The Wrong Girl

by Donis Casey

  “I can’t, Aunt Elizabeth. I couldn’t stand to face Mama. I don’t think I’d even be able to look at Daddy.”

  Both Elizabeth and Mrs. Gilbert hastened to assure her that her parents wouldn’t judge her. No one would judge her. The whole extended family, her parents, her grandparents, her nine siblings and their spouses and children, all of them so badly wanted her to come home.

  Blanche knew a kind lie when she heard one. A wave of exhaustion came over her. All she wanted now was for Mary and Kurt to arrive, take their new son, and leave her alone. Let her go to sleep. Let it be over.

  The Lucases would arrive late in the afternoon on Monday to sign the adoption papers and take charge of Billy Ray. Elizabeth would file the papers at the Maricopa County courthouse in Phoenix on Tuesday, and then Blanche’s parents and the three Lucases would take the train back to Oklahoma on Wednesday afternoon.

  Blanche knew that if she were still here when they arrived, Mary and their parents would keep trying to talk Blanche into coming home with them until the moment they mounted the steps to the train going back to Oklahoma. Maybe even try to force her. They would not hesitate to strong-arm her if they could. But Blanche didn’t believe for a minute that anyone really wanted her to come home after what she had done.

  ~Unwilling to bear the grief and disappointment

  she expects to see in her mother’s eyes,

  Blanche slips out at dawn.~

  As tired as she was, Blanche was unable to sleep at all that night. She rose before dawn and packed her little carpetbag before waking Mrs. Gilbert. She dressed the sleeping baby in a gown that she had bought for him in California so that he would look his best for his new parents, and the two women crept into the house, planning to leave the baby in the basinet in the parlor along with a note to Aunt Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth was sitting in an armchair beside the front door, dressed in her hat and coat, waiting for them.

  Blanche stopped in her tracks and for a long moment the women gazed at one another across the dim parlor. “How did you know?” Blanche said.

  “The train to Los Angeles leaves at 5:30.”

  “Don’t try to talk me out of leaving. Mrs. Gilbert and me have discussed it and she agrees with me.”

  Elizabeth leveled a glance at the small Negro woman who was standing behind Blanche with her hands folded quietly before her. Mrs. Gilbert’s answering gaze indicated that she didn’t agree with Blanche all that much.

  Elizabeth said, “You’ve made your feelings clear, Blanche. It’s your decision. Your mother is going to be unhappy, though, when they finally get here and you’re gone.”

  Blanche laughed. “I know it.”

  Mrs. Gilbert said, “Are you sure you don’t want to bring little Billy Ray along to the station and say goodbye, honey?”

  “No, he’s sleeping so nice. I’ll just leave the basket here on the table. Felicia is just in the next room. If he cries, she will take care of him.”

  She tried not to glance back at the basket when they left the house.

  * * *

  Mrs. Gilbert left Blanche and Elizabeth on the station platform while she took the luggage to the baggage car. Blanche could feel her aunt’s eyes on her as they waited. She knew Elizabeth was expecting some show of emotion. Tears, perhaps, at losing her little boy. But Blanche only felt a dull nothingness. A void. A weight in her chest where her heart ought to be.

  Elizabeth’s lawyerly senses were well attuned to her niece’s emotional state. “You still have time to change your mind about seeing your folks,” she said. “Stay at least until they get here. You don’t have to go back to Oklahoma, but you can at least set your mama and daddy’s hearts to ease.”

  “No. How many ways can I say it? They’ll try to make me go back there and I won’t go back. Not now. Not ever. I couldn’t stand it. You tell them, Aunt Elizabeth. You tell them that I’m fine and that I’m sorry as I can be for what I put them through. Tell them that I love them. You’ll know what to say. Tell Mama not to worry about me. Mrs. Gilbert takes good care of me. I have a respectable job lined up and I’ll write when I get settled.”

  Elizabeth nodded, satisfied that she had tried her best. Besides, she really didn’t blame Blanche that much. She had lived through her own existential crisis a few years earlier. Things generally worked out for the best. Or at least they worked out. “Where are you going now?”

  “Just tell them I’m going to California. I have lots of friends there. I won’t tell you exactly where. If you don’t know, you can’t tell Daddy. He’ll come after me, for sure.”

  “I don’t look forward to facing your mother. She’ll wonder why I didn’t hogtie you and throw you in the closet until she got here.”

  “I know. I’m sorry about that. Tell her that I packed up and sneaked out in the middle of the night and you didn’t know about it until it was too late. Or that I knocked you on the head and made my escape.”

  “Don’t worry, that’s exactly what I plan to do. If she thought I let you go without a fight, your mother would kill me dead. Now, if you have any more trouble, or if you need anything, you be sure and contact me. You’ve already discovered that the world is a rough place for young girls on their own.”

  Yes, Blanche had discovered that, all right. She didn’t tell her aunt that she had also discovered that the world could be as exciting as it was ugly.

  She hugged Elizabeth, mounted the steps, and settled herself into a seat next to Mrs. Gilbert. A young woman not much older than Blanche occupied the seat opposite them. A Westerner for sure, Blanche thought. A Southerner would not sit in the same car as Mrs. Gilbert. The train jerked to life and Blanche pressed her nose to the window as it slowly made the long turn out of Tempe and headed toward California. She would have a half-day head start on her family. She hoped that was enough.

  I’m coming, Graham, you rat. The thought repeated itself over and over, picking up rhythm as the train picked up speed. I’m coming. I’m coming. I’m coming.

  1926, Santa Monica, California

  This dame had better show up with the ledger in one hand and the murder weapon in the other.

  The woman with the rose in her hair was surprisingly attractive—blond, well-coifed and well-dressed, in a blowsy sort of way. She was rough around the edges, though. Oliver put her demeanor down to her disappointing lifestyle. She dug into Tony’s lasagna like she hadn’t eaten in a week.

  “Graham found me in Indio,” she said between shovelfuls. “I was a real appleknocker. I used to hang out at the flickers all day when I could. Graham sat down beside me in the theatre one Saturday while I was watching The Kid for maybe the tenth time. He offered to buy me an ice cream soda after the flick. He said he had been on a business trip to New York and was going home to L.A. on the train when he decided to take a break from travel and spotted me in the theater. Told me he was a casting director for the movies and I was just the type of girl he wanted for a new picture that Charlie Chaplin was producing. Charlie was looking for a fresh face to cast opposite him, and he’d introduce me. I ate it up. I met him at the train station that very evening and went with him to Los Angeles. He was a perfect gentleman for a while. He told me he was falling for me.”

  She pushed her plate away and lit a gasper before continuing. “He got me a room at what I thought was a nice boardinghouse for women, but it turned out to be something else. You know the interesting thing? I didn’t even care. I loved the clothes and the parties and the high life. I met all kinds of rich people. Millionaires. And I screwed all kinds of rich people, too.” She sighed. “He really did know Charlie Chaplin.”

  Oliver listened to her tale with a combination of pity and impatience. He had heard it all before, and as sympathetic to sob stories as he was, he really wanted to get down to business. “So what happened at Philippe,” he prompted, “when the brunette raised a stink?”

  Miran
da took a final drag on her cigarette before stubbing it out on her plate. “Oh, that. Well, here’s where it gets good. I hadn’t been in town very long. That was when I still thought I was going to be in the flicks. Man, Graham was still treating me like a queen. We were in the middle of this elegant feed when this girl with great clothes and a rube accent barged in and raised holy hell. She said that Graham had abandoned her out in the wilderness and left her in the family way to boot. She told him that she was going to make him pay for what he did, and it scared me. He was cool as a cucumber, though. Told Maurice to toss her out, which he did. Then Graham fed me a tale about how in his line of work he met all kinds of cuckoo-birds and this quiff was just looking for some fall guy to support her and her little accident. He swore up and down that the kid wasn’t his and he didn’t even recognize the slut.”

  “And you believed him?”

  “Sure I did. Willful blindness, they call it. ’Course, it did seem odd that he said he had never seen her before, but he knew where she was from. He called her his ‘Tennessee rose’ or ‘Arkansas rose’ or something like that. I remember it like yesterday.”

  Oliver scribbled the nickname on a napkin. “Where did you go after you left the restaurant?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “We went up to my room and had a roll in the hay to celebrate our recent engagement. Then he buttoned up his pants and left and I never saw him again.”

  Oliver folded his arms. “Well, Miranda, that’s an interesting story. So now I know the screamer’s name was Tennessee Rose or Arkansas Rose or something like that. That’s more than I knew before, but it’s hardly worth a hundred smackers.”

  “Oh, that’s not the fun part, sweetie. I had never seen the little bitch before that day, but I remember her face like I have a photograph in my head. I haven’t seen her again…not in the flesh, anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that a couple of years later I saw her up on the screen at Grauman’s Egyptian.”

  Miranda was dragging out whatever her shocking revelation was and enjoying it far too much. Oliver was tempted to grab her by the shoulders and give her a good shake. “You’re saying that this Rose person became a movie actress. So don’t keep me in suspense.”

  “Not just a movie actress. I nearly fell out of my seat when I recognized her. I swear to God the brat who threatened to straighten out Graham Peyton grew up to be…

  ~Bianca Dangereuse.~

  “You’re telling me that the girl who accused Graham Peyton of putting a bun in her oven was Bianca Dangereuse?” Oliver tried and failed to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

  “That’s right, sweetie.”

  “Considering that Bianca Dangereuse is not a real person, I find that less than persuasive.”

  “Not the character, stupid. I mean the actress who plays Bianca Dangereuse in all them movies. I swear she’s the same bird.”

  “The actress Bianca LaBelle? You think that the knocked-up screamer is Bianca LaBelle? Was this girl French?”

  “She sounded to me like she was a yokel from Yokelville, but just because the rags say that Bianca LaBelle is a French princess that don’t make it true.”

  * * *

  Oliver slipped Tony two bits to let him use the telephone with the private line in his office. He would have gone back to his apartment to make the call to Ruhl, but his was a party line, and besides, he thought that if he was going to follow Miranda’s sketchy lead, he was going to need some quick help from someone with pull. Ruhl himself answered the telephone, which impressed Oliver. Usually these big muckety-mucks had several layers of lackeys between themselves and the unwashed masses. If Ruhl had given the detective his private number, he must place more importance than Oliver had realized on the search for Peyton’s murderer, or the whereabouts of the ledger…or whatever he was really looking for. Oliver had more than a sneaking suspicion that he had not been told the whole story.

  Oliver brought his client up to speed on the progress of his investigation. When he related Miranda’s tale, Ruhl scoffed. “I would take the word of a two-bit whore with a great deal of skepticism, Mr. Oliver. I seriously doubt if one of the biggest stars in Hollywood had anything to do with Peyton’s death. Besides, Bianca LaBelle would have been little more than a child when Peyton disappeared. Still, you say that this woman was fairly certain of the girl’s identity?”

  “She says she’s positive. Of course, people are always saying they’ve seen John Gilbert at the five and dime or Gloria Swanson walking down the street in Long Beach. It’ll probably turn out to be nothing, but we have little enough to go on as it is. Unless you want me to back off, I might be able to turn up a lead if you can get me in to talk to Miss LaBelle for a few minutes.”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the line as Ruhl considered this. Finally he said, “I have some contacts. I’ll get back to you tomorrow. Until then, carry on.”

  “I intend to, Mr. Ruhl.”

  1921, Hollywood, California

  After leaving her baby to the loving care of her sister, Blanche returns to Hollywood to resume her transformation.

  Blanche plunged back into her lessons with a vengeance, anything to keep her mind off of the memory of the sleeping baby in the basket on her aunt’s table in Arizona. The martial arts sessions with Mr. Hashiyara were particularly therapeutic. Now that she didn’t have to worry about pregnancy, she took great pleasure in the strenuous workouts. Especially when he let her break things.

  She still helped Mrs. Gilbert around the house. She found that if she wasn’t commanded to do it, she enjoyed cooking and really enjoyed the praise Mrs. Gilbert heaped upon her culinary talents. She had hated it when her mother had made her learn kitchen skills, but she had to admit that they had come in very handy.

  A couple of times a week, Blanche and Mrs. Gilbert took the trolley or let Fee chauffeur them into Hollywood to shop for groceries, a nice break for both of them and a chance to spend some time together. Blanche loved strolling up and down Hollywood Boulevard, enjoying the sights and people-watching. Sometimes, she and Mrs. Gilbert caught a movie in one of the grand theaters in town, and occasionally Fee accompanied them. Blanche had developed a great fondness for Fee, even if she had not quite made a decision about the gentle giant’s gender affiliation. But it didn’t seem to matter. Fee was clever, competent, funny, and self-contained. Blanche wondered if Fee was lonely, how he/she navigated through life, but she was too shy to ask.

  The three of them had just come out of the Iris Theater and were walking down Hollywood Boulevard toward the limousine when they passed a restaurant called Philippe, and Blanche turned her head to admire the hat on a woman passing by. If Fee hadn’t been anxious to see Norma Talmadge’s new picture at the Iris, if it hadn’t been for whatever business brought the passing woman to town that evening, if it hadn’t been for the woman’s good taste in hats, Blanche would not have turned her head and seen Graham Peyton through the front window of Phillipe, having dinner with a young woman, and the course of her life might have turned out much differently.

  But she did see Graham Peyton, and all the hatred and humiliation and anger that she thought she had overcome rose up in her like a tidal wave.

  Mrs. Gilbert and Fee were talking about something and didn’t notice the hesitation in Blanche’s step. She was surprised that they were unaware of the sudden change in her mood, since the heat of her fury should have scorched the air around them, but she was grateful. Her friends were none the wiser as she caught up in two steps and walked with them back to the auto.

  Once they had returned to Alma’s mansion, she said nothing about her discovery. Graham Peyton was back in town. Mr. Hashiyara was the only person who had an inkling that something was up, but he didn’t press her about her newfound intensity. She made a point of volunteering to go down the hill into Hollywood at every opportunity—to pick up something for the house or run
an errand for Alma or Mrs. Gilbert. She haunted the street around Philippe, not near enough to be conspicuous, but close enough to see the diners come and go. It was several weeks before she caught sight of Graham again. It was about one in the afternoon. He was squiring a different young woman up the steps into the restaurant, a blonde.

  Blanche came back the next day, and saw the two of them crossing the street toward the restaurant at about the same time. After they had gone inside, Blanche retraced their path to the building they had come out of and discovered a plaque on the wall next to a stairwell located between two shops: “Peyton Talent Agency. Top of Stairs.”

  This was the place. This stretch of Hollywood Boulevard. This was where Graham Peyton had his lair.

  One fine day in May, Alma decided to ask a couple of friends to supper, and particularly invited Blanche to join the party. This was unusual, since most of the people Alma had over for a quiet meal were either business associates or lovers. It crossed Blanche’s mind that Alma intended to set her up with a date, but she banished the thought quickly. Not quickly enough.

  Alma’s smile was ironic. “Don’t worry, honey, I’m not trying to marry you off or pimp you out. These friends of mine are thinking of producing a serial about a daring adventuress, and I told them they should meet you. They’re coming for drinks at around five. We’ll talk a little business before supper. Be sure to put on some nice rags, puppy.”

  Blanche didn’t know how to feel. Today was the day that she intended to beard the lion in his den. The plan was laid, she had screwed her courage to the sticking point, and she didn’t want to postpone the confrontation. Yet…this meeting with movie producers could be her big break.