Sweet Women Lie
Loren D. Estleman
This is the one Helen and Don have been waiting for.
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A Biography of Loren D. Estleman
1
THE CLUB CANAVERAL’S rainbow front died short of the alley that ran alongside the building. Not for me the side that faced Griswold, where orange flamingos capered in the windows and a pink neon tube — turned off by daylight — scripted over a parti-colored awning that when cranked up resembled a roll of Life Savers. I stood in the alley among caved-in trash cans and smears of pale disinfectant powder flung over places where patrons had lost supper, pushed a button next to a brown steel fire door without a handle, and listened to the brazen noise inside. It sounded like a tired musician clearing his spit valve.
She surprised me by opening the door herself. I had been expecting the janitor, or at most one of the abbed and latted specimens in white disco suits who posed with her in newspaper advertisements. If I had been expecting her, it would have been in five-inch heels and piles of yellow hair and a dress that pushed her white breasts up through the hole in the ozone. It wouldn’t have had anything to do with this small slim woman wearing flat heels and a man’s denim workshirt with the tail out over black jeans. She wore her hair in a ponytail, brown, not blond, with silver glittering in the part. Her face was creased lightly around the eyes and at the corners of the wide handsome mouth that the caricaturists had had so much fun with when she dated Frankie Avalon. She looked a well-scrubbed, well-exercised forty, which put her a couple of years past her studio biography. Well, the white-haired moguls decomposing in their big oak cigar-smelling offices back then knew the teen audience, or thought they did. And what they thought was what we got.
I said, “You looked taller in my bedroom.”
It didn’t throw her. The wide mouth measured out forty watts of the famous thousand-candlepower smile. “Which poster was it, Beach Blowout or V-8 Vampires?”
“Vampires. You had on a shiny black leather jumpsuit unzipped to China. It ruined me for all the girls in the eleventh grade.”
“Don’t tell me. You had a surfboard and a stop sign on the other walls.”
“Just the poster. I was too straight a kid to steal signs and there’s no surf in Michigan. I’m Amos Walker.” I took off my hat. Grainy November snow slid out of the dent.
“Gail Hope. But I guess you know that.” She gave me the loan of a small supple palm. “Come inside.”
We were at the end of a shallow hallway lined with framed publicity stills from Gail Hope’s pictures. These included a honey of a shot of Miss Hope in a white sharkskin swimsuit fainting in the scabrous arms of a creature that appeared to be half reptile and half diseased elm. The rest room doors were divided into sexes by cutouts of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean pasted on them. She led me, trim white ankles scissoring under the barrel cuffs of her jeans, across the nightclub proper, dimly lit by sunlight through partially drawn blinds, to a door marked OFFICE. On the way we passed a lot of tulip-shaped tables and Brando biker posters and a divan made from the rear end of a 1960 Cadillac with tailfins. The walls were sea-green and pale orange, the floor a checkerboard of charcoal and pink. Evenings the colored lights played off paper lanterns, and musicians got up like Bobby Rydell and Connie Francis performed doo-wop on a bandstand the size of Warren Beatty’s wallet. By day it all seemed kind of tired, like a trick-or-treater on November first, but at night you could sit back sipping from a glass with an umbrella in it and pretend that John, Paul, George, and Ringo were still planning the invasion and Caroline and John-John were playing on the White House lawn.
The office had none of that. The desk was black-painted steel with a Formica top like the ones that migrate to gas stations, with a swivel behind it and a blank-faced computer on a stand. An Impressionist painting of a city street hung on the back wall in lieu of a window and there were only two photographs. One, in a clear Lucite stand on the desk, looked like a nonprofessional shot of Gail Hope taken twenty years ago. The other, on the wall, was definitely a much younger Miss Hope sitting on a sofa and sharing a laugh with a sandy-haired young man in an open-necked shirt and baggy plaid sportcoat. It took a moment to recognize him as Elvis before the black dye job and white Vegas gravity suit. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen.
She saw me looking at the girl on the desk. “My daughter Evelyn. She’s studying law at UCLA.”
“I guess you didn’t want her in show business.”
“Her choice. I’m glad she made it. At least this way if she winds up on drugs it won’t be because a studio doctor made her take them.” She took my hat and coat and hung them on an antique halltree, the oldest thing in the building. She frowned approvingly at what the coat had been covering. We sat. I watched her fish a pack of Bel-Airs and a book of matches out of the top drawer.
“I own the building, I pay the taxes,” she said, lighting up. “If you’re worried about black lung, you know where the door is.”
I grinned and borrowed her matches to light a Winston.
Relaxing a little, she sat back, planted an elbow on the arm of her swivel, and pointed her cigarette at the ceiling. “Just to dispel any pesky illusions: I wasn’t a virgin when they cast me in my first beach picture and the only reason I agreed to do it was the studio promised me the whore in an Edward Albee play and they wanted a two-picture deal. Then they scrapped the Albee and gave me a biker show instead. After that I was typecast. My leading man in Beach Blowout was living with a Beverly Hills men’s-room attendant and every time the director said cut, the old-fart star from Hollywood’s Golden Age they cast as my father stuck his big sweaty hand inside my bikini. Disappointed?”
“Devastated. I feel like going straight home and smashing my forty-five of ‘Johnny Jump-Up.’ ”
Her quick little smile sharpened the creases at the corners of her mouth. They could almost be passed off as dimples. “It isn’t even my voice on the record. It wasn’t enough to be the season’s biggest drive-in draw, you had to be a recording star too. My agent’s idea, the old souse. I stopped sleeping with him soon after and he cut his wrists like a hysterical old woman. The studio could have hired Hitchcock for what it cost them to hush it up. See, I’m nobody’s Gidget.”
“You’re tough as old gravy, all right.”
“You say that now, but would you have gone back to see me seven times if you knew the truth then?”
“I never saw any of your pictures even once.”
That opened her eyes a notch. They looked different without the thick fringed lashes. “You had a V-8 Vampires poster in your room and you didn’t go to see it?”
“There wasn’t any money in my house for movies. When yours got to TV I was working nights. My father worked in a steel foundry when they weren’t paying much.”
“You were lucky. Mine cut out when I was seven. When I was making thirty-five hundred a week he came back and took me to court. They made me pay for his support.” She blew a dagger of smoke and crushed out her cigarette in a plain glass ashtray that was probably a collector’s item in some circles. “I got your name from L. C. Candy. He gave you information on some old jazzman you were looking for. You made a good imp
ression.”
“I remember him. Did he play here?”
“Who, Candy? I couldn’t use him. There were no trombones in the early sixties. I rented him a room upstairs cheap while he was looking. He got a steady playing backup at the Chord Progression finally. I hear from him now and then. You ever carry money for anyone?”
“I’m bonded.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Sometimes. It’s not my specialty. Who’s shaking you down?”
She made a sound that was supposed to pass for laughter. It didn’t resemble her Malibu giggle. “If you knew as much about my private life as the slugs who used to read Rendezvous, you’d know how funny that one is.”
“Sam Lucy,” I said.
“Maybe you did read Rendezvous.”
“Call it osmosis.” Gail Hope and Samuel Frederick Lucy — pinball, restaurants, cleaning and dyeing, and any other business that dealt largely in cash that could be exchanged for money skimmed off the tables in Vegas before wind of it reached the IRS — had made the columns a dozen years ago when the papparazzi caught them attending the première of Broken Blossoms, a remake of a silent soaper that was hyped as Gail Hope’s comeback to motion pictures. The prospect of short, ugly, potato-nosed Sam, in tuxedo and fedora and mirrored sunglasses, escorting the cool beauty in spotless white velvet and diamonds had raised all kinds of speculation among the people whose business it is to speculate over such things, then evaporated in direct proportion to the movie’s reception among critics and the ticket-buying public. Now the picture appeared occasionally on local TV between “High Flight” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and Sam Lucy showed up even less frequently, usually in court on charges of conspiracy to commit something-or-other. If Miss Hope and Mr. Lucy were still involved, anybody who tried to put the bee on her was either new in town or tired of breathing.
“So what are you buying,” I asked, “and what’s the tariff?”
She reached inside the kneehole of the desk and placed a briefcase on top of it. It was one of those portfolios that women executives carry, tan pigskin with double handles and fine, almost invisible stitching, a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of office luggage. I rose a little from my seat and tilted it to see inside. The bundles were banded in paper and laid out with a mortician’s attention to propriety.
“Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” she said, in the tone she’d used when James Darren dumped her for Debbie Watson in Hang Ten. “Give it to Sam and tell him Gail wants out.”
I smoked my Winston down to the filter and extinguished it next to hers. “Do you want the briefcase back?”
2
“THE ACTUAL DEBT’S more like a million, counting cars and furs and jewelry and getting set up here,” she said. “This is as much as I could raise on this place and the house in West Bloomfield. Anyway, you’re supposed to get a break when you pay off early.”
“‘Early’ meaning before you and Sam walk hand-in-hand through the big gates,” I said. She nodded. “What’d he do, forget an anniversary?”
“Sam’s been good to me. He used to knock me around a little, but I stabbed him in the back with a serving fork one night and he gave me a Volvo and never hit me again. I didn’t figure in the Volvo; I earned that. I did include the fifty grand he spread around to keep the fork story out of the media. He did that strictly for me, bad press being a way of life for him.”
She lit another cigarette and pointed it at the ceiling. This time I didn’t join her. “I think it started last year when I made Sam late for dinner with a business associate. We were going to the show at the Fisher afterwards so he was bringing me along. I was still drinking then, it was before AA, and I had a hangover the size of Southfield. Anyway we were twenty minutes late. Time enough for two guys in ski masks to go in through the kitchen and plunk the business associate and his companion full of holes while they were waiting. Maybe you read about it.”
“I didn’t know Lucy was involved.”
“He wasn’t, thanks to my head and stomach. But he could just as well have been, and now the only thing that scares the living hell out of me is a dinner date with Sam. The associate’s companion was twenty-seven years old, a former Miss Ohio.”
“Why don’t you give him the money yourself?”
“Because if I see his face I may not go through with it. I know, he kills people and he steals from the government and when he was younger he did things with a blowtorch I wouldn’t wish on Will Hays, but in some ways he’s like a puppy, you can’t look him in the eye and tell him you’re giving him away because the landlady won’t let you keep pets. I admit I’m a coward, Mr. Walker. They tell me you’ve got guts for rent and that’s why I called you.”
“It’s not his reaction you’re afraid of?”
“No. Sam’s mellowed, and even when he was younger it wasn’t like him to become violent. He was facing two years on a trumped-up stolen credit card rap when he hit me. That would make anyone crazy.”
I stroked the briefcase. It was as close as I was ever likely to come to three quarters of a million dollars. “You’ve been with him a long time. Unless you’re deaf and blind or an idiot you had to have seen and heard things. He might not want to let you go for reasons other than love.”
“I had to consider that, from the men around him if not from him. That’s why the money. I’m hoping it will convince him I’m not looking to sell him out. It’s unlikely even the federal task force on organized crime would shake loose this much for one witness against one hoodlum. Sam’s not Meyer Lansky, or even Myron Floren.”
“There’s a cheaper way. You could turn witness against him.”
“Sure, and live the rest of my life as Mamie Underbrush in a prefab house owned by the feds in Salt Lake City or someplace, wetting my panties every time someone rings the doorbell. No, thanks. Besides, I like Sam. I met him at a dinner when I couldn’t get arrested in Hollywood. He made me happy, he and his rough friends who looked like truck drivers dressed up for somebody’s wedding, and he put up the money for Broken Blossoms even if it did stink up the place. He’s been good to me and he never treated me like his whore. We whores appreciate that. I just don’t want to end up full of holes with my face in the linguini.”
“You always did know how to make an impression.”
She laughed for real, and this time I heard the waves off Malibu. “Like the time I took a champagne bath at David O. Selznick’s sixtieth birthday party. That’s when the studio was waxing my hooves to make me the next Jayne Mansfield. Poor Jayne. Six months after she was decapitated in that crash I took a leave of absence and never went back until Broken Blossoms. God hates sex symbols.”
“This one did okay.”
She looked around. “It’s a roof. Everyone wants the sixties back, or what they think the sixties were. The club was Sam’s idea. I added the bubble-gum touches and the hokey ads with muscleheads in white suits. Fags, the bunch of them. I made sure of that, to keep Sam from getting jealous.”
“Does he know you’re unhappy?”
“I don’t know. You don’t slip up on him from behind. He comes on like a lug and dresses like one, but after thirty years in the mill he’s got his health and a lot of uptown boys in silk suits and manicures haven’t. It isn’t all luck.” The column of ash on her Bel-Air was two inches long. She tipped it into a tray. “Do you accept the job?”
The briefcase stood on the desk between us. I had to sight along it to see her face. “I charge two-fifty a day, three days up front to cover expenses. Have you got that much left in the jar?”
She produced an industrial-size checkbook from the top drawer, wrote one out, and tore it off. I glanced at it — she dotted the i in Gail with a circle, otherwise it might have been a man’s signature, no flourishes — and put it in my wallet. “It may take a few days. Meanwhile I’d be more comfortable if you’d hang on to the cash. The last time I had this much to work with was before they canned me from the board at Chrysler. It’s too pai
nful to talk about.”
“I’d rather you took it with you. I know me. The less chance I have to change my mind the better. I read a script on Friday once, thought about it over the weekend, and turned it down on Monday — who’d watch a gangster picture in 1967? They gave the part to Faye Dunaway.”
I scribbled a receipt for the $750,000 and another for the $750 check — three zeroes will change lives and topple governments — gave them to her, and stood up to heft the briefcase. Money never weighs as much as it does. She stood up too, a tiny woman, not much bigger than her posters, who had a way of lifting her chin slightly that made her look like a small girl playing at being grown up. Well, we all were.
I said, “You’re not letting me walk out of here with three quarters of a million dollars because of anything L. C. Candy said. Who checked me out?”
“Does it matter?”
“Not for the reasons you might think. I’ve peeked between too many curtains myself to worry about who’s watching my windows. But if he’s good enough to find out I can be trusted with a stash this size, he should be good enough to make the delivery himself.”
“It’s a fair question.” She rested five neatly pruned nails on top of the desk. They weren’t painted and she didn’t go in for those daggers you see around. When you’re small I guess it pays to grow everything to scale. “I have ethics too. I don’t give out names. He’s not in your line, but he knows people and he’s not on friendly enough terms with Sam to go running to him with this. Beyond that I wouldn’t trust him to hold my cheapest fur coat.”
“He’s good,” I said. “I usually know when someone’s sniffing after me. Maybe I’m getting too comfortable.”
“Not on two-fifty a day.” She tore the top sheet off a pad on the desk with Snoopy in one corner and gave it to me. “That’s Sam’s home address. Don’t give it out. Not that every loyal Rendezvous reader didn’t memorize it years ago when they ran a two-page spread on the stately homes of the Mafiosi.”
I took a second to burn it in and gave it back. “I hope I won’t need it. The last article I read about him had him still working in Southfield. I’ll probably make the drop there. They get awful jumpy when strangers come to their homes.”
Sweet Women Lie Page 1
