‘I thought at the time that Madge would thrash him with a vine-stalk, the way Centurions used to do with misbehaving troopers.’
‘What time?’
She turned events over in her mind. ‘It must have been two thirty or so. Not later than that, because when your friend Taffy looked at his watch, I looked at mine.’
‘Sounds like they knew exactly when she’d be out of her dressing room, all right.’
‘I wonder what Mr Crump told Millie?’ She helped him gather the film cans from the projection-room table, and carry them across the hall to Editing.
‘Could have told her anything,’ pointed out the cameraman. ‘Migraine headache. Overdose of commissary food. Happens all the time. We can check Payroll but I’ll bet you a fortune cookie nobody came in to pick up that money.’
SIXTEEN
But it was one thing to be reasonably certain that a ‘gross’ semi-crook named Gross had finagled his way onto the Foremost lot Wednesday afternoon disguised as an extra – and indeed, subsequent enquiry proved that a) ‘Eddie Crump’s’ $3.50 pay envelope was still sitting in Payroll waiting to be picked up and b) nobody of that name had ever worked for the studio before or since – murdered Camille de la Rose’s ex- (or current) husband, and left forged correspondence at the scene. Proving it was another matter.
‘If the guy’s connected with Crawford or the City Hall Gang,’ pointed out Zal, over a very late donut and cup of tea at the Pacific Dining Car on Sixth Street that night, ‘he’s gonna have five guys swearing he was with them anyway. Or the cops will write down on their report that five guys named Smith, Smith, Smith, Smith, and Baskerville swore he was with them. And that doesn’t really solve our problem.’
‘No.’ Emma turned from the glare of the street lamps and the wall of brick buildings across the street, to the soft yellow gleam of the Dining Car’s lamps. The restaurant was nearly empty at this hour, the owners sitting at the only other occupied table in the room, adding up the day’s take. She felt a pang of guilt – for keeping them up, and for leaving Kitty with no better protection than the empty-headed Peggy. But that egg fu yung had been many hours ago, and at the moment she felt a good deal of sympathy for poor Mr Torley’s lions.
And it wasn’t Kitty that Gross tried to kill Thursday night.
Was it?
‘And proving that he was on the lot – even proving that he pulled the trigger – still leaves us with the question of why?’
Zal sighed. ‘Makes me long for the days when I was just photographing the pig races in Fresno.’
Zal drove her back to the house, in the late-model black Ford that Mr Crain had arranged for one of his employees to sell to him (‘I insist on paying – if something should happen to Miss de la Rose I want to be sure you’ll be able to pursue the culprits …’). They found Peggy’s car in the yard, the front door unlocked, and old Mr Shang sitting on the front steps with his wife, playing a long-necked Chinese lute. ‘All is well,’ said the old man, setting the instrument aside. Starlight shimmered white on the silk of his long hair as he rose to his feet and bowed deeply. ‘Yet knowing that there are those who wish the lady ill, we came here to await your return. It is no hardship for the beautiful Mrs Shang and this insignificant servant to contemplate the stars.’
He helped his wife to her stubby little bound feet, and they disappeared into the shadows around the side of the house, like a crane and a tortoise, the lute slung on his back.
Peggy and Kitty slumbered on the living-room couches amid a storm-wrack of cards, empty champagne glasses, and snoring Pekinese. ‘If you can drive the Ford to the studio in the morning I can just take Sleeping Beauty here home without waking her.’ Zal gestured to Peggy.
‘It’s hardly fair to you.’ Emma gathered up the red-haired actress’s coat and handbag and collected crumpled piles of five- and ten-dollar bills that strewed the coffee table and the carpet round about. She was tired now and her head ached, and the thought that Mr Gross – whoever had hired him – had been able to walk on and off the Foremost lot at will did nothing for her unease about the darkness of the hills around the house. ‘They live like spoilt children – get drunk where and when they please, seduce whoever comes in their path regardless of consequences or previous marital arrangements on either side, drive while intoxicated … and expect you to pick up after them, like an unpaid nanny.’
‘And feed their dogs,’ added Zal with a grin, taking an empty Veuve Cliquot bottle from beneath the table. ‘And fetch chilled slices of cucumber to put on their eyes when they wake up after a bender – and it sure doesn’t look like much of an orgy went on here tonight.’ He gently shook another bottle which stood on a corner of the gramophone. The motor had run down with the needle still resting at the end of the groove: Baby of Mine, said the label. Recorded in Chicago.
Emma raised her eyes from Kitty, whom she had been regarding, she realized, with a combination of exasperation and tenderness. Zal went to the bar, and split the remains of the bottle between two clean glasses.
‘And what do you expect?’ He handed her a glass. ‘From what Kitty’s told me, the farm Peggy grew up on would make a Louisiana convict camp look like a weekend at the Ritz. Peggy told me once she ran away because she got tired of being raped by her cousins – and because one of them had started pimping her to his friends in the truck-stop in Tulsa. Rudy Valentino bussed tables and worked in dance halls when he came to this country; Barbara la Marr worked burlesque. Clara Bow’s crazy father swore he’d knife her before he’d let her come to Hollywood. Tried it, too. These are people who have whatever that is, whatever that fire inside is called, that brings other people to warm themselves when they bring these stories to life … Like Mrs Glyn says, they have “It”. But they’ve had no training for it. Or pretty much for anything else. La Marr’s, what, twenty-eight? Rudy’s the same … Clara isn’t even twenty. They don’t know they’re not going to be beautiful forever. You give ’em a pile of money and a nice place to live and the whole world telling ’em they’re God’s gift, what do you think is going to happen?’
‘And she didn’t have to bring me out here.’ Emma sighed again, and sipped her champagne, recalling with a smile her father’s strictures on the beverage – delivered in flawless Latin, of course. And Kitty, she suspected, couldn’t actually have told Veuve Cliquot from Miller High Life. ‘Nor help poor Eliot Jordan. And you’re right about Kitty. She can’t act to save her life, but I see her on film and she makes every scene come alive.’
‘That’s what “It” is. They’re kids.’ Zal met her eyes over the rim of his glass, sipped the champagne. ‘They’ll get slapped with the hard side of this business soon enough. In a lot of ways they already have been. You be all right here tonight?’
Emma nodded, set her glass down on the mantelpiece, and after a long moment, Zal set his down also, took her in his arms, and kissed her. A little awkward, his beard tickling and the corner of his glasses brushing her cheekbone. But his arms around her were strong, as Jim’s had been. The warmth of his hands was a comfort that went straight through her bones, to her heart. ‘Whatever you decide to do about your aunt, and going back to Oxford … I want you to be happy, Em. Even if it’s not with me. You let me know if there’s anything I can do.’
He turned, scooped up Peggy in his arms – and he was right, she didn’t stir – and carried her out the door and down the front steps, Emma following with an armful of velvet and monkey fur, sequined shoes and handbag full of cash.
Throughout the following day, and the next, Emma tried systematically to work out who, in Kitty’s life, would want to have her accused of murder. Accused but not convicted – ‘I can’t believe anyone would actually think that that telephone call to her dressing room, much less those silly notes, would be accepted by a court,’ she said to Zal, during a brief break in the filming of the strangling scene on Wednesday. ‘But it’s equally hard for me to believe that Mr Pugh – or Mr Fishbein – would go to the extent of … of actually killing someone …’ S
he found she almost couldn’t put into words the thought that had flickered into her mind half a dozen times since Rex Festraw’s death.
And as she pronounced them, it struck her even more deeply how absurd was the idea. ‘Much less bringing someone here specially from New York, and putting him up at a hotel …’
Not Mr Pugh …
Or the smiling, bespectacled Mr Fishbein …
‘Don’t you?’ Zal’s eyebrows tilted. ‘You ever heard the details about the night Bill Taylor was murdered a couple of years ago? Before anybody even called the cops, his studio had a team over there cleaning up: burning love letters, trousering account books, tearing pages off his telephone pad, wiping up stains. I’ve seen tap dancers in vaudeville move slower than the press boys at Paramount trying to cover for wherever the hell Mary Minter had been the night before, not that I think poor Mary had the slightest thing to do with it … And I understand from men I’ve talked to on the force that about a week into the investigation they all got word to lay off. Is covering up a fishy crime the same as paying Sid Gross to go in and rub out an inconvenient spouse? You tell me.’
He tapped the copy of World of Film that lay on Kitty’s make-up table, next to a thermos of gin and a bronze ashtray upheld by three muscular nude atlantes. The Goddess of the Silver Screen, flared the header of the article, accompanied by a photo of Kitty looking mysterious and several much smaller shots of the other contenders. ‘This is coast-to-coast news.’ He glanced back at the magazine rack beside Kitty’s camp-chair. Another photo, equally sphinx-like, adorned the cover of Photo Play under the headline of The Secret Tragedy. Screen World bore a photograph of Kitty as the Empress Valerna, beside the words, Temptress of Babylon – The True Tale! And in less conspicuous letters, The Triumphs and Passions of Peggy Donovan. ‘You can’t buy publicity like this … except of course that they can.’
Commentary on Miss Swanson’s cheetah and earrings at the Café Montmartre ran a modest third.
‘But … to bring Mr Festraw out here from New York – to put him up in a hotel, not to speak of having those notes forged …’
‘Festraw could have phoned Pugh weeks ago,’ pointed out Zal. ‘And Pugh could have read that Photo Play rumors column about Kitty and Crain – and we won’t even get into the studio gossip about what’s-his-name on the catwalk in Stage Three. Free publicity and a way to show her she needs his protection – what more could a guy want?’
‘And killing us?’ she asked softly.
Zal was silent. A few feet away, Kitty sat before her portable make-up table, while Zena Gosford delicately reshaped the dark storm cloud of her hair.
‘I talked to Benny Parr, by the way,’ Emma went on after a moment. ‘Mr Pugh’s driver, you know. He says Mr Pugh got Mr Fishbein’s call on Wednesday at a realtor’s downtown, and he seemed to be truly horrified and outraged. They had to rush to the Merchants’ Bank to get cash – which of course is exactly what I’d do, if I wanted people to think I’d been caught off-guard.’
‘Well, he did used to be an actor,’ said Zal. ‘Way back, and not on Broadway. But he can put a show on if he needs to.’
Emma was silent, arranging and rearranging the notes she’d made on torn-out pages of her notebook, as she did when concocting scenes in a film.
Mr Pugh jealous. Stanislas Markham. Worked a job for Cornero Friday. Who could come onto the lot to get the gun and the stationery? (Dressed as extra …) Who phoned the dressing room?
Like Sam Wyatt’s notes about sinister Chinamen and long-lost twins and the monkey’s eyebrows …
What makes sense?
Or like trying to fit fragments of broken pottery into a design.
The probable impossible is to be preferred to the improbable possible …
‘Do you really think he did it? Or had it done?’
‘Kitty was right when she said some men go kind of crazy when they think somebody else is making nookie with their woman. When I was hiding out from the Draft Board in St Francisville, Louisiana, the whole parish was in an uproar because one of the most respectable men in town murdered a priest – a kindly, devout man, according to everyone in town that I talked to. Turned out Mr Respectable was “taking an interest in” – as they say – a girl at the local high school, and convinced himself the padre had evil designs on her. He spent thousands of dollars setting up a way to get the padre alone twenty miles outside of town and shot him, with evidence manufactured to convict some poor black sharecropper … and then left mud from the murder site on the floorboards of his car when he drove back to town. People do get crazy when they get jealous, Em. I don’t understand it, but I know you can’t tell by lookin’ at ’em.’
Zal returned to his camera. The Two Neds wheeled troughs of crumpled newspapers into position between the set’s windows and the backdrop of Rome, and more troughs behind the backdrop, to be ignited when the cameras rolled. Water-trucks were wheeled into position, just out of shot-line. Kitty and Nick Thaxter, make-up refreshed, took their places once again among the debris left by the ravening mob, for close-ups. Nick had spent the morning strangling Kitty for the master shot and it was now time for the interminable series of reaction shots.
‘I cannot tell you,’ sighed Kitty, when at seven o’clock that night she sat before her dressing-room mirror, repainting, ‘how glad I’ll be tomorrow when we finish burning Rome and I can be done with all this. Did I remember to tell you we’re driving down the coast Saturday to San Diego, to stay at the Del? That tiresome man who was supposed to have the plumbing hooked up yesterday at Ambrose’s villa never turned up – at least, that’s what Ambrose told me – and now the place won’t be ready for weeks! And by that time I’ll be filming Hot Potato, and poor Ambrose will be tied up with Standard Oil. Did I tell you they struck oil on his Long Beach land? Oceans of it, darling – this was last month sometime – and he says Standard Oil has offered him a fortune for it … And of course the cook and the other servants he intended to hire for his villa for next week now won’t be available until sometime in July! Oh, and I got him to write down what it’s called … it’s here somewhere … But the Del Coronado is gorgeous, darling, and you’ll love it …’
‘And what does Mr Pugh think you’re doing over the weekend?’
‘Oh, he thinks I’m going with him up to San Simeon ranch.’ She licked the tip of her finest brush, and concentrated on edging her lashline with kohl. ‘Mr Hearst – Marion’s friend, the newspaperman, you know – invites people to go camping up there, but it’s not really like camping … It’s like what you were telling me about archaeologists bringing along table linen and portable bathtubs and their valets. Frank wants to get on Mr Hearst’s good side to get financing for land to film Westerns on.’
Turning on her chair, she smiled sunnily upon Emma. ‘You’ll need to call him early Saturday morning, when he’s just about to leave to pick me up, and tell him I’m sick and will join them Sunday if I feel better.’
As she followed Kitty down the stairs to where the car waited – Buttercreme’s wicker carrier in one hand and Black Jasmine tucked under her other arm – Emma wondered whether Kitty had some kind of back-up plan in case Mr Pugh offered to rush right over to Kitty’s house with offers of hot toddies and chicken soup?
Although, she supposed, if the studio chief were willing to murder a man to generate publicity for his star he certainly wouldn’t walk away from a weekend spent with William Randolph Hearst …
And though she tried to be flippant about that thought, it made her shiver.
And what, for that matter, would Detective Meyer have to say about the proposed vacation? The special hearing was scheduled for Monday.
And Kitty had nothing more to her defense than, I didn’t do it.
She dreamed that night about Jim. About the endless warm twilight of early May, the sky still light at nine thirty but the trees of the Baliol meadows submerged in blue dusk. The last twitterings of the daytime birds, and the hoot of an owl somewhere. The smell of wet gras
s.
The bones of his big hand holding hers, the smoothness and texture of his palm. Six years later, she thought, she would still know the feel of his skin in the dark.
Still know his voice …
He said, ‘If I should die …’
‘Don’t.’
‘Hey.’ She’d heard his grin, as much as seen it. He’d been quiet all evening, as if he could see the hours counting down on the clock. Only forty-one to go … ‘Your dad goes digging around dead people all the time.’ He finger-combed back the black swatch of hair that fell over his forehead. ‘He’s got about six skulls down in his study – those have to have belonged to somebody. From what he’s told me,’ he added in a softer voice, ‘some of ’em a lot younger than me.’
She’d whispered again, ‘Don’t.’
‘I just don’t want you to turn into one of those crazy ladies in an old novel, Em. The ones who go around wearing black for the next fifty years.’
Smiling, she said, ‘If it was good enough for Queen Victoria, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be good enough for me,’ and he’d laughed, and with his arm around her shoulders hugged her tight. They’d turned into Holywell Street and she could see the lights of The Myrtles ahead of them in the darkness, the jaunty, eccentric roofline through the trees. Sleeping, she wondered why they’d come here – after the wedding they’d taken a room at the George, and he’d laughed at her, for feeling shy about lying with her husband under her parents’ roof. (‘You think they don’t know what we’re up to?’)
But here they were.
‘I mean it,’ he’d said softly. ‘If I don’t come back, I don’t want to die thinking about you living the rest of your life alone.’
And he’d signed for her to walk ahead of him, to where the light glimmered. Halfway there she turned back to him.
But he was gone.
The following night, Rome burned.
Emma had been on the set that afternoon, while Madge was walking Kitty and the vengeful Praetorian Guards along the route and Zal set up his cameras. He’d spent the previous evening testing light settings and discussing angles with the director, and with Doc Larousse. Doc’s reflectors and lighting trees surrounded the maze of unpainted pillars, cardboard statues, and cock-eyed architraves like H.G. Wells’s Martians closing in for the kill. Emma herself had seen how wide the pathways were, that looked so narrow from where Zal would stand.
Scandal in Babylon Page 20
