been kicking the gong all day. Bix said he was crazy. They were going to do her up, Hop. But I left. I did.” Her voice shook and she couldn’t meet Hop’s eyes, which was fine with him.

“And the next day you see she’s missing,” Hop said. “But it’s not your fault. Not by a long shot.”

“I’ve known that girl forever,” she said, barely listening. “One of the most beautiful girls in the world. They should have written that for her.”

Hop looked at her. “What?”

She shook her head. “Never mind. You never got it.”

“We didn’t do anything wrong,” Hop repeated, more firmly. You gotta put it behind you. It’s over.” He could see the rye was hitting her. Things could get bleak. Someone had to end this or he’d find himself at St. Catherine’s, knees on the floor.

“Listen, I gotta get back to the grind, but we’ll have dinner sometime,” he said, setting some bills down and putting on his hat. “Catch up for real, beautiful. You’re one of the most beautiful girls in the world.” As he repeated it back, it rung in his head for a second, then shuttered into silence.

As he saw her face, struck and unmoving, watching him as he turned to walk out the door, he felt something tighten inside him and then drop away.

And her voice: “You think you can forget.”

Hop pretended he didn’t hear and he didn’t look back as he made his way to the exit. He resisted the urge to walk quickly, like someone discreetly leaving the scene of a crime. He hadn’t done anything. She couldn’t make him feel guilty for something that he didn’t, wouldn’t do.

“You think you can forget.” A second time, like the refrain in a torch song. Like a warning.

Hop walked back to work, taking the long way, picking up a sandwich at the commissary. As he moved through the lot, he thought about it all. Tried to piece it together.

What did she expect from him? He wasn’t a cop, a detective. If he honestly thought those guys, or anyone else, had anything to do with the girl’s disappearance … a girl like that, come on, was always finding herself tangled up with rough stuff. Girls with legs like that and loaded up on ambition—hell, it was surprising that more of them didn’t go missing—skip town, run away with a fella, maybe a married guy, or, sometimes, sure, just know too much, simply too, too much.

Even more common than that, of course: these girls often ended up bleeding their insides out in some shady MD’s rundown office on Olive Street. There was a whole stretch tucked deep in Griffith Park —not so far from where the girl’s purse was found—rumored to be a doc dumping ground for such unhappy accidents. Lovers’ Lane, they called it, with a nasty wink.

What did Iolene want him to do about that? If her idea was to tap him, she wasn’t going to get very far. Even if he did feel cornered, he was going to be dropping whatever pocket change he had on the divorce. There’d be nothing left. And if that wasn’t her idea, if she was on the up-and-up and wanted his help, why … why did she think he was the kind of guy who would care? Was he?

Fuck, maybe he was.

He thought for a long thirty seconds about his part in the drama. He’d kept his mouth shut. And lied to a few cops. Really, who doesn’t lie to cops? What else are cops for? All he did was make sure a few names never found their way into the papers or to the police. And to take care of that, sure, he made the girl’s name disappear from the studio logs just to be safe. And then dropped a few hints to a few cops and maybe a reporter that the girl was known to keep company with some less-than-reputable boys about town. The purse with the broken strap in Griffith Park only helped, gave more likely reasons for the girl to fade to black. The unhappy coincidence (or not) of the name Kirk in the note found in her purse and Kirk Douglas, whose movie Young Man with a Horn Jean Spangler had worked on, was easily taken care of. A few calls and no whiff of ugliness ever clung to Douglas’s fine suit.

Even if he hadn’t lied, would the outcome be any different? Sure, Sutton and Merrel, for all their on-screen geniality and grace, were maybe into some sick stuff, but nothing he hadn’t seen before—at least in part. Besides, girls like that know what they’re getting into. You roll the dice, you take your chances.

Still, the thought kept returning: What if he’d stayed? Would it have made a difference? Why’d he have to go off with Miss Hotcha, trying to make her? Did he end up making her? For a second, he couldn’t be sure. Then he remembered—a quick, warm flash of a creamy belly arched against his cheek. Oh, yes, right.

Remembering that, he remembered something else, too. He remembered how, after leaving Miss Hotcha that night, after driving home, he’d stood in his own doorway for a moment, reminding himself no one was waiting for him, the wife gone visiting her mother in Ohio. Iolene and Jean had been sitting there on his couch just a few hours before. He could almost see them there. Funny, even with, or maybe because of, the faint crease on the chintz cushion on which they’d sat, even with the smell of smoke and pungent honeysuckle still in the air, the apartment—his apartment, their apartment—had never felt so empty.

He was always lonely.