This, fumed Mr Pettinger, was what came of encouraging celluloid wantons in extravagant misbehavior, and what would come of it, with such horrors glamorized before the eyes of the pure young girls of America, he wept to think.
‘I wonder if I can get Ambrose to buy me that pair of diamond earrings I saw at Van Cleef and Arpel’s last week,’ mused Kitty, ‘that cost two thousand seven hundred, for me to wear at the hearing?’
Zal telephoned her, just before eight – still at the studio, he said – to make sure all was well (‘Other than the Pettingers preparing to launch a Holy War against us?’). It was good, only to hear his voice. But sleeping that night, Emma dreamed of Oxford. Oxford before the War, when she’d glide like a bird on her bicycle along Longwall Street, to The Misses Gibbs’ Select Academy where she had been a day pupil, or to Mrs Willis’s out along the Botley Road for her piano lessons. Walking with her mother early in the cool of May morning, to hear the choir singing in the Magdalen Tower. Seeing the undergraduates who looked so grown-up in their gowns when she was sixteen, that heartbreakingly beautiful summer before the War. Who looked so terribly young three years later, when she’d drive the ambulances from the train station to bring the wounded to hospital at Bicester. Sometimes, on warm nights in Michaelmas term, she had heard them strolling, late, along the Parks Road, singing. Those beautiful tenors and baritones, harmonizing in the dark.
In her dream she crossed the Magdalen Bridge, and quickened her step along Longwall Street. She thought, I’ve missed them so. It will be good to see them again: Mother, Papa, Miles. She had two of her father’s books under her arm, and knew she’d taken them along to read when she’d been … wherever she’d been. Macaulay’s The Lays of Ancient Rome, and a pocket copy of Much Ado About Nothing, always entertaining for a train ride … Her father would have acquired a catalog of the newest finds at the necropolis at Arrentium, he’d need help codifying the dates …
She glimpsed Miles, walking ahead of her. Miles jaunty and healthy, half-turning as if he’d wait for her, as he’d done ever since they were children, to go up the steps together.
But the house wasn’t there. The place where it had stood on Holywell Street was only a thicket of trees, a tangle of overgrown rose bushes: albas, her mother’s favorite, with petals fluffy as the skirts of Spanish dancers. The three shallow stone steps that had led up from the street to the door ended in nothing.
Miles was gone.
Emma cried, ‘What happened?’ and the effort to produce sound from her throat woke her.
For a moment she lay in the darkness, looking at the three tall, barely-seen rectangles of window opposite the foot of her bed and wondering, What room am I in?
The bow window of her bedroom at The Myrtles should have been there. The night-light (That’s not MY night-light … What happened to my little gold-glass night-light?) showed her a low, square, boxy bureau, an unfamiliar chair.
And she remembered. Not one single thing from her bedroom had been saved, when they’d cleared out the house to sell. Someone from the hospital had gone in and gotten the clothes they’d thought she’d need, to go down to that dreary lodging in Headington, for the week she’d stayed, recuperating, before taking the train to Manchester and Mrs Pendergast’s. Everything was gone.
All Father’s notes had simply gone into the rubbish.
She’d never found out what had happened to Daphne, Mother’s fat, white cat.
This wasn’t the first time she’d waked like this, for one second puzzled that she wasn’t in her own bedroom. It had happened every few weeks, during the horrible years she’d spent at Mrs Pendergast’s.
It just felt like the first time.
It always felt like the first time.
It was Chang Ming barking.
Not the furious, defensive intruder-bark of last night, but the wary ‘whuff’ of suspicion.
Doggy toe-nails clattered in the hall outside her room. Black Jasmine gave a short yap as well, like a little quack.
Not enough to wake Kitty, Emma didn’t think. After dinner her sister-in-law had had her usual round of telephone calls to Peggy Donovan (‘Did I do anything really frightful last night, darling?’), Marie Prevost over at Warners (who was one of her main competitors for the title of the Silver Screen Goddess), and Blanche Sweet, one of the longtime reigning queens of Hollywood. But at nine fifteen Emma had come into Kitty’s room and found her sleeping like a dead woman, the softly-complaining telephone under her nerveless hand.
It was now – she glanced at the clock on the nightstand – a quarter past one in the morning.
Headlights briefly swept Emma’s window, then quickly died.
Cornero.
The glint of starlight on gun barrels leaped to her mind.
A deep voice saying, Don’t try it. And then, Where’s Miss de la Rose?
Emma swept her robe from the foot of her bed, wrapped it around her as she went to the window in the hall that looked out over the silly pseudo-balcony above the porch, and so down into the scrubby vale that was the front yard.
Kitty stood there, a darkly shimmering figure in the moonlight. From the shadows of the eucalyptus tree a man emerged, little more than a tall silhouette, and the white V-shaped gleam of a shirt-front. Dark hair, and the glisten of brilliantine – Emma thought, Drat it! as he approached, and Kitty, shaking back the dark cascade of her tousled hair, stretched out her arms to him.
Then movement at the top of the bank above them caught Emma’s eye, and the drench of moonlight – only a day or two from full – showed her a man standing on the edge of the road, and the glint of something metal in his hands.
ELEVEN
Emma wrenched at the window-sash but the latch held fast. French doors opened from Kitty’s room onto the balcony – she had almost reached them when she realized that the moonlight that shone so brightly on the tumble of sheets on the bed outlined a woman’s hand and wrist. Hand and wrist and tousle of black curls among the pillow-lace.
She stood for a moment, then stepped close to the bed.
That was Kitty, all right. Sleeping like an innocent child, her other arm curved around Buttercreme, whose little round head rested in the hollow of her shoulder.
Quietly, Emma walked to the French doors, and looked out.
The dark-haired woman and the man in evening dress were still embracing, with a theatrical abandon that looked like progressing on to the honeymoon stage right there in the moonlight between the steep slope of the road-bank and the house.
It’s Kitty’s own house. Why fornicate in the front yard when there’s a perfectly good bed …
The dress the dark-haired woman was wearing was the one Kitty had had on Wednesday night at the police station.
The one she got from the wardrobe department.
Which has at least three duplicates …
Ire smote her. Not anger or rage … simple vexation, as she understood what she was looking at.
OH!!!
She would have stamped her foot, had she not feared to wake Kitty – the genuine Kitty – sound asleep in her own bed …
Emma yanked the belt of her robe tight, ghosted back into her own room long enough to get her slippers, then ran lightly down the stairs, through the kitchen – catching up the house-keys from the counter and locking the back door behind her – and down the back steps. The inky shadow of the hill blanketed the driveway itself – concealing the rather seedy little car parked there – and Emma kept to the drive’s verge as she climbed towards the road. She reflected that the couple in front of the house were putting on a sufficiently interesting scene that there was little likelihood that the man up on the road – Is that a telescope he has in his hand? Binoculars? – would hear approaching footfalls.
And as she climbed she recalled the glimpse she’d had through the doors of the empress’s garden last night, of Darlene Golden in her exiguous rags, talking earnestly with an extremely handsome young extra – in evening dress – from the Scandalous Lady set.
>
Ginny Field had been in the garden, too, she recalled. Kitty’s stand-in. Her height, her build, with her same dark hair.
OH!!!
It was a scene straight out of Much Ado About Nothing, although Emma doubted Darlene knew its provenance. She paused beside the car at the top of the drive, long enough to write down its license-plate number before walking around it to the shape of the man, crouched low beside the road bank, above that long slope of shadow. Binoculars in hand. She said, very softly, ‘Mr Madison?’ and he swiveled on his heels, jerked to his feet.
Before he could say a word she stepped onto the top of the little road bank, called down into the darkness in her gruffest voice, ‘You there! This is the police!’ And taking Madison’s hand – because it was indeed Colt Madison, speechless for once – pulled him to the brink and down the slope of rocks and weeds towards the couple, the yard, and the house.
‘You see they’re not making for the house,’ she said, holding herself steady on the man’s arm. ‘They know the front door will be locked. Drat these plants …’
‘Mrs Blackstone—’ he began, his attention diverted between her and the fleeing lovers, who could be seen dimly in the moonlight, scrambling up the shallower slope where the road curved around the lot immediately to the south.
‘Did Miss Golden hire you?’ she asked, drawing him firmly after her up the tiled front steps. ‘Or Mr Pugh?’
‘I’m not at liberty to—’
‘Naturally not.’ Emma cut him off. ‘Do you like Shakespeare, Mr Madison? He could get away with some amazingly hackneyed plots on sheer good writing. But ordinarily I’m annoyed by those plays in which the entire problem could be resolved in five minutes by one character asking another, “What were you actually doing?”’ She had guided him across the living room and up the stairs – trailed by Chang Ming, the only one of the Pekes who could get up and down the stairs unaided – and stopped outside Kitty’s door.
‘I would really rather not waken Miss de la Rose at this hour,’ she continued softly, ‘considering how early she must get up to be on the set tomorrow. But do please look and make sure that that is Miss de la Rose – and please take my word for it that she has been in bed, and asleep, since nine thirty.’
The detective stood in the doorway of the room, looking at the woman sleeping in the moonlight, her tiny dog snoring audibly in the curve of her arm. Then he backed away, and with Emma beside him, retreated to the head of the stairs. ‘I suppose you were asleep yourself, m’am.’ In the dark of the upstairs hall, little was visible of the young man but the outline of moonlight on his handsome profile, and the pale blur of his topcoat.
‘I was,’ returned Emma. ‘But do you imagine that Kitty – startled in the midst of her … er … transports – would have fled into the next lot and up the bank to the road, instead of back into her own house? Do you think that she could have circled back to come into this house through the back door …? Drat it,’ she added, as the faint growl of a car starting in the drive reached them, ‘there goes Romeo … Do you think that she could have circled back into this house and gotten undressed and settled down in bed in the time that it took yourself and me to come in and up here? And gotten her dog to fall asleep? I wonder if they came together or if she’s left a car somewhere also.’
Taking his elbow, she led him down the dark stair to the living room again. ‘Did you see her come out of the house, by the way?’
‘I saw her come down out of the shadows of the porch.’ Profoundly flustered, Madison seemed to have lost all his cockiness and seemed a bit adrift without it.
Emma glanced through the long windows that flanked the front door, though she’d noticed already that the porch-light had been yet again quenched – almost certainly robbed once more of its bulb. Quietly, she finished, ‘Would you like me to waken Miss de la Rose so that you can look at her in good light and ascertain that yes, she has just actually awakened from a sound sleep?’
Colt Madison was quiet for a time, his expression hidden by the stygian shadow of his hat. But she did see his lips, and they were tightly pressed. ‘No,’ he said, at length. ‘That’ll be fine.’
Which, Emma felt, told its own tale.
She led him out onto the porch, and closed the front door behind them. ‘I believe the woman you saw was Miss Field, Miss de la Rose’s stand-in,’ she said after a moment. ‘Though there is no way to prove this, if she denies it, as I’m sure she will. Are you prepared to believe that any of the extras on the Foremost lot – or in fact any extra in Hollywood – would be capable of accepting payment to enact a love scene such as you were told would be taking place here tonight, no questions asked?’
‘Oh, hell, yeah,’ said Madison at once. ‘For twenty-five dollars and rental on the tux, I’d do the scene.’ He was silent for a moment, fishing a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. ‘So you figure somebody’s trying to make Pugh jealous? Get him to dump Camille?’
‘Or get him to withdraw his support – studio support – from her before the hearing.’
‘And using me as a chump.’
‘And using you as a chump,’ Emma affirmed.
Flame illuminated his narrowed eyes, his lips hardened now in anger.
‘You can’t pick your clients,’ she went on after a pause. ‘And of course I’m sure that the reason your client chose you for this task was because Mr Pugh trusts your observations. Perhaps you could tell your client that you could observe nothing because the police were called?’
‘I’ll tell her that and I’ll tell her to stick her damn job.’ He expelled a line of smoke from one corner of his mouth. ‘Make a monkey out of me …’
He slapped her on the shoulder, man-wise. ‘You’re a square broad, Duchess.’ He started to turn towards the steps, then added, frowning, ‘Can I ask you to keep this on the QT? I told Pugh I was out workin’ a lead about Marion Davies – and I was, earlier tonight … and she’s clean … But seeing as this was just a peep show tonight, I’d just as soon keep separate things separate.’
‘It isn’t my business,’ said Emma. ‘Unless of course for some reason it becomes Miss de la Rose’s business.’
He nodded, and blew another line of smoke. ‘Understood.’ He shook hands vigorously with her, and descended the steps.
A moment later, Emma heard his shoes scrunch the gravel of the drive. Am I EVER going to get a complete night’s sleep in this place?
The headlights of his car went up. A moment later, the dark bulk of the vehicle slipped away down Ivarene Street.
Emma sighed, and looking down, saw Chang Ming sitting alertly on the threshold of the door, waiting to go in. It was probably, Emma guessed, after two …
Movement on the road made her turn her head. Moonlight gleamed on a second car, driving without lights, as it pulled out of the driveway of the darkened house just up the road from where she stood, and followed Madison’s car away in the direction of Franklin Avenue.
Kitty said, ‘OH!!!’ when Emma told her – some three hours later – of the night’s events, in the cold electric whiteness of the tiled kitchen as she made coffee. ‘It’s that bitch Darlene! It has to be!’
‘That would be my guess,’ agreed Emma, and poured steaming water into the coffee-press first, then the fat brown teapot for herself. More water bubbled gently around the eggs on the stove. Chang Ming and Black Jasmine, having devoured their own breakfasts, stared at Buttercreme’s dish in passionate agony as the little moonlight dog picked at a fragment or two of chicken liver, then sat back thoughtfully and contemplated the uneaten remains.
‘So that’s why Frank was acting so strangely yesterday! I will fire that nasty little slut Ginny—’
‘You’ll have to explain why,’ pointed out Emma. ‘And you know she’ll deny it. As will Darlene.’ She bore the coffee, and a small glass of orange juice, over to the table, all the sustenance Kitty could endure early in the morning. Awake since four, her sister-in-law had already bathed and donned full make-up – which would
be changed to camera make-up the moment they arrived on the Foremost lot – and looked as exquisite as a jeweled doll. ‘I doubt Mr Pugh will appreciate having to find another stand-in for you at short notice.’
Kitty sipped her coffee, and lit her third cigarette of the day. ‘Do you think you could talk Zal into having trouble with his camera settings so we could make Ginny stand under the lights for two hours while he fixes them?’ she asked.
They needn’t have worried. Ginny Field did not show up for work that morning, so the start of scene sixty-three was delayed while Madge stormed across to Belle Delaney’s little cubicle and ordered up another extra of approximately Kitty’s height, build, and coloring like a sandwich. While waiting for this young lady – Ruby Saks was her name – to be dressed and made up and acquainted with her duties, Kitty leafed through the morning papers in her dressing room, looking for accounts of how her rivals in the Silver Screen Goddess sweepstakes had sought to prove their glamorous outrageousness on the previous night.
‘Oh, Colleen Moore turned up at the Café New York with Ronnie Coleman, wearing a necklace that cost three thousand dollars! And they ordered a bottle of champagne that cost one hundred dollars! I’ll have to tell Ambrose about that – he thinks nothing of paying that for a bottle of wine …’
‘A hundred dollars?’ Emma calculated what that was in pounds, and was – even after six months in Hollywood – scandalized.
‘Oh, darling, that’s nothing!’ Kitty looked up from her paper in childlike surprise. ‘Gloria Swanson has a solid gold bathtub. They almost couldn’t get it into her house, it weighs so much! John Barrymore paid I don’t know how much – sixteen thousand dollars, I think – for his dining-room chandelier. Peggy’s new car has real leopard-skin upholstery and solid gold door-handles. And Ambrose had an entire Italian villa taken apart in Italy … He’s having it reassembled in the hills about two hours north of here … Villa Something-Or-Other. It belonged to some tremendously famous Italian a long time ago … Caruso? The opera singer? Robinson Caruso? Or was it somebody else? You’d probably know …’
Scandal in Babylon Page 14
