by Joan Hess
“It’s not quite as classy as a Beverly Hills mansion,” I said, “and you’ll have to excuse the smell. I’m fresh out of room deodorizer and incense.” I flung the towel in a corner.
“You’re quite as classy as the women who live in the mansions,” he said as he moved around the room, gazing at my choices of literature (lurid), cheap prints (French Impressionism), and the stacks of paperwork (tedious) that trailed me home from the PD. “And you’re real.”
I kicked the sodden rags out of the way, then squatted down to examine the charred depression in the floor. It was a good two inches deep; if I filled it with fresh water, the cockroaches could spend their nights at the pool. Blackened matches were scattered around it; the firebug had left his signature for me, just in case I missed the connection. “Real what?” I said as I stood up. “Real foolhardy?”
“Possibly. You certainly didn’t consider the danger when you charged upstairs as if it were San Juan Hill.” Anderson sat down on the sofa and gave me an inviting look.
I decided to ignore it and began to collect the rags in a tidy pile. “As I said, no one messes with me. What’s maddening is that I know who set this fire, but I don’t have any proof. I can confront him with a lie, but it’s not a crime to lie unless it impedes an investigation. A first-year law student would have him out in ten seconds flat. The worst thing is that the damn kid was in here—in my apartment.”
My head jerked around as I searched for other signs of his vile intrusion. Nothing seemed to be missing, but his pudgy white hands could have touched my things, twisted and turned them, moved them a centimeter or two, all the while leaving a trace of oil mingled with sweat on everything I owned. If he chose to return when I was asleep, he could do so. My skin began to itch, and the beer in my stomach turned sour.
“You’ll get him eventually,” Anderson said soothingly. “Why don’t you sit over here and let me wipe all the black streaks off your face? You look as if you applied blackface in a most inept fashion, and we don’t want any accusations of racism.”
I sat down, albeit warily, and allowed him to clean me up to his own satisfaction. Before I realized what was happening, several strategic bobby pins had been removed, and my hair tumbled down my back. He disengaged the remaining ones, arranged my hair over my shoulders, and sat back with a bemused smile.
“Sometimes it doesn’t work,” he said. “Some women need their hair tightly restrained, their glasses on their noses, their collars buttoned. It works every time in the movies, but in the real world there’s not always a seductress waiting to be unshackled.”
I opened my mouth to point out I was no seductress, shackled or unshackled, when he leaned forward and kissed me. It was right out of the last chapter of my more lurid novels, and I heard myself remembering snippets of purple prose that could curdle milk.
“Why is it no one messes with you?” he said as he nibbled my ear. “Because you won’t let them?”
I let him mess with me for a moment longer, then retreated and said, “That’s right, Anderson—I won’t let ’em. You’d better go now. I’m going to borrow a fan from Roy and try to get rid of the stench.”
“What about your testy trooper?” he asked. “Do you keep him at arm’s length?”
The mention of my testy trooper chilled me. I could almost see him sitting across from us, his feet flat on the floor, his arms crossed, and his face radiating disapproval from behind mirrored sunglasses.
“I don’t keep him anywhere,” I said coldly. “Furthermore, it’s none of your damn business. I don’t know if you make a practice of trying to find yourself a local bed and breakfast when you shoot a—”
“Back down, Arly. I don’t make a practice of anything. I was attracted to you because I found you a cryptic combination of sophistication and … naïveté. No, that’s not the word. I have no idea what you are, but I’d like to find out. Even though I live in La-La Land and associate with some remarkably shallow people, I hope I’m something more than a stereotype.” He stood up and walked to the door. “You know, I’ve never stayed in one of those bed and breakfast places.”
“Neither have I,” I said with a small smile.
Millicent McIlaney waited until Darla Jean came back into the kitchen with the mail, then said, “Last night you were hanging all over that movie star like he was honey and you were a fly. I’m surprised you don’t have sticky fingers this morning.”
“Maybe I do.” Darla Jean breezed right on through the room, dropped the mail on the sofa, and went upstairs to her bedroom to call Heather Riley. While the phone rang, she bunched her pillows under her head and got comfortable, because she had a lot to talk about and Heather had been at her cousin’s house in Lisbon (Arkansas, that is—also the possessor of a Paris and a London, and even an Omaha) the previous evening, a.k.a. the Fateful Moment. “You’re gonna die when you hear who I met last night,” she said.
“Frederick Marland,” Heather said archly. “I already heard all about it from Traci, and about ten other people after that. He held your hand and you turned to cornmeal mush. You asked him for his autograph, and—”
“I did no such thing! I am too mature to act like some silly little kid. Traci sure ain’t, though. She was flapping those cheap eyelashes so hard one of them came loose and fell onto the table like a dead spider.”
“She didn’t tell me that,” admitted Heather, who actually did want to hear Darla Jean’s version, because Traci said there had been something going on under the table that wouldn’t exactly please Darla Jean’s boyfriend when he heard all about it. “So you got a date with him, huh?”
Darla Jean glared at her stuffed poodle, who’d done nothing to warrant the hostility. “Of course not.”
“He’s not picking you up this evening?”
“He’s not picking me up this evening,” Darla Jean said coolly. He wasn’t, either. She was supposed to knock on his door after supper, and all she was going to do was give him a ride to Farberville so he could pick up some fancy kind of suntan lotion that he couldn’t find at Jim Bob’s SuperSaver Buy 4 Less.
“How old do you reckon he is?” Heather continued, knowing perfectly well what the plans for the evening were. Traci wasn’t a candidate for queen of the honor society, but there wasn’t anything wrong with her hearing. “I heard he’s playing a teenager, but Angie said she could tell he dyes his hair. He’s probably thirty years old, Darla Jean, not to mention being a Hollywood movie star. You’re going to get yourself in trouble if you start fooling around with someone like that.”
“I am not fooling around with anybody!”
Heather didn’t bother to point out that it was common knowledge that Darla Jean and her boyfriend were fooling around out by Boone Creek so often the squirrels and coons were tired of watching them. “You just better be careful,” was all she said.
Raz Buchanon found what he was looking for, and with a cackle took it back to the living room, where Marjorie was lying on the recliner. “I knew I could find it iff’n I looked hard enough,” he said as he loaded his cheek with shreds of tobacco and settled down on the sofa. “I’m sorry you had to wait all this time, but my collection goes back twenty years.”
Marjorie waited patiently.
“But I knew it weren’t that long ago,” Raz went on, “on account of it weren’t near a month of Sundays ago when it happened. Once I laid eyes on the feller, I was dead sure he’d been on the cover of one of these here newspapers, right there in the same issue with the article about how that woman in Brazil birthed a baby with two heads that spoke different languages, one being an alien tongue.”
Marjorie blinked in amazement.
“Now, you jest hold your horses and I’ll find the article.” He shook his head as he passed over the photograph of the two-headed baby, but he wasn’t about to rile Marjorie by getting distracted by the miracles of modern science. “Here it is! It sez that”—his lips moved slowly but surely—“the woman was killed in one of those ritual murders they favor in H
ollywood. You kin see in this here drawing where they wrote all over the wall in blood.” He showed it to Marjorie, who snuffled in disbelief while he laboriously worked his way through the next paragraph. “It sez the feller was making a movie in the desert, and he come home to find his wife all covered with blood and about as dead as you kin get. It was jest like a few years back when those wild-eyed hippies took to killin’ famous movie stars.”
Marjorie turned ashen at the very thought.
I parked in front of Billy Dick’s house. The truck was gone, and I was hoping he was busy looking for shacks to burn as I knocked on the door.
After a few minutes, a woman in a faded housecoat opened the door. Her gray hair was messy, and she had the vaguely bewildered look of someone who’d been asleep. Billy Dick must have inherited his soft bulkiness from his father, because she was short and undernourished. Her eyes were as pale as his, though, and as disturbingly blank.
“Mrs. MacNamara, I’m Arly Hanks,” I said.
“I know who you are.”
“I’m still working on that fire last week, and I wanted to ask Billy Dick if he remembered anything more about the truck he saw by the low-water bridge.”
“He’s gone off somewhere. Said he’d be back before suppertime so he can take me to work.”
That was the good news. The bad was that she wasn’t inviting me in for a cozy chat, and, in fact, was looking a little bored with the conversation.
“Do you mind if I come in and wait?” I said, doing my best to look so exhausted I might crumple before her eyes and thus require all kinds of action on her part. “I was up most of the night trying to clean up after the fire in my apartment.”
“I heard about that. I suppose you can sit for a few minutes, but I don’t expect Billy Dick for at least an hour.” She held open the screened door and gestured for me to come into the living room. The walls were as drab as her housecoat, the furniture shabby, the few knickknacks coated with a veneer of dust. The television was on, but the sound had been turned down. She switched it off and moved away from it, a guilty look on her face.
I sat down on the edge of the sofa. “How long have you lived here, Mrs. MacNamara?”
“Goin’ on most of a year, I suppose. The house belonged to a cousin of mine, and when he died, he left it to me. Billy Dick and I had been living in Farberville, out in a trailer park on the east side of town, and it seemed like a good idea to move somewhere and start fresh.”
“Start fresh?”
She sank down on a chair in the corner, her hands in her lap, and looked at the worn carpet. A scrawny tan cat came around the corner of the doorway, hesitated when it saw me, then glided across the room and leaped into her lap. She stroked it listlessly while she decided what—if anything—to tell me. When she at last spoke, her voice was so low I had to lean forward to hear her. “My husband passed away when Billy Pick was twelve. It was hard on both of us, not only losing him but having to make ends meet on a waitress’s salary.”
“How’d Billy Dick feel about moving to Maggody?”
“He never said anything about it. He’s busy with his own doings, and he doesn’t ever say much. Ever now and then I ask him, but he just gets mad and stomps out the door.”
“I guess it helped when he found a new friend.”
Mrs. MacNamara flinched, and unless I was overly sensitive, the quick look she gave me was hostile. “I guess it did, even though I don’t cotton to him playing silly make-believe games with a boy so much younger. Billy Dick didn’t have a lot of friends in Farberville. He’s always preferred to keep to himself mostly, just like his pa and me. We worried a sight more about paying bills than we did about wasting money in fancy restaurants or at the picture show. My husband—well, he had an ailment that kept him from working all the time and holding down a steady job. He’d work, but then he’d have a bad spell and get fired.”
In Maggody, an unspecified “ailment” was the accepted euphemism for alcoholism, and I would have bet all three bullets that my theory was correct. Mrs. MacNamara had the dispirited look of someone who’d waged a futile war for a long time. She hadn’t been able to control her husband, and it sounded as though she no longer controlled her son.
I doubted she knew anything of his activities. “I’ve got some more people to talk to,” I said, rising. “Please tell Billy Dick that I stopped by and that I’d like him to call me either at the police department or at my apartment.”
“I’ll tell him, but I can’t promise he’ll call.”
“Thanks.” I went outside, relieved to be free of her potentially contagious drabness, and drove toward Farberville and the state police barracks. I wanted to talk to Sergeant Merganser one more time.
“Did you hear what Fuzzy told Carlotta?” Gwenneth said as she dribbled coconut oil onto her arm and began to rub it into her skin. Even a cruddy little swimming pool would have been better than the edge of the motel parking lot, but she and Kitty were bored out of their coiffures after less than twenty-four hours in Maggody. Sunbathing seemed better than vegetating. Both women were on aluminum lounges, and wearing what most of the locals would describe as Band-Aids and little pieces of string.
Kitty lit a cigarette and blew a ribbon of smoke into the sky. “From the mouth of the seriously inebriated?”
“I think it means something,” Gwenneth said. She regarded her companion from behind her dark glasses, then flipped her hair back and sighed gustily (lustily would come later, in front of the camera). “Fuzzy swears he saw an unauthorized cut of Prickly Passion in a motel in Vegas. When Hal had me in his room last night to rehearse my lines”—she rolled her eyes, even though Kitty couldn’t appreciate the effect—“he admitted as much and said someone had pirated a tape.”
“Well, hell,” Kitty said, then paused while she oiled her basically bare breasts. They weren’t of Gwenneth’s caliber, but they were better than standard issue and twice as expensive. “If that’s true, we won’t make nearly as much on the distribution. Buddy and I are currently in an uncomfortable situation, and we were counting on our five-percent cuts to ward off the wolves baying at the Jaguar.”
The sunglasses fell off Gwenneth’s delicately tilted nose, as she jerked upright. “Five?” she said shrilly. “Five? You and Buddy got five? Hal swore up one leg and down the other that everybody was getting three. That son of a bitch! I’d like to take his toupee and shove it—”
“Good afternoon, ladies,” Ruby Bee said as she came across the parking lot, a tray in her hands and a determined smile on her face despite the quantity of naked flesh on display in her parking lot. These Hollywood people seemed disinclined to clothes, she thought uneasily. “I brought you all some iced tea. It must be hotter than an oven out here on the gravel.”
Gwenneth got the sunglasses back in place and rewarded the woman with a dazzlingly white smile. “Aren’t you a sweetie! I was just telling Kitty that I’d pass up a day of shopping on Rodeo Drive for a glass of tea.” She held out her hand, and Ruby Bee hastily put a glass in it.
“Thanks,” Kitty said, her voice as gravelly as the parking lot. “I didn’t have a chance to meet you last night when Hal ordered us—I mean, invited us to have a few beers at your bar and meet the locals. I’m Kitty Kaye.”
“Oh, I know who you are,” Ruby Bee said, trying not to gush but gushing all the same. “I saw every last picture you made back in the fifties. I used to try to fix my hair just like yours in case Humphrey Bogart came knocking on my door. It must have been heavenly to be kissed by someone like that, even if you had to do it ’cause it was in the script.”
“It had its moments,” Kitty murmured. “It’s very kind of you to remember me. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been accused of being dead, even to my face. Before we leave, you and I will pose for a photograph, and I’ll autograph it for you personally. Buddy will, too, if you like.”
“Oh, Miss Kaye,” Ruby Bee breathed reverently, imagining the framed photos on the barroom wall, just like in those f
ancy Noow Yark restaurants.
Gwenneth frowned at a freckle on her arm. “Who’s Humphrey Bogart?”
Kitty and Ruby Bee exchanged looks that bordered on unspoken condemnation. Ruby Bee started to explain, then realized it’d be presumptuous to think she knew better than Miss Kitty Kaye, who’d kissed him in the fifties.
“Later, darling,” Kitty said. “So, Mrs. Hanks, what kind of excitement can we anticipate in Maggody?”
“I’d be happy as all get out if you’d call me Ruby Bee, and you, too, Miss D’Amourre. The only folks what call me Mrs. Hanks are the pesky fellows from the ABC.” Ruby Bee could hear herself prattling like one of those ventriloquist’s dummies, but she couldn’t seem to stop. “The ABC’s the Alcohol and Beverage Control. They have to inspect my license twice a year and snoop around to see if I’m serving minors.”
“Those dirty-faced men who dig for diamonds?” Gwenneth asked, although she appeared more interested in the circle of oil she’d drawn around her belly button.
Ruby Bee wondered if this blonde wasn’t several logs short of a rick, but she didn’t say a single word, and after a moment, Kitty Kaye yawned and said, “Where is everybody?”
Gwenneth’s yawn was more restrained. “Carlotta and Hal went to check the sites. The boys are holed up in that last room, playing poker and doing their best to run through the entire liquor supply by dusk. Anderson said he was going to take a walk, although I cannot imagine why he’d do such a seriously sweaty thing like that.” She sat up and held the iced tea glass until Ruby Bee retrieved it. “I, for one, am ready for a martini. Do you suppose dear Buddy could be flattered into making me one? He’s the only one who merely allows the gin to gaze longingly at the vermouth.”
Kitty handed her glass to Ruby Bee, who’d sprouted roots in the parking lot on account of being in such proximity to Hollywood movie stars. “Thank you ever so much, Ruby Bee,” she said with a nod. “I do believe, Gwenneth, that I’m going to hunt up my hubby and lure him into our room. We don’t have any scenes quite like yours, but he does enjoy our rehearsals … as much as Hal must enjoy his rehearsals with you.”
