I said that Card had fallen in love with the screen Louise Brooks in 1928. Twenty years later he established a very complex relationship with the real one. She was at the time living in Manhattan, a bloated drunk who split her time between her bed and a barstool. He got her interested in living, started her writing, and was the person primarily responsible for the international recognition she enjoyed in her later years. He brought her to Rochester and helped her establish a new life. They were for a time very close, and then they fought bitterly.
We all loved Pandora’s Box, in which she’s stunningly beautiful and at the end is murdered by Jack the Ripper. We saw it at Box 5, we showed it in two or three different film series here in Buffalo, we showed it to friends at our house. One time when we watched it Card said, in a matter of fact way, “You’ll be interested in this, Bruce, because you’re a criminologist: When Louise and I were really hating each other I devised the perfect murder. It was really perfect.” I asked him what he’d come up with. “She smoked in bed and she still drank a lot. I don’t know how many times she nearly burned herself up with those cigarettes in bed. I thought I’d pour some volatile fluid around the bed, one that would burn totally. Then I’d put magician’s flash paper all around her. You know, that stuff that bursts into flame at the slightest spark and leaves no residue? When she was drinking, she wouldn’t notice things like that. She get into bed, she’d smoke, and–ha!–she’d go up in smoke.”
“That’s horrible, Jim,” Diane said. “To burn her to death?”
“I didn’t do it,” he said. “I only had the idea.”
“But,” Diane said.
“Why didn’t you do it?” I said.
“We were fighting then, so I never had the opportunity. Then I wasn’t that mad any more. When we got to be friends again I told her about it. She said it was a wonderful idea, that it was a perfect way to murder someone like her, and she could understand why I’d come up with it. Louise always liked good plots.”
