The Woman Who Fell From Grace

by David Handler

  Edward’s cook came in and cleared the table. She left us a pot of coffee and a plate of cookies. Edward poured the coffee.

  “Would you happen to know if he used morphine?”

  “Not that I ever saw,” Edward replied, nibbling on a cookie.

  “Was there a doctor on the set?”

  “There was. He arrived with the production team from Hollywood. Dr. Toriello. An older fellow with dirty fingernails and hair growing out of his ears. He spent a lot of time with Miss Darnell. I was told she suffered from severe menstrual cramps and refused to work when she had them.”

  “Sounds like a Dr. Feelgood,” I suggested.

  He frowned. “A what?”

  “The studios always kept some borderline quack around to make the little green men go away. They still do. Did he spend time around Sloan?”

  “Yes, he often looked in on him for his headaches.” Edward’s eyes widened. “Why, do you think he was … ?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Edward shook his head sadly. “Morphine. It’s for pain, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  “It was her, Laurel Barrett. She was so angelic, so delicately beautiful. Yet she was the dirtiest, rottenest tramp imaginable, Hoagy. God, how she tortured him. It was as if she took delight in punishing him for his love. She and Flynn — the two of them would go into his trailer in the middle of the day to have sex. Everyone knew. It was disgraceful.” He lowered his voice. “She even made a play for me.”

  “Did you … ?”

  “I was tempted. Lord, was I tempted. She was one of the most gorgeous women in the world. But Sterling was my friend.” He sighed longingly. “I must confess I still wonder sometimes when I’m lying in my bed alone at night. I wonder what I missed out on.” Abruptly, he reached for his coffee. “Drugs? Who could blame the poor man?”

  “The night before she died, Fern told me she believed he was murdered.”

  “And you believe she was murdered, as well. Yes, I know all about your theory. Mavis phoned me first thing this morning. I was shocked, truly. It’s been so many years since she’d phoned. I almost didn’t recognize her voice.”

  “And my theory?”

  “I’m skeptical, frankly.”

  “So is Polk Four,” I admitted.

  “Yes, I know. I spoke with him as soon as I got off the phone with Mave. I wanted to have the facts of the case. Lawyers, by nature, have an aversion to surprises.” He sipped his coffee. “I’ve been curious about Mother’s diary myself. Why those pages were torn out. Why Fern screamed.”

  “Did Fern ever say anything to you about it?”

  “Not a word. The entire incident came as news to me.”

  “Do you have any idea who was there in Vangie’s room with Sloan?”

  “None.”

  “You said his wife was sleeping around on him.”

  “Gleefully.”

  “Was he doing the same?”

  “There weren’t any whispers,” he replied. “As I mentioned, Sterling kept to himself most of the time. He certainly said nothing to me about anyone.” Edward got up and went over to the French doors. “One thing you should bear in mind about Fern, Hoagy, is that she was always inclined to exaggerate. The fact is Sterling died of a ruptured aneurysm. The warning signs were all there. He had been complaining of blinding headaches. He acted strangely, he was frequently drowsy. The medical experts later agreed that these symptoms indicated the leakage in his brain had already begun. He looked particularly pale and drawn that last day of filming. He was so weak he was barely able to finish. That very night he was stricken in his suite at the Woodrow Wilson.”

  “Who else was there?”

  “She was — Laurel. And Dr. Toriello arrived almost immediately. He was staying in the hotel. He sent for an ambulance at once, but Sterling died before it arrived.”

  “Did any other doctor besides Toriello see him?”

  “I imagine so. Someone local had to sign the death certificate. Toriello was licensed out of state.”

  “Were the police called?”

  “Of course. The sheriff got there right away.”

  “Not the Staunton city police?”

  Edward smiled. “Town was a lot smaller then. There was no city police force.”

  “I see. Who was the sheriff?”

  “Polk Two,” he replied. “Polk Four’s granddad. Fine man. Only just gave up his senate seat in Richmond last year. Represented us there quite proudly for the past forty-five years. His legs are bothering him — he’s eighty-seven, after all. But he’s still sharp as a tack, old Polk Two.”

  “How would I get in touch with him?”

  “If you wish to be gracious, you go through Polk Four and get his blessing. He’s very protective of the old fellow.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  Edward stared at me for a moment, then turned and looked out the door at his garden. Stiffly he said, “He’s in the book.”

  Polk Two lived on a small farm out off Route 11 on the way to Harrisonburg. The road to it wound back through lush, fragrant farmland and through time. A colony of Mennonites lived there. I passed a couple of their black, horse-drawn carriages clopping slowly along, and a farm where four women in bonnets, long dresses, and sneakers were planting vegetables in a garden. They waved as I passed. I waved back and fleetingly, wished I lived there with them.

  A big silver Lincoln Town Car was parked out in front of the white, wood-framed farmhouse, which was badly in need of paint and a new roof. The broad wraparound front porch had a serious case of dry rot. There was a bank barn and grain silo out behind the house, a poultry house, hilly pasturage. All of it looked neglected.

  I left the Jag behind the Lincoln and rang the doorbell and waited. And waited some more. Finally, I heard heavy footsteps inside and a cough.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting, son,” Polk Two said cheerfully as he opened the door. “It’s my legs — they’ve pure gone to hell on me.”

  He was a tall, beefy man and he still had the lawman’s air of authority even if he did have to walk with two canes. His coloring was fair. His full head of white hair was still streaked with blond. His eyes were blue and twinkly behind the heavy, black-framed glasses, his loose, saggy skin so pale as to be almost translucent. I could see the blue veins on the backs of his hands as they clutched the canes, trembling slightly. He wore a white button-down shirt, black knit tie, a heavy gray wool sack suit, and hearing aids in both ears. He smelled like witch hazel and Ben-Gay.

  “Come on in, son,” he said. “Come on. Your dog, too, if she wants.”

  She didn’t. She likes porches.

  He moved slowly, waddling like a large, heavy penguin. Wheezing, he led me into a small parlor that hadn’t been painted or aired out since V.J. Day. The air was heavy with cigarette smoke and dust and heat. Portable electric heaters were going strong in each corner. It must have been ninety in there.

  “Too warm for you?” he asked.

  “No, it’s fine,” I replied as I felt the perspiration beginning to run down my neck. “Cozy.”

  A radio was on, tuned to the police band. He waddled over to it and turned it off. “Can’t get too warm when you get to be my age, you know,” he observed. He chuckled. “I have to turn up the thermostat another degree every birthday. In three more years I’ll be able to bake bread in here.”

  A captain’s chair piled with cushions was set before a table. A large-type edition of Reader’s Digest lay open on the table along with the phone and a carton of cigarettes.

  Polk Two plopped slooooowly down in the chair. “Have a seat, son,” he commanded, indicating an easy chair. “That one used to be mine. Most comfortable one in the house. I just can’t get up out of it anymore.”

  I took off my cap and sat. “Nice place you have here, Mr. LaFoon.”

  He turned up his hearing aids. “Thanks. Been in the family a long time. And make it Polk Two, Mr. Hoag.”

  “If you’ll make it Hoagy.”<
br />
  “As in Carmichael?” he asked, turning them up some more.

  “As in the cheese steak.”

  He nodded. “Always like his songs. ‘Stardust,’ ‘Georgia on My Mind’ — you could hum ’em. Yessir.” He lit a cigarette and looked around. “It’ll all be Polk Four’s when I pass on, if he wants it. Needs work, of course. Haven’t done much to it since the wife died in ’72. But the land’s good. Twenty-five acres of it. My boy, Polk Three, he’s retired down in Florida with his wife. I’m all alone here. But it suits me, except for this habit I got of not being able to shut up when I trap some poor fellow here like you.” He chuckled. “Polk Four, he looks in on me regular as clockwork. He’s a good boy. I just wish he’d take a drink of whiskey or a dip into a cute little blonde once in a while. A man needs to let off a little steam now and again, or he’ll blow.” He glanced at me sharply. “I phoned him after you called. He said he’d try to make it over.”

  “It sure is nice how everyone in the valley talks to everyone else.”

  “He said you were trouble.” The old man looked me over with a practiced eye. “Don’t know. You look to me like about as much trouble as a tub of warm grits. Take off your jacket, son. You’ll sweat right through the material and stain it. Now what can I do for you? Something about this sequel to Alma’s book, you said?”

  I stripped off my jacket. “Yes. The publisher wants me to write an introduction recalling the sensation it caused when it first came out. The making of the movie, Sterling Sloan’s death … ”

  He puffed on his cigarette. “Ah, that business.”

  “I understand you were there on the scene when he died.”

  “I was.”

  “I wondered if you could share some of your recollections with me.”

  “Newspapers covered the hell out of it.” He moistened his thin lips. “You ought to go on over to the News Leader and go through their old issues. They give you any trouble, tell ’em I sent you. They’ll treat you right.”

  “I’m not interested in what was reported,” I said. “I’m interested in what happened.”

  He grinned at me. “Well, whatever you are you aren’t dumb.” He coughed, a deep, rumbling cough. “Okay. Sure. It’s the recent things I can’t remember, you know. Like what I had for dinner last night. But fifty years ago I can remember just fine. … Pork chops, mashed potatoes, and okra — that’s what I was eating at my desk the evening I got the call. Sent over from Joe’s Cafe across the street. They’re out of business now. Joe got himself killed in Korea. No wait, that was Joe Junior. Joe had a coronary and dropped dead.”

  “The phone call … ?”

  “Something about the movie folk over at the Woodrow Wilson,” he continued. “Quite some hotel in those days, it was. Fanciest place within fifty miles. Fine dining room, ballroom, orchestra. I headed on over there, none too happy about it. Those movie fellas, they’d been making my life miserable ever since they got here. I had no complaint with the performers. Or with all them boys and girls from the fan magazines and newsreels neither. They behaved themselves. It was the damned film crew, dozens of healthy young roughnecks with money in their pockets. Whole bunch were like sailors on leave, drinking, chasing local gals, getting in brawls with the local fellows over ’em. I was sick of the whole lot, even if they did bring money into the town. But I’d had no trouble with the actors, like I said. Until that evening. … The manager and house detective, fella called Lou Holt, met me right at the front door, all agitated, and said there was an emergency up in the Sloan-Barrett suite. Quite some suite it was, too. Living room. Two bedrooms. Very first thing I noticed when I got there was the beds in both rooms were mussed. Odd for a man and wife, I thought. What I mean is, I don’t believe the two of ’em slept together.” He coughed. “I don’t know if that’s the sort of recollection you’re interested in … ”

  “Go right ahead.”

  “Miss Barrett was standing there in some kind of flimsy dressing gown, without any makeup on. Or slippers. I remember she looked like a frail young girl standing there like that. She was a pretty thing, but no meat on her. Had the whitest little feet I’ve ever seen, like a baby girl’s. Seems they’d been dressing for some big party being thrown that night down in the ballroom to celebrate finishing up the filming. Seems he, Mr. Sloan that is, got himself a blinding headache while he was dressing. She had sent a bellhop out for some aspirins, but by the time he got up there with ’em the fella had collapsed.”

  “Where was he?”

  “On the sofa, unconscious. The doctor from the movie company, Dr. Toriello, was with him. Ambulance was on its way. But it was pretty obvious he wasn’t going to make it. He was breathing with great difficulty, huge gasps. Died just a minute or two after I got there.”

  “Was anyone else in the room?”

  Polk Two stubbed out his cigarette, thought it over. “The bellhop was still hanging around.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Don’t recall. Just some scrawny kid. I got rid of him.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “One other fellow came in, some sort of take-charge right-hand man of Mr. Goldwyn’s. Melnick. No, Melnitz. Seward Melnitz. One of those high-strung types, kept trying to boss me around. Telling me not to say a word to the press, not to let nobody in. Treated me like I was retarded or something.”

  “He was probably just used to dealing with producers. No other witnesses?”

  “If there were, they were gone by the time I got there.”

  “I see. What happened then?”

  “Well, since Toriello was from California, I had to get a local man up to sign the certificate of death. It was Doc Landis I called. Discreet, professional man. He got right over, came to the same diagnosis as Toriello — that some kind of bubble had burst in Sloan’s brain. After that the body was —”

  “How?”

  “Excuse me, son?”

  “How did he arrive at his diagnosis?”

  “Ah. Well, he asked Toriello a lot of questions. Don’t recall what they were. I do remember they talked about Sloan’s blood pressure. … ”

  “What about it?”

  “It dropped dramatically after he collapsed, Toriello said. Apparently that told them something. And they discussed Sloan’s symptoms of the previous few days. His headaches, way he’d been behaving … ”

  “Did you get the feeling Landis thought Toriello was negligent?”

  “No, sir,” replied Polk Two firmly. “Not at all.”

  “Did he examine the body?”

  “His eyeballs. He looked at Sloan’s eyeballs. Don’t ask me why.”

  “To see if a pupil had dilated,” I said. “A brain aneurysm would compress the optic nerve of one eye, possibly both. Was there an autopsy?”

  “No, sir, there wasn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “No reason to. The man died of natural causes. Medical men were satisfied.”

  “How long had you been sheriff at the time?”

  “Three, four years.”

  “You’d been to a lot of death scenes, filed a lot of reports.”

  “My share of ’em,” he acknowledged. “Yessir.”

  “Did you get any sense that something funny was going on in that hotel room?”

  He frowned. “Funny? I’m not following you, son.”

  “That it wasn’t what they said it was.”

  Polk Two reached for his cigarettes and lit one. “I’m still not following you, son,” he said, a little chillier this time.

  “Sloan’s headaches, drowsiness, disorientation … And the collapse itself — loss of consciousness, severe drop in blood pressure, difficulty in breathing — all of it could point to an entirely different cause of death.”

  “And what’s that?” he asked.

  “Sloan was heavy into morphine. I think he died of an overdose.”

  Polk Two didn’t react much. Just looked at the ash on his cigarette and tapped it carefully into an ashtray and took a puff
and blew out the smoke. His blue eyes gave away nothing. “Doctors said it was an aneurysm,” he said quietly.

  “Of course they did. Sloan was a major star. Ugly things like drug overdoses had a way of being prettied up for people like him. Is that what happened, Polk?”

  Polk Two shook his head. “No offense, son, but I genuinely don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “Was there a cover-up, Polk?”

  “There was no such thing!” he fired back angrily. “I didn’t run this county that way. Or my district when I sat in Richmond. And I don’t like you coming here to my home and suggesting I did!”

  “I’m trying to get at the truth.”

  “You got the truth, boy. The man died there on the sofa from an aneurysm. I don’t know how I can make it any plainer.”