SIXTEEN

The Canteen managers told Jack he could close out the evening, telling us we could go on at eleven thirty as long as we wrapped it up within twenty minutes, to give the band time to play a final couple of songs and spit everyone back out on Cahuenga by midnight.

At first I was relieved to have such a late spot. Jack had been on set all day shooting the “For Sale by Owner” number, so we hadn’t had a moment to rehearse the terrible sketch I’d banged out in my office. The Canteen opened at seven, so we’d have plenty of time before we went on. When Jack didn’t even wait until we’d reached the Canteen, however, to crack a flask in the back seat of the cab we were sharing from the studio—I started to worry. We had four and a half hours to rehearse, but it was also four and a half hours for Jack to drink.

“Hey, maybe we should both lay off,” I said when he offered the flask to me. “We want to stay sharp.”

“This is how I stay sharp” was his only answer. Then something out the window caught his eye. “Holy sh—look.”

I followed his gaze to see June and Don, walking north together on Vine Street. The two were deep in conversation—June talking animatedly, Don with his brow furrowed in thought and his hands buried in his pockets. “They’re walking to the Canteen together!” said Jack, whispering as if they might be able to hear us. “Everyone from Pacific is going to the Canteen tonight, and she chose to walk with Don?”

I had to admit, it was unusual. “Maybe they happened to be leaving at the same time and ran into each other on the street.”

“I know what we’ll do,” Jack said, after taking another slug from the flask. “Let’s wait for them outside the Canteen and confront them.”

“Confront them?”

“I mean—talk to them. You know. Ask some questions.”

We didn’t have to wait long. Traffic snaked so slowly up Vine Street that by car, we only arrived at the Canteen a few minutes before June and Don did on foot. I watched June carefully as they rounded the corner, looking for any sign that she felt guilty for being caught. Nothing.

“Look who it is,” Jack said as the two approached us. I tried to shoot him a look to keep it down. With the Canteen about to open, there were more than a few onlookers milling about, hoping to catch a glimpse of their favorite stars. The last thing we needed was an item in the gossip columns that Jack Kott had accosted a grieving widower in an alley. “Don, you don’t normally show up to Pacific nights. What gives?”

“Normally, I didn’t like putting my wife in the position of having to choose between spending time with me or her friends, who hate me,” answered Don.

“I don’t hate you,” said Jack. “I don’t think about you at all, most of the time. I merely dislike you when I’m reminded of your existence, like when a beet turns up in a sandwich.”

“Don’t be an asshole,” June said.

Don only smiled. “How’s the radio treating you these days, Jack?”

“See, this is why we don’t like you. I tell you to your face, openly, that I dislike you, and all I get back is polite conversation. Be a man, Don. Fight back.”

“You don’t want that,” Don replied. “Unlike you, I actually served in the military.”

“There you go!” said Jack. “You could have worded it a little better. ‘I was actually fit to serve’—that’s nice ’cause then you also get a little jab in there about how I’m crazy.”

“Ignore him. He’s drunk,” said June.

“Not yet,” Jack replied.

“I’m going in to start my shift,” said Don. “Thanks for the comedy advice, Jack. Always a pleasure.”

“Hold on,” said Jack. “It was nice of you to walk June over from the studio. Did you two have a nice talk?”

Don only tipped his cap and headed inside. Jack made a sour face, and June punched him in the arm. “What is wrong with you? The man’s wife just died.” Before either of us could respond, she had turned on her heel to follow Don through the volunteer door.

Jack sucked on his teeth as he watched her go. “I need a drink,” he declared. “There’s a bar two blocks north. Let’s go.”

“We have to rehearse,” I said.

“One drink. We’ll rehearse after. We have four hours.”

I didn’t know what to say. He’d been performing his entire life; surely he knew how much he could drink before a show and still go on. Who was I to stop him? “I’ll stay here,” I said. “I’m not thirsty.”

“I’ll be back soon,” he said. “I won’t be long.”

He pulled me into one more kiss, and then he was gone.

I spent an hour reading over my lines in the unfinished room upstairs, and when I couldn’t take it anymore I went down to the kitchen to make sandwiches. I couldn’t go out on the floor without leaving my bag unattended somewhere, so kitchen duty seemed like the next-best option to occupy my hands and keep me from losing my mind with nerves. I was starting to get the feeling that Jack’s and my performance would end the evening on an incredibly sour note.

Around ten o’clock, with Jack nowhere in sight, Bette approached me.

“Jack said you were part of his act tonight,” she said. “Do you know where he is?”

“He had to run an errand,” I replied.

I could tell from her raised eyebrow she knew exactly what kind of errand I was talking about, but she said nothing.

He’ll be here, I told myself. Jack was known for the drinking, for the Communism, for the scandalous things he said on the radio every now and then, but he’d never had a reputation for being irresponsible. He’d never been a no-show on set or missed a broadcast, as far as I could recall. He was a loose cannon, but he could still reliably fire cannonballs.

At eleven, I headed for the sound booth, which was also the de facto green room, given the Canteen’s limited space. Soon Terry, June, and Vic joined me, there for some strange preshow bonding that no one was quite sure we were friendly enough at the moment to be doing but all felt compelled to do nonetheless. I kept glancing at the clock on the wall, and Vic seemed to read my mind. “He’ll be here,” he said.

Sure enough, with fifteen minutes to spare, Jack waltzed through the stage door. I was relieved to see he didn’t seem too drunk—he could walk, at least, which was a start. His hair was a bit disheveled, and his tie had become loose around the neck, but he was in one piece and knew where he was, so I breathed a sigh of relief. He winked at me as I handed him his copy of the script. “Told you I’d be back,” he said.

“You also said you’d be gone an hour and have one drink,” I replied. “We haven’t rehearsed.”

“I did have one drink. I didn’t specify the size. And I never rehearse. Keeps the material fresh.” He looked around at June, Terry, and Vic. “You should go get seats. You’re going to want the best view in the house for the acting debut of Miss Annie Laurence.”

“Opens her legs one time, and next she’s debuting as an actress,” muttered Vic.

“If that’s a lead-in to a comment about me, you can shove it,” June said.

“It wasn’t going to be, but give me a minute. I can get there.”

“Do you think my purse will be safe in the booth?” I asked Jack, maybe a little too loud. My debut as an actress was already off to an auspicious start. “The coat check girl was on a break.”

“I can hold on to it, if you want,” said June.

“June, you don’t want to be responsible for her enormous purse,” said Jack instantly, ushering the three of them out. “It’ll be fine in the booth.”

“Her purse really is enormous,” I heard June mutter as they walked out to the street. “It’s why I assumed she was a lesbian.”

“Me too!” cried Vic.

Jack shut the door behind them and grinned at me. “Ready?” he asked.

The bandleader introduced Jack, and I had about five minutes alone in the sound booth to get my bearings. I cracked the door an inch to get a peek at the crowd. Vic and Terry were along the wall, all the way over by the snack bar. If either one of them were after my purse, they would have to go through the kitchen and out the volunteer entrance into the alley to get it. If they made a move, we’d be able to see it. I assumed June would be near the two of them and spent a moment scanning the crowd but didn’t see her.

Jack had moved from his jokes into the setup of the sketch. “You know, I’ve always considered myself a serious writer,” he began. That alone got enough of a laugh that I momentarily felt bad for making him say it. “This weekend, I’m actually going to dinner with some of my fellow serious writers. Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, even Willa Cather’s riding in. So to help me prepare, I’ve asked my dear friend Miss Annie Laurence to give me some notes. Annie?”

I took one last deep gulp of air and walked onstage.

The lights were surprisingly bright out there—nowhere near as blinding as a Broadway stage, but it still took my eyes a minute to adjust. There was only one mic, in the middle of the stage, so I made my way next to Jack. The seconds it took me to cross felt like days with all those eyes on me. The front row, sitting on the floor, were so close any one of the servicemen could have reached out and grabbed my ankles if he wanted to. Even this late in the evening, they were packed in like sardines and stretching back all the way to the door.

“Hi, Jack,” I said, trying to keep the paper script I held in my hand still.

“Annie, you’re a writer,” said Jack. “What have you written?”

“I’ve had two plays on Broadway, and I’m working on a movie,” I answered.

“A movie—that’s swell,” Jack said. “I like movies. They’re like plays with no ambition.”

Even though he’d spent the last four hours drinking, he wasn’t reading from his script at all, just casually talking with his hands in his pockets as if this were the most average day in the world. As the boys laughed at the joke, Jack’s eyes flickered toward the front entrance of the Canteen. I followed his gaze and saw what he saw: June was right by the door, and next to her? Don Farris.

“What have you written, Jack?” I asked, my voice cracking slightly.

“Thanks for asking,” he improvised, and the genuine gratitude with which he said it—clearly making fun of how I was glued to a piece of paper to even recite my own résumé—got another laugh. “You know how everyone answers the telephone a little bit differently? For example, I say, ‘Kott residence’; my sister says, ‘You’ve reached the Kotts’; and my mother says, ‘Jack, stop calling. I’m not sending more money.’”

With my body angled toward the mic, Terry and Vic were right in my line of sight, but I had to look out a bit to see June. I adjusted my position to keep her in my sight line. “What about it?”

“Well, I write those.”

“You write telephone greetings?”

“It’s a very exciting market,” said Jack. “Think about it. Books have been around for hundreds of years. If you want to write a book, there’s a good chance some other fellow’s written it already. But the telephone’s only been around a few decades, which means there’s lots more room for innovation. You ever hear someone answer the phone and say, ‘Broom closet, this is the sweeper speaking’?”

“I haven’t,” I said.

“There you go. That’ll be fifty dollars.”

“Fifty dollars!” I exclaimed. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Don lean in and whisper something to June. She nodded.

“Originality ain’t cheap,” Jack said. Our eyes locked—he had seen it too. “That’s what I tell NBC. They have to pay me double or else I just repeat Fred Allen’s show.”

June and Don were on the move, heading for the front door of the Canteen. My heart started to pound. This was it—this was really it. They could be going for my purse.

To be honest, I was disappointed. To have it all—the murder, the threats—come down to a fit of jealousy over a man? I thought June had been better than that.

I tried to keep my cool, remind myself it wasn’t over just yet. We had to act normally until we could get offstage and check my bag. Not until then would we know for sure what June and Don had done. “But, Jack,” I began, hoping neither of them would notice that the hand holding my script had begun shaking like a leaf. “This is a dinner full of serious writers. You can’t show up with—”

“Hold on, I have to stop you,” said Jack. I looked up from the script, but he wasn’t looking at me, instead gazing out into the crowd. At first I thought he was improvising, riffing on the sketch. Then he leaned into the mic. “June Lee, where are you going?”

“Jack,” I hissed.

He ignored me. Out in the crowd, June turned around, confused. She and Don had nearly reached the door. “Yeah, I’m talking to you,” Jack went on. “Why are you leaving early, in the middle of my show? With your dead friend’s husband?”

The eyes of the several hundred servicemen immediately snapped to the back of the Canteen. A few of the others who had been standing along the front wall ducked away from Don and June, as if to say they weren’t part of this. June’s cheeks flushed. “What is your problem, Kott?” shouted Don.

“What’s my problem?” Jack shot back. I grabbed his arm, and he immediately shook me away, so violently I stumbled back a few steps. “You killed her. The two of you did. That’s my problem!”

Pandemonium is the only word I can find to describe what happened next. Half the crowd started running for June and Don, egged on by Jack shouting into the microphone not to let them leave. The rest of the crowd could only fall over themselves as they tried to get out of the way. A dozen or so volunteers swarmed the stage, trying to pull the microphone away from Jack. Out of nowhere, Terry grabbed Jack and yanked him back into the sound booth; I tried to follow through the swarm of band members who were coming back onstage to see what all the fuss was.

When I finally made it out the back entrance and onto the street, Jack was hysterical, hardly caring that dozens of strangers had assembled to watch him ranting in the street. Terry was doing her best to calm him down, but it was in vain. “They killed her, Ter, I know they did. They’re having an affair, and she got in the way. I know they did, I know it. I know what I saw—”

A moment later, Don Farris rounded the corner with murder in his eyes and knocked Jack square in the jaw.

Jack stumbled backward, hitting the ground as the crowd gasped. A moment later he was back on his feet, lunging for Don, who grabbed him by the lapel and sent him flying back once again. Terry leapt between them, urging Don to stop in a calm but commanding voice, and though his hands were still clenched in tight angry fists, he seemed to listen. June arrived next, grabbing Jack as he attempted unsteadily to rise to his feet a second time. “I’m not sleeping with him!” she shouted in Jack’s face, mascara pouring down her cheeks. “I just wanted a friend who doesn’t call me a slut all the time!”

I watched it all unfold in horror. How had this happened? In forty-eight hours, the club had gone from laughing on Henry’s stolen couch to literally brawling in the street.

Vic appeared at my side and wordlessly handed me a cigarette. “I tried to warn you,” he said after I took it and lit it off the one in his hands. “The only thing Jack Kott knows how to do is self-destruct.”

“What do we do?” I said.

“Join the fray, if you want, or go home,” he said with a shrug. “Not my problem to care what any of you do anymore. Shame, really. If a man says something clever but he doesn’t have a club to repeat it to later, did he even say it all?”

With that, he stalked off into the night. I was about to follow him when I remembered something.

I knew as soon as I ran back to the booth what I’d find. The purse was still there, at least. I’d have money to take a cab home or somewhere—on top of all this, my apartment still had a hole instead of a front window. But I was right. When I reached my hand into the bag, the camera was there, my keys were there, the crumpled-up piece of paper that said I was in love with the Cooks was there…but Fiona’s notebook was gone.

It was nearly one in the morning by the time I made my way back home. My plan had been, once again, to grab a few of my things and head for the closest hotel. But by the time I reached my apartment, I was too exhausted to do anything but collapse on the couch.

I was done with Los Angeles. I’d tried to start my life over with a move, tried to give it some meaning by solving Fiona’s death, even tried to have an affair again, and look where it all had landed me. The message was clear: I was a failure in New York and a failure out here. It was time to pack in my dreams and give up. I’d finish out my contract with Pacific and be on the next train out. I’d go back to Westchester and be a shop girl, and once I was old and had inherited the house and lived there alone, the neighbors would develop all sorts of interesting gossip about me. “You know Miss Laurence, up on Church Street? She once had an affair with Adam and Beverly Cook.” “The movie stars? With crazy old Annie Laurence? I doubt it.”

I poured the last of the vodka into a mug and put on Side 1 of the Hilbert concerto again. I was asleep before either was finished.

The next thing I knew, someone was pounding at my front door.

I’d been having an uneasy dream I’d had a few times before, about showing up to the first day of rehearsals for a play only to find that I’d forgotten to write it. The knocking grew louder and louder, until I shouted, “Could somebody get that?” and woke myself up.

The tarp was making all the morning light that streamed into the apartment a moody shade of blue. I hoisted myself off the couch and made my way to the door.

Terry was there, dressed for work in a smart black suit and looking anxious. At first I thought she was here to round me up for not showing up to work on time, but surely after the events of last night, I would get a pass. “Jack’s not here, is he?” she asked.

“Of course not,” I said. “Why? Is he missing?”

“The cops took both him and Don to the station last night, but I don’t know what they did with him after that. I just wanted to make sure you were alone. Can I come in?”

I stood aside, and she walked in, immediately settling on my couch. I lingered there in the middle of the room, not sure how to take this or even a hundred percent certain I wasn’t still dreaming. “I don’t see any way the club comes back after last night,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I replied.

“What are you apologizing for? Not your fault,” she said.

It was, in a way. I could have stopped Jack from going off to drink. I could have done more to discourage his paranoia over June and Don. Hell, the only reason we were on that stage was because of a plan he saw in a play I wrote. I sank into the couch next to Terry. It was only just now occurring to me that when Adam catches Bev going for the money in the play, it’s merely a distraction that allows the real murderer to escape. How come both of us had forgotten that? “It feels as if everything is my fault,” I said. “Fiona…everything. You were all so happy before I showed up.”

Terry guffawed. “Don’t think so highly of yourself. We were plenty unhappy. Maybe you were the catalyst for some things, but that club has been long overdue for someone to get punched in the kisser. I’m glad it’s dissolving, quite frankly. I’m done keeping secrets for those louses. I came here to tell you something. Something I’ve wanted to say since the night Fiona died. I felt as if I had to keep quiet because we were all protecting each other. I told myself it wasn’t my secret to tell, that he must have reasons for not sharing it with the group. But after last night? What’s left to protect anymore?”

“‘He’?” I said. “You mean Jack? What else did he do?”

She shook her head. “Not Jack. Victor.”