Marisha Pessl - Night Film

“But we have to make sure he’s okay—”

“We’ll be more help to him out of jail.”

But suddenly there were loud voices, and the cops reemerged, leading Hopper down the steps.

He was handcuffed, and his gray coat had been confiscated, but otherwise, in his faded blue T-shirt and jeans, he looked rather undaunted by the proceedings. His eyes purposefully avoided our direction, though I swore I caught a faint smile on his face as they shoved his head down and pushed him roughly into the backseat.

At home, I called an old friend, a criminal defense attorney named Leonard Blumenstein. I’d never needed him —not yet, anyway —but he’d pulled plenty of people I knew out of rocks and hard places. Apparently, you could call Blumenstein a couple of hours after killing your wife and, in a voice silkier than an Hermès scarf, he’d assure you it was all going to be fine. Then he’d give you a directive, as if the issue were simply that you’d lost your passport.

I left a message with his answering service: Someone assisting me with some research had gotten carried away and broken into a private residence — though he’d been unarmed and stole nothing — and was now in police custody.

The woman assured me she’d have Blumenstein call me back.

Nora and I then moved into my office to research Inez Gallo.

“What do we know about her?” asked Nora, curling up on the couch beside the box of research.

“Not much,” I said. “She was supposedly Cordova’s longtime assistant.”

After digging through the papers, I pulled out Inez Gallo’s wedding photo. The picture always turned up whenever her name appeared in the press. In it, she looked like every other beaming newlywed, which only made it tragic. Years later, she’d abandon this very husband and her two children to go work alongside Cordova.

“We also found that page on the Blackboards,” noted Nora. “The one that contends she and Cordova are the same person. They both have a tiny wheel tattoo on their left hands. Are you sure it was a woman?”

“Positive.”

We dug around YouTube and found the grainy film clip of Gallo’s infamous acceptance speech on behalf of Cordova at the 1980 Oscars.

It began with co-presenters Goldie Hawn and Steven Spielberg announcing, “And the Oscar goes to … Stanislas Cordova, for Thumbscrew. ”

The audience gasped because it was a startling upset. Best Director was believed to be a shoo-in for Robert Benton, the director of Kramer vs. Kramer. In fact, Benton was so convinced he was going to win, he actually got out of his seat, making his way to the stage before his wife jumped up and physically restrained him. There was a long, confused pause during which the audience, disconcerted, was whispering, looking around, wondering if it was a mistake, if Cordova had actually showed.

Then the cameras focused on Inez Gallo, who was quickly making her way down the narrow side aisle of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. They had her sitting in the back, away from the real stars, Jack Lemmon, Bo Derek, Sally Field, and Dudley Moore.

Gallo was black-haired and heavyset, with strong, brawny features — undeniably similar to Cordova’s in his early photographs — dressed in a black T-shirt and combat boots. Later, people in the audience would profess to thinking she was crashing the event like the 1974 streaker, Robert Opel, who jogged across the stage naked when David Niven was about to introduce Elizabeth Taylor — or when Marlon Brando, at the 1973 ceremony, sent Sacheen Littlefeather to turn down his Best Actor award for The Godfather on behalf of exploited Native Americans. Awkwardly, Inez Gallo took the Oscar from Spielberg and said into the mike, two feet too tall for her: “This is a summons to those watching to break out of your locked room, real or imagined.”

She then ran offstage, and the network cut to a commercial.

We watched the speech a few times, then logged on to the Blackboards. Most of the discussion of Inez Gallo concerned rumors about the exact nature of her relationship to Cordova, that she was his sister, his puppeteer and Svengali, his female doppelgänger, an obsessive caretaker and enabler who catered to Cordova’s every need and desire, a custodian who cleaned up his every mess.

Combing through one rumor after the next, Nora’s eyes were closing, so she headed to bed, though I stayed up a few more hours reading.

Maybe it was simply my shock at encountering her, but there had been something unaccountably bizarre about Gallo’s wide chiseled face, the hard features, the embittered voice.

Maybe the key to all of this was exactly what Cleo had said at Enchantments: Dark magic passed from generation to generation.

I searched on the Blackboards for mention of it, witchcraft and Inez Gallo, or another reference to the wheel tattoo that both she and Cordova supposedly had on their left hands, but other than a brief mention of her being from Puebla, Mexico, and her selfless devotion to the director being the stuff of legend (“There’s nothing Gallo won’t do to protect him,” claimed one poster) — there was nothing else there.

“Woodward?”

I cracked open an eye. The clock read 4:21 A.M.

“Are you asleep?”

“Yes.”

“Can you talk?”

“Sure.”

Nora opened the door, slipping through the darkness. She was again wearing that ghostly nightgown, a pale blur perched on the end of my bed.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, propping myself up on the pillows.

She said nothing. She seemed nervous. She had a way of being quite talkative, then suddenly growing silent and still, so you studied her face like some hard blue desert sky, waiting for some sign of life, however distant, a hawk, an insect.

“You’re going to have to give me more to go on,” I said, after a moment. “I’m a guy. I’m illiterate when it comes to reading between lines.”

“Well …” She sighed, as if it were the end of the conversation rather than the beginning. This meant, because she was a woman, she’d probably already had this discussion umpteen times in her head.

“Is it about Hopper?” I asked. “Are you worried about him spending the night in jail? Because he’ll be fine.”

The bed jerked.

“Did you nod? It’s too dark to see in here.”

“It’s nothing to do with him. It’s something I said that I feel bad about.”

“What?”

“That I wouldn’t sleep with you.”

“No need to clarify it. It goes unsaid. And it’s nothing I haven’t heard before.” I did not know where Bernstein was going with this, but I had a bad feeling. It was crucial to get the girl out of my room, back to her own bed, stat. Adding sex to investigative reporting was as inspired an idea as Ford unveiling the Pinto —what was meant to be fun, sexy, and practical was actually a nightmare, causing great personal injury on all sides.

“You’re handsome, ” Nora said. “If you were at Terra Hermosa, the ladies would die. ”

“Isn’t that what they do anyway?”

“I didn’t want any professional lines to be crossed.”

“You were right. I can’t tell you how many women I’ve crossed all kinds of lines with and afterward felt terrible.”

“Really?”

“Like I’d just been given a prognosis of a few weeks left to live.”

She giggled.

“Started my very first time when I was fifteen. Lorna Doonberry. Talk about lines; she played bridge with my mother. I got carried away. She fell into a shower curtain. You know that little soap holder in bathtubs?”