Her mother, and the governess she’d had as a child, would both have cut off the exchange before the smile, let alone before she could say, ‘Yes, of course …’ She recalled she’d felt a little shocked at herself for speaking to the young man.
Had he met her eyes because she’d worn her blue-and-white uniform that afternoon? Would things have been different if she hadn’t?
Where did these things start, anyway?
Or did it matter?
The memory made her glance aside from her companion, and across the dancefloor she saw, with a start of surprise, Colt Madison, his hair now tar-black and shining with brilliantine. He was in evening dress and wore the least-convincing Van Dyke and monocle this side of Millie Katz’s Wardrobe counter …
Their eyes met for a startled moment. Then Emma saw the petite, delicate, and unmistakable figure of Gloria Swanson a few yards away, glittering like a jewel-crusted stiletto as her escort – a French nobleman whom Emma had encountered at Frank Pugh’s Christmas Party the previous December – bowed her into her chair.
Good heavens, is he still sleuthing after the other women in that silly competition?
After last night the hypothesis seemed absurd – Even if it WAS Gloria Swanson or Darlene Golden or Blanche Sweet, they’d have hired someone else to do the deed …
But the thought that another star’s studio would cover her transgressions, and pay Detective Meyer to ‘lose’ whatever evidence there was, returned like a queasy shadow on her thoughts, and she felt as if she’d reached into a dark cupboard and encountered half a century worth of cobwebs and spiders.
Hollywood …
You will have a home with us, Aunt Estelle had promised.
Well, far be it from me to ‘blow’ the poor man’s ‘cover’, as I think they say in the espionage novels …
She sipped her champagne and replied to her companion’s question with a half-smile. ‘Nine times out of ten I think yes, we’d still take that left-hand path, sir. But do you sometimes want to just … go back to that place and that time? Not for any particular decision, but simply to smell the air there? To see the sunshine of that particular day again?’
‘New York in the Eighties?’ His answering smile was as gentle and as dry as the champagne. ‘Struggling and maneuvering to make sure one is seen at the best houses? To make sure one meets the “best men of business”? What a long time ago it seems.’ He almost chuckled.
‘And speaking of the best houses,’ said Emma, ‘Kitty tells me you’re building an Italian villa, one that used to belong to someone Italian and famous. She doesn’t think it was Robinson Caruso the opera singer, or the Pope—’
Crain chuckled. ‘No, nobody so famous. One of the lesser Medici, I was told. It’s probably late-eighteenth-century. You’ll see it,’ he added, ‘once Kitty is done with this picture. I plan to take her there for a rest, and I’m virtually certain she won’t go without her dogs …’
‘And her gramophone.’ They both laughed, at the foibles of their friend.
‘And her astrology magazines …’
‘Excuse me – Mrs Blackstone. Mr Crain.’ Colt Madison executed a very continental bow, to go with the generic European intonation of his words.
Mr Crain regarded him in some surprise, and Emma said to her companion, ‘Would you excuse me for a moment, sir?’ and got to her feet. Madison led her to the far end of the bar with the practiced grace of a gigolo, and touched his lips with a cautionary forefinger.
‘You’re very astute, Mrs Blackstone,’ he murmured. ‘I beg of you, not a word to me, or a sign that you know me. Too many people here would recognize my face.’
‘Including Miss Swanson?’
He nodded slowly, as if approving her perspicacity. ‘So far, so good,’ he said. ‘I’ve ruled out Barbara la Marr and Pola Negri – you can always find out from their maids what a movie queen has been up to – but the woman I talked with over at Paramount said Swanson sometimes meets with some fairly sketchy customers here. And that boyfriend of hers knows enough people in the City Hall Gang that he bears checking on, if you know what I mean. We’ll find ’em,’ he added, nodding wisely. ‘We’ll find ’em.’
He glanced across at Miss Swanson – whose necklace really did look as if it had cost $1,750, though, thank goodness, she’d left her cheetah back at the Paramount menagerie. Her companion helped the Paramount star to her feet, and they moved out onto the polished boards of the dancefloor. As all film stars did, Miss Swanson, in person, had a slightly fragile air within her sheathe of bugle-beads and sequins. The camera, Emma knew, made its subjects look about ten pounds heavier than they actually were, and every actress in Hollywood had a ‘potato clause’ in her contract, specifying immediate suspension if she gained too much weight.
No wonder so many of them take cocaine …
Or, in Miss Swanson’s case, lived on health food …
‘Your secret is safe with me,’ whispered Emma. ‘And honestly, I wouldn’t have gone to speak to you, seeing that you were in disguise.’
Madison smiled, and patted her cheek. ‘You’re a good egg, Duchess.’ And he wove his way back through the crowd to his table.
Turning back to her own table, Emma saw the sleek head and burly shape of Tony Cornero there. Both he and Mr Crain rose as she approached. ‘Would you rather I left you together here, Mrs Blackstone?’ Mr Crain asked. ‘I realize your business may be confidential.’
Cornero raised his eyebrows, with a glance that referred the question to Emma. Emma said, ‘Not … Not as such. If you don’t mind, Mr Cornero …’
‘Hey, I’m just a businessman trying to make a living.’ The bootlegger spread his hands innocently, as he had done Thursday night. ‘Just like Mr Crain – but on a much smaller scale, of course. I’m not the one who owns five hundred acres of Long Beach oil fields. Giovanni said you wanted a word with me, m’am?’
Crain held her chair for her as she sat, and took the seat beside her again. Briefly, Emma outlined what had taken place the previous night: that Miss de la Rose had gone out, late and secretly, to meet and help a friend who had to leave Los Angeles immediately and needed money. ‘Nothing to do with Mr Festraw’s death or the film industry,’ she added, not quite truthfully. ‘It was a personal matter, and a confidential one.’
Cornero made a very Italian grimace and gesture, to show he understood.
‘Miss de la Rose drove back along the coast highway toward Santa Monica, and my friend Mr Rokatansky and I followed in his car. We were overtaken by another car which first tried to drive us off the highway – over the cliff there into the sea – and then shoved us into the cliff that comes down on the inland side of the road. The driver of that car – which was without lights – then stood up out of the car and fired a shot at us. But by that time Kitty had seen what was happening, turned around, and came back. The other driver got into his car again and fled. No one was hurt,’ she concluded, ‘but it was clearly an attempt on our lives. I don’t know whether the other driver thought Miss de la Rose was in the car – whether he thought Mr Rokatansky was driving Miss de la Rose’s car back to town. Mr Rokatansky said he thought we’d been followed from Hollywood and along Ventura Boulevard and through the hills. We’d left Miss de la Rose’s house at about twelve thirty and there’s very little traffic on the road, he said, at that time.’
‘Mannaggia,’ said Cornero quietly. ‘You get a look at the car?’
‘It was a dark-green Chrysler coupe. The license plate had been removed. If you know of – or know how to find out about – the owner of such a car … I understand that in your business as nightclub owner,’ she added tactfully, ‘you have the opportunity to hear things from people.’
‘Yeah,’ said Cornero. ‘Yeah, I’ll ask around. Thing is, there’s a gumshoe named Sid Gross who drives a dark-green Chrysler coupe. Has offices downtown in the Bradbury Building. And he’s the kind of guy, if I wanted some dirty work done, I might take it into my head to ask him if he knew anybody who might w
ant to do something like that, if you know what I mean. You want I should ask the folks at his garage whether he’s got any new scratches on his fenders this morning?’
‘Thank you,’ said Emma, from the bottom of her heart. ‘If you can.’
Mr Crain spoke up. ‘Will you need an advance of some kind to cover incidental expenses?’ he asked, and reached for his wallet. ‘In case, for instance, this Mr Gross has hidden his vehicle—’
‘Thank you,’ said Cornero. ‘That’s very kind of you, Mr Crain, and yes, we’ll probably need some kind of grease. I don’t need anything now. Can I let you know?’
‘Of course. And do you have,’ he went on, with the soft-voiced good breeding of a businessman inquiring about market shares, ‘any recommendations for an investigator in New York, to follow up on this Stan Markham Mrs Blackstone told me booked rooms for Mr Festraw at the Winterdon? My son handles my firm’s business matters in New York,’ he added apologetically. ‘But as I was telling Mrs Blackstone just now, he works mostly from our home in East Hampton. He has never really approved of me personally handling the California interests.’
He frowned, as if at the recollection of conversations that had ended in uncomfortable compromise. ‘He thinks I should purchase some respectable property in Palm Beach – which in fact I have – and retire there myself instead of building a hotel. He is extraordinarily old for a man nearly forty, and I doubt he’d know the names of any investigator in the city.’
‘I’ll hook you up with one,’ said the bootlegger. ‘A good honest one, not some half-baked ambulance-chaser. Though who the hell,’ he added, as Crain handed him a card from his silver case, ‘would want to bring Rex Festraw clear out here, and put him up in a class joint like the Winterdon, just to bump him off? You could save your money and have him done in Jersey. Bad management.’
He shook his head. ‘The guy wasn’t connected back in New York – strictly small-time. Unless he was secretly romancing some wealthy widow and her family wanted to rub him out to keep her from disinheriting them, but frankly, the way that guy’s shirt smelled – not to speak of his breath – that don’t seem very likely to me. And I never heard of it. Not from the boys in New York.’
He frowned, puzzling over the inconsistency.
‘It’s one of the things I hope to learn from your investigator,’ said Crain.
Emma turned back to them, having become momentarily distracted by the entrance of Kitty’s friend Peggy Donovan, clearly intent on out-vamping both Miss Swanson and Kitty in a golden dress flashing with sequins and fringe and a necklace that made Miss Swanson’s look like something picked out of a Christmas cracker. She was accompanied by two unbelievably handsome young men – Emma wondered whether she’d rented them for the occasion.
Now she said, ‘But why drag Kitty – Miss de la Rose – into it, which it’s quite obvious that the murderer has taken pains to do? Everything connected with Mr Festraw’s death is the … the oddest mixture of what sounds like careful – and expensive – planning, and sheer clumsiness.’
‘Perhaps they’re simply out to obfuscate their own guilt,’ suggested Crain, ‘without seriously harming Miss de la Rose. They know she’s the obvious suspect, if the man is murdered for some other reason …’
‘That’s what it looked like,’ said Emma quietly, ‘until they – whoever “they” are – made a very serious attempt to murder Mr Rokatansky and myself. And maybe Miss de la Rose as well, if they thought she was in Mr Rokatansky’s car. What could be at stake that’s worth that?’
There was an uncomfortable silence, into which Miss Swanson’s voice could be heard saying, ‘Peggy! Darling! That dress is gorgeous on you – far better than it looked on me in Gilded Cage …’
‘And it makes me wonder,’ concluded Emma quietly, ‘what “they” – whoever “they” are – are going to try next.’
FIFTEEN
‘Mr Madison!’
At the sound of a feminine voice Colt Madison turned from the door of the studio guard-shack with his cocky, welcoming smile: Hey, women call my name all day …!
Past his shoulder Emma saw the guard’s book open on the counter. Checking who’d come and gone last Wednesday – she wondered whether Rex Festraw had entered his name, or had simply slipped Floyd a couple of dollar bills, as she was fairly certain Mrs Turnbit had done. ‘Hey, baby—’
She paused a few feet from him, and nodded toward the far corner of the little kiosk, out of range of a casual eavesdropper. And simply out of the way of passers-by: in the brightness of a Monday morning, with Christian martyrs scheduled to be thrown to the lions on Stage One and the studio’s two resident comedians commencing an epic about a dance competition on Stage Three, the open dirt between the gate and the Hacienda fairly swarmed.
Madison followed her around the corner. His golden locks had none of the residual stain and deadness left by dye, so what he’d had on last night must have been a wig. The skin along his hairline showed traces of reddening, as well as that on his lip and chin, where the Van Dyke had been glued last night.
‘Do you know a Mr Sid Gross?’ she asked.
He stepped back a half-pace with a movement of his head that Madge Burdon – and Zal – would have described as a ‘double take’. ‘Hey, you’re not getting mixed up with him, are you, Duchess?’ His brows plunged down over the Praxiteles perfection of his nose. ‘He’s bad medicine, and crooked as a dog’s back leg.’
‘A gangster?’ Emma widened her eyes.
Madison’s lip curled. ‘It takes’ – he bit back Kitty’s favorite items of anatomical synecdoche descriptive of courage, and substituted a less vulgar body part – ‘guts to be a gangster, baby. Gross is a bagman for Charlie Crawford’s Connection, to drop off payments to City Hall.’
‘Is he dangerous?’
The detective thought about it for a moment. ‘If he thinks he can get away with it,’ he said at last, and shrugged. ‘Give him enough money and he’ll shoot somebody in the back, if that’s what you mean. What’re you askin’ about him for, doll? Nobody in the Connection would trust a job to the guy; everybody downtown knows him too well by sight. No,’ he went on, ‘the guys they’d use would be Iron Man or maybe Teddy Knucks. I know ’em all by sight. Gross …’ He shook his head. ‘He’s not one of that group. Personally, I’m surprised Crawford uses him. The guy’s scum. Where’d you hear about him?’
‘Oh.’ Emma tried to sound taken aback. ‘Oh, dear. Yesterday I found his card in the mailbox at Kitty’s house, you see. I have no idea how long it had been sitting there. It’s a deep box, and generally I just reach in and grab whatever’s there.’
‘Hunh.’ Madison frowned again, and groped in his pocket for a cigarette. ‘I wouldn’t worry about it, hon. But let me know if the guy tries to get in touch.’
‘I will. Thank you.’ Emma looked as helpless and admiring as she could, not easy with a man only an inch or two taller than herself. ‘What does he look like, by the way? Mr Gross?’
‘Gross,’ replied the detective, and laughed at his own pun. ‘Big guy.’ He measured something above his own six-foot height. ‘Fat. Not Fatty Arbuckle fat, but big like a wrestler.’ Emma recalled the tall bulk of the shape rising out of the driver’s side of the dark-green Chrysler.
‘Dimple in his chin, kind of thick mouth, squinty little eyes. Fat earlobes that sort of hang down.’ He demonstrated with his thumbs. Emma felt a moment’s surprise at this very technical description, but realized in the next second that this was Madison’s job; to note things that couldn’t be easily altered. ‘Nose that comes down straight and then like a little potato at the tip; mole on his left nostril. No oil painting, that’s for sure.’ He chuckled again, just a trifle smugly, as if comparing the man with his own movie-star countenance.
‘Say, I want to thank you for not blowin’ me last night, Duchess,’ he added. ‘Far as I can tell, Swanson’s out of it. And I got hold of Darlene’s bankbook, and the dough she paid Ginny Field and Barney Grissom – that was lov
er boy the other night – seems to be the only outlay that doesn’t look kosher. No big pay-outs, like you’d see if she was setting someone up for an underground hotel-room. So it’s lookin’ like I said.’ He blew a line of smoke, and moved his head a little, to survey a couple of shapely young extras who stopped at Floyd’s window, then hastened on towards Belle Delaney’s open door at the corner of the Hacienda, slim ankles almost twinkling in the morning sun.
Et vera incessu patuit dea, reflected Emma. As Virgil said of Venus. ‘Her true godhead was obvious in her walk …’
‘Festraw’s got to have been mixed up with the City Hall Gang. They’re the only ones who’d be keepin’ it this quiet. Which is good,’ he added with a self-satisfied smile. ‘Means it’ll be easy to sort out. Couple thousand to Crawford, couple thousand to Cryer’s re-election campaign fund … Kitty hasn’t come clean about where she was, has she?’ The blue eyes narrowed piercingly into hers. ‘’Cause that’s what’s holdin’ up the show.’
Emma shook her head. ‘I honestly think she was looking for that silly dog.’
‘Well, if she was,’ said Madison, ‘nobody out there buildin’ the sets saw her. And that red kimono she was wearing—’
He must have gotten that part of the description from Mr Fishbein—
‘—would’a made her hard to miss.’
And anyone in the armor and helmet of the Praetorian Guard, Emma reflected – as she followed in the wake of the two goddesses now bound for Wardrobe – or in a Ruritanian cavalry uniform, or fancy evening dress at two in the afternoon – even carrying a gun – would have passed completely unnoticed.
There had been two hundred and fifty extras on the Foremost lot on Wednesday afternoon. Emma had brought one of her blank copybooks with her, and Millie Katz in Wardrobe – skinny and brisk, like a reincarnated witch – was perfectly happy to turn over Wednesday’s log to her, and give her a place to sit in her cubbyhole office, and a cup of coffee. Past the open door Emma watched them come through – men, women, and three or four children – and fill out wardrobe slips. Millie would then check the list of the day’s costumes, write a size, and toss the slip into her basket. The names, outfits, and sizes would be transferred to the ledger once the rush was done and the sixty-five ‘rags’ extras had gone around first to Wardrobe, then to the extras’ dressing room, where two of Herr Volmort’s assistants waited with buckets of blood-paint and dirt. Madge would need them all in the Coliseum set just after lunch, looking suitably downtrodden, blood-streaked, and radiant with the glory of martyrdom.
Scandal in Babylon Page 18
