Joseph Kanon - Stardust

“I don’t know. I’m not moving in.”

“No? Where’d you get the key?” he asked, but almost off handedly, moving over to the counter, looking at everything.

“I’m his brother-the guy before.”

The kid stopped. “Sorry. I didn’t mean-”

“What do you want to see? There’s nothing here.”

“Honest maids,” the kid said, picking up the brandy bottle. “Usually the liquor’s the first to go.” He went into the bathroom, checking the medicine chest, behind the door. “You come here to pick up his stuff?” He went over to the balcony, retracing Ben’s steps, even putting his leg against the railing.

“There’s nothing to pick up.”

“I noticed. Funny, isn’t it? Somebody must have been here already.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you think he used the room for? We said writing office, but what the hell, be nice to the wife. What would he use it for? You ever meet a woman yet who didn’t take over half the bathroom? Cream here, powder there. Douche bag on the door. And what’s here? Nothing. She must have cleaned it out. I don’t know when, though. I’ve been watching the building.”

“What for?”

The kid looked at him. “To see who else had a key.”

“You think someone was with him?”

“Not then. She’d have been spotted. Every window’s got a head sticking out. You know, taking an interest. Cops had to use a passkey to get in. There’s no one in there with him. It had to be later.”

“Unless she’d already moved out. Maybe that’s why he-”

“I get it. You think he jumped. The breakup, huh?”

“You don’t?” Ben said, interested.

“At first. We get the police call, nobody else is interested, but my position, you need the inches, even the blotter stuff. The cops are already here and the night clerk’s going ‘oh-my-god, he must have fallen’-you know, don’t make the place look bad-and the cops are going along with it but I can see they’re looking at it as a jump. You know, taking pictures and everything. And it’s Hollywood, where you get this. Not Hancock Park or someplace-people have been known to jump here. But I’m thinking, it’s a funny kind of jump.”

“Why?”

“You know anything about jumpers? I covered a few. They like it a little higher. To make sure. Maybe for the show of it. Why not just go to the Roosevelt and jump off the roof? Four, five stories? You can — I mean, he did, he’s dead. But you could also just wake up in a cast somewhere. That’s one thing. Then the angle of the fall. All the jumpers I’ve seen, they don’t back out. Face forward. So I figure the LAPD are looking for a little excitement, pick up a slow night. I wouldn’t let this get to you. You believe what you want, but my guess? He was plastered and tripped.” He nodded toward the brandy bottle on the counter.

“Then why are you watching the building? If that’s all it was?”

“Look, why have a separate place anyway? Under a different name. They got him as Collins downstairs. All right, he’s seeing somebody on the side. Not a one-night stand, a longer-term thing. Still, why not a hotel? Unless they don’t want to be seen in public, take that chance. Maybe she’d be recognized. So who is she? I’m wondering about this and then something funny happens. I know the cops wrote it up as a jump, I was here, but when I’m doing the story the next morning they got it as an accident. How come the change? That’s when I get interested, because that kind of change, the only people in this town get favors like that are the studios. So I figure there’s a story.”

“Why would a studio do that for Danny?”

“Him? They wouldn’t. Anyway, he was a goner. They look to the living. And now what do we find?” He looked around at the clean apartment. “Nobody was ever here. But she must have been. And she must have been more than a fuck.”

Ben looked at him, sorting it out. “You don’t know any of this,” he said finally.

“You’d rather have him as a jumper?”

Ben said nothing.

“Maybe we could help each other out.”

“How?”

“You’re family. Go through his stuff. If he’s seeing somebody, he has to call her. There must be a number somewhere.”

“So you can find her and put her in the paper,” Ben said, thinking of Liesl reading it.

“If she’s in pictures, it’s a story. Don’t you want to know?”

“Seen enough?” Ben said, ducking it, starting to leave.

“I’ll do the legwork. That’s what I do,” the kid said, a half grin on his face, playing reporter, the kind he’d seen in the movies. “I just need a number.” He took a business card from his jacket pocket and handed it to Ben. “Day or night.”

Ben looked at it. Tim Kelly, a name you’d forget without a card.

“What if she isn’t in pictures?” he said. “Just a secretary or something?”

“A secretary-and he gets a place like this?” Kelly said, breezy, still in character. “Then I’d like to fuck her myself.”

Ben stood beside Liesl and Hans Ostermann at the funeral, the immediate family. Around and behind them, all in black, the emigre community sweltered in old high collars, hats with veils, mourning clothes that belonged in the drizzle and cloudy skies of Middle Europe. Thomas Mann had come, a courtesy to Liesl’s father, and Ben recognized a few others-Lion Feuchtwanger, slicked-back hair and eager eyes behind rimless glasses; Brecht, rumpled and smelling of cheap cigars. They were standing in front of the plain marble wall where Danny’s box of ashes would be placed. The rest of the cemetery was more elaborate, carved headstones and obelisks and flamboyant tombs from the 1920s. Valentino was somewhere over to the left. Beyond the cypresses and the high wall, Ben could see the water tower of the Paramount back lot, as close as Danny would ever get now.

There were Americans, too-people from the studio, glancing at their watches, expected back-and while they all waited, Ben wondered what made it so easy to tell them apart. Not just the clothes or the haircuts, maybe something in the way they held themselves, an attitude. Or maybe, like Tim Kelly, everyone here slipped naturally into a part, hitting marks under the giant arc lamp. Wasn’t he? The grieving brother. Liesl, the stoic widow, dry-eyed behind her dark glasses, leaning on Ostermann, all formal Weimar dignity, as publicly correct as the other Mann. Ben saw that Polly Marks had come, keeping close to a man in a double-breasted suit whom Ben assumed was Herb Yates. Who were all the others? Ben looked at the faces, bored or genuinely sad, and realized again that he knew nothing about Danny’s life.

He was still scanning the crowd when he caught someone doing the same thing-a man in a gray suit standing near the edge, looking at faces methodically, as if he were counting. When he met Ben’s eyes he didn’t even pretend to be embarrassed, just looked, then moved on. Ben stayed on him, watching him fix on Ostermann, then on the others, each in turn. What part was he playing? Not from the studio, certainly not an emigre. Holding a hat in his hand, like a policeman.

He heard a crunch of tires and turned to see a black Packard pulling up. The others had had to park near the gates. A driver hopped out to open the doors. First a little man Ben didn’t know, then Alma Mahler, making her entrance. She was dressed for a Viennese funeral the emperor himself might have attended, long black silk with a sizable hat, and without hesitation made her way to the front of the crowd. Ben watched her approach, fascinated. Everybody’s mistress, now broadened and grown outward, a kind of pouter pigeon effect, but still turning heads. She put her hand on Liesl’s arm as she took her place near the family, then nodded to Ben, her eyes interested, someone new.