Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [164]
“It’s been a long time,” Frank said, when they were alone.
“Sure has,” Ava said.
“I suppose we were rushing things a little the last time we met.”
“You were rushing things a little.”
“Let’s start again,” Frank said. “What are you doing now?”
“Making pictures as usual.” She had just finished shooting The Bribe, at Metro, with Bob Taylor. “How about you?”
“Trying to pick myself up off my ass.”
She nodded sympathetically. “Though I knew all about Frank’s problems,” Ava wrote years later, “I wasn’t about to ask him about them that night. And, honey, I didn’t bring up Nancy, either. This night was too special for that.”
They slipped easily back to their earlier, alcoholic mode. Both of them could hold a lot of liquor. After a couple of hours, they walked out in the crisp desert night, under an inky black sky strewn with more stars than either of them had ever seen.
He offered to take her home.
Ava smiled. It was very gallant of him, but she had to tell him that she wasn’t staying alone—she was renting a little place with her big sister Bappie.
Frank shrugged. Did she feel like taking a drive?
Her smile grew broader. Sure she did.
After he went back into the house and gave the bartender a $100 bill for a fifth of Beefeater, they got in his Cadillac and set off. The top was down, despite the evening chill, and they rode under the river of stars, her hair flowing in the wind. She shivered and clutched her mink stole around her bare shoulders. He passed her the bottle; she took a long drink and passed it back.
Frank navigated out to a two-lane blacktop, Palm Canyon Drive, that led out of town, and they drove southeast, through sleepy villages separated by long black stretches of nothing: Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Indian Wells. Each of the towns had a few streetlights, a couple of stores, a blinking traffic signal. Then it was black again. Once they passed a little graveyard whose gates fronted onto the highway. She shivered.
After a half hour, another pocket of light approached. A city-limits sign read: Indio. The two of them were singing, loudly, as they headed into the darkened town. She had a nice, tuneful voice; she could even do harmony. Frank looked impressed. She sang pretty good!
The gin bottle had gone back and forth a number of times, and the Cadillac was weaving when Frank pulled off the road and into a Texaco station. The car fishtailed as he put on the brakes. He cut the engine. A blinking traffic light hanging over the main drag swayed in the wind. It was two thirty in the morning, and Indio was out cold.
Ava looked around. It sure was a one-horse town. But where the hell was the horse?
He laughed, then kissed her. They kissed for a long time. She was still holding the bottle.
Then he got an idea: how about they liven the goddamn place up?
Frank reached across her, almost falling in her lap, and, after fumbling with the latch for a second, opened the glove compartment. He handed her a dark, heavy metal thing that smelled of machine oil. Ava cradled it in her hand, looked at it in wonderment. It was a snub-barreled Smith & Wesson .38 Chief’s Special. Frank took out another pistol just like it and, squinting, aimed it at the traffic light.
An hour later, the phone rang in Jack Keller’s bedroom. Though he had been deeply asleep, Keller knew exactly who was on the other end before he picked it up.
“Jack, we’re in trouble,” Sinatra said.
It was his one phone call. He and Ava were in the Indio police station, feeling much soberer than they had an hour before, when, whooping and hollering, they had both emptied their pistols, then reloaded and emptied them again, shattering streetlights and several store windows. Then there was the town’s single unfortunate passerby, drunk as the shooters, whose shirtfront and belly had been creased by an errant .38 slug.
Keller shook his head. Sinatra always knew how to up the ante. Still, there was only one thing that concerned the publicist.
“Have you been booked? Do the papers know anything?”
Frank looked at the police chief,