Stardust(42)

“Why?”

“I got the resident list you wanted from Joel. Past year, right? He got all huffy. Why did I want it? Damned if I knew. Why do I?”

“I told you. Danny wasn’t driving around looking for FOR RENT signs. He knew the building. So, how? Maybe she used to live there.”

“Or somebody knew somebody. Or somebody heard—how far do you want to stretch it?”

“He had to know about it somehow. If we’re lucky, there’s a match.”

“Okay, I’ll swing by and leave it for you at the gate. Maybe—you got me curious—maybe I’ll run it by Polly’s files. She never throws anything out. Every rumor since Fatty’s Coke bottle.”

“She lets you go through her files?”

“Are you kidding? But it so happens it takes her hours to drink her lunch, and the secretary’s a friend of mine.”

“You have friends all over.”

“And I’m just the lowlife. Run a studio, you got the whole town in your pocket.”

Except the police, according to Bunny. He sat for a minute looking at the desk, then pulled over the contract list. Work backward. Who would they protect? A woman. Worth making a call for. He checked the credits. At Fox or Metro there would have been a slew of names, but Lasner borrowed stars so the featured players here made a much shorter list. Speaking parts, not hat-check girls or window shoppers. Recognizable. Rosemary Miller. Ruth Harris. Someone who met Danny on the side. Already married? One of these few, easy to check against the Cherokee records. Assuming she’d used her real name. Danny hadn’t. He thought of Lasner on the train: Who changes names? Actors. Or Danny, with something to hide.

He spent the rest of the day with Hal Jasper, a short, wiry man, still in uniform, with a permanent five o’clock shadow that suggested sprouting hair everywhere else. He was one of those technicians for whom film was tactile, a physical thing, not another form of theater. There was a reverence in the way he handled it, each splice a weighed decision. He’d already screened most of the footage, waiting for Ben, and now was full of ideas about it, eager to start.

“For the opening?” he said, framing his hands. “There wasn’t enough in the Dachau reel, but if you add some of the other material— Belsen, I guess, right?—you can go in just the way a GI would. The fence, the gates, everything. First time you see it. Walk in, looking around. What the hell happened here? Let it sink in. The faces. You don’t say a word. Just look. Put a big chalk mark on the floor.”

“A crime story,” Ben said.

“It’s the way in. I mean, if you see it that way.”

“A crime,” Ben said, thinking. “Why we need trials.”

“Trials. How the hell do you judge people like this, I don’t know. Unless you string them all up. Then you’re doing what they did.”

Ben looked up at the intensity in his voice. Thinking of Germans in greatcoats with attack dogs, not the kids eating out of PX garbage cans, both things true.

“Signal Corps said there’s more footage coming, but let me start with this.”

Ben nodded, feeling like an assistant, the machinery of the studio already whirring around him.

There were technician reqs to fill out and discarded film to be sorted and sent back to Fort Roach, so it was late by the time the gate called to say there was a delivery for him. Kelly, almost forgotten. It was still light, but the lot was quiet now, only a few distant carpenter hammers banging on a set somewhere. In the Admin screening rooms, they’d be setting up the rushes for Lasner and the producers, but most of Continental had gone home. The east sides of the sound stages were in shadows.

“Anything?” Ben asked, taking the manila envelope.

“Nada,” Kelly said. “Only a Red. If he is. Polly’s got them under every bed, so who knows?”

“A woman?” Ben said, interested.

“No. Guy. No connection. Probably some name she got from the Tenney Committee. They feed her stuff they can’t use—can’t prove. Then she runs it and they watch what happens. What pops out of the hole. Cozy.”

“And nothing else?”

“Not at the old Cherokee. You know what, though? She’s got Frank Cabot as a fruit. That’ll come as a surprise to his ex-wives.” He grinned. “Or maybe not.”

“Where does she get this stuff anyway?”

“Little birds. Chirp, chirp. And once in a while she gets hold of something real and makes him sing. ‘You wouldn’t want me to—’ And of course he doesn’t. Can’t. So he feeds her someone else.”

“Nice.”

Kelly shrugged. “Hooray for Hollywood. Don’t work too late,” he said, making a mock salute with one finger. “Let me know if you get a match.”