A Death in California

by Barthel, Joan;

  Bill enjoyed his work. One night he brought home a can of 16 mm. film, a selection of his commercials. Martha Padilla had called her twin sister Mary, who worked for the Smiths, next door to Hope, and the two maids and Hope and the children had watched Bill’s show in the living room, applauding vigorously after each spot. The children especially liked the commercial set in an elegant dining room with a crystal chandelier, a table set with china and flowers and fine linen, and twelve formally dressed people sitting around it. A maid carried in a big, beautiful roast on a platter and set it in front of the host, who stood up and began to slice it. At least, he tried to slice it. Then everything began to shake: knives and forks, wineglasses, the table itself. He grunted and groaned as he stabbed at the meat, but the more he stabbed, the more things shook, until all the glasses and dishes were pitching off the table and the chandelier was swinging wildly. The scene shifted to the kitchen, where the maid was shaking Adolph’s meat tenderizer over another roast. “A little of this kind of shaking beforehand can save that kind of shaking after.”

  Hope was even prouder of Bill’s work than he was, and had even been somewhat involved in it. In a layout Bill had just finished for Occidental Life, an ad for insurance policies for wives, he had used Hope as his model. Hope’s picture was placed right in the center of the page. She wore a black dress and held a long-stemmed rose. Her eyes were grave, her expression sweet but serious above the bold caption: WHAT IF SHE DIES FIRST?

  Bill had been born in St. Louis in 1932. He’d enrolled at the University of Missouri to study journalism; in his freshman year, 1951, he’d pledged a fraternity, Phi Psi. After graduation he joined the air force as a jet pilot. Back in St. Louis, he’d worked for an advertising agency until 1966, when he and his wife Frances and their two little girls had moved to southern California. Bill loved California. He adapted to its casual life-style as perhaps only a man whose birthright was the sleet and slush of the Midwest could—without reservation, wholeheartedly. He became passionate about physical fitness, and grew tanner and leaner, lunching on cottage cheese and yogurt and never, ever, skipping his daily exercise. His new trimness pleased him so much that he no longer carried his wallet in his pants pocket, not even a matchbook, nothing that might cause the slightest ripple in the silhouette; he usually had the pants pockets sewn shut so he wouldn’t be tempted to put anything in them. He carried his wallet and credit cards in the glove compartment of his car, or in his briefcase. He was so zealous about weight that, even though most of Hope’s friends thought she was too thin, Bill urged her to stay the way she was. “Whenever I get involved with someone, she gains thirty pounds,” Bill told Hope.

  Since slimming down, Bill had become very careful about his clothes. He liked tweedy jackets and well-cut slacks, perhaps beige, with a blue and beige tie and a maroon shirt. He owned eight blazers in eight colors. Hope had seen his clothing chart, showing which jacket would go well with which pants and shirt and tie. At one time, he told Hope, he had been unconcerned about clothes, but when he got some settlement money from the sale of the house he and Fran had bought when they came to California, a girl he was seeing had urged him to buy new clothes, and he’d bought a whole new wardrobe costing about three thousand dollars. Hope had never met that girl, but she knew her name was Sandi and, as far as Hope was aware, Sandi was the only other woman, besides Bill’s wife, he’d been serious about. Bill was separated from Fran, and Sandi was separated from her husband, Fred, and he had moved in with her and her four children. He told Hope that he and Sandi had talked about marriage, but when his final divorce papers came through and Sandi announced they would then be married in two weeks, Bill had apparently changed his mind. He’d moved out of Sandi’s, into his own apartment on Lafayette Park Place, and he hadn’t yet signed his final papers.

  Bill’s daughters got along beautifully with Hope’s children. They were six and eight years old, fitting like stepping stones into Hope’s family, a combination of five children from three to twelve. Bill took his girls on alternate weekends, and often he and Hope went off somewhere with all five children. Before he’d met Hope, Bill sometimes had asked Fran along on outings when he took the girls, which Hope later interpreted as Bill’s gesture of appeasement to Fran, who didn’t like Sandi. But after meeting Hope, he took her instead of Fran. Once Hope had heard him talking to Fran on the phone, from her house, to make arrangements to take the girls to Lion Country Safari. Fran had been expecting to go along, but Bill told her he was taking Hope and her children, too, so there wouldn’t be room for Fran in Hope’s Vega. When Bill went to pick up the girls, he wanted Hope to come in and meet Fran, but Hope felt it would be better for her to wait in the car. Later, at other times when Bill went to get the girls, Hope always waited in the car, reading a book, because she sensed Fran was still hurt about being left out of the Lion Country trip. “I would have taken her along, because that’s the kind of person I am,” Hope explained, “but it would have been uncomfortable for her. She knew exactly what was going on.” Another reason Hope always stayed in the car and never met Fran was that, when Bill asked Hope to marry him, Hope knew that Fran was always going to be left out. Bill had told Hope a great deal about both Fran and Sandi, and it sounded to Hope as though “each of them wanted Bill to come back to her in the worst way,” and she sensed that each of them felt that Bill would leave Hope and come back to her, sooner or later. And still another reason that Hope tried to lay back, when it came to Fran, was that the Ashlock girls got along so famously with Hope’s three, and with Hope herself. Hope had shown his girls how to make him laugh, demonstrating by burying her face in his neck and growling, and she heard later that, when they got home, the girls couldn’t wait to tell Fran. “Hopie’s the only person in the world who can make Daddy laugh,” they told their mother.

  Hope was thinking that if Bill’s interview couldn’t help Tom in some way, maybe it could help her neighbor Gary, who had a financial interest in a restaurant chain. When she got Gary on the phone, she told him about Bill’s story. “Is there any company, or any place that you own, that it would do you some good to have mentioned?” she asked. “What about the restaurants?”

  “Not really,” Gary said. “I really don’t want my name in the paper. But Bill is more than welcome to say he’s a member of one of my companies.”

  “No, that isn’t the point,” Hope said. “I just wanted to know if there’s anything that would help you if it got mentioned in the paper.”

  “Not really,” Gary said again. “Thanks anyway, Hopie.”

  As Hope and Gary were talking, about ten minutes before noon, a neatly dressed man in a three-piece suit, wearing wire-rimmed glasses and carrying a pipe, stepped off the elevator on the ninth floor of the tall, modern building on Wilshire Boulevard where Dailey & Associates had its offices.

  He told the receptionist, Sara Monaco, that he had a lunch appointment with Bill Ashlock, and he gave Sara his name. Sara nodded, jotted the name down on a slip of paper, and disappeared into Bill’s office. “He’ll be just a few minutes,” she told the man who was waiting. “He’s on the telephone, talking to his girlfriend.”

  The man laughed. “That’s a little ironic,” he said, “because I’m here to interview him on his bachelorhood.” He told Sara he was from the Los Angeles Times. After a few minutes, Sara went in again to remind Bill there was a man waiting. Bill was putting on his jacket. “I’m ready,” Bill told Sara, “but I’ve forgotten the guy’s name.” Sara laughed, and repeated it for him.

  Bill was right behind Sara as she returned to the reception room. The man with the pipe stood up and smiled. He and Bill shook hands, and they left together.

  Hope got out of bed and made her way down the long hallway to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. She took the coffee and her cigarettes into the living room and curled up for a few minutes on the sofa, her feet tucked under her. K.C. was lying on the rug, playing with miniature cars. The living room was big and comfortable, cluttered with pillows and b
ooks, including one whole shelf of Nancy Drew books that Hope had kept for twenty years, and meaningful odds and ends, including an ashtray she’d taken from the Stork Club the night she and her father had been asked to leave. One wall was brick, with a gas-jet fireplace in the center and a long ledge for sitting, running along the wall. A long, plump sofa faced the fireplace, and a smaller sofa was placed at an angle, forming a cozy, L-shaped sitting space. The wall behind the small sofa was all glass, with a sliding door that opened onto a narrow balcony overlooking the street below and the treetops across the street. Across the room, a big round table and chairs made a dining area, near a door opening onto a tiny flagstone patio. Beyond the patio, a rocky hillside covered with thick, thorny bushes rose steeply, almost straight up.

  Hope had lived on the Drive for four years. She had stayed on in the Benedict Canyon house for five years after her divorce, but when she married Tom and was expecting another child, that house was far too small. Her mother had bought this house for them, transferring Hope’s ten thousand dollars’ interest from one place to the other. The house was almost hidden from the street by shrubs and trees. On rainy winter days, shrouded on all sides by foliage, it seemed to perch in a ghostly, gray-green, dripping forest.

  Hope pulled on blue jeans and a shirt, ran a comb through her hair, found a sweater, and told Martha she was going out for a little while. The pale winter sunshine felt marvelous as she got into her car, a ’71 apple-green Vega, and backed carefully down the short, sharply inclined driveway. She backed up again, but less carefully, because the Drive was a cul-de-sac and ended, a few houses below hers, in a small paved turnaround circle where the neighborhood children often played. With all the children in school, the street was now deserted. At the top of the hill, she turned right and began the twisting descent to the shopping section in Beverly Hills. She drove past Sammy Davis’s house, anonymous and scarcely visible behind tall, clipped hedges and an even taller iron gate; she knew whose house it was from Tom, who had pointed out to her one night how Sammy Davis kept all the lights on, all night, his house safely ablaze with electricity to scare off intruders. Tom seemed to know where everyone lived, in the villas and mansions and thirty-five-room bungalows tucked away along these hills; it was his business to know. Hope said that when Sharon Tate was murdered in just such a house, Tom had been excited by the case—Hope called it obsessed.

  Passing the pale pink Beverly Hills Hotel, Hope crossed Sunset Boulevard and continued south, past royal palm trees edging the curbs and vaguely shading the houses on either side, including her mother’s. Honey’s house was appraised at over a million dollars. It had no front lawn at all, just a semicircular driveway; the front door was only ten yards or so from the street. Although there was a small, lovely lawn in back of the house, that, too, backed right onto an alley, and the house itself was scarcely an arm’s length from the house next door. When a window in Honey’s den or kitchen was open, a person in one of these rooms could hear conversations going on inside the house next door. Honey’s living room and her bedroom were huge, but there was only one other bedroom, a small den, a double dining room, and a kitchen. There was no pool.

  But Honey’s house, along with the other houses on Rodeo and Beverly and Bedford and a few other special streets that stretched the few blocks between Sunset and Wilshire boulevards, was not just a place to live. Houses in “The Flats” stood for all the things money could buy and a few things money couldn’t, such as membership in the Los Angeles Country Club, where Honey met her friends for lunch and bridge two or three times a week. “It’s not so much what you are that gets you in, but what you aren’t,” Hope said, explaining that you couldn’t join the L.A. Country Club if you were new to California (unless you were from the East Coast 400), or Jewish, or Roman Catholic, or a journalist, or in show business. She often repeated the story she’d heard about Victor Mature applying for club membership and being told, “We don’t accept actors.” “I’m no actor,” Victor Mature is supposed to have said, “and I have sixty-four pictures to prove it.”

  Hope pulled into the parking lot behind the bank and went in to cash a check. Her checking account was down to about two hundred dollars, which was not unusual and didn’t particularly bother her; it had been lower. But her shaky financial status seemed to bother Bill and, three weeks earlier, he’d put her name on his checking account, making it a joint account. Hope had written only one check on that account, for groceries, because Bill told her he gave Fran eight hundred dollars a month, exactly half of his monthly take-home after taxes, and the other eight hundred dollars got stretched pretty thin. But Bill insisted that he wanted to help Hope out a little, just as he insisted on continuing to split his salary with Fran, which Hope personally considered excessive, in view of the fact that Fran was working full time. But when Hope suggested to Bill that he ask Fran if she could manage with somewhat less from him, Bill didn’t want to. Hope was sure it was because he felt guilty about Fran, not so much about the separation and pending divorce as about some other things, including his feeling that he hadn’t been very considerate of Fran at least part of the ten years they’d been married. One morning, when Hope was barely awake and Bill was just about to get up, he had said suddenly, “You know, if Fran ever hadn’t gotten out of bed to fix my breakfast, I would have complained. But now I won’t even let you get up. It was terrible what I expected of Fran.”

  Hope agreed with him. She’d never met Fran, but from what Bill said, Fran sounded like a model wife who kept an immaculate house with well-scrubbed floors and meals on time. “Let’s face it, Fran did a lot of plain old miserable housework, of which I do as little as possible,” Hope said. She didn’t feel guilty about Fran, though, because Bill and Fran were already separated when Bill met Hope, and eventually Bill agreed that he simply had to cut down on the amount of money he was sending Fran. He said he would call Fran to discuss it, which Hope told him was ridiculous and absolutely the wrong thing to do. “It’s silly to forewarn her,” Hope pointed out. “If you tell her in advance, she’ll just change her circumstances and then she can prove she needs that much. Just go to court; just do it.” Bill didn’t want to handle it that way. “I just can’t hit her with a court order,” he told Hope, so one night he telephoned Fran from Hope’s bedroom phone and told her that money was becoming a hassle for him and Hope. He asked Fran whether she would accept a couple of hundred dollars less each month. Fran said she wouldn’t. Bill told Hope that Fran said no. “Look, I’m only getting one hundred eighty-five dollars a month from Tom,” Hope told him. “You’re just paying her eight hundred dollars a month to make yourself feel better.” Hope told Bill to talk to his lawyer about it, and when he didn’t, she talked to one herself.

  From the bank, Hope crossed the street to the market. She walked up and down the aisles briskly, tossing things in her cart. She wanted to get back soon so that when Bill came home early, as he had promised, they could leave right away. If they didn’t get away by midafternoon, traffic would be a mess. Hope loved weekends at the ranch, even though it wasn’t hers; Honey and her husband had a quarter interest, along with three other couples, and the four families rotated the weekends. This weekend, especially, Hope couldn’t wait to get there. Her back had been acting up for days, with her pain pills not helping much, and she had a busy week coming up. She had to go to court for the divorce hearing and, on Wednesday, she was to be hostess at a Chips luncheon.

  Chips meant Colleagues’ Helpers in Philanthropic Service. The Colleagues were rich women who met periodically to raise money for worthy causes; the Chips, by and large, were their daughters. The Chips’ two main functions were to help at the Colleagues’ annual sale at the Santa Monica Auditorium, where the women brought their used furs and clothing and jewelry to sell, and to make an annual Christmas trip downtown to a home for unwed mothers, where the Chips decorated a tree and served punch and cookies. Membership in both the Colleagues and the Chips was strictly limited; it was by birth or, rarely, by invit
ation. Through her mother’s social connections, Hope was a charter member and, although it was unusual for a Chips member to live in a house with a leaky roof and to qualify for food stamps, her status, as Honey’s daughter, was always secure.

  Besides the court date and the luncheon, she had an appointment for some lab tests her doctor had ordered. For a while now, Hope had been troubled by a strange feeling of fright and weakness, and she had called her doctor about it. “It’s like a feeling of death coming closer,” Hope told the doctor, “and I just had to tell somebody about it. I can see death.” The doctor listened carefully. “What does it look like?” “It’s like a fog surrounding me, around my whole day,” Hope replied. “I know it’s not just psychological because I’m real happy. But I’m becoming less alive, and I don’t know why.”

  When she got back up to the house, Bill wasn’t home yet, and Martha said he hadn’t called. Hope asked her to put away the groceries and went to the telephone.