The Garden on Sunset

by Martin Turnbull

  “You mean Silent Sam and his silly sidekicks?”

  “Yes. Did Silent Sam come in with an overcoat?”

  “He sure did. Beautiful cashmere.”

  “Could you do me a favor and check his pockets?”

  Terry looked at her warily. Going through pockets was a big no-no on Grainger’s long list of no-no’s.

  “I’ll stand guard,” Gwendolyn implored. “Please? I’ll owe you.”

  Terry disappeared into the coat room for a moment. “I found this.” She handed over an empty, flattened box of Viceroys.

  “So much for that theory,” Gwendolyn said. “I stock Viceroy.”

  “Those are the new ones with the cork tips.” Terry pointed out. “They filter out all the bad stuff. Much better for you.”

  Gwendolyn turned the pack over, wondering what the odds were that Bobo carried them. She headed out to the hotel’s tobacconist, but Terry called her back. “You might want to take a look at this.” Terry placed a coaster from the Vine Street Brown Derby next to the Viceroys.

  “I don’t need to know about that,” Gwendolyn said, and tapped the cigarette pack. “This is all I care about.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” Terry told her. “Turn it over.”

  Gwendolyn flipped the cardboard coaster over and saw, stamped in faded black ink, the words Gwendolyn Was Here.

  “Marcus? Marcus Adler? Is that you?” The voice was a hoarse whisper.

  Marcus glanced at the clock over the check-in desk; it read two minutes to two. “Yes,” he said into the telephone. “Who’s this?”

  “Marcus, it’s George Cukor.”

  “George? What’s wrong?”

  “Holy crap, where do I start?” George croaked.

  “Are you in trouble?”

  “Is there any way anybody could overhear this conversation?”

  Marcus looked at the night clerk, who had roused him from sleep for an urgent phone call. He was already nodding off. “What’s happened?”

  “I’ve been arrested.”

  “What for?”

  George let out a groan. “For lewd behavior.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I got caught approaching a young sailor at Pershing Square.”

  “I thought the sailors came to you.”

  “Sometimes a man needs the excitement of the hunt. Anyway, we got to talking, and I could have sworn he knew what was going on.” Cukor let out a breathy groan. “But he didn’t. When he cottoned on, he started yelling. It caught the attention of a cop and now I’ve been arrested. I need your help, Marcus.”

  “What can I do?”

  “I need you to come down here and get me out.”

  “Sure thing. I can do that,” Marcus replied. “Is there a bail?”

  “It’s two thousand dollars.”

  Cukor may as well have said two hundred thousand dollars. “George, I don’t have that sort of money laying around.”

  “Normally, I have it at the house, but I just bought a set of French silver, and the seller wanted cash. At best there’s a couple hundred. Marcus, I need to impress upon you how urgent this is. Reporters come to the jail every morning to sniff out any story-worthy detainees. I need to be out of here before seven.”

  Marcus was flattered that someone like George Cukor would turn to him in such a dire hour, but was he really the best person for this? “Aren’t there people at MGM who do this sort of thing? People with pull?”

  “Of course, but my contract is up for renegotiation soon. I don’t want MGM or Louis B. Asshole to hold something like this over me.”

  “But what about your lawyer? Or Billy Haines?”

  “My lawyer just had a heart attack and his partners wouldn’t understand. Billy’s back east on decorating business, and the others don’t have your sensible head. Please do this for me. I’m begging you.”

  “Okay, George, I’ll try to think of something.”

  “It goes without saying that you cannot tell a soul about any of this. Really, Marcus, not one word.”

  Marcus hung up the telephone, but not before he heard a whimper crawl down the line to him. He stared into the dark. “Two grand?” he muttered, and ran his fingers through his hair. “How on earth am I to dig up that kind of dough?”

  Return to Sender, the romantic comedy he penned for Marion Davies, was about to go into production. Even if it got released, it probably wouldn’t make the small-time picture show circuit like McKeesport, and so his family would never know that he wrote it. I need to get out of Cosmopolitan Pictures and into MGM, Marcus told himself. I need to write a hit picture so that all of McKeesport–my father included–will be sitting in the orchestra seats of the Bijou when my name fills the screen. The only way that was likely to happen was with the help of someone like George Cukor. But Jesus Christ. Two grand…?

  Kathryn was dreaming about hitting Louella Parsons over the head with a half-inflated beach ball when the knock at her front door punched her awake. She raised her head off the pillow, still hearing Louella grunt.

  “Kathryn, are you in there?”

  She pulled on her robe on the way to the door. “Marcus?”

  “Open up.”

  She glanced at the mantle clock. He didn’t sound drunk. She opened the door. “Marcus? What the hell . . . ?”

  Marcus stepped inside Kathryn and Gwendolyn’s villa. His shirt was buttoned wrong and his hair was flattened on one side. “I’m so sorry to wake you, but there’s been some trouble and I’m out of ideas.”

  “What sort of trouble?”

  Marcus curled his face up into a wince. “You don’t happen to have two thousand dollars on you, do you?”

  Kathryn couldn’t help the laughter-gasp that popped out of her mouth. “Marcus, honey, if you’re in trouble you know you can tell me anything.”

  She watched her friend stare at her in the moonlight slanting through the living room window. Clearly something was up. She took him by the hand and sat next to him on the sofa.

  “It’s not me who’s in trouble,” he said.

  “But somebody is, and they need your help. At two o’clock in the morning? It must be a sensitive matter.”

  He nodded.

  Kathryn thought, And he’s not telling me because I’m a gossip monger. It had to happen sooner or later, that people would see me as a gossip columnist first and a friend second. But I never thought it would be Marcus at the front of that particular line. “I can’t help you if you won’t tell me what’s going on,” she said.

  Even in the dim light, she could see the vacillation in his eyes. He shifted his gaze from Kathryn’s face to the clock and seemed to study it for longer than necessary. The moments dragged by. Eventually he said, “You have to promise me that you won’t breathe a word of this to anyone.”

  Kathryn nodded, but he made her swear it out loud. Then he spilled out his telephone conversation with George Cukor.

  “Two thousand dollar bail?” she asked. “That’s outrageous.”

  “And somehow he expects me to come up with it. We don’t know anyone who has that kind of cash lying around . . . do we?”

  The cogs started clicking inside Kathryn’s mind. Maybe this was how she could repay that favor. Kathryn had always wanted to pay George Cukor back for the way he’d saved her bacon that day of the hideous Hollywood Women’s Press Club luncheon. After MGM had opened that Clark Gable/Loretta Young picture, Louella had eventually used the tip Kathryn handed her, and even remembered her name when she called Wilkerson.

  “Cash, no,” she said, “but we do know someone with something worth three thousand bucks.”

  Hope shined out of Marcus’ eyes. “We do?”

  She grabbed a kitchen chair and led Marcus into the bedroom. She placed the chair in front of the closet door and climbed up.

  “What are you doing?” he whispered.

  “Gwendolyn’s diamond brooch.” She reached up and pushed aside the cover of an air vent built into the ceiling. “It’s
the only hockable thing any of us have.”

  “Oh, Kathryn, I don’t know . . .”

  She reached up into the hole in the ceiling and felt around. “Of course, we’ll have to ask her first, which probably means she’ll want to know why, but unless you’ve got some other big idea —” She pulled a striped pillow case out of the hole. “Gwennie showed me this, just in case something happened to her.”

  But the pillow case felt far too light and far too empty.

  “Uh-oh.”

  Knowing that Eldon Laird had a Gwendolyn Was Here coaster in his coat pocket cast the man in an entirely different light, and gave Gwendolyn a new thrust of courage. She approached his table and lingered long enough for the Three Stooges to get an eyeful before she sang out, “Cigars, cigarettes . . .” She caught Laird’s eye. “I have the new cork-filtered Viceroys, in case you’re running out.”

  His eyes flickered with a subtle double take; his lips parted slightly.

  “Why, yes, I do need a couple of packets, Miss Gwendolyn,” he said.

  Thank God for Bobo and his stock of every tobacco product known to mankind. “Never fear,” she told him, “Gwendolyn is here.” Laird’s eyes narrowed. He had the look of a man not accustomed to being caught off guard.

  She turned around when Chuck tapped on her shoulder. “You have a couple of visitors,” he said. His face was more solemn than she’d ever seen it. She raised her eyebrows. “Grainger knows they’re here. It’s okay. He told me to come get you.”

  Gwendolyn found Kathryn and Marcus in the alcove by the Grove’s front door. They looked unsettled. “What the heck are you two doing here?” she asked. “No!” she gasped. “It’s Monty, isn’t it? He’s been killed!”

  “No, no,” Kathryn assured her, “it’s nothing like that.”

  “Gwennie, honey, we’re so sorry to pull you away from your work,” Marcus said. “But I have a friend in trouble and we need to come up with some cash, real quick.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “And I wanted to know if I could borrow your diamond brooch in order to hock it. I’d get it back in a day or two, plus interest for the trouble.”

  Gwendolyn’s big green eyes darted between her friends’ gloomy faces. “Sure you can,” she said.

  Marcus shot Kathryn a curious look of surrender.

  “Sweetie,” Kathryn’s whisper was hoarse. “We looked inside the pillow case. It’s not there. I think we’ve — you’ve been robbed.”

  Gwendolyn hoped she wouldn’t have to own up to the silly boo-boo she’d made but who knew that someone would need her diamond brooch so badly? This week, of all weeks! “No, we haven’t,” she said.

  “Gwendolyn, it’s gone. Nothing’s up there in the ceiling, just the pillowcase.”

  “That’s because Alice has it. Something about a big date with some director she’s desperate to impress.”

  “No honey,” Marcus fought to keep the disappointment from his voice. “I mean the real one.”

  “She’s got the real one.”

  “You lent Alice —?”

  “Last week I took them down to be cleaned. Somehow I got them mixed up and I ended up lending her the real one.”

  Marcus and Kathryn exchanged a completely different look. “Where’s her date?”

  The Biltmore Bowl was one of those places Marcus had always wanted to go to but had never seen. It wasn’t outrageously expensive — you could have a night of dinner and dancing in the World’s Largest Ballroom for less than five dollars.

  But as good a dancer as Kathryn was, and as much as he’d be the envy of every man there if he took Gwendolyn out for a samba, it wasn’t the sort of dinner-and-dancing date he longed for. Nice places where nobody would drop their highball in horror at two gentlemen waltzing around the floor simply didn’t exist. Men like him could only have clandestine gropings behind bushes and sand dunes, or at best, half-decent hotel rooms. Like that Zachary guy said at Pershing Square, We don’t get to have dates any more than we get to have marriages or relationships or love. This is it, so learn to like it the way I have.

  It was nearly four o’clock in the morning by the time Marcus and Kathryn got to the Biltmore Bowl, but the Central Casting goon out front wouldn’t let them in unless they paid. “You want in, you pay in.” They did, but it didn’t leave much for cab fare.

  The Biltmore Bowl was a cavernous room two stories high and decorated with enough gold to choke King Tut. A surprisingly healthy number of dancers filled the floor. Even in a vast, classy joint like the Biltmore Bowl, Alice Moore wasn’t hard to spot. She was smoking a cigarette at the bar in an atrocious crimson dress with a sparkly silver neckline. As Gwendolyn and Marcus got closer, the dress began to shimmer like mercurochrome. The diamond sunburst only made it look cheaper.

  There was something about this girl that Marcus never quite trusted. It went all the way back to that night she and Gwendolyn were part of that crazy human billboard. He’d been watching Gwendolyn the moment she lost her balance and toppled off like a Raggedy Ann doll. It was hard to say for sure but it looked to him like Alice had nudged poor Gwendolyn off their perch. But she did it in such a way that it could have just as easily been the accident Alice swore it was afterwards. Everyone had given her the benefit of the doubt but Marcus had never been as convinced as he’d have liked.

  Marcus forced a smile. “Alice, we’ve been looking for you.”

  “Do me a favor.” She jabbed her cigarette into a Biltmore ashtray. “Give me a minute to get back to my table then come ask me to dance. I’ve been playing cutesy pie with that dyke director Dorothy Arzner all night. I’ve been angling for a role in a Rosalind Russell picture she’s doing at Columbia and I think I’ve got her hooked. But I don’t want this crowd thinking that I’m her actual date or nothin’. Thanks a bunch!”

  “I really need to . . .” But Alice had already started back to her table to join a mannish woman whose dark hair was slicked back like Clark Gable. She wore a dark brown suit, a cream blouse and a copper necktie, and leered like she was about to get lucky. Alice plopped herself down on the vacant seat and started making ridiculously big arm gestures.

  “This is the girl Gwendolyn gives a three thousand dollar brooch to?” Kathryn asked.

  “I’m going to have to dance with her now, aren’t I?” Marcus said. Kathryn offered him a better-you-than-me nod. He counted out ten seconds and approached the table.

  “Miss Moore.” He bowed stiffly toward her. “I would so enjoy the pleasure of this dance.”

  “Why, Mr. Adler!” she exclaimed in the over-the-top way that only actresses of negligible talent can summon. “How lovely to see you.” She turned to her dinner partner. “You don’t mind, do you?” She didn’t wait for a response and jumped to her feet.

  They were still within earshot when she said, “Honestly, would it kill that woman to put on a little lipstick?”

  “Alice,” Marcus broke in. “I need Gwendolyn’s brooch.”

  “My brooch?”

  “Gwendolyn’s brooch. I need to borrow it. And I mean right now.”

  “At four o’clock in the morning?”

  “I’ll see to it that Gwendolyn gets it back.”

  “Sorry, chum. Gwendolyn lent me this brooch for a whole week, and that week doesn’t end until Monday. I have a date with a new gentleman friend who’s connected to Fox. He’s taking me dancing at the Palomar tomorrow evening and I intend to wear it.”

  “You planning on wearing the same dress?” Marcus asked her.

  “What’s wrong with this dress?”

  “I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it.” He shook his head solemnly. “A silver neckline with a gold brooch . . . ?”

  Alice’s hand pulled free of Marcus’ and flew to cover the brooch. “It’s the nicest piece of jewelry I could lay my hands on!”

  “But that doesn’t mean it matches. Haven’t you heard that old saying? Silver and gold leave me cold.”

  Kathryn thought the pawnbroker
Alice directed them to was remarkably well groomed, considering he’d been open all night. She’d expected some seedy character, all tired and sad from dealing with people teetering at the bottom rung of life’s ladder. He was dressed neatly in a pressed suit and a cinnamon necktie. The only unsurprising thing about this setup was that Alice knew an all-night pawnbroker at the south end of downtown. He took his time studying Gwendolyn’s brooch.

  “So?” Kathryn pressed. “How much for it?”

  “Eighteen fifty.”

  “Don’t jack us around, buddy,” Kathryn shot back. Her voice was harsher than she suspected possible. “We’ll accept twenty-one hundred.”

  “Nineteen twenty-five.”

  “Two thousand,” Marcus cut in. “I guarantee you I’ll be back within forty-eight hours and I’ll buy it back from you for twenty-two hundred.”

  Kathryn was dying to wipe her clammy palms on her skirt, but she didn’t dare show how desperate they were. “That’s a two hundred dollar profit in two days,” she pointed out. “Is that really a deal you want to knock back?

  The pawnbroker looked at them unblinkingly. “I don’t know that I’ll see you again any time in the next forty-eight months, but I’ll make it two thousand if you tell me who you’re bailing out.”

  Kathryn kept her eyes trained on the pawnbroker and heard Marcus push a laugh out of his throat.

  “Listen,” the guy said. “I’m the only twenty-four hour pawnbroker in L.A. I’m ten blocks from the city lockup. Two thousand is steep. The only people whose bail is more than a couple hundred are movie people in a hell of a jam, but movie people usually have fancy lawyers and studio heavies calling police chiefs and D.A.s for them. Let’s just say you’ve got my curiosity up.”

  Baloney, Kathryn thought. As soon as we leave here, you’ll be on the phone to some yellow journalist for your big fat tip about who’s been locked up. She looked outside. The taxi driver was still waiting for the big fat tip Marcus had promised him.