16

KARISSA

On Sunday, Karissa decided to pick up where she had left off and continue exploring her house on Harvard Boulevard. Who knew what other treasures that belonged to Blair Kendrick she might find?

The bedroom where the trunk was also contained several cardboard boxes. She opened them, one by one, and was disappointed to find mostly paperwork pertaining to Blair Kendrick’s activities at the studio, such as scripts and publicity stills. One box held a collection of the latter that were pre-signed, apparently to mail to fans. Karissa figured they might be of value. Autographed photos of a murder victim/actress present at the murdering of a Hollywood studio head? Someone could make a killing on eBay, but it wouldn’t be Karissa. She left the pictures in the box, save one that she would take to the office for inspiration.

Inside another box were copies of the California Eagle, the oldest African American newspaper published in the western United States. Karissa knew that it had started in the late 1800s under a different name and was changed to the California Eagle not long after the turn of the century, staying in print until the 1960s. The box in the bedroom held various issues from the late 1940s.

Blair had marked the issues on the fronts with a pen, indicating page numbers within. Karissa examined one and found a piece on Hank Marley and his band, who were appearing at the Last Word nightclub. Another paper had a photo of Hank and the band performing at Club Alabam. Yet another featured a photograph of the audience at the Downbeat Club—and there was Blair Kendrick at a table with Hank. The caption read, “Jazz musician Hank Marley out on the town with actress Blair Kendrick.”

The last Eagle in the box was dated January 1949. Karissa recalled that Eldon Hirsch had been killed in July 1949. This might be significant, she thought, and so she went downstairs to her laptop computer and began to search various subjects via Google.

First, she studied Blair Kendrick’s filmography. She had made three pictures for Ultimate that were released in 1947—A Kiss in the Night, The Jazz Club, and A Dame Without Fear. Three more movies came out in 1948—The Dark Lonely Night, The Love of a Killer, and The Outlaw Lovers. The IMDb website indicated that Blair had begun production of a picture called The Boss and the Blonde that was to be a 1949 release, but production was never completed. It had been scrapped by the studio in January of that year.

Karissa searched online for The Boss and the Blonde but found very little to explain why the studio had canceled the film. Apparently, it was to be yet another film noir with Blair playing a gun moll to a powerful mobster who was none other than James Cagney. The actor had not portrayed a gangster since the 1930s. It was to be something of a return to that type of role for Cagney. When The Boss and the Blonde was stopped, Cagney instead made his mobster comeback for Warner Brothers in the classic White Heat.

Next, Karissa looked for any information about Blair Kendrick in January 1949 and found a couple of references to the cancellation of the title by Ultimate Pictures, but again with no reason why it had happened. A search for her name in February 1949 produced no results. The same was true for March and April. Then, when Karissa typed “Blair Kendrick May 1949,” She was linked to a scholarly article on a political website that referenced a Los Angeles Times story on the House Un-American Activities Committee and its “Red Scare” witch hunt. Fortuitously, in the same column and in a sidebar unrelated to the main piece, Karissa discovered one of Hedda Hopper’s gossip columns. “Where is Blair Kendrick?” Hopper asked. “The feisty blond actress has not been seen or heard from in Hollywood since her last starring vehicle was canceled by Ultimate Pictures. When I spoke to studio executive Buddy Franco about it, he replied that Blair had become gravely ill and production was halted. Franco wouldn’t elaborate on Blair’s condition or where she was convalescing.”

Wow. What the hell had happened to her?

Karissa printed out the page and continued to look for further mentions of Blair in the following months. Nothing in June. Then, in July, the murder of Eldon Hirsch. Lots of hits there with speculation that Blair Kendrick had witnessed it and was killed by the perpetrators. The charred body by burned cars on Mulholland Drive, identification made by the jewelry—her signature pearl necklace—that the corpse was wearing, and the subsequent burial in Westwood cemetery.

What was the mysterious illness she had contracted? Had she experienced a “nervous breakdown,” as they called it back then? Karissa had to admit that Blair Kendrick exhibited a recklessness by having a love affair with a black man in the late 1940s. It could have been detrimental to her career—and perhaps it was.

Karissa’s initial instincts to create a film around the actress, portraying her as a femme fatale who, in real life, had been a victim, seemed to make more and more sense. But why was Ultimate Pictures so dead set against her making the picture? Something wasn’t clicking.

She decided to research the history from another direction. She googled “Hank Marley 1949” and found a few hits about his disappearance: he was reported as a missing person in early February of that year. That meant he had most likely vanished in late January—the same month that Blair Kendrick had become “ill” and her movie was canceled.

A coincidence? Karissa thought not.

The California Eagle had been archived online, where it was accessible and free to the public. Karissa searched for mentions of Hank within the paper and found plenty dated throughout the late 1940s. However, there were no links to issues in 1950 or ’51, though there were a handful for 1952. Karissa clicked on each one, and every time she was sent to a page that proclaimed, “Sorry! This issue is missing from the archives!”

That’s odd, Karissa thought. She then remembered the other newspaper that catered mostly to African Americans—the Los Angeles Sentinel. She looked for archives online and learned that they were accessible at the UCLA Library.

Hm. Field trip.

The Charles E. Young Research Library was an impressive building on the north end of the UCLA campus. As Karissa walked the familiar grounds of her alma mater, she reminisced about the many hours she’d spent here preparing for exams, writing papers, or researching various topics that piqued her interest. While the UCLA library was comprised of several physical locations, the research library was perhaps Karissa’s favorite. It contained documents, books, journals, newspapers, and digital files from all over the world in many languages.

Inside, Karissa located the microfiche for the Sentinel, which was first published in 1933 and still in circulation. She went through the index to locate dates and issues in which Blair Kendrick and/or Hank Marley were mentioned, but they were mostly duplications of news in the California Eagle. She then wrote down the entries from 1952 and went to collect the film. Once she had the microfiche threaded into a machine, she scrolled to the appropriate issue.

The microfiche abruptly ended. In fact, it had been cut. The rest of the film was still spooled onto the small reel. She threaded the remainder and saw that the page she’d been looking for was missing. It was as if someone had deliberately deleted it from the archive and hadn’t bothered to splice the fiche back together.

Karissa spent the next hour checking the other 1952 reels. They, too, were missing the pages she wanted. She picked up the various reels and took them to the help desk.

“I want to report some vandalism on these microfiches,” she said to the librarian, carefully displaying the damaged microfiche.

“That’s horrible!” the librarian said. “Thank you for pointing it out.”

“Is there any other way I can see these issues?”

“They’re also online. Let’s go look.”

Together they got behind a terminal and searched for the desired issues.

The situation was the same. The online issues, too, were missing.

“This is freaky,” the librarian said. She suggested that Karissa try some other libraries. Karissa thanked her and left. A disturbing development, she thought.

She decided to drive back to the east side via the 10 and entered downtown to visit the Los Angeles Public Library on 5th Street. But after checking the catalog, she found that there was only online access with ProQuest, the same service used by UCLA. They would be the same files. Just to make sure she wasn’t going mad, Karissa searched for the missing issues and, sure enough, they weren’t there.

Somehow, someone had erased articles from 1952 about Hank Marley.

The library closed at five on Sunday, so Karissa stopped in Little Tokyo downtown for dinner at Kura Revolving Sushi, a restaurant where various plates of nigiri moved on a conveyor belt by one’s seat and she could pick whatever she wanted and pay by the plate. Karissa sat at the bar, so as not to take up a full table, and found herself next to a Caucasian man around her age, dressed as if he had just come from the beach.

During the meal, she noticed that he kept glancing at her. Finally, after he had paid his bill and was ready to leave, he got up the nerve to say, “Excuse me, I was just curious, are you, what, Middle Eastern?”

Oh, no, here we go again, Karissa thought.

“No, I’m not.”

“Oh, sorry. You’re mixed, aren’t you, what, part black and part white?”

“I’m biracial, yes.”

“That’s interesting. Well, I think you’re gorgeous. Very exotic looking, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“Actually, I do.”

“It was a compliment.”

“Not really.”

“Oh. Well, sorry.” He got up.

“You want to touch my hair, too?” she asked.

With that, he turned and started to leave, but then swirled around to face her again. “You know, I was going to offer to buy your dinner and see if you’d like to have coffee when you were done, but now I won’t.”

“My loss, then. Have a good evening.”

“Bitch,” he said, and left the restaurant.

Karissa sighed heavily, took a moment to breathe, and finished her meal.

It was dusk when she pulled into her driveway in West Adams Heights. Instead of entering through the garage entrance into the house, she walked around to the front yard to pick up the newspaper she had neglected to retrieve that morning. She looked up at the porch and saw pieces of mail sticking out of the slot in the door, stuck.

As she went up the steps to the porch, she suddenly had a sensation that she was being watched. Karissa turned to look out to the street and saw a black SUV sitting at the curb across the road. It was now too dark to discern clearly what the make and model was, but she didn’t know brands of cars by sight anyway. What concerned her more was the silhouette of a man who was sitting in the passenger seat. The orange dot of an ember at the end of a cigarette glowed against the shadow. His hand moved the cigarette and flicked the ashes to the asphalt through the open window.

He was watching her.

She dug her cell phone out of her purse. Karissa was ready to dial 911, but she stopped and asked herself if she was overreacting. The man could be waiting for someone. He could be totally harmless, and perhaps he wasn’t actively watching her. He’d probably only just spotted her crossing the yard. But after the incident at the restaurant and the creepy guy at the World Stage the other night, Karissa felt justified in her paranoia. She went ahead and dialed the numbers. She was put on hold, of course, and she unlocked the front door and entered the house from the porch. After locking the door behind her, she walked through the foyer to the kitchen and made sure the door to the garage was locked.

When the dispatcher finally came on the phone, she reported that a suspicious person was sitting in his car in front of her house. She was told a patrol car would swing by in a few minutes.

Karissa hung up, went to the front of the house, and looked out a window.

The SUV was gone. Now she would appear foolish to the cops who showed up.

Her phone rang, startling her. The caller ID indicated it was Marcello.

“Hey,” she answered.

“Hello there. Did you have a productive day?”

“Just uncovered more mysteries. How about you?”

“Well, I just got some bad news. Ray Webster died today.”

“Oh, no.”

“Yeah. Butch told me. Apparently, that cardiac incident the other day was pretty serious.”

“Oh, gee, I’m sorry to hear that. We need to redouble our efforts to find his son. Does Butch know how to reach him?”

“I asked,” Marcello said. “He had a number for him, but it’s no longer good.”

“Sounds like Gregory Webster doesn’t want to be found,” Karissa said. “What’s that about?”

“Who knows. Anyway, Ray’s funeral is in a few days. Gregory will probably be there, don’t you think?”

“Can we go?”

“I don’t see why not if it’s a public funeral. I’ll find out from Butch.”

Karissa tossed and turned and slept fitfully, but she awoke with a start at 3:05 a.m. She got out of bed, went to the bathroom, and splashed cold water on her sweating face. It had been a nightmare that, of course, she couldn’t recall much of now. She remembered the emotions in it, though—an urgent need to hide from something or someone that was looking for her. Her parents were both present in the dream, but they couldn’t help her. It was a recurring dream that Karissa always had whenever she felt stressed or worried.

Karissa had never known her real parents. Her adoptive parents, a white couple, were warm, God-fearing souls who had given her a wonderful upbringing. She was an only child in the household, although there was once a time when they had considered adopting another. It never happened. Karissa had a sudden desire to phone her parents in Sacramento—but that, too, was out of the question. Her father, Thomas Glover, had died of a freak heart condition when Karissa was in her thirties. Her mother, Belinda Glover, had succumbed to breast cancer only six years ago. Sometimes it saddened her that she had no real family left.

Although she had asked on several occasions what they knew about her birth parents, the answer was always a big zero. The adoption agency had told them Karissa was an orphan. She had been left at the doorstep one morning, a toddler secured by a belt in a basket, accompanied only by her Julia rag doll and a note that said she was eighteen months old and that her parents had been killed. An accident? No one knew.

Karissa had no memory of those earlier years. She had assumed a traumatic event at that age could be somewhat recalled, but according to a therapist she had seen during college, it was entirely possible that her brain had blocked it out. Karissa chose not to be hypnotized, which may or may not have induced some memories. The problem was a mind that young simply didn’t have the maturity to understand the incident and put it into a cohesive narrative.

Julia was the only link Karissa had to those early times. The rag doll that now sat on Blair’s dresser was the single memento from her short life with her real parents. She’d taken good care of it throughout the years, periodically repairing any tears in the fabric and cleaning the dress that bore the stitched name Julia.

Unable to sleep, Karissa picked up the doll and went downstairs, poured a small glass of red wine for herself, and sat in the parlor with Julia, the ghost of Blair Kendrick, and other phantoms of the past.