Scandal in Babylon

by Barbara Hambly

  Emma sank into the soft leather of the upholstery as the big car purred along Sunset Boulevard – stilled now in the deeps of the night – and turned up the darkness of the Cahuenga Pass. Stars sprinkled the sky, brighter as they wound up into the hills; the white shapes of pseudo-Spanish houses glimmered among fan-palms, and a coyote trotted across the road. In the back seat, the Pekes snored in their boxes.

  Emma’s hand stole into the pocket of her cardigan. For thirty-six hours, she had been dragged like Alice through the looking-glass country – doing all the running she could, just to stay in the same place – and aside from the sleep she’d snatched when they’d finally gotten home last night, had been preoccupied with rewriting scenes twenty to twenty-four in one of her pile of school copybooks. Added to this had been the chore of getting Kitty to where she needed to be and keeping track of the dogs and trying to sort out what it was about this whole business of the murder that troubled her so deeply …

  But not for a moment had Aunt Estelle’s letter been completely gone from her mind.

  She was exhausted now, but in the quiet of the car – Zal, blessedly, seemed to sense that stillness was what she craved – she went back over the words.

  Over the memories.

  The Myrtles … How will I ever live close enough to walk to The Myrtles, without feeling grief whenever I turn down Holywell Street?

  Her parents’ grave, in the Wolvercote Cemetery. Miles asleep for eternity beside them. It will be good to be able to visit. To remember without pain … or with much less pain …

  She didn’t know where Jim was buried. The War Department had written her a letter – it was one of the many things that hadn’t been in that single small suitcase that somebody had saved for her when they’d cleared out the house. It didn’t matter, really, since the letter had contained no information either. Only the date, and the information that his effects would be mailed to her, which they hadn’t been.

  If I return to Oxford I’ll be able to look up my old friends again. Did Anne Littleton ever return from the Front? Is Professor Etheridge still lecturing at Sommerville? So many people had simply disappeared from her life, in the wake of the War and the epidemic. Letters returned unanswered. No Longer Here, printed on the envelopes. As it had been, she knew, on the letters that had arrived at The Myrtles for her …

  She closed her eyes. I’ll be able to look them up again …

  Somewhere in the hills to the west, along Wedgewood Avenue, Peggy Donovan’s preposterous castellated mansion was lit up like a Christmas tree, her guests whooping and shrieking with laughter around her swimming pool … her two swimming pools … while a fortune teller in an Arabian tent in the rear of the property read peoples’ palms. Just the thought of the noise made Emma shudder. What am I doing here?

  And Zal’s elbow brushed the side of her arm, accidentally and very lightly, as he turned the wheel and the big car swayed its way slowly down the steep drive. The dell at the bottom of the drive, below the road, was a well of indigo shadow, and on the opposite hillside Kitty’s Moorish fantasy of a house seemed to glimmer in the moonlight. Opening her eyes, Emma saw the star-threaded outline of Zal Rokatansky’s face, the glint of reflection in his glasses. After a day of sweating at the studio he still smelled, very faintly, of soap and bay rum.

  He turned the car around the big eucalyptus tree in the drive, stopped before the fancy tiled steps up to the porch. Getting out, he took Chang Ming’s box and that of Black Jasmine. Emma withdrew Buttercreme’s, and followed him up the steps. The porch light had been switched off, probably, she guessed, by the gardener’s wife, a tiny, bent Chinese woman who watched every penny spent in the household, as if they were paupers.

  Can I leave Zal?

  And can I find my house key …?

  In their boxes, Chang Ming and Black Jasmine both jolted suddenly, and set up a salvo of barking.

  Emma stopped on the porch steps in the moonlight, looking up. Behind her, Zal set down the boxes he carried, called out, ‘Who’s there?’

  Emma turned to retreat as a shadow moved in the porch, and she saw another shadow emerge from the tangle of rhododendron that grew around the tall foundation of the house. A man’s dark shape reached the bottom step in two strides and a man’s deep voice commanded, ‘Don’t try it,’ as Zal moved. To flee? To fight?

  In the same moment the man from the porch reached her and caught her arm in a frighteningly powerful grip. The two male Pekes in their boxes were yapping furiously, challenging, like enraged lions, and she saw that both men had guns.

  NINE

  Another voice said, from the black abyss of the porch, ‘There’s nuthin’ to be afraid of, Miss. Mr Cornero just wants to have a few words with you.’ And then: ‘Shut them mutts up, will you, Rico?’

  Emma said, in a voice that astonished her by its calm, ‘They’re only doing their jobs – as I’m sure you are as well.’

  This second man emerged from the shadows and descended the steps to her, even as another – also brandishing a pistol – joined the one who stood next to Zal.

  ‘May I get my house key?’ she continued. ‘I promise you I don’t have a weapon in my handbag.’

  And the man next to her said, ‘Crap, it’s the secretary. Where’s Miss de la Rose?’

  ‘Having a late dinner at the Club Montmartre,’ said Emma. ‘Can we all go inside? Or at least switch on the porch light? Yes, I’m Mrs Blackstone, Miss de la Rose’s secretary …’

  A third man came down the steps, held out a gloved hand politely to her. His accent was pure radio-hoodlum, but his voice was pleasant. ‘I’m sorry we have to bother you this way, Mrs Blackstone, but there’s a couple things we need to get straightened out, and you can’t be too careful in my business.’

  After shaking her hand he descended another two steps to offer his hand to Zal. ‘Tony Cornero,’ he introduced himself.

  ‘Zal Rokatansky. I take it this is in connection with Rex Festraw?’

  The first hoodlum having released her arm, Emma set Buttercreme’s carry-box down on the step, located her house keys by touch in the dark of her handbag. ‘Could you get that box for me, please?’ No reason a gun-toting gangster can’t make himself useful …

  Mother would FAINT …

  She unlocked the door, switched on the lights in the living room (‘Put that bulb back in the porch light, Rico,’ commanded Cornero over his shoulder), and said, ‘Thank you,’ as the gunman set the little dog’s box down near the door. Zal entered, flanked by Cornero and his thugs and carrying the other two dogs.

  ‘Hey, pooch.’ Cornero bent to peer through the little wicker window at Chang Ming. ‘They bite?’

  ‘They couldn’t do you any harm if they did,’ pointed out Zal, and the bootlegger laughed.

  ‘Like hell they couldn’t! Worst bite I ever got in my life was from that little dustmop that belonged to my stepfather’s landlady in North Beach. Che lupa, what a bitch! I had to get like five stitches on my arm!’

  Tony the Hat, a little to Emma’s surprise, turned out to be a year or two younger than herself – not yet twenty-five, she guessed – a good-looking young man of medium height with intelligent dark eyes and a pleasant manner. He turned to his men and said, ‘I think we’re OK here, boys,’ and the men obediently trooped out onto the porch. Emma indicated one of the sleek, black-and-chrome chairs, and seated herself on the couch, with Zal, quiet but wary, at her side.

  ‘I am glad to make your acquaintance, Mr Cornero,’ she said. ‘All the way back from downtown this afternoon I was cudgeling my brains, to come up with some way of asking you a few questions about Mr Festraw, so this all works out very nicely – I hope. You didn’t … Are Mr Shang – the gardener – and his wife all right? They’re down in the cottage—’

  ‘Oh, yeah, yeah!’ The bootlegger raised both hands with a slight pushing gesture, palms out, as if to show them clean of innocent blood. ‘One of my boys is down there with them, that’s all. Just to make sure they don’t get exc
ited and phone the cops or anything. Not that I have any reason to worry about the law,’ he added quickly. ‘Just … people misinterpret things, you know?’

  Being held at gunpoint would certainly lead one to jump to conclusions, Emma was careful not to say. And in fact from all she’d heard, Tony Cornero didn’t have any need to fear the law in Los Angeles. Instead she turned to Zal, said, ‘Zal, could I possibly trouble you to make some coffee? I’m sure it will be all right.’ That last was in reply to his look, not to any words spoken.

  ‘It will,’ said Cornero. ‘Really. And thank you, Mrs Blackstone.’ He touched the brim of his pale-ivory fedora respectfully. ‘I appreciate it. What makes you think I had anything to do with Rex Festraw?’ he added, with an appearance of innocence. ‘I came here because, frankly, I was disturbed by what the movie rags are saying, that I or my brother Frank might have had something to do with the man’s death. We’re businessmen, Mrs Blackstone. We’re not gangsters. If movie stars go around murdering their ex-husbands, that’s one thing, but that kind of rumor and slander can be very harmful.’

  ‘Oh, quite,’ agreed Emma. ‘He that hath a bad name is half hanged, as the Scots say. But – please correct me if I’m wrong – I understand that Mr Festraw did work for you last Friday, and in fact may have … well, taken an unauthorized advance on his salary.’

  All the warmth vanished from his eyes, but he only tilted his head a little. ‘Who’d you hear that from? Do you mind me asking?’

  ‘An acquaintance of his,’ she returned. ‘Of course I have no idea how true it is, and haven’t spoken to anyone about it. And I suspect the name she gave me – Elizabeth Bennet – wasn’t her own. But she did show me some quite impressive pieces of jewelry that she said he’d bought her.’ She folded her hands composedly. ‘Now, I’m not sure where the publicity department of Foremost Productions – or the columnists who write for Screen Stories and Photo Play – get their information, but they did seem to know that Mr Festraw was associated with bootleggers in New York. They may simply have drawn an inference that he would seek out similar business opportunities in Los Angeles, to earn himself some extra money while preparing to blackmail Miss de la Rose. The young lady I spoke to did seem to be a fairly expensive proposition.’

  The corner of Cornero’s mouth tugged sidelong, and under the sleek, expensive suiting, his shoulders relaxed. ‘Rex Festraw was small-time,’ he said dismissively. ‘The dough he stole from me – well, he heisted a motorboat with sixty cases of single-malt Scotch in it – that was penny-ante. Twenty-five hundred bucks, tops. What kind of a man would risk a rap for conspiracy to do murder for that kind of chicken feed?’

  Emma’s brow creased a little. ‘That does seem an extremely modest amount. Now, there were Roman Emperors – Tiberius springs to mind – who would have had men cut up and fed to their pet eels, for quite trivial transgressions, simply because seeing it done had such a good effect on their other servants.’

  ‘Roman Emperors had pet eels?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Emma. ‘Not pets, precisely, but eels were considered a delicacy, and the Emperors Tiberius and Caligula kept great pools of them, so they could have eel for dinner whenever they wanted.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that affect the taste of the meat?’

  ‘I should think so,’ agreed Emma. ‘But I don’t imagine either Tiberius or Caligula would much care. And of course,’ she added, ‘as Emperors of Rome, they could get away with that sort of lesson to their subordinates much more easily than someone like – what name did Miss Bennet mention? Joe Adonis? – could.’

  ‘Yeah, but if you fed Rex Festraw to a bunch of eels,’ grinned Cornero, ‘they’d get so drunk they’d just float down to the bottom of the pond an’ lay there. Same goes for anybody who ate the meat off ’em. Thank you,’ he added, as Zal came in with two cups of coffee and one – to Emma’s touched delight – of tea, on a tray.

  ‘Who fed Rex Festraw to eels?’ inquired Zal, but Emma noticed he kept a wary eye on Cornero and glanced swiftly around the room to make sure ‘the boys’ were all still back on the porch.

  ‘The Emperor of Rome,’ said the bootlegger with a laugh. ‘That’s a new one, I’ll remember that. But I tell you honestly, Mrs Blackstone,’ he said, ‘I had nothing to do with Festraw buying it. Yeah, if he hadn’t paid me the full price of that Glenfiddich I won’t say he wouldn’t have been sorry – and from what I’ve heard about him from the New York boys, I don’t think they’d have shed a lot of tears over him comin’ to grief. But the fact is, he wasn’t one of my regular boys. I put him in charge of drivin’ a motorboat, not distribution or set-up. Joe Adonis suggested Festraw might be useful for little jobs, but I wouldn’t put a new man in charge of anythin’ worth – well, worth runnin’ any risks over.’ He shrugged. ‘Even the Roman emperors would be smarter than that.’

  ‘I suspect,’ said Emma, ‘that when anyone says “bootlegger”, people find that a handy explanation.’

  ‘They do. When all I’m really doin’ is savin’ a hundred an’ twenty million people from bein’ poisoned by the homemade stuff. By the way,’ he added, reaching into his coat, ‘if you’d care for—’

  ‘No, thank you.’ Emma smiled.

  ‘Kitty’ll kill you,’ warned Zal.

  ‘Kitty has three dozen bottles of everything you could name in the kitchen cupboards. And none of it homemade.’ She turned back to Cornero. ‘But thank you very much for the thought, all the same, Mr Cornero. Did Mr Festraw happen to mention to you having some other job on hand? Another source of income in Los Angeles?’

  The young man pondered for a moment. He was little more than a boy, Emma judged, and by his accent had immigrated from Italy, but his well-fitting brown suit and subdued silk tie were the garments of a very wealthy man. Evidently saving the population of the United States from its own bathtub gin was an extremely profitable undertaking. The diamond on his pinkie-ring was small enough to be real but large enough to have cost the price of a new car – six months with Kitty had made Emma something of a connoisseur of diamonds. When he took off his gloves to handle the coffee cup, she noticed that his hands were manicured. This was a man – like Colt Madison – who took his personal appearance seriously.

  ‘To hear Festraw tell it,’ he said at last, ‘he needed the job somethin’ bad. But he was stayin’ at the Winterdon, which ain’t no flophouse. An’ one of my boys said he’d seen Festraw at the Bel Giardino – one of my nightclubs – buyin’ drinks for a dame who was makin’ like a napkin in his lap. This was Sunday night, so he was either spendin’ what he’d got sellin’ my liquor under the table, or he had some other source of dough, or both. I was reservin’ judgment til Friday, when he was supposed to hand me the delivery money for the shipment.’

  ‘And he didn’t tell you how he happened to be staying at the Winterdon?’

  Cornero shook his head. ‘I thought that sounded a little screwy at the time, but it wasn’t my business. If somethin’ had happened and I hadn’t got my dough Friday, then maybe I’d have asked some questions.’

  ‘Were you keeping an eye on him?’ Zal made a gesture to lift the coffee pot again, to which the bootlegger shook his head with a motion of thanks.

  ‘Not really, though if he’d taken a powder my boys would have been able to find out where in a coupla hours. You know how it is. Everybody knows somebody, all over town. He wouldn’t’a been hard to find.’

  Emma considered the matter. ‘Do you know anyone – or know of anyone – named Stanislas Markham? I think he’s in New York.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Cornero at once. ‘Stan Markham – Stan the Mark. He’s sort of medium smalltime in Queens. He’s got a club – the Four Queens – but he does all kinds of stuff: launders a little money, runs crap games, maybe arranges shipments in from Canada for Luciano. Nice guy. Stays out of trouble and keeps his nose clean.’

  ‘According to the clerk at the Winterdon, Mr Markham wired the money for Mr Festraw’s room.’

  ‘Makes sense,’
agreed Cornero. ‘If I was sendin’ somebody someplace on a job, I’d have Stan make arrangements for me. What I can’t get is who’d do that for Festraw? I mean, he may know Adonis and Luciano to recommend him, but he’s not connected connected. He’s not in with any of the big pezzonovantes that I’ve ever heard of. Takin’ a look at him, I wouldn’t’a put him as worth the buck-fifty a night it cost to put him up at the Winterdon. So what gives?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ returned Emma. ‘But something obviously does. Would this Mr Markham happen to know any forgers?’

  ‘Oh, yeah! Stan can get you set up with anybody on the East Coast. You send him the stationery, and a sample of your mark’s fist, he’ll get you turned around in a week. That’s what they tell me, anyway.’ He looked a little self-conscious at having this knowledge.

  Emma reflected briefly on the number of people who came and went through the studio gates every day – from delivery boys to agents to Thelma Turnbit slipping dollar bills to Floyd – and the fact that almost nobody locked the doors of their dressing rooms. ‘And would you by chance have heard of anyone else who’d have reason to kill Mr Festraw? Someone who might have thought that having Miss de la Rose accused of the crime might distract everyone’s attention from any other motive?’

  She was aware of Zal watching the younger man’s face as Cornero turned the question over in his mind. He didn’t look shifty, she thought. But then, it was part of his job not to.

  At length he shook his head. ‘I ain’t heard nuthin’,’ he said. ‘And I think my own boys would have told me, if he’d been dealin’ with anybody else in town.’

  ‘I should think so, too,’ agreed Emma. ‘Thank you. And taking such pains to cover the murder doesn’t really make sense, for someone as … as insignificant as Mr Festraw. It isn’t as if he were wealthy or famous, or that the police would really care who killed him, you know. I’ll speak to Mr Fishbein about soft-pedaling any innuendos that Mr Festraw might have been shot by bootleggers. Quite honestly,’ she added, ‘if you were trying to kill Mr Festraw yourself, I think you’d do a much better job of it.’