The Sharpest Needle

by Renee Patrick

  As if getting wrapped up like Boris Karloff in The Mummy could be relaxing. But the cumbersome process meant Vera and I would be alone for at least fifteen minutes. Enough time, I hoped, to ferret out some answers from her.

  I started out casually. ‘You never did tell me how you and Mr Kehoe met.’

  ‘I didn’t? It’s such a funny story.’ What followed was a convoluted yarn involving a misplaced coat-check ticket at the Brown Derby, chockablock with digressions and devoid of humor. Vera managed to tell it without seeming to stop for breath; maybe she should have set her sights on being a singer instead of an actress. Every part of me save my immobile arms fidgeted as the minutes ticked away. Finally, time running out, I made a desperate lunge to seize control of the conversation.

  ‘I wanted to ask about Walter’s interest in Paolo Montsalvo.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘We talked about him over the weekend at the ranch.’

  ‘We did?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said levelly. ‘He’s the painter.’

  Vera turned toward me. ‘He painted Marion’s house?’

  Tapping deep wells of patience, I tried again. ‘Not that kind of painter. He’s an artist Walter admires.’

  ‘So Walter talked about him.’ Vera tittered. ‘I have a confession to make. I hardly ever listen to Walter.’

  I sighed, knowing a lost cause when I saw one.

  Phyllis and Hattie soon returned. They removed the wax from our arms by peeling it off like opera gloves. My eyes watered, but I neither yelped nor cried. My skin looked almost as pink as it did when the wax was on.

  ‘That’ll fade in a jiff,’ Hattie told me. ‘Shall we do your nails?’

  They set to their task, the two women happy to spill who’d been in the salon this week. ‘Rosalind Russell,’ Phyllis said.

  ‘The Bennetts,’ Hattie chimed in. ‘Joan and Constance.’

  ‘Dolores Del Rio. And Olivia de Havilland.’ Phyllis peered at Vera’s face. ‘You’re around, like she is.’

  Vera recoiled slightly. ‘I’m around what?’

  ‘I mean you have a round face. That’s one of the seven basic facial types according to the Westmore system.’ Phyllis shook her hair away from her features. ‘I’m a square face, like Joan Blondell.’

  ‘I’m an oval,’ Hattie said, but she could have fooled me. ‘Me and Janet Gaynor. We’re practically sisters.’

  ‘Round is maybe the best, though.’ Phyllis sounded like she’d given the matter considerable thought. ‘You really can’t louse it up. So many options. You can arch your eyebrows, wave your hair off the forehead.’

  ‘Round is the best shape by far,’ Hattie said sadly.

  ‘What am I?’ I asked.

  The two beauticians scrutinized me, then exchanged a look. ‘Inverted triangle.’ Phyllis’s tone implied the condition was fatal. ‘That’s a tricky one. Don’t draw your hair back too tightly. Don’t raise your eyebrows. Don’t do too wide a mouth treatment.’

  ‘Are there any dos associated with my poor face?’ I asked.

  The white-and-gold telephone trilled. Phyllis answered it, then handed the receiver to Vera. She uttered a series of bored monosyllables into it, then handed it back to the manicurist.

  ‘Timothy,’ she said. ‘He’s picking me up.’ I tried not to smirk.

  The ladies completed our manicures, the results genuinely impressive. ‘What’s next?’ Hattie asked.

  ‘I just got my hair done,’ Vera said, ‘but you should stay.’

  ‘I wasn’t planning on getting my hair done.’

  ‘It looks great,’ Vera reassured me. Phyllis and Hattie, meanwhile, suddenly busied themselves packing up their arsenals.

  I returned to the front counter to pay, but the clerk informed me that ‘Mr Westmore has taken care of it.’ Vera again raised an eyebrow. I almost suggested she go back in and have them arched on Wally Westmore, while I ordered a custom-made bag to cover my inverted triangle face.

  Timothy slouched against one of the awning’s supports. He scarcely stirred as we stepped outside. ‘Look at this pair of angels on the loose,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, shut up.’ Vera slipped on a pair of enormous sunglasses. ‘Can we give you a ride?’

  ‘No thanks. My ride’s right there.’ I moved to point at Rogers, but Timothy stepped forward and pressed something into my side. Something that, to my untrained ribs, felt like the barrel of a gun.

  ‘Yes, about him.’ The lazy half-smile never left Timothy’s lips. ‘Why don’t you wave to him, send him on his way?’

  For a moment, I stood motionless. Then I stiffly raised an arm to Rogers. I could see him grumbling as he started Addison’s Cadillac and drove off, conceivably out of my life forever.

  ‘Well done,’ Timothy said. ‘My car’s not as nice, but it’ll do the job.’

  Vera stepped close to me. She really did have a round face. ‘Time to tell us everything you know. Everything.’ She seemed a stranger to me, a totally different person. No longer stubborn and self-involved, but fearsome and in control.

  Timothy took my arm. He glanced down at it, then into my eyes. ‘Very soft.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  TWENTY-NINE

  It wasn’t merely the close confines of the car: Vera, to my eyes, seemed physically larger. She held herself loosely, occupying more space in the way that’s only possible when you’re wholly at ease in your own skin. No longer forced to play a character, she’d revealed her true self, rangy and feral. Timothy, alone in the front seat, was happy to keep his distance from her.

  ‘What the hell is this about?’ she fairly spat at me. ‘This girls’ day out was a ploy to ask about Kehoe and Montsalvo. Why? What do you know?’

  Kehoe, she’d said. Not Walter, and not with an ounce of affection. I had plunged into a game I couldn’t fathom. When you’re drowning, I knew, your only hope was to kick hard and swim for the surface.

  ‘I know there’s another painting underneath Montsalvo’s Madonna of the Hills. One by Otto Haas.’

  ‘Goddammit.’ Vera hurled herself against the car’s seat. Up front, Timothy chuckled. Vera spun toward me again. ‘Who else knows? Marion?’ Another name she uttered with pitiless contempt. I nodded, even though strictly speaking Marion didn’t yet have all the details.

  ‘We’ll never get it now,’ Timothy said.

  ‘Yes, we will.’ Vera ran a hand through her recently done hair. ‘I just need to think.’

  We drove in silence. Then someone spoke. Naturally, it was me. ‘I don’t know exactly what’s going on. But I have a guess.’

  Vera smirked. ‘Let’s hear it.’

  ‘You’re using William Randolph Hearst’s art purchases in Europe to smuggle paintings into this country.’

  ‘Paintings by a friend,’ Timothy said. Vera slapped his shoulder to quiet him, but he shrugged it off. ‘What difference can it make? She saw Otto’s painting. Tell me, Lillian, how did it look? Did it survive the trip?’

  ‘Yes. It’s quite stunning.’ I caught Timothy beaming in the rearview mirror, the notion bringing him some happiness.

  ‘This is a mistake,’ Vera grumbled. Then she relented. ‘We knew Otto in Paris. We all studied there, painted there. A group of artists, musicians, writers.’

  ‘Bohemians.’ Timothy pronounced the word as a maiden aunt would, charged with fear.

  ‘Otto achieved success first, as we expected he would. He had a dealer, regular buyers. He was developing a reputation. Then his mother took ill, and he returned to Germany to tend to her. We warned him not to. The Nazis had seized power. They’d established a stronghold in Otto’s home town. We told him they hated people like him. He said they’d been hating him his whole life.’

  ‘Otto was the best of us,’ Timothy said bluntly. ‘The best person. The finest artist.’

  ‘I was pretty good.’ A hint of her former vanity in Vera’s protest.

  ‘You were not Otto. Even you have to admit that.’

  I spoke up ag
ain. ‘He was killed, your friend.’

  Vera turned toward the window. ‘By drunken ruffians outside a bar. Otto never could control his tongue when he drank. He said something he shouldn’t have, I’d wager. They beat him to death. The authorities covered it up, because some of the men who did it were the authorities. Nazis, feeling their power.’

  ‘His mother had died,’ Timothy said. ‘He should have left. Instead, he stayed and painted. Until they killed him.’

  ‘And so we made a pact.’ Vera continued to address her comments to the passing streetscape, her voice affectless. ‘His friends from Paris, now scattered across Europe and America. We vowed to remember our dear Otto the best way we could. By preserving his art.’

  ‘Meaning you had to get it out of Germany,’ I said.

  ‘We didn’t move fast enough,’ Timothy said. ‘That’s how some of Otto’s work ended up in the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. But our comrades in Berlin were able to spirit the rest of it into hiding. It was only a temporary solution. If we didn’t move Otto’s paintings out of the country, they would meet one of three fates. They would be destroyed. Nazis love a bonfire, you know. Or the party kingpins would keep the work for themselves – degenerate art is not for the masses, but it’s perfectly fine for our betters to enjoy it. Or, worst of all, they would sell the paintings for pfennigs on the Reichsmark, like at that auction in Lucerne, with the proceeds going to the Nazi war machine.’

  ‘We refused to allow Otto’s life’s work to line the pockets of his killers.’ Vera directed this sentence at me. Given the iciness in her eyes, I wished she hadn’t. ‘We established a system. Hearst buys art by the truckload, so much of it no one looks twice at his purchases. He pays in full, his papers always in order.’

  ‘You substituted Otto’s paintings,’ I said. ‘Under copies of work Hearst had bought.’

  ‘Middling stuff,’ Vera scoffed. ‘Art he’d been schooled by a doting mother to appreciate. You heard him droning on about it. All he cares about is the provenance, not the passion. Otto came up with a whole new way of seeing, and Moneybags Hearst might as well be blind. It added a whole other level of pleasure to the game, using Hearst’s dreadful taste to save Otto’s work.’ She nodded casually toward Timothy. ‘Meet Paolo Montsalvo.’

  ‘You painted the Madonna, Timothy?’

  ‘Not a great likeness, I know. But that’s because I didn’t try very hard. I knew no one would look at it.’ He grinned at me in the mirror. ‘My name’s not Timothy, by the way. Any more than hers is Vera.’

  I looked from the back of his head to Vera’s round face. ‘Then who are you? What should I call you?’

  ‘Stick with Vera and Timothy,’ she said. ‘We’re Otto Haas’s friends. That’s what’s important.’

  ‘Very well, Vera. Tell me how Otto’s painting ended up in a Hearst warehouse.’

  ‘One of our friends would switch the paintings in Europe. Another was in position to remove Otto’s once it arrived here, before it was shipped to Hearst.’ She pursed her lips. ‘Then the clod managed to get himself fired. For drinking, if you can imagine. He hid the news from us. As a result, several of Otto’s pieces were lost.’

  ‘Not lost, exactly,’ I said. ‘You know where they are.’

  ‘In Hearst’s holding pens.’ Vera scowled. ‘It’s disgraceful.’

  Timothy sighed. ‘Even my fakes aren’t being appreciated.’

  ‘Then the only reason you’re involved with Walter Kehoe is to retrieve the painting.’

  Vera’s nod incorporated a shudder. ‘He’s part of Hearst’s circle, and it’s common knowledge he’s after the Montsalvo to curry favor with Il Duce. It was easy enough to attach myself to him. Just get prettied up and become a bauble for him to possess. He’s a dunce as well as a boor, Kehoe. Pours nonsense into my ear about making me a star. I couldn’t care less about that. I gush at his empty promises while keeping track of his wheeling and dealing. Waiting for the Montsalvo to surface so we can replace it with another copy Timothy tossed off.’

  ‘This one’s better,’ he said from the front seat. ‘Honest.’

  ‘Where are the original paintings?’ I asked. ‘The ones Hearst paid for?’

  ‘Who gives a damn?’ Vera said with feeling.

  ‘In a loft somewhere in Europe. Or under a haystack.’ Timothy chuckled. ‘Let them fall into the hands of the Nazis, for all we care. When Hearst realizes he’s been hornswoggled – assuming he ever does – he can deal with those devils directly. I’m sure as soon as he shows them his receipts, they’ll set everything to rights.’

  ‘What matters is that Otto’s work is here. Safe.’ Vera’s eyes blazed. ‘Now. Who else knows about the Montsalvo?’

  ‘I think Anthony Selden does.’

  Timothy thumped the palm of his hand against the steering wheel, the first show of genuine emotion I’d seen from him. ‘I knew it, that bastard. He started sniffing around Otto back in Paris. With his access to Hearst, he’ll get to these pieces before we do.’

  ‘He won’t. I won’t let him.’ Vera thrust her jaw forward. ‘How did Marion find out? That scatterbrained old doxy knows even less about art than her meal ticket does.’

  The gratuitous insults of Marion rankled, and I answered without thinking. ‘The letters.’

  Vera and Timothy pointedly did not look at each other. ‘What letters?’ Vera asked.

  ‘The ones threatening to dredge up an old scandal if she didn’t come across with Madonna of the Hills.’

  ‘Typical Marion. Fretting only about her social standing at a time like this.’ She paused. ‘Who sent these letters?’

  ‘It wasn’t you?’

  ‘Selden,’ Timothy said. ‘Has to be. Not least because the letters worked. They forced her to fetch the painting.’

  ‘There are murders linked to these letters,’ I said softly. ‘Two of them.’

  Vera grunted. ‘Definitely Selden, then. Has Marion handed over the painting yet?’

  ‘No. It happens tomorrow night. At her party.’

  ‘Damn. I wish we’d thought of these letters,’ Timothy said.

  I wasn’t convinced they hadn’t. Their manner was too glib, their denials too easy. Worse, if they were indeed Argus, I’d been hoodwinked into informing them their plan was coming to fruition.

  ‘We’ll simply have to work fast,’ Vera declared.

  ‘Somehow make the switch before the handover,’ Timothy said. ‘Be on our merry way.’

  ‘Waiting for a chance to take another of Otto’s paintings off Hearst’s hands.’ Vera laughed. ‘Perhaps we can twist Marion’s arm into getting them all for us.’

  ‘She’s been through enough,’ I said with more force than I expected.

  ‘She’s a silly, vain woman. Allowing herself to be kept by a man of such bourgeois tastes.’

  I crumpled against the car seat, tired of Vera’s posturing, tired of the state of the world, tired in general.

  ‘I knew all along you weren’t brother and sister,’ I said petulantly. ‘Canoodling at the ranch. I saw right through your act and made you two for a couple.’

  They erupted into simultaneous guffaws, Timothy’s notably louder. ‘We’re not lovers, either, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘We expected people to see through the act. All part of the deception. When hiding a secret, make up another for them to find. Anything to keep them from suspecting what you’re really up to.’

  As I sulked, he reached into his pocket. A moment later, he placed a roll of pennies on the dashboard. ‘If it makes you feel any better,’ he said, giving me a sad-eyed smile in the rearview mirror, ‘I didn’t have a gun, either.’

  THIRTY

  At least my would-be captors consented to drive me home. The trip took longer than anticipated. As Timothy tooled around Hollywood while the woman who was neither his sister nor his lover browbeat me, he encountered multiple snarls of traffic. ‘What goes on?’ he finally said in muted frustration.

  ‘Tonight’s the premiere of The Women
at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. It’s a hot ticket. Starring Joan Crawford and Paulette Goddard.’ Out of the film’s sprawling A-list cast, I’d only named the actresses with whom I’d had extended conversations. Living in Los Angeles had definitely altered me.

  Vera glared out the window at the packs of young girls flowing around the car to join the commotion further down Hollywood Boulevard. ‘What utter madness,’ she said. ‘The world’s ablaze and people clog the streets to stargaze. This extravaganza’s over nothing. No one will remember this movie. It won’t last the way a painting will.’

  ‘More people will see it,’ I countered. ‘And you’re the ones who cast Paolo Montsalvo’s work aside. What if somebody other than Mussolini wants to appreciate it?’

  Vera turned her fiery eyes on me. I stared back. I’d had enough of her posturing for the night. Timothy turned on the car’s radio for the remainder of the ride.

  Naturally, Edith was still at Paramount, waiting for an update. I decided she didn’t need to hear every detail of how Vera and Timothy had gotten the better of me outside The House of Westmore. Instead, I highlighted my triumphs, explaining what was behind what lay behind Montsalvo’s Madonna. ‘Is the painting still OK?’

  ‘Bill reassembled it perfectly. You can’t tell it’s been touched. I’ll lock it in my office closet and return it to Miss Davies tomorrow.’

  ‘Kehoe’s nothing but an angle for Vera and Timothy,’ I said. ‘He’s a way for them to get at the painting.’

  ‘Do you believe them to be responsible for the letters to Miss Davies?’

  ‘They claim they’re not. They pinned the blame on Selden. But they’re the ones who switched the canvases, so they’re the most desperate to recover it. They’ve even got a second counterfeit ready to go, to speed the swap and leave a Montsalvo in Hearst’s possession.’

  ‘Which is also a forgery. It’s getting so you can’t tell the artwork without a scorecard.’ Edith’s dry chuckle carried hints of exhaustion. ‘It’s all coming down to tomorrow evening, I fear.’