For now, I need to pursue this thing. Momentum is always an issue, and if I wondered whether the anonymous letter and drawings were a wild-goose chase before, I certainly don’t after hearing what Marie Donovan had implied about her relationship with her brother, and about the parentage of her child. Everything is connected. If Jack set these letters up himself, or has—as I certainly suspect—greater knowledge of them than he chose to share with me, then I need to see all three women he suggested knew something about them as soon as possible.
I park outside Geri Foster’s white Art Deco house on a leafy avenue in Foxrock. I still drive the racing-green 1965 Volvo 122S my father, a motor mechanic, had unknowingly bequeathed to me. It’s a big old beast of a car, the Amazon; Tommy Owens, who is a mechanic by trade, and had once worked for my father, keeps it on the road for me; I often look out into the yard at the rear of my apartment and see Tommy burrowing beneath the hood. He doesn’t feel it necessary to warn me when he’s coming, or to let me know he’s been there; at some essential level, I think he feels the car belongs to him, and I’m just the nominal owner; I probably feel the same way. I didn’t get along very well with my father, but the fact that the car was something he loved and that I drive it around the city he lived in means something to me, although it would probably take a Jack Donovan to tell you quite what that something is.
Geri Foster wears flat round-toed shoes with ankle straps and white pleated trousers and a silk top in a green that matches the Volvo; her short, reddish-brown hair is cut in a loose marcel wave; she seems to have been styled to go with the house. I sit on a chair to one side of the hearth in her open-plan living room and thank her for the cup of very good coffee she brought me and wonder why, since I was pretty sure I had noticed Chanel No. 5 when she greeted me at the door, I can smell Jo Malone Lime, Basil and Mandarin, Anne Fogarty’s scent.
Geri Foster sits on the sofa across from the fireplace and looks at me expectantly. I had spoken to her on the phone, and when I mentioned that I wanted to talk to her about Jack Donovan, she had told me that in that case, I must come over, in such a careless manner that I was taken aback; that same cheerful carelessness is the overwhelming impression I get now. After all I have been told, I find it a little unsettling. On a set of shelves by my side there’s a framed photo of two small girls riding a toy car along a funfair track. They look like miniature grown-ups in the car, their faces set in solemn concentration, as if they were two old ladies driving to church together. I pick up the photo and smile, and turn the smile around to Geri Foster, and her face lights up.
“Alice and Daisy,” she says. “They’re five. Started school last September, God, the time goes so fast. The crèche picks them up in the afternoons.”
“Alice and Daisy?” I say.
“That’s right. What did Jack tell you, Jackie and Joanie? Set me up as a total bunny boiler, did he?”
Still reeling from the level of misinformation my old friend has armed me with, I can do little more than shake my head.
“Maybe you could tell me…your side of the story,” I say.
“Maybe you could tell me why,” Geri Foster returned. “I mean, you’re working for Jack, fine. I said I’d see you. Notice I don’t have a solicitor here, which I probably should have. That’s not the way I work. But why are you here? Is Jack trying to reduce his maintenance payments? Do you intend to poke around, see if there’s any sign of a man in the picture? I mean, that’s how people like you make their money, isn’t it?”
I’m not sure how comfortable I am being lectured about how I made my money by a woman who continues to make all hers from a man she was married to for a few months, but then again, I can’t necessarily be sure that anything Jack has told me is true.
“It’s not how I make my money.”
“Oh no? Dublin’s a small town, Mr. Loy. I happen to know, was at school with someone whose husband divorced her because you provided him with evidence of her infidelity. And there was a prenup, and she landed hard on her ass with fuck all. So don’t paint yourself as some kind of service to widows and orphans, some knight in shining armor.”
I don’t think I blush, but I can feel the heat on my brow. In recent months, I have felt the city shrinking. Part of my excitement at Jack Donovan’s return is that he is a link with outside, with L.A., with the wider world. I try to do as little divorce work as possible, for the same reasons I try to avoid organized criminals if I can: because the people are depressing, and what they do makes you sad, and if you catch them out, they invariably want revenge. Not that the kind of people who hire private detectives for divorce work are as dangerous as organized criminals. (Although once the wife of a Dublin gangster tried to hire me to catch her husband with a woman she suspected was his younger girlfriend. I said I was too busy, whereas in fact I was too scared. I don’t know if she hired a different kind of operative or took the job on herself, but three months later her husband and a twenty-three-year-old woman were shot dead in bed at the woman’s apartment, thus vindicating her judgment, and mine.) But they are often influential in legal and security circles that it’s not in my interest to alienate. Equally, they talk to the press and the press run stories, mostly speculative, on what I do. Dublin is a small place for a private detective to be a public figure, and I’m already too well known for my own good. The city is shrinking, and I wonder, not for the first time, whether I’m running out of road.
“All right. I’m not here at Jack’s behest to snoop around and catch you out. I can assure you of that. I’m here because…because Jack has received a series of anonymous letters, and he’s worried you might have sent them.”
I pass the letters and the drawing to Geri Foster and finish my coffee while she examines them. Unlike Marie Donovan, Geri doesn’t show the slightest glimmer of amusement; when she reaches the daubs of the fetus and the inverted cross, she emits an involuntary squeal and thrusts the bundle of paper back to me as if it was red hot.
“Oh my God, how creepy!” she says, in fluent Foxrock. “Some kind of Bible basher. Jack thought they were from me? Why would he think that? My God, that fetus and the crucifix, it’s like The Omen or something.”
I’m not sure what age Geri Foster is, somewhere in her mid-thirties at a guess, but she seems to have regressed from Southside sophisticate to agitated teen. She dips her head and tugs at strands of her hair, teasing them in the direction of her mouth. When she looks up at me, her face is flushed.
“What’s the matter with him, Mr. Loy?”
What’s the matter with you? is what I feel like asking.
“It’s hard to say. I think he’s feeling anxious about…about things in his life. A sense of unease. Maybe a, you know, a midlife sense. And the letters, while not specific, seem to suggest guilt and maybe retribution, in very general terms. And since there is a drawing of a fetus, he seemed to think that maybe…because you and Jack were at odds over the, uh, the girls there, the birth of the girls, I think he was interested in what you might have to say.”
Part of my own stumbling unease is genuine, but the bulk of it is a kind of performance intended to relax Geri, and to an extent it seems to work; by the time I’ve finished speaking, she has regained composure and allows the trace of a smile to play around her lips.
“So what are you saying, you’re, like, a go-between?” she says, her voice gently mocking.
“I guess that’s what I’m like. To be perfectly honest, Geri, and I don’t know how much you know of this, but I fell out with Jack myself, I haven’t seen or spoken to him in ten years, and when he approached me with these letters, I didn’t know what to think. I still don’t. But I can tell you he’s upset and anxious, and I said I’d try and help him. That’s as much as I can tell you.”
Geri Foster considers this, getting off the sofa and walking to the front window and looking out through the narrow wooden blinds.
“Cool car. Jack used to talk about that car.”
“No he didn’t. I didn’t have that car in
L.A.”
“Well, he used to talk about some cool old car you had.”
“A ’63 Cadillac Eldorado. Same color.”
“He used to talk about that. He used to talk about you. A lot.”
“We were friends.”
“You hurt him very badly. He said you would have nothing to do with him.”
Back at her apartment on Horizon Avenue, the sun had burned the clouds, scorched the mist away. My hair was matted by the time she opened the door and I saw…
“That’s about right. Did he tell you why?”
“He said you’d fallen out over a woman.”
“I suppose we did.”
“But it’s all right now?”
“I don’t know. Maybe enough time has passed.”
“But the reason you fell out, the details…they don’t seem important anymore?”
…and I saw Amanda’s face…
“No, they do, I just…I guess I was glad to see him.”
“He never told me what had happened. But he said it was all his fault. A couple of times…a couple of times, he broke down and cried about it. Said it was no use, he could never, should never be forgiven for what he had done. I couldn’t believe it. Jack Donovan, such a tough guy, such a bear of a man, crying in my arms.”
“Was that on Twenty Grand?”
“In the Sierras, yeah. God, I was such a fucking…I bet he told you I was a silly little bitch, working with this famous director, this amazing costume designer, and I hadn’t the wit to realize opportunities like this did not fall out of the sky.”
“Something like that.”
“Well, he’s absolutely right. I was an unspeakable little fool. And the only thing I can say in my defense is, I wanted to be an actress. And you know what you should never do if you want to be an actress? Work in production, or administration, or design, or in a technical department. Better off being a waitress. Because it’s like being the bridesmaid and wishing you were the bride, the actual bride, marrying that actual guy. I had done some work here, fifteen years ago, theater stuff, I was okay. I was good, actually.”
She pauses, as if to let how good she had been settle in the room. She is still at the window, her hair catching the light that filters through the half-shut blinds. About five eight, with a slender boy’s hips and chest and a dancer’s steady, supple posture, she is certainly good at finding a place to stand that makes her look elegant and graceful.
“But I was doing costume as well, in the theater, and then I was doing some styling for people I knew, to make some money, and that led to an ad, and then I worked in costume on a couple of small Irish movies and one went to L.A. and I just went on a holiday while the guys were out there and they met Jack and everyone and I got, I think it was through Maurice Faye, I got the chance to do it. And because it had happened so haphazardly, without my, you know, waiting in my room, oh my God I really hope I can do this, because it was so not my dream, I just took it for granted. I was like, if I hang out with the actors, I’ll somehow get acting work. But of course, I totally pissed them all off as well, because it’s on location in the Sierras, and everyone needs to do their job, and what did I think? They’re going to write a part for me? So I was sacked.”
“But at that stage, you had gotten together with Jack.”
“That’s right. Not Conor Rowan or Mark Cassidy, Jack Donovan, the director himself. Case closed.”
“I don’t know what the case is yet. You tell me.”
Geri turns from the window and closes the blinds and walks back and sits where she had been sitting in one fluent movement that looks like it had been rehearsed. Her manner is not theatrical but somehow her overall affect is. I can’t take my eyes off her.
“Of course, it might spoil a perfect little showbiz fable about a gold-digging actress who gets her director in her sights and then nabs him to point out that Jack made all the running. All the moves came from his side. I wasn’t…to tell the truth, I don’t think I really fancied him to begin with.”
“He did say something along those lines.”
“Along what lines?”
“That you didn’t seem to like him very much, and especially, you didn’t seem to like having sex with him.”
Geri Foster cups her hands and thrusts her face into them as a high-pitched shriek issues from somewhere deep inside. When she reemerges, she looks chastened, as if the truth is hard to admit but you can’t avoid it.
“Well, basically, that was true. I didn’t fancy him at all, I…not then…but he was so keen, you know, and he was funny, and charismatic, and…”
“He was Jack Donovan.”
“Ye-ah. In spades. Private-jet-at-the-weekends-to-go-to-Palm-Springs Jack Donovan. And I was just-been-fired Geri Foster. So it was all a bit…imbalanced? I mean, I liked him, but…and the other thing was, he was out of his face pretty much all the time. Self-medicating. I mean, there was booze and coke and Valium, up down up down all day and all night. I didn’t really think that much of it then, I guess I felt, since he was the only famous director I’d ever met, and he’d won Oscars—Oscars, for fuck’s sake—I just felt this was the way you did it. You were an artist, on drugs, what was the problem? And I really don’t want to sound like I had an eye out for the main chance. It was just very hard to refuse him. And I had nothing, you know? And I reckoned, well, I’ll get to fancy him. It’s not like I actively dislike it, it’s just the…the spark? The smell? Whatever it is you need. Which is weird in the light of what happened later. But I just want to say, in the weeks leading up to, and at the moment of, the wedding, I was not thinking, I’m going to take this guy for what I can get.”
Geri looks around the room ruefully, as if the evidence tends very much the other way.
“So what happened?”
“What happened was, virtually the day after we got married, which was the day after the shoot, Jack started pushing me away, literally, as in, go back to Ireland, go back and find a house, our Irish house. And he’d come over when there was a break in postproduction. And I thought that was really nice, and I went back, and I found this place, quite near where my mother lived, I picked it because it had an L.A. kind of feel to it, and he said he loved it, and bought it within six weeks, and he never came back, he said he was under too much pressure and what was the problem and all the documents were made out in my name. And I was kind of so giddy with the excitement and the stress of it, that I didn’t notice how weird it was. To buy a house without even looking at it. But at the time, I was like, hey, these movie directors, they’re wild and crazy, they’re so different from us. I thought, if this is going to work, it’s going to work in a way I’ve never encountered before. The only thing was, he wasn’t there, and pretty soon I was having trouble even getting him on the phone because he was so busy. And you know, shooting a movie he’d had time to start an affair with me, but editing the thing he’s suddenly under pressure? I don’t think so. And I started to feel a bit foolish, you know? All my friends were, what’s the deal? Where’s your husband? I mean, you get married, it’s a public thing, right? So I flew out to L.A., unannounced…you’re nodding your head, what, did he tell you?”
“He told me, yeah.”
“He did? What did he tell you?”
“He told me that you walked in on him…with somebody else.”
“Is that what he said? Well, I guess that would make it more understandable. No, I walked into the house on Amalfi Drive and he was sitting in a chair, looking out the window, down across the hills to Pacific Palisades, that view I’d been looking forward to, that I’d heard all about. And he turned to me—he didn’t even get up—and he said, ‘Hi.’ Not ‘Hi, Geri,’ not ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were coming,’ not ‘I can’t believe you’re here!’ Hi. Like I’m…I’ll tell you exactly what it was like, like I’m someone he met on holiday and told, if you’re ever in L.A., be sure and drop in, knowing there’s no way the person would. Well, the person did. And he completely ignored me. Wouldn’t even ta
lk to me for the first evening, he showed me to a bedroom and vanished. I was just wondering, is he depressed? What’s the matter with him?
“The next day, I get up, he’s outside by the pool, I go out, and he’s ready to talk. But all he has to say is, he gets really low after a shoot, it’s a big comedown, it’s better if he’s left alone to regroup. And I ask him if he wants me to go back to Dublin, and he says he thinks that would be best. And I ask him—this is such a surreal situation, I swear to God, I’ve just gotten up, I’m by this pool, you can see down the hills to the Pacific Ocean, and I’m talking to this man who I thought I wasn’t so keen on, and it’s obvious he doesn’t want me anywhere near him, I mean, how did this happen to my life?—I ask him if he wants a divorce. And he says yes, he thinks that would be best. And I say, what about the house? And he says, it’s in your name, it’s paid for, keep it. And he named a sum he wanted to offer in maintenance. And I said, no way, I don’t need maintenance, I won’t accept any, it’s bad enough I get the house.
“Well, that was even more surreal, three hours, he becomes animated, it’s like he grew back into himself, the old Jack, energy and wit and verve, calling his lawyer to draw up papers, all in the service of making me take some alimony. I say I don’t want a penny. He eventually convinces me to accept by claiming I’ll save him money, because any divorce attorney worth his salt would screw him for five times what he’s offering, so I say yes and ask for a taxi to LAX. And the divorce is handled like the house purchase was, documents couriered back and forth. He drove me to the airport, and he cried when he said goodbye. And then we didn’t have any contact in five years. And every month, the maintenance payments. Do you understand Jack Donovan? Because I sure as hell don’t.”
I shake my head, and trust that my face is a reliable guide to my feelings, which are genuinely and decidedly that I don’t either. Geri shoots a smile in my direction that is just a little too bright, and that flashes off abruptly like she has turned a switch, and suddenly all that’s left in her eyes is wounded pride, and confusion, and loss. Well-heeled loss, for sure, the kind of loss that people who in the last year had lost things like their pension, their job or their home would gladly plump for. But loss is loss wherever you sit, and it doesn’t much care how worthy you are of universal sympathy. I nod at Geri, encouraging her to pick up her strange Hollywood tale.
City of Lost Girls Page 14
