Scandal in Babylon

by Barbara Hambly

  Mr Festraw must have had more money than he appeared, if he was staying here.

  She said, ‘Excuse me,’ and approached the counter. Halfway down from Hollywood she’d realized her name may have appeared in Thelma Turnbit’s column as Kitty’s ‘secretary and companion’, and though this gentleman didn’t look as if he’d touched a film magazine in his life, she recalled what Zal had said last night. It was better to be safe than sorry. ‘My name is Flavian – Mrs Augustus Flavian. Is this …? Did a man named Rex Festraw stay here?’

  The clerk’s upper lip lengthened and his thin nostrils flared. ‘He did, m’am.’ His gentle drawl marked him as a transplant from the American South. ‘I’m afraid he is no longer a resident.’

  Whatever grief he felt about this could have been concealed behind a folded gum-wrapper.

  ‘No,’ said Emma. ‘No, I understand he … He’s deceased. Under unfortunate circumstances.’

  The clerk’s chill eye spoke of un-Christian thoughts, piously suppressed.

  ‘The thing is,’ she went on, ‘I’m looking for … that is, Mr Festraw …’ She puckered her brow and clutched the clasp of her handbag in what she hoped sufficiently resembled distress. Kitty had told her once about imagining herself in her characters’ situations (though Emma would have been hard-pressed to guess her own reactions had she actually found herself Empress of Babylon …). ‘My sister became – involved – with Mr Festraw just before Christmas. She left home – she’s only seventeen, and … She’s very good-hearted,’ she added earnestly. ‘But … wild. Impulsive. We got a postcard that she’d left with Mr Festraw, but we’ve only just heard – my mother and I – that they came here to Los Angeles. Did Mr Festraw … was there a woman … a girl, really …’

  ‘Mr Festraw’ – the clerk handled the name as he would have handled a deceased mouse discovered in his soup – ‘generally did not spend his evenings here at the Winterdon. The woman he brought here this past Monday night’ – he looked Emma up and down with eyes like ball bearings – ‘would not have been any relation to a lady such as yourself, m’am.’

  Emma lowered her eyes and tried to picture a maenad like the Emperor Augustus’ wastrel daughter Julia, clinging to Rex Festraw’s arm. In a subdued voice, she murmured, ‘What did she look like, sir? Julia …’ She stopped herself, as if too mortified to go on.

  ‘She is shorter than yourself, m’am,’ said the clerk, in the tone of one washing his hands of the whole encounter. ‘And … ahem … voluptuously built. Her hair is red – rather emphatically so – bobbed short and waved.’ He paused to consider, approvingly, the braided knot at the back of Emma’s neck, and the hemline that Kitty had more than once informed her ‘went out with bustles’. ‘She wore a frock of red artificial silk flowered in black and her fingernails looked like she’d started to grow them long before Christmastime. They were painted, too. Quite vivid red.’ More gently, he added, ‘She didn’t look seventeen, m’am, or anywhere near it. And her speech, when she opened her mouth, was nothing like yours.’

  And, when Emma said nothing, he went on, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘And Mr Festraw never mentioned any other … any other companion?’

  ‘I never had words with the man.’ The chilly eyes softened to kindness. ‘He arrived last Thursday night, just a week ago. His room had been paid for in advance. He had only a small suitcase with him, and the police removed that yesterday when they came. He only slept here, but he’d come in late some nights – walking steady, but I could smell the liquor on him, from where I stood here behind the counter. Monday night was the only night he brought a woman here, and I don’t need to tell you, that of course I didn’t let her past the lobby.’

  The narrow lips tightened again. ‘I asked her to leave – in my opinion she was also intoxicated – and she did. Then ten minutes later I had to stop Mr Festraw from unlocking the rear service door of the hotel which opens into the alley. Had Mr Festraw not met with an unfortunate accident yesterday, I would probably have asked that he take his custom to another establishment. He was not the sort of guest we look for here at the Winterdon.’

  Emma looked around her at the lobby and exclaimed, ‘Oh, heavens, no!’ Then she frowned again, as if puzzled, and said, ‘His room was paid for in advance? De mortuis nihil nisi bonum, of course, but that hardly sounds like what I know of Mr Festraw.’

  ‘I am of one mind with you on that head, m’am. But it might help you to get in touch with this’ – he opened a drawer under the counter, removed a blue-backed ledger, and looked up a notation – ‘Mr Stanislas Markham in New York, who might be able to give you some further clues about Mr Festraw’s other acquaintances in Los Angeles. That might point you in the direction of finding word of your sister.’

  Emma gasped, ‘Oh!’ Her face flooded with unfeigned delight. She hadn’t hoped for any information so definite as a name. ‘Oh, sir, I cannot thank you enough! God bless you, sir! I can never repay your kindness!’

  And she made a note of the name, shook hands with the clerk, and hurried out the door, reflecting that writing improbable scenarios for Foremost Productions appeared to provide valuable training after all.

  She was seriously tempted to return to the studio at that point. Who on EARTH is Stanislas Markham of New York and WHY would he pay for a hotel room for Mr Festraw … And did the police think to ask about this? But the mild brightness of the spring day, and her unexpected success, gave her heart. After consulting the correct side of Sam Wyatt’s sketch-map, Emma walked the some twelve blocks, past the trees and fountain of Pershing Square and up the tidy, downtown streets to Frannie’s Delicatessen, at Eighth Street and Flower.

  The large room with its black-and-white tile floor was a little grimier than the Winterdon, and very much more noisy. The entire place seemed to be tiled, without a soft surface anywhere to be seen, save the bodies and clothing of the people seated at the tiny, marble-topped, round tables. Their voices ricocheted from walls, floor, and pressed-copper ceiling like an avalanche of ping-pong balls: gentlemen in business suits whose condition and cleanliness advertised the wearer’s probable financial state; women in neat frocks like the ladies of Wardrobe or Vinnie Lowder; ladies in outrageously short skirts or fringed frocks with no sleeves. Dusky Mexican mothers helped black-haired, black-eyed children eat ice-cream sodas. A black girl of sixteen or so, neatly dressed as for work in an office, hurried in, waved a quick greeting to the young man behind the counter and made straight for the three telephone boxes just beyond the end of the counter itself. She dropped in her coin without closing the booth door, dialed, and had a hasty conversation – no more than a sentence or two – before hanging up.

  Then she crossed back to the counter, asked the young man, ‘Anybody call for me, Roy?’

  He fished a slip of paper from his shirt pocket and pushed it across to her. ‘Sounded like your sister. She just asked you to call.’

  The girl glanced at the number and beamed like a reprieved life prisoner. ‘God bless you, Roy. Coffee and a donut?’ While Roy was getting them she went straight back to the telephone box. The young man – red-haired and freckled from hairline to collarbone – set the coffee and sweet, together with a paper napkin, at the end of the counter for her, and turned with a welcoming smile as Emma approached.

  ‘Can I help you, m’am?’

  Emma glanced at the girl in the phone box – the second box was now occupied by a slender dark gentleman in the overalls of a petrol-station attendant – and said, ‘I’m looking for a woman who I think uses your telephone to make her calls. Do you have tea?’ She sat on one of the tall, leatherette-cushioned stools. ‘And that donut smells awfully good.’ It was no flattery; the pastry on its thick white porcelain plate waiting for the girl in the phone box glistened with freshness and glaze. ‘Might I have one also?’

  ‘’Fraid we don’t have tea, m’am.’ Roy tonged a donut from some mysterious bin below the counter. Even his arms and hands were freckled. ‘Just brewed a new pot of coff
ee, though. As for the lady you’re lookin’ for, I guess half the neighborhood uses this place as an office and me as the secretary …’ He grinned, as, at her assent, he poured out some coffee and gently pushed the cream pitcher and sugar jar in her direction. In a stage whisper, he added, ‘Least I don’t have to wear a frilly hat an’ high-heeled shoes!’

  Emma’s eyes twinkled back at him. ‘Oh, I don’t know; I think one of those fascinators with a couple of long feathers would suit the shape of your face very well.’

  ‘I been told I should never wear an eye-veil,’ he returned, in mock anxiety.

  ‘Whoever told you that was simply jealous of your cheekbones. It would be quite becoming.’

  ‘It would be coming off.’ His grin widened. ‘What’s she look like, this lady? I know pretty much all the regulars.’

  Emma repeated the description the clerk at the Winterdon had given her, and saw the bright, bantering look fade from the counterman’s lashless green eyes. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Her.’

  And he studied Emma in silence for a moment.

  ‘I’m not a bill collector,’ said Emma quietly. ‘Nor with the police. I just … She knows – knew – an acquaintance of mine, who met with an accident yesterday. I’m trying to find out what he was doing in Los Angeles, and who else he might have known in town. He was …’ She hesitated, looking aside a little shamefacedly, trying to imagine Lesbia asking Catullus for money. ‘He was supposed to be bringing my mother money.’

  ‘If he was keepin’ company with Phyllis,’ said the counter-man, his voice suddenly dry, ‘I’m sorry to tell you, m’am, that he likely wouldn’t have a dime of your mama’s money left in his pockets.’

  Emma conjured all the resources of her imagination, and murmured, ‘Thank you. I still have to try.’

  ‘’Course.’ He nodded towards the plate-glass window, which gave a view, across the brightness of Flower Street, of a four-story building in yellowish brick, like a cardboard box whose corners were capped with unlikely-looking square turrets. ‘She lives someplace in there.’ He glanced at the clock, just beside the telephone boxes. ‘She ain’t been in yet, and she usually comes in for coffee an’ to make phone calls, oh, close to noon. She’ll be in an’ I think’ – his eyes narrowed, calculating – ‘she’ll be awake. Phyllis Blossom. Does extra work – she says – over at Century … when she’s sober.’

  He turned away then, and went to take the order of a couple of uniformed policemen a few seats down the counter. Emma sipped her coffee – which when sufficiently doctored with cream and sugar bordered on drinkable – and turned over in her mind what Roy had said, and what she had learned, over the past few months, about young ladies who claimed to work ‘in the pictures’ who didn’t get much work. It was – she turned to look at the clock – eleven fifteen. At the studio they would be midway through scene ten. She supposed she could wait in Frannie’s until Miss Blossom came in … if Miss Blossom came in.

  When Roy next had a moment to spare he brought her a slip with the price of her refreshment scribbled on it – twenty-five cents – and she laid thirty-five on top of the little paper. Leaving her handbag slightly open and nudging a one-dollar bill far enough out of it to show, she looked into the young man’s eyes and said, ‘You’re going to think this terribly forward of me – Mother would die of mortification if she thought I’d gone to … well, to certain lengths to get information from the sort of woman it sounds like this Miss Blossom is … But would you know of any … any argument that might gain me her time and attention for a few minutes? That would keep her from shutting the door in my face?’

  The young counterman’s eyes moved from her face to her handbag, then back up again to her face, on which she wore an expression which she hoped would convey forlorn embarrassment and desperation. Like Juliet: Come weep with me, past hope, past cure, past help …

  After a moment’s struggle with himself he said, ‘Go down to the corner of Ninth and around to the alley. Our back door’s the third one along. Knock twice.’

  Wishing she could blush on cue – her cousin Maud could – she looked away from him, lips pursed as if in great pain (Mother really WOULD die of mortification … And the recollection, even at four years’ distance, that her mother had actually died brought genuine tears to her eyes). She managed to whisper, ‘Thank you,’ and slid the bill under the donut plate as she slipped from the stool, and hastened out the door.

  EIGHT

  Breathless as she was at her own shame and embarrassment (Aunt Margaret was right when she said bad company would turn a woman bad …), Emma had to admit that the little brown bottle that Roy passed to her through the back door of Frannie’s worked like a miracle. It was unlabeled, but strong enough – when, in Phyllis Blossom’s grubby furnished room, she unscrewed it to add to the reheated coffee that the ‘actress’ poured out for them both – to fell a horse.

  Miss Blossom shut her eyes and sighed after the first long swig, like a woman warmed to the ends of her red-nailed toes. ‘Shit fuck, I needed that. You are a fucking angel, Mrs F.’

  ‘Um … Thank you.’ By her tone, Miss Blossom was obviously sincere.

  The excuse Emma gave for the liquor – and for her visit – was to let Miss Phyllis Blossom know that Rex Festraw had ‘met with an accident’, and to offer her sympathy and solace. At the news Miss Blossom voiced a string of curses in a tone that held no anger, nor even sorrow: just a sort of philosophical melancholy at the shortness of men’s days. ‘The Corneros get him?’ she asked, curious rather than vengeful.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Tony the Hat, and his brother Frank. Biggest rum-runners in town. They bring in the stuff by freighters from Canada, unload it into motorboats to bring it ashore at Long Beach and then truck it into the clubs. I told Rex not to get mixed up with those guys.’

  Good Heavens, was Mr Fishbein right after all?

  ‘I didn’t think Mr Festraw was in Los Angeles long enough to even meet bootleggers,’ said Emma, and Miss Blossom, with an absent-minded air, took the bottle and dumped about a gill of it into her half-empty coffee cup.

  ‘Oh, Rex was connected.’ She made a long arm for her bright-red handbag, perched on a corner of the minuscule table on top of a litter of bills, magazines, bread-wrappers and stray items of tableware, and extracted a cigarette. ‘He worked for Joe Adonis and the Luciano boys in New York. He said he was out here on other business, but needed some extra.’ Miss Blossom shook her head, and lit the little tube of tobacco. As the clerk at the Winterdon had promised, her fingernails were long, red as sealing-wax, and chipped.

  Familiar as Emma was, after six months in Hollywood, with cosmetic embellishment that would have gotten any girl she’d previously known thrown into the street, Phyllis Blossom redefined the limits of the vulgar. At least, Emma reflected, her highly-painted sister-in-law knew how to apply her make-up. The blood-crimson of Miss Blossom’s lips made Kitty’s efforts in that direction look virginal. Her small, rather puffy, hazel eyes glinted from caked masses of kohl and rouge, and her mascaro looked as if she’d slept in it, and then simply applied a fresh coat on top of last night’s.

  She had, in fact, upon Emma’s arrival at her door, been dressing to go out. Curling tongs lay across an unwashed frying pan on the room’s single gas ring: the tiny apartment smelled of scorched styling lotion and lightly charred hair.

  ‘I never saw a man unload as much as Rex did, on the ponies, and the fights – I swear if he’d lived long enough for baseball to start he’d have been in the poorhouse.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘He sure knew how to show a girl a good time, but he couldn’t have picked the winner in a fight between a lion and ham sandwich. When he showed up Monday throwin’ money around like confetti – and I knew he’d done a job for Tony Cornero Friday, soon as he got into town – I said, “You better be careful messin’ around with them boys”.

  ‘You know what he said? He said, “Relax, doll. I don’t have to make the drop to Tony ’til Friday, and with the dough I
got comin’ in Wednesday, he won’t even know it’s gone”.’

  ‘And he never mentioned what money he had coming in on Wednesday?’

  Miss Blossom shook her head, shrugged, and removed her cigarette long enough to drain her now cold coffee cocktail. Emma couldn’t imagine how she swallowed the stuff. Her own cup was untouched. The liquid smelled like motor oil, and whatever it was in Roy’s bottle couldn’t have helped. ‘Guys like Rex, they always got money comin’ in. Or say they do.’

  ‘Did he mention who else he might have seen or spoken to here in town?’

  ‘Well, Tony and Frank. And somebody named Al, who he said was a cheap-ass Jew-bastard and didn’t pay worth shit, and somebody else named Sid, who was fucking worthless as far as Rex was concerned and was never around when you needed to get hold of him, and somebody else named Jerry, who Rex said would … well, it doesn’t matter ’cause it’s just what men say about other men they don’t like. It didn’t sound like it had anything to do with your mama’s money. I’m sure sorry, honey.’

  Miss Blossom leaned across the corner of the cluttered table and patted Emma’s hand. ‘I swear to you, if Rex had any plans to hand over so much as a dollar to your poor mother, he didn’t act like it. I can’t even really say I’m sorry he’s dead, because he was a real dick when he was drunk, but I’m sorry you and your mama got screwed.’

  ‘It’s all right.’ Emma manufactured a brave smile, trying to look as if it wasn’t. Then she frowned, and added, as an afterthought, ‘He didn’t happen to mention his ex-wife, did he? Or his wife, he might have called her – someone named Kitty?’

  It crossed her mind then how he’d pronounced de la Rose in the stage. Almost mockingly. And he had known her as Kitty, the name she’d gone by as a chorus dancer on Broadway. Yet the man Vinnie had heard on the telephone had called her Camille. Would Rex have countered that with, You mean Kitty?