NINETEEN

I bummed a cigarette off one of the other girls outside and wandered down to the corner to be alone. Why had I done this? Why had I done any of this? Why had I been so certain a woman I knew half a week couldn’t have taken her own life? Vic was right—I wanted to be the smartest. Smart enough that the Ambassador’s Club would like me, smart enough that Devlin wouldn’t sideline me, smart enough that Beverly and Adam would regret leaving me behind. When you write a play that makes the audience gasp at the ending, you feel like a god. Had all this been me chasing that feeling again? Had I forgotten, like Jack said, that this was real? That this counted?

There was one thing I could do, at least. I put out my cigarette and went back inside, heading immediately for the coat check at the front of the building and asking for my purse. The bottles of pills, freshly refilled that day, jostled inside as I carried it to the bathroom, where I emptied both the uppers and the downers into the toilet quickly, before I could lose my nerve. From now on, any decision I was making, any ghosts I was hearing, I was going to be certain they were coming from my own brain. If that made me less than a perfect cog in the Pacific machine, so be it.

I had hardly rechecked my bag when I was pulled onto the dance floor. I almost declined, but it didn’t feel right. I’d had an eventful day, month, year, but nowhere near as eventful as this sailor had had, would have. I looked at him and found my brain automatically blurring out his face, the way one did when caught up in the frenetic pace of the Canteen dance floor. This time, I actively worked to counteract the effect. I looked in his eyes (brown), studied the shape of his face (round, friendly, with a genuine smile and bushy eyebrows), noticed the way his arms felt around my waist.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Les,” he replied.

“I’m Annie,” I said. “Where are you from?”

“Cincinnati.”

“Neat. I’m from Pennsylvania. We’re neighbors.”

“I’ll be sure to write home and tell the block we ran into one another.”

I smiled. “Is this your first time at the Canteen?”

“It is,” he said.

“What do you think of it?”

He looked as if he were about to stop himself from saying something. “It’s fun,” he said finally. “I liked Mickey Rooney. And it’s always fun to dance. I love dancing.”

“You can be honest,” I said.

Les grinned. “Am I that transparent? It’s grand that you all are doing this. But I do get this sense… I don’t know. That we’re supposed to be grateful for all of it? And it’s not like I’m not. But I’d be more grateful to not be here at all.”

“Of course,” I said.

“One of the girls I danced with earlier… I said I was from Cincinnati, and she said, ‘Bet you don’t have many movie stars in Cincinnati!’ As if the only thing I care about right now is movie stars.”

“It’s the only thing Hollywood cares about,” I said. “So they assume it’s the only thing everyone else cares about too.”

“I can tell. But the sandwiches are good,” he said with a shrug. “So there’s that.”

We laughed, and he spun me around as the song hit a crescendo, ending with a complicated dip that got a reaction from the other dancers nearby. I gave him a hug and we parted ways, each of us disappearing off into the crowd.

But our brief conversation lingered with me. This town was obsessed with stars. They were products, selected and crafted. I thought about Beverly, measuring her knees; Adam, taking horseback riding lessons. The memo Fiona had copied down, the long list of initials Irma and Devlin were considering for new male stars. Henry had been the chosen one, the new star to save the studio and get it through the war. How far would Pacific Pictures go to protect that investment?

The thing about endings, Adam had said, is they are intrinsically linked to beginnings. It had all begun here, at the Hollywood Canteen, one night in the kitchen as servicemen and MGM stars listened to a piano concerto. For all our following the trail of Fiona’s article, we’d never done something so basic to any mystery. We’d never returned to the scene of the crime.

When the current song ended and I’d said farewell to the man I’d been dancing with, I made my way to the kitchen. With Mickey Rooney’s performance over, it was back in full swing again. A couple of volunteers were making sandwiches at the island in the center; a woman was loading used cups into a dishwasher; a few of the Canteen managers were discussing the upcoming week’s schedule over mugs of coffee. None of them paid any attention to me. I went over to the window through which I’d seen Fiona’s body and looked out into the darkness. My reflection stared back at me, the kitchen behind me, reflected in the glass: the volunteers, the island, the sandwiches, the coffee…

“What’s that?” I asked.

No one was listening to me, so no one answered the question. I squinted at the reflection. There was a piece of paper underneath the island.

I turned around, crouching down low and apologizing to George Burns as I reached in between his legs to grab it. The piece of paper had slid pretty far under the island. Finally, after a fair amount of groping around, my fingers curled around its edges, and I was able to slide it out.

It wasn’t a piece of paper at all, I realized. It was a pad, a familiar one. I’d carried a piece of paper torn from it to the studio pharmacist my second week on the lot, exchanged it for a jar of white pills identical to the ones I’d flushed down the Canteen toilet.

Pacific Pictures Medical Offices, Office of Mrs. Irma Feinstein, Assistant to Mr. Devlin Murray.

How could this have gotten here? Irma told me she had lost it, but Irma didn’t volunteer at the Canteen. All the Pacific nights I’d attended, I’d never seen her here, not once. It couldn’t have been stolen by some pill-addicted Pacific actor either—Irma always carried it on her person; she told me that herself. Besides, who would need to steal it? The woman would have happily written you a morphine prescription if you told her it would somehow make Pacific Pictures money.

No. Irma Feldstein had been in this kitchen, and this pad had been deliberately placed to prove it. Whether it had originally fallen accidentally out of Irma’s jacket during a struggle or Fiona had made a point to grab it, I’d never know, but Fiona had waited until Irma wasn’t looking and flung it under that counter as far as she could. She knew enough to know if it were on her person, the police being paid off by Pacific could find it and dispose of it without telling anyone. Her only hope, her last resort, had been to stash it at the scene of the crime. One last chance for someone to put together another one of Fiona Farris’s clever hints.

She had been smart.

I tucked the pad carefully into my pocket before claiming my things from coat check and leaping into the first taxi I saw. I went straight to Vic’s house, where I banged on the door fruitlessly until the taxi driver, who was waiting, rolled down the window and asked if I’d like him to take me somewhere else. Not knowing what else to do, I gave him my address. I could find a neighbor with a phone and try to reach Vic at Henry’s, assuming that’s where he was.

I wouldn’t get a chance. When I reached my apartment, I found not a stray black cat on my doorstep but Detectives Kiblowski and Cooper.

“Annie Laurence?” Kiblowski asked.

Why was he asking? He knew who I was by now. “Is something wrong?” I asked.

“You’re under arrest,” he replied.

I assumed I had heard him wrong and did that thing one does at loud parties when you haven’t quite made out your conversation partner’s words: smiled and nodded. It was only when he came toward me with a pair of handcuffs that the meaning of his words sank in.

“Wait, me?” I asked.

“For the murder of Fiona Farris,” he went on.

“But I didn’t murder her,” I said, and as the words left my mouth, it clicked. I had started a rumor that morning that I was going to finish Fiona’s article, hoping the news would reach the murderer’s ears. It had; it just wasn’t the murderer I’d expected it to be. Irma Feinstein, aware of everything that happened on the Pacific lot, had heard it too, and this was her way of ensuring I never ruined the studio’s investment in Henry Hilbert.

I had to think fast. The only evidence I had against Irma was in my pocket. I had to get rid of it somehow before the police searched me. Kiblowski was narrowing in with the handcuffs. “Wait!” I cried. “Can I use the restroom?”

“You can use the restroom at the station.”

“I’ll cooperate with you, I promise, only it’s my time of the month,” I lied quickly. “I’m not sure it can wait—”

Kiblowski made a face. “Fine. But hurry up. Cooper, take her in.”

Cooper watched me unlock my apartment door. “Leave the purse with me,” he said.

Thank God I’d put the prescription pad in my pocket. I walked to the bathroom, as calmly as I could muster, and stashed the notepad in the tiny crack between the porcelain back and the wall, where I prayed no one would find it. I flushed the toilet, washed my hands, and went to meet my fate.

Kiblowski and Cooper took me to the same station in Hollywood we’d sat in the night Henry had thrown a brick in my window. Not that my treatment there the first time had been stellar, but this was far worse. I was fingerprinted, photographed, given a scratchy beige jumpsuit to put on, and shoved into an empty interrogation room. A glass of water had been kindly placed on the table for me. Unfortunately, my hands were handcuffed behind my back.

I waited for the detectives to arrive, which they did not. They must have been trying to psych me out, watching from somewhere, wanting to see me squirm. Well, I wasn’t guilty. They could watch all night and would see nothing but a woman in handcuffs who would eventually need to go to the bathroom for real.

After maybe half an hour went by, it started getting hotter. I couldn’t tell if this was deliberate—trying to sweat me out?—or if the air-conditioning had kicked off for the night. Ten minutes later, it became extremely cold. My body, which was now coated in sweat, became clammy and frigid. My teeth chattered. I had to hand this round to Kiblowski and Cooper: I would have put temperature-related mind games above their skill level.

I distracted myself by putting together the remaining pieces. Jack had said Irma had interviewed him about his past when considering him as a potential Pacific star. That must have been when Henry spilled the beans—the “past issues” that Irma had mentioned in her list for Devlin. Henry must have given Irma the sheet music, the letters, everything else from Fiona’s office: the studio would want to hold on to that, make sure if Vic got any ideas about going public, he’d have no evidence to back himself up. Henry lied to Vic and said the movers had lost all the sheet music, and then Fiona stole it all from Irma’s storage on whatever day she’d broken in and copied down all those memos. It was bold of her to take it. She must have thought no one would notice if it went missing. I wondered if that had been her mistake, the thing that had tipped off Irma and Devlin that a story was coming, the thing that had made Irma think about clever methods of poisoning she’d read about recently in scripts.

I sat there, shivering, for a long time, aching to wrap my arms around my torso. I was starting to lose track of how long I’d been sitting there. An hour? More? My head began to pound, the cold sweating got worse, my stomach began to rumble. Finally, I laid my head down on the cold metal table and tried to close my eyes, thinking I might as well get some rest if they were going to leave me here to rot.

And then it all started.

Thumping, footsteps, shouting, all coming from above me, out of nowhere and alarmingly loud. There were people on the roof of the police station! I bolted upright, my eyes wide in panic. If the station were under attack, would they leave me here, handcuffed and helpless? “What’s going on?” I shouted, so loudly the sound bounced around the empty room. The noises were only growing louder and louder. Any minute now, I was certain someone would kick down the door to this room and take me as a hostage.

Then, the strangest thing—whoever was taking over this police station started to play music. Not a song I could recognize; something screechy and discordant, a hundred instruments being played by toddlers. As I was racking my brain for an explanation of why what had to be some kind of militia group was attempting to torture us with a terrible symphony, the truth dawned on me.

None of this was real. I was in a silent room. The only one who could hear these noises was me. I tried to take a deep breath but suddenly struggled to pull air into my lungs.

As if they had been waiting for panic to set in, Kiblowski and Cooper chose this moment to enter the room. “Sorry for the wait, Miss Laurence,” said Kiblowski pleasantly, flipping through a folder as if the hours I had sat there were no more inconvenient than a delayed streetcar. “We had a lot of evidence to sift through before we got started.”

I hadn’t recovered from my first spiral, and this sent me only further down. I had thought this was a trumped-up arrest charge meant to smear my name to the public. I hadn’t expected them to have evidence against me. How could they? I hadn’t done it.

“Miss Laurence—may I call you Annie?—I’m wondering if we could go over again where you were on the night of Mrs. Farris’s death,” began Kiblowski.

“I was upstairs,” I answered. “In the unfinished room on the second floor over the stage.” Then, too eagerly and too suspiciously, I added, “Jack Kott saw me.”

Kiblowski held up a hand, as if to say, We’ll get to that. “Back all the way up,” he said. “Where is this unfinished room?”

I wasn’t sure what he was asking. “Upstairs?”

“Upstairs where?”

“At the Hollywood Canteen?”

“Ah,” said Kiblowski. “So you were at the Hollywood Canteen. What were you doing there?”

“Volunteering,” I said. “I volunteer as a hostess there.”

“Interesting,” said Kiblowski, nodding. “Why?”

“It’s the Hollywood Canteen” was the only thing I could think to reply. “Everyone volunteers there. We have to.”

“Sure,” said Kiblowski. “Plus, I bet you meet a lot of successful people, volunteering at a place like that.”

“I suppose,” I said.

“That’s where you first met Mrs. Farris, isn’t it?” asked Kiblowski. “And the rest of that crew?”

I nodded.

“Do you happen to remember how?”

I tried to grasp for specifics. “I believe I saw them sitting together and went up and introduced myself,” I said.

“Interesting,” said Kiblowski. “And they invited you into their club, just like that?”

“Well, no,” I said. “They invited me for a drink. I wasn’t part of the club until—” I was halfway through the sentence when I realized perhaps I shouldn’t confess to stealing Henry Hilbert’s couch. “Until later,” I finished.

Kiblowski smiled, and I felt a pang of dread, as if I’d said something wrong. “So volunteering at the Hollywood Canteen, meeting Mrs. Farris, being introduced to her friends—that was all rather good for you,” he said.

“Yes, I suppose,” I answered.

“Do you have other friends, Annie?” Cooper asked, a little pointedly.

“I just moved here,” I said.

“So, no, then.”

“Let’s talk about that, actually,” said Kiblowski. “Why did you move out here? I’m curious.”

“I’d been offered a contract with Pacific Pictures,” I answered.

“That’s a long move, all the way from New York,” Cooper said.

“Sure is,” Kiblowski agreed. “I’m from Chicago, and the only reason I came all the way out here was—well, I’ll just say it: my wife left me.”

I stared at him.

He let me stare for a beat, then shrugged. “You need a big kick in the pants to make a change like that, is all I’m saying. Anything like that happen to you, spurn you to move all the way out to California?”

“I’d been offered a contract with Pacific Pictures,” I repeated, adding for effect, “I’ve always been a fan of money.”

Kiblowski laughed. “Can’t blame you there,” he said.

“So,” began Cooper, “you didn’t move out here to follow Mr. and Mrs. Adam Cook?”

I probably would have handled a slap in the face better. My jaw went slack, my already uneasy stomach lurched. “I did not,” I said, immediately regretting the forcefulness with which I spoke. It was too emotional. I’d exposed an open wound to a predator out for blood.

“Sounds like a touchy subject,” said Kiblowski. “This Adam and Beverly Cook—do they think you moved out here to follow them?”

“I don’t know what they think,” I said.

“Well, you ran into them shortly after you arrived,” Kiblowski said. “And they reacted poorly to that, didn’t they?”

Something began burning at the back of my throat as I realized the only possible way he could know that. Was it before or after she’d tried to undress me against her piano that Beverly had spoken to the cops behind my back? “They did,” I admitted. “But I didn’t move out here to follow them. If they said that, they’re wrong.”

“Of course,” said Kiblowski. “Still.” He tapped his fingers on the table. “Pretty good timing on that Pacific contract. You know, maybe it was one of those situations where—you wouldn’t have followed them on your own but that contract pushed you over the edge.”

Saying anything felt like hurling myself in front of an oncoming train. “No,” I said, tears starting to pool in my eyes. “I just needed to go somewhere. I needed a change. I needed—Pacific was the first offer I got. I would have gone anywhere. It just happened to be where they had gone.”

“And why did you need a change?” asked Kiblowski, gentle all of a sudden, his voice a whisper. The tears had spilled over, and I was crying now, big fat embarrassing tears streaming down my cheeks that I couldn’t wipe away. It was the first time, I realized, that I had cried for Beverly and Adam. I’d raged at them, cursed them, begged them to change their minds, wanted to kill them, wanted to kill myself, felt nothing inside, pounded my fists against the floor, pounded my head against the wall, smoked until my apartment was so full of haze I couldn’t see a foot in front of me and drank until the room spun so much I couldn’t hear my own thoughts. Not once had I cried for us, for the soft ring of blond curls around Bev’s head as she slept that I’d never see again, for Adam’s dimples and his big head and small smile that crossed his face just before he said something that would knock your socks off with its wit.

“You were involved with Mr. Cook, weren’t you?” prompted Kiblowski after it became clear the lump in my throat was too big to allow me to speak. “His wife found out he was carrying on with the writer of the show they were starring in and dragged him out here to get him away from you. You saw the first opportunity to follow them and took it.”

I wanted to kiss Beverly for this story, for this tiny lie that meant I didn’t have to expose every single one of the raw edges of my heart to these men in this cold, dark room. I wanted to kiss her, and then I wanted to hit her. How easy had it been for her to lie like that? How easy had it been to deny me?

Kiblowski cleared his throat. “Annie,” he prodded. “Is that what happened?”

None of this had anything to do with Fiona anyway. What difference did it make? “Yes,” I said, sighing the word out. It felt like I had been trying to stay afloat but finally decided to sink down into the warm water. “Yes, I was involved with Mr. Cook.”

“Did anyone else know you were fooling around with another woman’s husband?” asked Cooper.

“The affair,” Kiblowski corrected diplomatically. “Did anyone else know about the affair?”

I shook my head. “No, we kept it secret.”

Kiblowski opened the folder in front of him and flipped through, producing a clipping from a newspaper, which he slid over to me.

Stars Shine, Ending Disappoints in Altogether Too Many Murders, the familiar headline read.

By Fiona Farris.

“Would you mind reading me that bit we have underlined?” asked Kiblowski.

I didn’t have to look for the underline, and I didn’t need to read it. That quote had been burned in my mind since that cold February opening night all those months ago. “Playwright Annie Laurence writes so lovingly for her two leads one wonders if the three don’t spend their off-hours running lines among an extra-large bedroom set.”

“Sort of sounds like one other person might have known,” said Cooper.

So this was their angle, the story they’d concocted for me. I had killed Fiona because she knew about my affair.

“She was only making a joke,” I said.

“To be honest with you, Annie, before this evening, I would have agreed with you on that,” said Kiblowski. “Someone we interviewed brought up that article, and personally, I thought it was a reach. But then we brought you in here tonight and found something in your bag.”

Kiblowski opened the folder one more time, and this time slid across to me the piece of paper I had torn from Fiona’s notebook, all smoothed out for me to read.

Annie Laurence—playwright—involved with the Cooks?

“That’s Mrs. Farris’s handwriting,” said Cooper.

I had nothing to say. I could only stare at Fiona’s messy, slanted penmanship.

“Did you find this at the Canteen?” Kiblowski finally prompted. “Did it fall out of Fiona’s pocket the night you met her?”

“I don’t remember how I found that,” I said finally.

“But you panicked when you read it, didn’t you?” he went on. “Mrs. Farris knew, and she was going to reveal yours and Mr. Cook’s secret to the world.”

“You were only trying to protect the man you loved,” said Cooper. They were really closing in on me, if Cooper was getting in on the nice cop game. “He’d only just moved out here. You didn’t want Fiona Farris ruining his reputation before his film career could even get off the ground.”

“How unfair would that be?” said Kiblowski.

“That’s not what happened” was all I could say.

“So that’s all that’s going on here,” said Kiblowski. “You happened to meet a woman who happened to make a joke about you that happened to be true and then she happened to be murdered by a poison you knew a great deal about,” said Kiblowski.

“Yes,” I said.

“I guess what I’m wondering is,” began Cooper, “if this is all coincidence, why’d you spill your water on her?”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, and the second I said it, I remembered. I’d danced over to their table, then gotten a glass of water. I was standing nearby, eavesdropping—oh God, how embarrassing—then that couple had rammed into me, and I’d spilled the whole thing on Fiona. “That was an accident.”

Cooper made a show of furrowing his brow. “You don’t know what we’re talking about, or it was an accident?”

“It was an accident,” I repeated.

“So you do know what we’re talking about,” said Cooper. “Curious, then, that you didn’t bring it up when telling us how you met Fiona.”

“I’d forgotten,” I said. “It wasn’t that big a deal.”

“Really?” asked Kiblowski, his eyebrows shooting up. “Because everyone else remembered. They all brought it up right away. Miss Lee, Mr. Durand, Mr. Kott. We asked them all, ‘How did you meet Annie Laurence?’ ‘Oh, she spilled her water all over Fiona at the Hollywood Canteen.’ So why were you the only person not to bring it up?”

“There’s only one reason someone doesn’t bring something up to the cops,” said Cooper. “They don’t want us to know.”

“So it seems likely to me that you spilled that water on purpose,” continued Kiblowski. “To have an excuse to talk to her. After you found that piece of paper there, you decided to worm your way into the group, get invited to drinks. Learn their patterns, gain Fiona’s trust a bit. Am I wrong?”

He was, but on the other hand—was he? I had wanted to talk to Fiona, largely because of what she might have known about me and the Cooks. The night Fiona died, hadn’t I been excited, daydreaming about the look on Adam’s and Beverly’s faces when they saw me talking to her? And if that were true, it was reasonable to conclude I had spilled my water on Fiona on purpose. And if that were true, it was reasonable to conclude…

“Let’s get back to the night of Mrs. Farris’s death,” said Kiblowski, after it became clear I had no answer to why I’d spilled my water. “Where were you during the concert, again?”

I knew the answer to this one, but I was so turned around by now I hesitated before saying, “Upstairs, in the room above the sound booth.”

“And you were in the kitchen before that, right? With Mrs. Farris?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Annie.” Kiblowski leaned forward, his elbows on the table. He lowered his voice. “Did you? Did you kill her?”

“No,” I said.

“Are you sure?” he said, easy and unthreateningly, as if I were a child being asked if I needed to use the potty before leaving the house. “Maybe you asked Fiona if you two could talk during the concert. You didn’t mean for it to happen, I bet. You only brought the poison to show her you were serious about never telling your secret. You didn’t think she’d actually drink it. You didn’t think she’d actually die.”

The noise and music were hammering the inside of my skull now. I pressed my hands to my temple to drown it out. “Jack Kott saw me,” I remembered suddenly. “Jack saw me, upstairs, during the concert.”

“It’s interesting, that,” said Kiblowski. “When we questioned him the night of the murder, Mr. Kott had no recollection of where he was during the concert. We bring all of you back here a few days later, after you’ve become friends with him, and suddenly he does remember.”

“He was in shock the night it happened,” I said.

“I see,” said Kiblowski. “So his story shifting there doesn’t have anything to do with the two of you starting a sexual relationship?”

My mouth flew open, but the surprise passed quickly. Of course they knew that too. They knew almost everything else. I wondered who had ratted that one out. June, after she’d agreed to spy on us for them? “It doesn’t,” I said.

“I heard Jack Kott’s a Communist,” said Cooper. “Is that true?”

“I don’t know,” I said half-heartedly, already aware that it didn’t matter. What was true or not true no longer mattered. It had been decided by Irma and Devlin and Kiblowski and Cooper before they had even put the handcuffs on me what I had done and why I had done it. It would be easier for them if I went along with it, but it wasn’t necessary. They had proof Fiona knew a secret about me and proof the secret was true. They had my whereabouts during the concert completely unaccounted for, except for the changing testimony of the drunk Communist I was screwing, and the murder weapon in a script with my name on it. I’d written my own confession before I even walked in the room.

I was silent for a moment, and then I laughed. I had to. What other response could there have been? I was entirely screwed. I was definitely going to jail, and that was if I wasn’t going to the electric chair. Boy, wouldn’t Beverly and Adam feel sorry for me then? Execution—now that’s how you stick it to your exes.

“I don’t think I’d like to talk anymore without a lawyer,” I said.

“As is your right,” said Kiblowski, shutting the folder. “We’re done, anyway. An officer will be in shortly to take you to a cell.”

He pushed his chair back from the table, making an awful screeching sound, and headed for the door. Cooper started to follow him but then hung back at the last second. “Bet you won’t be writing any articles for the Dispatch now, will you?”

His voice was so low and threatening I almost didn’t hear him. I lifted my head, which I had hung toward the table. “What was that?” I asked.

“You heard me,” he snapped, exiting the room and slamming the door shut behind him.