Read Online Manhattan Nocturne by Colin Harrison - Free Book Online Page A

required twenty stitches and apparently shocked the executives into submission. His star, the very young, very ravishing Juliet Tormana, who had tantalized Hollywood’s old stags (including the now-married Warren Beatty), declared that she was sleeping with Crowley and that “the sex is the best I’ve ever had.” And so on. The usual hype, the usual drivel of celebrity culture. When The Time of No Return was released on nine hundred screens nationwide, it was a gigantic hit, grossing $24 million in the first week—an unheard-of sum for a “serious” film—and lauded by critics as a valuable, challenging portrait of fin de siècle America, “stark, huge, and immensely disturbing.” The work was nominated for three Academy Awards, and won one for best screenplay, which Crowley had written. He was seen in every Hollywood and New York watering hole. He was arrested for picking a fight with Jack Nicholson in a Brentwood café, calling him, in front of others, “an old bag of shit with one or two cheap actor’s tricks.” He proclaimed that Spike Lee was “an inconsequential talent, a token black director whose work everyone knows is mediocre.” Kathleen Turner, he noted, “has become fat and mean, with the fat and mean little chin of a lousy actress who can’t even act the tart, so why should I want to film her?” Quentin Tarantino, he announced, made cartoons.
    And so on. I set the file aside, looked up.

    â€œThey never solved it,” Caroline said.
    â€œI guess I remember that.”
    â€œThey never arrested anyone, nothing.”
    â€œThey probably tried pretty hard.” Certainly Crowley’s death had received any and all proper official attention, given the intense media speculation. The death of a celebrity in American culture is a commodity worth quite a bit of money, so long as it flickers in the nation’s consciousness.
    Caroline brought me another drink, and although I did not want it, I took it. We were, I assumed, now where she wanted us to be.
    â€œSo this is what you wanted me to look at?” I said.
    â€œNo, actually.”
    â€œNo?”
    She shook her head.
    â€œI don’t get it.”
    â€œThis is what I needed you to look at first, before I show you what I want you to look at.”
    â€œHave I been tricked?”
    She smiled. “No, not really. It will all make sense, eventually.”
    â€œShall I look at the thing you actually want me to see?”
    â€œI want you to see it, but not tonight. Tomorrow, or the next day?”
    There was something selfish about her answer, as if I didn’t have a job and a family already scheduled, or as if she was so beautiful that I would drop my duties to both to study the life of her dead husband, which, so long as she was around, might, on further reflection, be true. “What do you want?” I asked. “You want me to write a story about your dead husband? Everything’s already been written about him.”
    Caroline sighed. “No.”
    â€œWhat, then? The police apparently can’t solve this.”
    â€œYes,” she said quietly. “I know all this, Porter.”
    She seemed distracted by melancholy, and I realized that I had not asked her what it all meant to her, to have her husband killed, to have her life brutally jolted like that.

    â€œHow long did you know him?” My voice sounded thick, stupid now with drink.
    â€œWe were together only about six months.”
    â€œYou got married fast?”
    â€œYes. Very. He was like that …” She carefully closed the thick album. “I was like that, too.”
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    The minutes passed with a strange luxury to them. We said nothing. Caroline rolled three cigarettes, laid two of them on the glass coffee table, and sat back to smoke the third. I took myself into her kitchen for a little ice and felt suddenly aware of the white starkness of the counters