Ed Ifkovic - Make Believe

Hair Today was a glitzy salon with black-and-green art deco stenciling on the plate-glass windows. An overly large neon sign announced the preposterous name and, though it was broad daylight, still blinked and hummed, the red letters popping on and off. Inside, I spotted a row of bubble-head helmets, under which women idly browsed through movie magazines.

Liz Grable stopped what she was doing, a comb in one hand, scissors in the other. She froze, ignoring the remarks her client was making, and nodded toward me. A woman in a frilly blue blouse with a name tag sewn on approached me and asked whether I had an appointment, but I was already moving past her. Liz, mumbling to another woman to finish up the disgruntled customer, walked toward me, a slow-motion walk, the comb and scissors held before her like weapons. Two western gunslingers pacing each other at high noon.

“What happened?” A voice hollow, strained.

“May I talk to you a moment, Liz?”

She spun around and bumped into a small table, which teetered. “I’m working.”

“A minute of your time.”

“I don’t know…”

“It has to be now.” I raised my voice.

She looked over her shoulder as a catlike squeak escaped from her throat. “Follow me.” She yelled to the woman up front. “I’m on a break.”

“You’re not on a break, Liz. Not until…”

Liz cut her off. “I’m on a break now.”

I followed her into a back room, a tiny space where cardboard boxes were stacked to the ceiling, shelves lined with hair products. For a moment I was overcome with the heady scent of lotions, cloying tropical fragrances. A face buried in a bouquet of gardenias. Fainting time at the funeral parlor. But near the back door there was a small table with two folding chairs, empty coffee cups bunched and stacked together in the center. Liz motioned for me to sit down.

“What?” she said, breathless.

“I need your help.”

“Tony…” she faltered.

“I want you to tell me what you remember about the night you went to see Max at his home.”

She looked puzzled. “I already did . I told you everything.”

“Yes, indeed. But I didn’t get to ask you the right questions.”

“Miss Ferber, please. I don’t want any trouble. Last night I threw Tony out of my place and he was…”

“That’s a good move, Liz. I applaud that. You need to start making the right decisions for your own life. But I have to insist now-tell me about that night. Every little detail.”

She looked helpless. “I don’t know…”

Hotly, “Of course you do. Now start at the beginning. What time did you go to Max’s?”

She started to cry. “I can’t help you. I can’t think…”

“You can, Liz. Stop crying and talk to me. Let’s create the scene. You were sick of Tony, you wanted to get back into Max’s good graces, and you decided to see him. What time?”

She thought about it. “Early. I don’t know. It was light out.” She brightened. “Max said Alice had just left-gone to see you and Lorena at the Paradise. Just left.”

“Good. Now imagine everything you did- saw that night.” Slowly, methodically, prodded by me, Liz reconstructed the events of that awful night. Step by step, her voice tentative but then assuming confidence, Liz told me her story, but this time, prompted by me, she added details she’d previously omitted. I could tell, as she stammered through her memory, she had no idea the impact of what she was telling me. She paused after each sentence, trying to weigh its significance herself, but she was thinking only of one person: Tony.

She told me what I wanted to hear. “Thank you, Liz.” I stood.

“It doesn’t matter, Miss Ferber. I mean, I don’t got nothing to do with anybody any more.” She stood, smoothed her dress. “I got to get back to work.” A moment’s hesitation. “This is about Tony, isn’t it?” She waited, her lower lip trembling.

“Thank you, Liz. You’ve been a big help.”

“Tell me, please.”

“There’s nothing to tell you yet,” I insisted. “I’m just asking people some questions.”

A flash of fire in her eyes, the words spat out. “I don’t believe you, Miss Ferber.”

No one was home at Sophie Barnes’ shabby apartment complex on Santa Monica Boulevard in the flats, a third-floor walk-up over a hardware store and a green grocer. I’d taken the address from Max’s files. I expected her to be sitting at home, quiet in a small apartment, listening to Mary Noble, Backstage Wife on the radio. No one answered the doorbell upstairs and I tottered back down to the lobby. My eyes scanned the rows of mailboxes. I turned to face a tiny sunburnt man holding a broom and dustpan, a glint in his eye, amused at something, rocking on his heels.

“You seem a happy man,” I observed.

He chuckled. “You got some look on your face, lady.”

“Which communicates what?” I began to push past him.

“It says how dare Sophie not be at home.”

That gave me pause. “How do you know I’m here to see her?”

“Well, the other four apartments got lost souls inside them, including the one across the hall from Miss Sophie’s. Young folks from Nebraska or Ohio who work in diners and department stores, strutting around like they already are up there in the movies, and at night they prowl the streets hoping for dreams to come true.”

“And Sophie has no dreams?”

He didn’t answer, tucking the broom and dustpan into a small closet under a stairwell. As he straightened his body, he rubbed his lower back, groaned, stretched. “Getting old, ma’am.” He glanced up the empty staircase. “She’s got little old ladies complaining about them flights of stairs.”

“No other visitors?”

“No one as I can see.”

“I thought she’d be at home.”

“Well, ma’am, some folks gotta have themselves a job.”

That surprised me. I just assumed Sophie, leaving Max’s employment in a huff, had resigned herself to a life lived with early suppers and genteel canasta and Arthur Godfrey.

“And who are you?”

“The superintendent.” He nodded toward a closed door. “That’s my apartment right there. The wife is probably pinned against the door eavesdropping on us now. She’s got less of a life than me.” He chortled, his head bouncing up and down.

“Can you tell me where she works?”

Sophie, he volunteered, worked part-time a couple days a week in a real estate office around the corner. “Pays the rent,” the man muttered. “Barely.” Leading me outside, he pointed me in the right direction, though when I glanced back, he was still standing on the sidewalk, that same bemused look on his face.

The real estate office was a cubbyhole occupying the corner of a flat-roofed stucco building, the anteroom the size of a closet, where Sophie Barnes now sat leafing through a movie magazine- Movieland , I could see from the doorway. There was an office behind it, the door shut, a brass plate announcing Private. She scarcely looked up when I walked in, engrossed in her fan magazine, and she mumbled something about Mr. Janssen being gone for the day. Then, recognizing my face, she sucked in her breath and dropped the magazine on the top of others. Photoplay, Modern Screen . “Miss Ferber.”

“Hello, Sophie.” I moved closer and smiled. “You recognize me? We spoke on the phone years ago and…”

Abruptly, glancing back at the closed door, “I know you. You were at the Paradise with Alice and Lorena that night. Someone pointed you out to me.”

“That’s right. You were there with friends.”

“Yes, I was.” Brusque, unfriendly.

“Is something the matter, Sophie?”

She shuffled the movie magazines on her desk, and then neatened the pile slowly. Her fingertips drummed on the top one. Betty Grable smiled at the camera, leaning against a white pillar.