Scandal in Babylon

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘I have no idea. Mr Fishbein is trying to contact him, but apparently some evangelists have arrived—’

  ‘Here!’ Kitty seemed almost not to have heard her. ‘Here … Oh, my God …’

  Seeing the expression of despairing horror on her sister-in-law’s face, Emma handed Buttercreme to Zal, took Kitty’s arm and steered her back into the shadows around the corner. ‘What is it?’ she asked quietly. Given Kitty’s usually flippant attitude towards former spouses, there was clearly something more here than met the eye. ‘How much trouble can he make for you?’ Visions of abandoned children, of nameless vices (although most of them, Emma was well aware, had perfectly good Latin names), of drunken vehicular manslaughter flitted before her eyes. ‘What would he know about you?’

  Kitty stared at her with eyes that seemed even more huge in her delicate face. ‘What would he know about me? He’ll have our marriage license!’ And, seeing Emma’s puzzlement at this. ‘Emma, I married Rex when I was fifteen. I mean, really fifteen, back in …’ She hastily counted on her fingers, and shuddered at the result. ‘Anyway, I’ve been telling everyone in Hollywood that I’m twenty …’

  ‘Ah.’ Emma felt a wave of relief. ‘So what he could sell to the fan magazines would be the date of your birth.’

  ‘More than that!’ gasped Kitty, nearly in tears. ‘Worse than that! Because I didn’t have my parents’ consent I told them at City Hall that I was eighteen, which would make me …’ She flinched again, and turned her face aside, unable to bear the thought of her real age, not to mention her real age plus three years. ‘Oh, Emma—!’

  ‘I’m sure all he wants is money.’ Emma wondered how she managed to get herself into conversations like this and what her mother – not to mention Aunt Estelle – would have said. ‘It will be embarrassing, but I’m sure, given how popular Royal Desire has been, and all the advance interest in Temptress of Babylon, Mr Pugh will be happy to come to some sort of arrangement. Mr Fishbein said he’d try to get hold of Mr Pugh, and he can …’

  She made a move toward the Hacienda, but Kitty caught her arm again in a desperate grasp.

  ‘But what if he tries to make me live with him again?’ she demanded frantically. ‘What if he demands half – or all – of my income for the past nine years? Did he have a lawyer with him?’

  ‘Kitty …’ Emma frowned, trying to recall what she knew about California divorce law – a subject of perennial discussion amongst Kitty’s colleagues. ‘Did you ever get a divorce from Mr Festraw?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ Kitty wailed.

  Despite her genuine sympathy for her sister-in-law’s distress, Emma could not keep from raising her eyebrows. High.

  ‘He said he was going to divorce me when I ran off with Ted,’ explained Kitty. ‘Or was it Solly?’ She counted briefly on her fingers again. ‘Anyway,’ she continued, giving up the effort, ‘I left New York right after that, and then I was in Philadelphia for just a very short time and then Chicago, and for awhile in there I was calling myself Raquelita Vasquez … but nobody knows that … so if he did serve me with papers, they wouldn’t have reached me …’

  ‘It sounds’ – Zal stepped closer to the two women to lower his voice, Buttercreme trying to hide herself in his armpit – ‘like we need to speak to Mr Festraw.’

  Kitty’s dark eyes shifted. Then she looked back at Emma, and nodded.

  But when she didn’t speak, Emma asked, more gently, ‘Would you like me with you? Or Zal?’ The size – the bulk – of Rex Festraw flashed through her mind. Though the first impression anyone received of Kitty – especially on the screen – was one of intense, voluptuous energy, she was, in fact, a small woman, and though curvaceous, rather delicately built. For an instant Emma saw her as she had been at fifteen, married to a man in his thirties who was six feet tall and muscled like a boxer. Her scalp prickled with a rush of angry heat, remembering the smell of liquor on his breath and person.

  She’s afraid of him.

  Kitty bore no scars on her flawless face, but the marks were there in her eyes.

  ‘There’s actually no need for you to see him at all,’ Emma added. ‘I’ll get Mr Fishbein, and … What’s the name of Foremost Productions’ lawyer? Mr Spiegelmann? And Zal … Might you go tell Miss Burdon that you’ve found Kitty, but she’s been taken ill?’ She glanced at her watch. The sky overhead between the stages had the golden tone that suffused California afternoons, and the ‘street’ was slowly filling with shadow. In a lower voice, she asked, ‘Were you meeting someone?’

  ‘No!’ Kitty stamped her foot, her fright of her husband dissolving into flashing anger. ‘I – That is, poor Buttercreme got away – someone must have left her basket open …’

  Emma opened her mouth to acquit ‘poor Buttercreme’ of such bravado, but at that moment, Frank Pugh’s sleek black Pierce-Arrow pulled in through the ornamental gate on Sunset Boulevard and halted before the Hacienda. The producer climbed out, moving with surprising agility for a man of his considerable bulk, and headed for Kitty’s dressing room. He had a small briefcase in hand. Clearly, Conrad Fishbein had reached him by telephone. The publicity chief himself emerged from the Hacienda and hurried to catch him, with a fat man’s rolling stride, presumably with a warning about the Pettingers.

  Kitty said, ‘Oh, nertz,’ and darted from the cover of the corner to intercept them both.

  ‘I hope he left somebody in the office to keep an eye on the Holy Twins,’ muttered Zal, striding at the star’s heels. Emma, making haste to follow, wondered if Thelma Turnbit was still lurking somewhere as well.

  Frank Pugh, like Rex Festraw, was a big man. Both were heavily built, dark-haired, and thick with the fleshiness of middle age; the difference being that Festraw had clearly been dazzlingly handsome in his younger days, something which was only said of Frank Pugh by young ladies hopeful of a contract with Foremost Productions. Pugh’s eyes, like Festraw’s, were light, in his case a cold jade-green and shadowed now by a saturnine scowl as his chief moneymaker scurried up to him, flashing with all the jewels of Babylon.

  ‘Oh, Frank!’ Kitty flung herself into his arms. ‘Oh, thank God you’ve come!’

  Her acting before the camera was hopeless. But in real-life situations, reflected Emma, her talents rivaled Duse.

  ‘Emma just told me,’ sobbed Kitty. ‘I was looking for poor Buttercreme – she was clear out in the backlot, poor darling …’ Kitty’s gold-ribboned sandals bore not the slightest trace of the backlot’s dust. ‘Oh, I thought Rex was dead! I’d heard he’d been killed in a motor accident just after the War. Oh, Frank …’

  She burst into a convincing rendition of terrified tears, and the producer handed Fishy the briefcase and gently folded her in his arms. ‘It’s all right, baby,’ he said. ‘The man probably just wants money and I’ve got that. There’s nothing to worry about.’ He kissed the top of her tousled dark head and she raised her face to his, leaving smudges of Motion Picture Yellow on his bosom but having miraculously preserved both her mascaro and lipstick intact.

  ‘Mrs Blackstone.’ He fixed Emma with his unnerving green glare. ‘Has this Festraw jasper come out of Kitty’s room? Or talked to anyone?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ said Emma. ‘I’ve been looking for Kitty – I thought it best that she be located right away, and warned.’

  ‘Good,’ he affirmed. ‘That Turnbit broad still around? Damn it,’ he added, when his publicity chief nodded.

  ‘And the Pettingers—’

  ‘Screw the Pettingers.’ He glanced at the dilapidated Pettinger Ford parked in front of the Hacienda beside his own sleek conveyance, as if debating having it hauled away as junk. ‘The Pettingers don’t bribe my switchboard operators and gate-guards to sell them information.’ He put a hand on Kitty’s back, and led the way to the arcade that shaded all six ‘star’ dressing rooms. Kitty leaned into his strength like a schoolgirl clinging for protection, and Emma – joined again now by Zal and Buttercreme – wondered if her sister-in-law’s doci
lity was assumed to emphasize to her lover her dependence on his strength, or to make sure that she was on hand to refute whatever her visitor might have to say.

  When they reached the second door along the arcade, Pugh put Kitty gently aside. ‘If this rube thinks he’s gonna put something over on us with some horseshit about still being married to Kitty, he’s gonna find—’

  He thrust the door open.

  Taller than Kitty and slimmer than Fishbein, Emma was just behind Pugh as he took a half-step through the door, and saw the dressing room at the same moment that he did.

  And smelled it. The first warm whoof of air that puffed from its stuffy confines.

  The smell of gunpowder, that had lingered in her brother Miles’s uniforms when she’d unpacked them at his return on leave.

  The smell of blood. There wasn’t a lot of this. The wounds in Mr Festraw’s chest and forehead were small and hadn’t bled much. He must have been killed instantly. Miles – and Jim – had told her that much about the corpses in the trenches.

  The smell of feces was much stronger. Like a lot of victims, Rex Festraw had soiled himself when he died.

  Festraw himself had evidently stood up when someone had come into the dressing room, because Kitty’s make-up chair was overset beside his body. He looked like he’d staggered back a pace or two and then fallen. The red roses that Ambrose Crain had sent Kitty that morning – only some of which had gone with her to the set – lay scattered about him, like a tribute. He’d been shot in the forehead and the chest, and the gun – a revolver with a long, thick tube attached to the barrel, which Emma deduced had to be a ‘silencer’ – lay just in front of the threshold.

  ‘Well,’ said Kitty, ‘damn.’

  Emma thought that about summed it up.

  THREE

  Natura inest mentibus nostris insatialibus, the great Roman jurist Cicero had said, quaedam cupiditas veri videndi.

  Our minds possess by nature an insatiable desire to know the truth.

  Mr Cicero, reflected Emma, had obviously never visited Hollywood.

  ‘Of course it’s my gun, Frank, darling.’ Kitty raised huge dark eyes to the studio chief as he steered her into Dirk Silver’s dressing room next door. ‘You gave it to me! But what does that have to do with Rex being dead?’

  Silver, ready in cuirass and caligae to welcome the empress in scene eight, looked up startled from the Volkischer Beobachter and set down his tumbler of dark amber liquid.

  ‘Was ist los?’

  Pugh and Fishbein looked at one another warily, neither quite ready to take the irrevocable step of admitting that anything had happened, and Emma stepped forward and asked, in her schoolgirl German, whether Dirk had heard anything next door.

  ‘Just now?’ the star replied in the same language. His dark curls were rumpled and flattened, and the helmet he’d been wearing in scene fifteen hung on the coat rack in the corner. ‘Only fifteen, twenty minutes I have been here …’

  He glanced at the clock – Pugh made damn sure there was a large clock in every dressing room – and then at the gun in Fishbein’s hand, without much interest. Prop guns could turn up anywhere on the lot. But his brow darkened at the sight of Zal and Kitty. ‘Where they been? They’ve had the set ready to go for an hour now and Madge is shitting broken bottles—’

  ‘You heard nothing?’

  ‘Heard what?’ The German’s frown deepened. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Get him outta here,’ ordered Fishbein, when Emma relayed this information, but Pugh caught Silver’s arm in a hard grip as he turned to get his cloak and leave.

  ‘He stays here. Fishy, stash that gun in the trunk of my car, and make sure you wrap it up good in something. And have a look through the room for anything else that looks shady. I’ll be with you in a minute. You.’ He jabbed a finger at Silver. ‘Stay here.’ He pointed to the floor, turned back to Kitty. ‘You didn’t know Festraw was in town?’

  She shook her head, hugging Buttercreme to her chest as a child will hug a toy for comfort. The Pekinese, not liking the producer’s tone, gathered all her courage and challenged him with a sound much like that produced by a small rubber duck when it’s trodden on.

  ‘I didn’t even know he was still alive!’ Kitty’s eyes filled with realistic tears.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked Silver again, in German.

  Zal responded – in much better German than Emma’s, ‘Feller was shot in Kitty’s dressing room.’

  ‘You!’ Pugh swung around on the cameraman. ‘You don’t tell him a thing! Not a thing! Tell him something was stolen from Kitty’s room, a bracelet or something.’

  ‘Erschossen?’ Silver exclaimed.

  Zal held up a warning hand in the star’s direction, but Silver poured out a torrent of questions and speculation, which fortunately the studio chief did not understand. But when Silver strode towards the door, Pugh stepped in front of him, poked with his finger again. ‘You tell this kraut to stay put, Rokatansky. All of you stay put.’ He glared at Emma and Kitty. Buttercreme barked at him again from the safety of Kitty’s kimono.

  Faithful to the legal principles of the Roman Republic, Emma began, ‘Surely the police—’

  ‘I’ll deal with the police. When was the last time you heard from this four-flusher, Kit?’

  ‘Not for years!’ she protested, and Emma saw her hastily counting back in her mind and on her fingers. ‘Not for – oh …’

  ‘When’d you dump him?’

  Kitty was spared further mental arithmetic by the opening of the door. ‘I found these, boss.’ Fishbein, the gun still in hand, held out a couple of crumpled pieces of paper. ‘They were in his pocket. I thought you’d better see them.’ Emma caught a glimpse of the elaborate gold curlicues which decorated her sister-in-law’s private, personal notepaper that nearly filled one drawer of her bureau in the dressing room. From the Desk of Camille de la Rose, Foremost Productions, Hollywood, California, not that Kitty had ever sat down at a desk in her life. The engraving of the Hacienda at the top, and the gold scrollwork that surrounded it, occupied a good thirty percent of each page’s surface. Emma could just imagine Aunt Estelle’s reaction, should she receive a reply to her letter inscribed on such a sheet.

  You shall never have a penny of my money, was written on one in a girlish scrawl. I hate you and will have nothing to do with you. Leave me alone or I will shoot you dead.

  Come near me and I will kill you, said the other.

  One was dated April 14th – which had been Monday – the other, yesterday, the 15th. Both were signed, Camille.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ Zal snatched the papers from Pugh’s hand as the studio chief took them to read. ‘You can’t really think Kitty did it. She can’t hit the side of a barn at three feet.’

  ‘I can, too!’ Kitty protested.

  ‘You really shouldn’t touch those,’ pointed out Emma, as Kitty stepped past her and seized the notes from Zal. ‘I’m sure the police are going to want to—’

  Pugh took them back, ripped them into pieces, and handed the pieces to Fishbein. Fishbein took the ashtray from Silver’s dressing table (Silver rescued his half-smoked Chesterfield in passing), tossed the litter of stubs and ash out the door, then dropped the evidence into the china dish and lit it. ‘Find anything else?’

  ‘Not so far.’

  ‘I didn’t write those!’ Kitty’s fingers shook as she took the tumbler of whisky from Dirk Silver’s hand and drained it.

  ‘Nobody’s gonna say you did, sugar.’ The studio chief laid a soothing hand on her shoulder. ‘But you gotta come clean with me. Where were you between … What time did she leave the set, Rokatansky?’

  ‘We finished scene seventeen at quarter after one,’ reported Zal. ‘Then Miss de la Rose talked for about twenty minutes with Thelma Turnbit—’

  ‘What the hell was that broad doing on the lot in the first place?’ Pugh turned sharply to his publicity chief. ‘Who let her in the gate?’

  ‘No idea.’

 
‘Well, get an idea. All we need is for her to get hold of this …’

  Furious thumping on the door. Madge Burdon’s voice boomed through the panels, ‘You in there, Kitty? For Chrissake, if we don’t get something in the can we’re gonna have to bring that frikkin’ elephant back tomorrow at twenty-five bucks a—’

  ‘Beat it!’ yelled Frank back. ‘Miss de la Rose is indisposed!’

  ‘That you, Frank?’ demanded the director, unimpressed. ‘What are you, doin’ a threesome in there? I didn’t know Dirk was your type.’

  Fishbein stepped outside, and shut the door again.

  ‘I swear it!’ Again Kitty lifted those limpid, tear-filled eyes to her lover’s. ‘I’d left my cigarettes in the stage, and while Madge was having the lights moved, I went back in and saw that someone had left the door of poor Buttercreme’s basket open.’ She hugged the little dog closer. ‘I hunted for her everywhere! I finally found her out in the back lot, near the peasant village sets—’

  Outside, Emma heard Madge exclaim, ‘Fuck no! If I’d sent anyone out looking God knows when they’d be back—’

  ‘When’d you last see the gun?’ Pugh turned back to Kitty.

  ‘I don’t know!’ Her voice shook and she dabbed at what Emma guessed were now genuine tears. ‘Not for over a year!’

  Given the clutter of kimonos, divan, chairs, liquor cabinet, cushions, make-up shelves, old fan mail and fashion magazines that crammed her dressing room, this was not difficult for Emma to believe. You could probably conceal Socrates the Elephant behind the shoe-rack … Behind her, Dirk Silver and Zal were still engaged in explanations in German too swift for her to easily follow, but she did catch the words, Kitty? Sie konnte keinen Heuhaufen schlagen …

  ‘Did you put that silencer on it?’ asked Emma. ‘And did you ever take it out of the dressing room?’

  ‘Good heavens, no! I mean, I don’t know. I don’t think so …’ Kitty looked inquiringly at Pugh, as the door opened and Fishbein slipped in again, still holding the gun under his jacket.