Ed Ifkovic - Make Believe

“I don’t want to be bothered.” She looked away.

“I’m here for Max.”

At the mention of his name, she flinched, and her right hand flew to her cheek. “Max.” She said his name softly. “He’s dead.”

“Sophie, someone murdered him.”

Her eyes got wet, and she rubbed them with the backs of her hands. Her words were whispered. “Who would do that to Max?”

I slid into a chair in front of her desk. “I have some ideas, Sophie.” I waited patiently. Her eyes were hard, but there was something else there now: curiosity.

“What do you want from me?” Her fingers drummed Betty Grable’s face.

“I think you can help me.”

She gasped, threw back her head. Red blotches on her neck. A hand gripped the edge of the desk. When she looked back at me, her eyes betrayed fear. “I warned him.” She swallowed her words.

“How?”

“He was playing with fire. That support of those men. Max talked a blue streak about politics, but he just…talked. I’d know if he was a Communist. I knew all his business.”

Flat out, “Of course, he wasn’t a Communist.”

“I know. He wasn’t. But he had to get involved in that brouhaha, him and Sol yammering all day long. So angry at the way the country was going. And now he’s dead.” She blinked wildly. “And…Sol.”

“Why did you leave him, Sophie?”

A long silence. She fiddled with the copy of Movieland . She held a pencil in one hand and idly doodled on the cover, black lines drawn across Betty Grable’s pristine and glossy complexion. Finally, nervous, she picked up all the magazines and dropped them into a drawer. She smiled thinly. “Mr. Janssen gets angry when I read them. He says they’re trashy. But when he’s out of the office…” She flipped her hands in the air, a devil-may-care gesture. “I spent a lifetime with Max and with movie stars.” She chuckled. “That is, people who wanted to be movie stars. So it sort of got into my blood. It’s a bad habit to break.” She rolled her eyes.

“There are worse habits, Sophie.”

She nodded. “Now I set up appointments for newcomers to L.A. to look at cheap apartments. Not quite the same thing, is it?” She stared into my face. “With Max, I felt a heartbeat away from the world of the movies.”

She lapsed into silence while I waited. “Miss Ferber, I was a very foolish woman. I’m certain you’ve heard the stories about me. I’m sure I was the laughing stock of that crowd. Ava and Frank and…Alice.”

“No, not true,” I told her. “Max worried about you, as did the others.”

“Well, I made a fool of myself. I let myself believe that he and I had closeness-but we did. We spent years as a team. But when he got married, it knocked me off balance. I felt-betrayed. I was a foolish, foolish woman. So I got bitter and I made things worse. I walked away. I’ll show him. The bastard. He’ll miss me. He’ll beg…” She waved a hand in the air dismissively. “Sometimes you do something that you know is all wrong, like you can see yourself outside of yourself and you say, stop, stop, stop, but you can’t.” Her voice was strained and weary, almost a whisper.

“You miss him. Sophie.” An epitaph for both of us.

Suddenly she was crying. “What do you think? He was such a good man. He gave me a life I thought I’d never have. On the outside it was nothing-the old maid in the front office. But we laughed and told stories and…” She closed her eyes. “He never made me any promises he didn’t keep.” She reached into a drawer and took out a tissue, dabbed at her eyes. The crumpled tissue dropped into her lap, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself, Sophie. You’re not the first woman who’s tumbled like that. You were a woman who…”

“But foolish, foolish.” She seemed surprised the tissue was not clutched in her hand.

“I need you to help me now,” I said, and she sat up, a puzzled look on her face.

“How?”

“That night at the Paradise. You were there with friends and…”

“And I had a fit, stormed out of there. A birthday party I ruined.”

“But why?”

She sighed. “Those are my friends, those three women. My only friends. We play cards together, see movies, travel to places for the day, shop and gab. But mostly we get on one another’s nerves.” Her laugh was brittle. “We’re the only friends we got. Well, that night Mina, one of them, the most annoying, spotted Alice at your table, so, of course, she had to tease me about it. I took a little of it. After all, I’m used to the cruelty of other people who get something out of hurting others. But I simmered. A slow burn, let me tell you. The party went on, but I sat there quietly, nursing this one drink I always allow myself when I go out.”

“Then you exploded.”

She shook her head back and forth. “A class act, no? You three ladies had left there by then, and my mood was getting darker and darker. Ethan was in the booth with a drunk Tony, and he sent over a bottle of wine for the birthday girl. I’d been ready to head out of there, but that wine meant I’d have to stay longer. Nobody was ready to light the damn candles. After a half bottle of free wine, Mina chided me again about Alice-chubby Alice, not even a pretty starlet to intoxicate Max. And a murdering widow, a mob wife. It was getting late. I’d wanted to leave an hour earlier. When they lit the candles on the cake, I exploded and”-she laughed out loud-“ruined the evening for everyone.”

“Well, it sounds to me like you enjoyed yourself. At the end.”

A twinkle in her eye. “It did feel good to see frosting on that beastly woman. She hasn’t talked to me since. Candles in her blue hair.” Her voice got low. “Then I learned the following day that Max was shot to death, and…and I didn’t know what to do.”

“Could I ask you some questions?”

She shrugged. “I guess so.”

“Did you see Liz Grable walk in?”

She looked perplexed. “The actress?”

I beamed. “She’ll be happy hearing you call her that.”

She grinned. “I’ll bet. A first time for everything. She used to drop by at the office to pester Max. She was seeing…Tony Pannis.”

“Not any more.”

Sophie’s face fell. “Yes, I did see her. Later in the evening, though. I was ready to get out of there. She walked in and stood in the doorway. Just stood there. We all looked up. She caught me looking at her and she backed up. She looked…I don’t know… hurt . I figured she was there to see Tony, but I know she didn’t like going to the Paradise because that’s where Tony drank and got nasty and weepy and stupid.”

“So she left?”

“I guess so. I turned back to my friends and when I looked back at the doorway, she wasn’t there. Gone. What does she have to do with this?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Well, you don’t think that she killed Max, do you?”

I didn’t answer her.

“Well?”

“I don’t know.”

She harrumphed, and then seemed to think better of it. “I’d be surprised. She always struck me as sort of pathetic.” Then her eyes widened, frightened. “You don’t think that I killed Max, do you?”

“No.”

But her eyes were wary as she twisted in her seat, staring over my shoulders. “I stormed out of there but I didn’t go to see him. I swear. I told the police that.”

“Could you answer one more question, Sophie?”

That stopped her. A small voice, nervous. “What?”

She gave me the answer I expected.

Late afternoon, refreshed from a pot of coffee at a diner across the street from Sophie’s office, I sat by the window and watched Sophie hang a CLOSED sign in the door, lock up, and slowly walk down the sidewalk, headed in the direction of her apartment. A half hour later, a taxi dropped me off at Culver City where I mentioned Ava’s name. As promised, she’d left my name at security, but the guard at first seemed hesitant to call her. I raised my voice. “She’s expecting me, young man.”