“What you said about her ‘situation’...”
“Well, obviously from what happened she had psychological issues,” said Shay McNamara.
“What about when you worked with her?”
“She could get a little hyper — no, I take that back. Real hyper. I was a minor myself and my mom would come on the set — she homeschooled me — and she’d watch Zelda and shake her head and say stuff like, ‘That girl is all over the place.’ I didn’t think much of it, not messing up my lines was all I cared about. I don’t miss it. Way too much pressure.”
Justin Levine’s life was a short story on Facebook. The usual friends, party photos, detailed lists of favorite music and movies. He’d grown to be a nice-looking young man who favored baseball hats worn backward. The photos featured him with like-minded males and pretty females, the dominant mood glaze-eyed intoxication. Physics major, interests in rugby, lacrosse, skiing, skateboarding. No mention of his acting days.
I posted a message, asking him to get in contact about Zelda Chase.
Sometimes clearing a path for discovery means eliminating the detours. But my only remaining route to finding Ovid seemed likely to dead-end because it was based on crazy-talk: Zelda’s tale of a disappearing “movie star” mother.
Who happened also to be a deity, burrowed deeply inside her daughter’s viscera.
Tempting to dismiss but I wasn’t ready.
Maybe I was denying but my training had taught me that madmen and madwomen weren’t the cage-rattling ravers depicted in low-rent movies and books. That the transition to psychosis could be subtle, more segue than quick flick of the on/off sanity switch.
I’d also discovered that truth could be embedded in the jumble of skewed perception, illogic, and decimated judgment that plagues a disintegrating mind.
More than that: Truth and logic could serve as springboards for psychosis.
On any back ward, you could encounter an apparently rational human being in a cell-like room and wonder what the hell they were doing there. Sit down with that person, begin chatting about a topic — say geography — and your skepticism grows. This is a perfectly normal human being clearly oppressed by the system!
But as you sit there, outraged, the cerebral short-circuits kick in and the conversation edges off kilter and finally veers into fantasies that grow progressively more florid and bizarre and now you’re hearing about a planet grown flat and overrun with godlings who transmit evil messages straight to the sensors implanted in your co-conversationalist’s head.
Does that matter clinically? Often not, but sometimes yes. Because crazy people are still individuals and learning what’s on their troubled minds can occasionally elevate treatment beyond dosage-calibration.
What if Zelda’s mother really had disappeared and tracing family ties could somehow lead me to Ovid? Because the few facts I had did fit early abandonment: a young woman with no known relatives.
On the other hand...
Only one way to find out.
Vanished actress pulled up a host of fan sites and blogs about women who no longer worked in movies or TV. The reasons for “vanishing” ranged from a series of flops to marriage and motherhood to motives unknown.
Not a promising start but scrolling through pages finally led me to two actresses who actually had disappeared. Both in L.A.
The first, a woman named Jean Spangler, had played small roles in big pictures, dated several organized crime figures, and been embroiled in a custody dispute with an ex-husband.
Provocative, but the time frame was off: She’d gone missing in 1949.
Zina Rutherford, on the other hand, had walked out of her West Hollywood apartment and slipped into the ether twenty-nine years ago, shortly after her thirtieth birthday.
Zelda would’ve been five. Old enough to remember.
Zina/Zelda.
I’d wondered if Jane Smith’s name change had stemmed from identification with another tormented young woman, the unfortunate Mrs. Fitzgerald. But what if it had been an attempt to get phonetically closer to her mother?
She’d listed her given name as Jane Smith, not Jane Rutherford. But that could be explained by adoption. Or a five-year-old girl taken in by a relative.
I looked for everything I could find about Zina Rutherford, which turned out to be nothing but the same sketchy summary on four sites listing unsolved disappearances. No leads, no theories, description of Rutherford as an “aspiring actress.”
I clicked every contact us icon, was rewarded with an instant quartet of out-of-service error messages.
Searching movie databases produced no credits for Rutherford, so aspiring was as far as she’d gotten. Galaxies from the “star” Zelda had claimed. Yet more delusion or pathetic wishful thinking? Or she’d made up the whole thing and had no connection to another actress, alive or dead?
One more try: Hollywood might’ve ignored Zina Rutherford but LAPD could’ve paid attention.
Milo picked up after one ring. “Just about to call you on a couple of things, guess you’re my psychic friend, here’s my credit card number.”
“What’s up?”
“No nasty flora in Enid DePauw’s garden. She wasn’t sure but she referred me to her landscape architect. Apparently, the estate’s one of the landscaper’s crowning accomplishments, ‘classical but updated emphasis’ on roses, azaleas, local sustainable fruit trees and ornamentals, blah blah blah. So herbal medicine is the probable culprit, like Bernstein figured, Zelda got her hands on the wrong batch of whatever. A couple of days and ten miles passed between her leaving the shelter and dying, plenty of opportunity to dumpster-dive for the wrong veggie.”
I said, “I suppose she could’ve scored herbal meds at the shelter.”
“That, too.”
“I’ll let Andover know. No sense someone else keeling over.”
He said, “Good deed for the day? Why not, we can all use cosmic brownie points. The other thing I wanted to tell you is I heard from a Central patrolman, older guy works the desk, used to be on the streets. He remembers Zelda, confirms she was a street person. I checked the time period. Around half a year after her show got canceled, so she slid down pretty fast. He was the arresting officer on the second bust, said there were plenty of other times he could’ve hauled her in but he felt sorry for her, being so young and so messed up. He had no idea she’d been an actress, was pretty sure she was hooking to make ends meet, though he never caught her at it. She didn’t have a particular turf, hung out in that patch of Skid Row near Little Tokyo, flops, shelters, freeway underpasses. The main thing from your perspective is he never saw a kid with her and I’m going to take that as a good sign: She knew she was falling apart and made provisions. Because some psychology savant once told me positive thinking’s good for my health. Now why’d you call me?”
My mind reeled. I focused and told him.
He said, “Zina Rutherford, never heard about that one. If it was filed as a missing person twenty-five years ago, good luck. During the transfer from paper to computer a lot of stuff got tossed.”
“Could you look into it anyway? Positive thinking and all?”
He laughed. “Sure, now go get positive yourself.”
“Meaning?”
“Talk about role reversal,” he said. “Meaning kiss your gal. Poochie, too. Who I thought of while enjoying that second Cuban sandwich from my doggie bag. Because Mademoiselle Flatface likes veal, right? I have a distinct memory of some scaloppine noshed on the sly.”