Murder on High Page 5

  “Yeah,” he said, his jaw dropping in surprise. “How’d you know?”

  “I was in a play once with Thoreau, or rather, with John Redfield, who played Thoreau,” she replied. “So I did a lot of reading about him. I played Margaret Fuller, his editor at The Dial. Henry David and I spent a lot of time on stage rowing around Walden Pond.”

  “The title was On Walden Pond,” said Tracey, who was one of her loyal fans. “Miss Graham was nominated for a Tony award,”

  Charlotte nodded. The role was one of her favorites both for the powerful woman she had played—“I wish I were a man,” Margaret had said. “’Tis an evil lot to have a man’s ambition and a woman’s heart”—and for the lifelong fascination with Thoreau it had inspired.

  “Anyway,” Pyle continued, “she became a leader in Thoreau studies, I guess you could say. She started The Pumpkin Paper, taught a course on Thoreau at the university, led trips upcountry that traced Thoreau’s footsteps—that sort of thing. I know she had quite a following.”

  “In what way?” Charlotte asked.

  “I only know that before I joined the state police, I was a police officer in Old Town. Not a week went by that someone didn’t stop by the station to inquire how to get to Hilltop Farm.”

  They were interrupted by a knock. A moment later, the door opened and Miss Ouellette stuck her gray head through the opening. “How are you doing?” she asked, clearly curious, but afraid to ask outright.

  Charlotte noticed that she didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to look around the room, which she thought odd for someone who had presumably been excluded from it for thirty-odd years.

  “We’re doing fine, Miss Ouellette,” said Tracey dismissively. “We’re just about finished here.” He checked his watch, then turned to his companions. “I don’t know about you, but I’m getting hungry. How about some dinner?”

  Maine was one of those places where people still referred to the midday meal as dinner, and ate accordingly.

  “We just have time before the hearing,” he added.

  Charlotte and Pyle agreed.

  “We’ll be right out,” Tracey said to Miss Ouellette, and her gray head withdrew from behind the door.

  She was waiting for them just outside when they emerged a moment later. “Did you find anything, Lieutenant?” she asked tentatively. She had a way of hovering, like an oversized mother hen.

  “We’ll get back to you when we learn more about the circumstances of Mrs. Richards’ death,” said Tracey as the small group made its way back down the hall. “Meanwhile, we appreciate your help.”

  As she and Tracey followed Pyle to the coffee shop that he had recommended for dinner, Charlotte found herself pondering the metamorphosis of the Hollywood sophisticate into the proprietor of a wildflower nursery in rural Maine. It didn’t make any sense: there seemed to be no overlap between the two. They were as distinct from one another as the austere farmhouse was from the cluttered green room shut away within it. An interest in gardening or a love of the outdoors might have explained it, but the closest to gardening Charlotte could remember Iris ever getting was a story conference at the Garden of Allah, one of Hollywood’s most popular watering holes. Or even a rural upbringing, but she knew for a fact that Iris had grown up in a Chicago suburb, and Pyle said she hadn’t even known the aunt who left her Hilltop Farm. Not that she hadn’t physically fit the part of the nursery woman. With her tall, rawboned figure and patrician bone structure, she’d always looked as if she belonged more on a gentlewoman’s farm than on a Hollywood movie set.

  From Hilltop Farm, they followed Stillwater Avenue down the other side of the hill toward downtown Old Town, which lay in the river valley. The road ended a few minutes later at a stop light at the intersection with North Main Street, which ran along the river. To their left, a two-lane bridge arched over the river. Next to it was a sign that read INDIAN ISLAND, HOME OF THE PENOBSCOTS. The picture on the sign was of an Indian in profile with two feathers hanging down over his ear and an arm pointing over the bridge. Underneath was a notice that read “Penobscot Nation High Stakes Bingo: Next Game Saturday, June 23 & Sunday June 24.”

  “There’s Indian Island,” said Tracey.

  Charlotte looked over at the placid island with interest. Old Town had been so-named by the Indians, who called it that because their ancestors had inhabited this spot for ten thousand years or more. Relics of the Red Paint People, the prehistoric ancestors of the Penobscots, had been found buried in red ochre powder in graves on Indian Island. “I don’t know what I expected,” she said, gazing out at the steepled church and clusters of white clapboard houses. “But it wasn’t this.” Somehow she expected an island that had been inhabited for ten millennia or more to look more prepossessing.

  “Doesn’t look like an Indian reservation, that’s for sure,” said Tracey. “But I can’t say that I’ve ever seen any other Indian reservations. Except in the movies,” he added.

  As they waited for the light to change, Charlotte studied the sign. The Indian was shadowed by a bald eagle with an outstretched wing. The Indian’s outstretched arm and the wing, which merged into one, pointed to a distant, snow-capped mountain. “Is that Katahdin?” she asked.

  “Ayuh,” said Tracey, looking over at the sign. “It’s the sacred mountain of the Penobscots. Home of Pamola, the Indian god who inhabits the summit. Part moose, part eagle, with a wicked temper. I’ve heard that the Penobscots won’t go above the tree line for fear that he’ll come after them.”

  “Unless they take along a bottle of rum.”

  “Huh?” said Tracey.

  “The article said that’s why Iris took along a bottle of rum. To pacify Pamola. She got the idea from Thoreau’s writings.”

  “I must not have gotten to that part,” Tracey said.

  When the light changed, they turned right onto North Main past a row of old red brick mills, once the economic backbone of the city, which had been transformed into senior citizens’ apartments or office buildings, or stood vacant, windows empty and roofs caving in. Beyond the mills the wide, green river flowed south to the sea under a high, light blue sky, the opposite shore fringed with willows whose leaves were still the pale green of early spring. Though its surface was smooth, the river nevertheless gave the impression of enormous power and weight. Charlotte had once read that the Penobscot drained a quarter of the state, and the river seemed to carry the authority that came from having traveled a long distance. The waters that flowed past these mills had once been snow on the summit of Mount Katahdin, and had traveled through hundreds of miles of paper-company-owned forest land before reaching Old Town, which was the first in a string of good-sized towns and cities that lined the river on its path out to Penobscot Bay.

  As they approached the center of town, Pyle pulled the police cruiser to a stop in front of an unpretentious eatery called the Canoe City Coffee Shop. Old Town was also known as Canoe City after the Old Town Canoe Company, whose factory outlet store adjoined the coffee shop. Tracey pulled in behind Pyle, and a moment later they were sitting in a booth by a sunny window overlooking an old hydroelectric dam.

  The menus, which were propped between the sugar bowl and the napkin holder, didn’t offer any surprises. It was all hearty down-home fare: baked ziti, meat loaf, hot turkey sandwich. “Any recommendations?” Charlotte asked Pyle, who, judging from the welcome he had received, was a regular.

  “Everything’s good, but the hot turkey sandwich is especially good,” he replied enthusiastically. “Real turkey breast, thickly cut, with homemade gravy. None of that fake pressed turkey stuff.”

  “A hot turkey sandwich it is,” said Tracey, closing his menu.

  “How about the mashed potatoes?” asked Charlotte. “Not instant, I hope.”

  “No way,” said Pyle.

  “That makes three,” added Charlotte. She was a great fan of diners, of which this was the Downeast equivalent. One of the great virtues of a good diner was the ability to do simple food very we
ll.

  After they had given their orders to the blue-haired waitress, Charlotte asked Pyle what Iris had been like. She was curious how life in this small Maine river town had changed her.

  “Town character’s what she was,” he replied. “An odd duck.”

  “In what way?” Charlotte asked. Pyle was clearly one of those taciturn Yankees whom you had to prod a bit to get going.

  “Every way, near’s I can tell. Always wore old, baggy clothes and a straw hat; walked everywhere—didn’t believe in cars, or telephones, for that matter. Lived right here in town, and didn’t have a telephone. Can you fathom that?” He shook his blond head in disbelief.

  Not unlike Thoreau himself, Charlotte thought.

  “A lot of people thought she was a mite prickly,” Pyle continued. “She had strong opinions about a lot of things, and she didn’t mind telling people their business—that’s for sure.”

  “Then she made enemies,” said Charlotte.

  Pyle nodded. “Plenty of ’em. She was kind of a hermit, though. Miss Ouellette took care of all of her business: shopping, errands, and so on. It wasn’t that she didn’t get out and about—you’d always see her out walking—but she didn’t mingle much, if you know what I mean.”

  “A hermit-about-town,” said Charlotte.

  “That’s it,” said Pyle with a smile. “A hermit-about-town.”

  “It’s what New Yorkers used to say about Garbo,” she explained. The great Swedish movie star had just died and was very much on Charlotte’s mind, her death seeming to mark the end of a Hollywood era.

  “Can’t tell you much more than that,” said Pyle.

  “Now, Charlotte, why don’t you tell us what you know?” Tracey asked as the waitress set the heavy Buffalo-ware platters with their hot turkey sandwiches down on the Formica table. Speedy service was another virtue of the good diner.

  “She was my screenwriter,” Charlotte said. “In the old days, we each had our own. She had been a novelist. Maybe you’ve read some of her books: The Lonely Heart is considered a classic; it’s on every eleventh-grade English teacher’s reading list.”

  “I’ve read it, but it was a long time ago,” said Tracey as he tucked into his dinner. “In eleventh grade, as a matter of fact. I remember thinking that it was a girl’s book. At that point, I was more into Edgar Rice Burroughs.”

  Charlotte gave him a look of distaste, at which he grinned and pounded his chest in an imitation of Tarzan.

  “She came to Hollywood with the rest,” Charlotte continued. “Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald. It was the offer they couldn’t refuse; the money was too good. Many of them ended up leaving. Either they hated it or they were no good at it, usually a combination of the two. But that wasn’t true of Iris.”

  “This is delicious, Pyle,” interrupted Tracey, pointing with his fork to the food on his plate.

  “What did I tell you?” the trooper replied.

  “Sorry, Charlotte,” Tracey said. “Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “That’s okay,” she said. She addressed Pyle: “It is good. Perfect, as a matter of fact. Anyway,” she went on, “Iris had a knack for comedy, which was odd, since her novels weren’t funny. She had a light, easy touch—a way of flirting with the material. I don’t think a man could have done what she did. She and I usually worked with the director Harold Ames. As a writer, actor, director team, we were unbeatable. We had hit after hit.”

  “You’ve probably seen some of those films on television, Pyle,” said Tracey. He reeled off a list of titles.

  Pyle nodded in recognition.

  “I owe much of my success to Iris,” Charlotte said.

  “Then what?” Tracey prompted.

  “HUAC,” she said as if it explained everything, which it did.

  Pyle looked at her with a quizzical expression. “The House Committee on Un-American Activities,” she said. “Otherwise known as HUAC. Self-appointed guardians of American internal security from 1947 to 1953.”

  “Oh,” said Pyle, who still looked baffled.

  “Their mission was to expose Communists, and their special target was the entertainment industry,” Tracey explained.

  Charlotte continued. “Iris had some friends—other screen writers, mostly—who were self-confessed Communist sympathizers, or com symps, as they were known. She had been very close to some members of the Hollywood Ten, who went to jail for their beliefs, as well as to other blacklisted writers.”

  “Blacklisted?” asked Pyle.

  Charlotte sighed. She was feeling more and more like a time traveler these days. She realized that she would have to start from Square One.

  “If a writer was called to testify before HUAC, and refused to answer the sixty-four-dollar question, as it was called, after the quiz show, which was, ‘Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party,’ his—or her—name was put on a list and he or she could expect never to work again.”

  “Unless he or she implicated others,” interjected Tracey, who, thank God, had some acquaintance with the events of that era.

  “Right. Those who were subpoenaed had the option of getting off the hook by naming names. And many of them did. Losing your swimming pool or your tennis court were powerful threats. But there were some who would rather have lost everything than turn stool pigeon.” Like Linc Crawford, she thought.

  “Was Iris O’Connor a Communist?” asked Pyle in the same tone of voice one would use to refer to a child molester or a rapist. It was clear which side he would have been on had he been born a generation or two earlier.

  “It didn’t matter. It was a witch hunt. Two hundred and fifty people were blacklisted. Thousands more were graylisted. And the FBI had dossiers on hundreds of thousands more, myself among them, I suspect.”

  Pyle looked contrite.

  To be fair, she thought, it was probably difficult for a thirty-year-old to see the idealistic appeal of a system that in those days was still young enough not to have demonstrated its essential unworkability or revealed the evil and corruption that went along with it.

  “Anyway, in answer to your question: I don’t know. She wasn’t a card-carrying Communist, to use McCarthy’s phrase. She may have gone to a few meetings, but so did a lot of people.”

  “Of the Communist Party?” asked Pyle incredulously.

  Charlotte tried to explain. “The line between capitalist and Communist was thinner then. No group could have been more plugged into the capitalist system than the Hollywood screenwriters. Yet a lot of them were outraged at how blacks were treated; remember, there was still segregation then.” She paused for a moment to eat her dinner, which was indeed delicious, and then continued. “Then there was the Spanish Civil War.”

  “The Abraham Lincoln Battalion,” said Tracey.

  “Yes. A lot of actors and writers supported the Loyalists; some, like Hemingway (and Linc, she thought), even joined international battalions that were formed to fight Franco. Though that was all in the late thirties, the Red hunters had long memories.”

  “I guess I don’t know much about history,” Pyle apologized.

  What were they teaching in school nowadays? Charlotte wondered. “Anyway, it didn’t matter whether Iris was a Communist or not. It was enough to have breathed the same air as a Communist, and Iris had associated with a number of self-confessed Reds.”

  Thinking about those days, Charlotte remembered a story she’d once heard about someone who was subpoenaed because they’d been at the same bullfight with Picasso, an admitted Communist. It didn’t matter that the person didn’t know Picasso, hadn’t even sat on the same side of the ring. He had been there.

  “Did Iris go to jail?” asked Tracey.

  “No …”

  “What happened to her?”

  “That’s a good question.” She was trying to remember. She had repressed a lot from that period. Part of it had to do with her own passive complicity, or what she perceived as her own passive complicity, in the witch hunt. Despite the
fact that she too had associated with known Communists, one of her favorite directors among them, she had never been called upon to testify. The reason for this, she was sure, lay with her public image. It would have been impossible to convince the public that an actress who had made a career out of playing idle debutantes and sassy secretaries could ever have been a Communist. The same had been true of the war heroes; they were untouchable by virtue of their public image (except for Linc, she thought).

  At the time, she had felt much as a Vietnam-era student who received a high number in the draft lottery must have felt—relieved at not having to take a stand (or rather, the stand). But as the hearings had dragged on, leaving a trail of blighted lives in their wake, she had begun to feel ashamed of this chapter in her life. Yes, she had joined the Committee for the First Amendment, flying to Washington with a plane load of stars to protest the first round of HUAC hearings in 1947, but the committee had folded almost as fast as it had coalesced, and other protest efforts were equally short-lived, especially after friendly witnesses starting naming names.

  Iris’ was one of those ruined careers that had left Charlotte with survivor’s guilt. She supposed that’s why she had thought so little about her over the years, despite the fact that her name still came up with some frequency in literary and cinematic circles. What had happened to Iris? she asked herself. As she gazed out the window at the water falling over the dam, it slowly came back to her. “She was subpoenaed,” she said finally. “It was in the winter of 1952, after HUAC had reopened its investigation. I remember the date because several other people I knew got their pink slips at the same time. Her testimony was taken in executive session at a hotel in L.A.”

  “Executive session?” said Tracey.

  “It meant that the testimony wouldn’t be released. It was a deal that the lawyers were sometimes able to work out to avoid having their clients’ names dragged through the mud. But it only worked for the small fry. The big fish didn’t have that option.”

  “What happened to her after that?” asked Tracey.

  “She simply disappeared. Went underground, I guess you’d say. Most of the blacklisted screenwriters went to New York; some went abroad—Paris, Mexico, Paraguay; some moved to rural areas where they could live cheaply.”