Kathryn lingered in the corridor outside her boss’ office, nervous as a turkey in November. She fanned herself with two versions of her next column. She had already put off this confrontation for three days and was all out of procrastination.
She strode toward his secretary, faking nonchalance. “Is he free?”
Vera didn’t look up from her typewriter. “Yep.”
“Today’s mood?”
Vera tugged out the letter and screwed it up into a ball. “On a scale from white to black, I’d say battleship gray.”
Kathryn found Billy Wilkerson standing at a teak credenza against the large windows that looked north across Sunset Boulevard toward the Hollywood Hills. He was using a blue checked handkerchief to wipe down a plaster statue painted a striking shade of pink.
“What’s that?” she asked.
Wilkerson stepped aside to give her a full view of a two-foot-tall flamingo with a downward curving beak tipped in black, long spindly legs, and tiny eyes of yellow glass. “Inspiration.” He returned to his desk.
Kathryn took a seat. “How goes it in the casino-building department these days?”
Kathryn and her boss had never actually agreed out loud that the subject of his desert folly was off limits. She’d already made it sufficiently clear that she thought the whole project was a reckless waste of time and money, and he’d made it clear he didn’t care about her opinion one way or the other. It made for an easier working relationship if they simply didn’t talk about it.
Wilkerson sat down to the mess of papers littering his desk. “You need me for something?”
She held up both sheets of paper. “I’m doing a piece on the Busby Berkeley situation.”
The director and choreographer had been suffering through a tough time lately. His mother, with whom he’d been particularly close, had died, and he was floundering in a sinkhole of debt. Still, everyone was shocked when the LA Times reported that he had attempted suicide.
“Got some news to add?” Wilkerson asked without looking up.
“LA General is releasing him to a sanitarium.”
“Probably the best place for him. So what do you need me for?”
I need you to wise up and get out of business with the mob.
“It’s a delicate situation, and I don’t know whether to go with just the hard facts, or softball it into a puff piece.”
She knew how to read his scowl: You’ve never needed my opinion before.
“Whatever you’ve got up your sleeve must be a humdinger,” he growled, “if you think you need to come up with a ploy as feeble as that.”
She lowered the papers. “I know about the million bucks.”
His face froze over. “I didn’t know your sources were that good.”
She looked at the tacky plaster flamingo while she steeled herself. “This time my source was the top of the food chain.”
On the credenza behind him, a barrel-shaped mahogany humidor sat on a shelf out of the sunlight. Wilkerson reached back, flipped open the lid, and pulled out a Montecristo. He closed it, but made no attempt to light the cigar. Instead, he ran the length of it under his nose. “Which food chain might that be?”
Kathryn felt a line of sweat pool along the underwire of her brassiere. “The FBI.”
Wilkerson remained as still as the garish statue behind him. Eventually, he said, “You want to explain that?”
I don’t want to, but I’m going to have to.
“About a year before the end of the war, an FBI agent approached me about becoming an informer for them. I told them no, but they can be persuasive.”
“So they had something on you?”
“No, but they could see I was hostile to the idea, so they said, ‘We only want you for the duration.’ Then they changed their story. ‘We really just need you for one thing.’ They were trying to build a case against Humphrey Bogart. They had some crazy idea he’s a Commie, so they wanted me to befriend him because he lived at the Garden before he married Betty Bacall.”
“And did you?”
Kathryn rubbed her forehead. “It got complicated. The long and short of it is that I’m still on their radar. He’s the one who told me that their main area of interest is a particular Nevada casino.”
“And who is this ‘he’? Your super-secret spy FBI agent G-Man?”
“It’s not like that.” Kathryn thought about their convoluted method of contacting each other through classified ads. Okay, so maybe it is.
“And what have you been able to tell him?”
“I thought I’d given him a solid line on where Ben Siegel got the extra money to fund the rest of the project.”
A cheerless smile curled his lips. “I had no idea Mata Hari was on my payroll.”
“Apparently, I’m not a very good Mata Hari—my lead on Siegel’s dough went nowhere.”
“Why is this the first I’ve heard of it?” The dour smile had already disappeared.
“I figured the best policy was a ‘need to know’ basis.”
“Are we having this conversation because I now need to know?”
Kathryn couldn’t get a grip on whether or not he approved.
“You need to know that the FBI recently started to wiretap all of Siegel’s domiciles and offices.”
Wilkerson’s poker face dropped away. His hand trembled as he lit his Montecristo. “You think they’re wiretapping me?”
“He said they’re not.”
“Do you believe him?”
She pictured Hoyt greeting his father inside the lamp store. “I’d like to, but he only knows what Hoover chooses to tell him. Either way, I felt you should know.”
He blew out a plume of gray-blue smoke. They both watched it shoot toward the ceiling. “I appreciate your sharing this with me.”
Kathryn breathed more easily. She’d been expecting fireworks, maybe some desk thumping and ashtray throwing. But he sat across from her, puffing like a banker. “They don’t care about you,” she said. “The whopper they’re hoping to land is Siegel.” She perched at the edge of the seat and gripped the corner of his desk. “Boss, don’t you think it’s time to let this one go? I know it’s your dream, and I know it could become the ultimate moneymaker for you, but it’s put you a million bucks in debt to the mob. I know you don’t want to hear it, but this might not end well for you.”
She let herself fall back in the chair, sapped. His eyes wandered aimlessly around the messy office until they landed on a framed photograph on his desk. It was of Wilkerson and his fifth wife, Vivian, who he’d married only two months before. He was still contemplating the photograph when someone from the typesetting room burst through the door. He was a short guy, thickset, with Popeye forearms and a perpetual five o’clock shadow.
“Here you go, boss.” He rushed to Wilkerson with a galley proof. “Gimme a jangle when you’re sure it’s exactly what you want.”
“Thanks, Perc,” Wilkerson said, and waited for the guy to leave the room. “You know I can’t walk away,” he told Kathryn. “I’ve got too much invested, and I don’t just mean the money.”
I gave it my best shot.
His telephone rang. She went to get up but he waved her back down. “There’s something I want to ask you,” he said as he picked up the receiver.
Kathryn’s eyes fell onto the galley in front of her as Wilkerson took the call. The fresh black ink was drying in the afternoon sun that was slanting through the panoramic window behind Wilkerson. She blinked when she saw the headline: A VOTE FOR JOE STALIN
For a number of years now, Wilkerson had been using his editorial column, “TradeView,” as a soapbox for his deepening hard-line views. Whenever anyone—especially the more politically active liberals at the Garden—brought them up, Kathryn was quick to point out that she rarely agreed with anything her boss had to say. She would then add that he seldom censored anything she wrote in her “Window on Hollywood” column, and reminded them there were worse things than being given free rein to write whatever she wanted by someone who wrote whatever he wanted.
But “A Vote for Joe Stalin”?
Preoccupied by the phone call with his new wife, Wilkerson flung his feet up on the credenza. Kathryn perched herself forward and swiveled her head to the left to read the column.
He’s actually going to name names! In print!
She recognized many of them. She’d briefly met Dalton Trumbo at the Academy Awards banquet the night he was nominated for Kitty Foyle. She’d met Howard Koch a couple of years later when he won for Casablanca. And Ring Lardner Jr.—Hoyt had asked about him the night the Hollywood Canteen closed down.
By the time Wilkerson got off the telephone, Kathryn was on her feet.
“Are you insane?” She pointed at the galley. “This is libelous. You’ll be sued all the way to bankruptcy court!”
He stared back at her, infuriatingly nonplussed. “I can only be sued if I publish a false statement that is damaging to a person’s reputation.”
“Exactly!” Her voice hit a strident pitch.
“In that case, I’ve got nothing to worry about.”
“How do you figure that?”
He ran a finger down the list of names. “Every one of these men are members of the Communist Party. They won’t be able to deny it.”
“You’ll ruin careers!”
“Whose careers?” Wilkerson’s voice had thickened with contempt. “A bunch of fellow travelers hard at work slipping their Communistic message into our movies? If those careers get ruined, then I consider that ‘mission accomplished.’” He got to his feet. “I’m not the only one who thinks Clifford Wardell did Hollywood a favor by expos—”
“Reds in the Beds is a pile of drivel written—atrociously, I might add—by a two-bit hack with a chip on his shoulder the size of Cleveland. You cannot use it as the basis of some”—she waved her hand over the galley— “manifesto declaring war on talented people who may or may not be members of the Communist Party, which, I should remind you, is not illegal. It’s called the First Amendment. Look it up!”
“I’m not concerned with constitutional legality.”
“You should be!” Kathryn stepped away from the desk, wanting to throw something at him.
“I’m concerned with the moral question here,” he said. “Our motion pictures exert a huge influence on the values of this country. If there is any danger—and there is—that the fabric of American society might be compromised by the Communist principle, then I consider it my duty to fight it where I see it. To sit by and let that happen is un-American.” He held up the draft of tomorrow’s column. “This is how I fight the fight.”
She opened her mouth, but he cut her off.
“Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the information you came in here to share with me. But I’m warning you, Kathryn, when it comes to this Commie issue, you either get on board, or get out of my way. This is war.”
Kathryn backed out of her boss’ office, past Vera’s desk, and into the corridor that led to the elevators. The doors opened, and she was whisked to the ground floor. When she stepped out onto Sunset Boulevard, the heat of the July sun shocked her out of her stupor.
I’m standing here in public, she realized. No hat, no gloves, no handbag. People will think I’m a homeless person. Then she thought, Just walk, Kathryn. If this is war, you’re going to need a clear head.