‘This’s the best we could do.’ Returning to his own chair, the bootlegger took from among the neat stacks of papers on the table three sheets stapled together. ‘Far as my boys could tell, sounds like Sid Gross is laying low.’
He held up his hand, snapped his fingers for the bartender: ‘What’ll you have, Mrs Blackstone? Champagne again?’
‘Tea.’ She smiled. ‘If it’s not inconvenient.’
‘Louie!’ he called out. ‘Tea for the lady, and don’t go tellin’ me we ain’t got any … Louie wouldn’t know tea if the Queen of England spilled it in his lap.’ He sipped his own drink, which smelled of gin and lime.
‘Gross ain’t been to his apartment and he hasn’t been at his office since last Thursday. His girlfriend ain’t seen him since the Monday before that. The Pasadena police found his car day before yesterday in a gully up in the Santa Susanna hills. The left front fender was scraped and dented, like he’d bumped it into another car, and the glovebox and trunk were cleared out.’
Emma paused, halfway down the first page of a list of sightings: Gross’s apartment on Hope Street on the thirteenth – the Sunday before the murder. The café at the corner of Hope and Washington on the fourteenth for breakfast. The barbershop on West 23rd that same Monday afternoon. ‘He would have gotten another, surely.’ Whoever had assembled this had better informants than Colt Madison. Zal’s wrecked Model-T had been hauled back to Foremost Productions the day after the attempt on their lives: Emma was fairly certain it was destined to go off a cliff or in front of a train in the next Wildcat Slim two-reeler. ‘Can that be traced through the Motor Vehicles Department?’
‘Sure could,’ agreed the bootlegger. ‘If Gross bought it under his own name, which I’ll lay you five to one he didn’t.’
Emma opened her mouth to speak her thought – that this seemed another case of someone having a great deal of money – and then closed it. Mr Crain had purchased the black Ford coupe for Zal, used, from one of his employees; it couldn’t have cost more than a hundred dollars. The price, evidently, of a high-class bottle of wine. Yet the idea nagged at her thoughts, and with it, the sense that she could almost see what was really going on.
Like Zal’s forced perspective. It’s all an optical illusion … We’re forcing their point of view …
A peep show, Mr Madison had said.
He was there all the time … you just need to know the secret …
She thought, Yes. We’re only seeing what’s in the shot-lines. A Silver Screen Goddess award. A powerful man’s jealousy.
What’s beyond those lines?
But she said, ‘Thank you for this,’ then smiled at the bartender when he brought her a cup of tea which smelled vaguely of coffee grounds. ‘Please let me know what it cost you to get this information, Mr Cornero. I know some of this’ – she gestured with the papers, which included information, she could see running her eye down the first page, gleaned from cab drivers and the owner of the magazine-stand across the street from Sid Gross’s apartment building – ‘can’t have come cheap.’
Cornero waved her question away. ‘I’ll settle that with Mr Crain,’ he said. ‘He’s a real gent, Mr Crain – unlike that crooked cheap-ass son of his.’
Startled, Emma asked, ‘Do you know his son?’ From Kitty – and old Mr Crain – Emma had developed a mental picture that combined Uriah Heep with Cato the Censor: dour, stingy, and self-important in an oleaginous way. At least Cato the Censor wouldn’t – as Kitty assured him that Young Mr Crain did (only he was nearing forty) – constantly write to his father hinting for money.
‘I seen him.’ The young bootlegger made a face. ‘When I was back in New York, he’d come into the 300 Club to meet his business pals after hours, lookin’ around him like he was at the zoo and couldn’t wait to do his deals and scram.’
‘A nightclub?’ Emma almost laughed. ‘And here he gives his father the impression he never leaves the sanctity of Long Island and his country club.’
‘Country club my – uh – foot. You can do crooked stock deals at a country club as easy as you can at the 300, or anyplace in town … It’s why you coulda knocked me over with a feather, when Selma downstairs told me she’d seen him at Doolittle’s, last Wednesday night.’
‘Doolittle’s?’
Selma must be the kewpie-doll coat-check girl.
‘Club over on Avocado Street, in Los Feliz.’ Cornero shrugged. ‘Quiet little place. Charlie Crawford owns it; Selma’s dating one of the musicians there.’
Wednesday night. Emma flipped through to the last of the pages. Drinks with Tim Crain, Doolittle’s, nine p.m. ‘Are you sure? Is she sure?’ Her heart was suddenly beating fast.
What they’re seeing isn’t really what’s going on at all …
Ambrose Crain’s son. Here.
‘Yeah. Selma used to wait tables at the Quick and Easy, around the corner from the Crain Building on Fifth Avenue. She said for a guy that rich Crain was the world’s lousiest tipper and treated the staff like garbage. She said the kitchen boys would take turns comin’ up with the worst stuff they could drop in his food – I’m not even gonna tell you the stuff they made that crooked mammalucco eat.’
‘Crooked?’
‘Oh, hell, yeah, crooked,’ said Cornero. ‘I don’t know whether poor old Mr Crain ever knew about it, but I know of at least twice, that his boy nearly got into felony territory, signing his old man’s name to back stock deals that I know for sure were under the table.’
Emma sat for a long time, looking at that single typed line. Drinks with Tim Crain, Doolittle’s. Last Wednesday at nine o’clock …
Here. In Los Angeles.
Meeting Sid Gross.
And feeling a cold certainty, as if she’d felt when those little bits of hands on pottery fragments had fallen into relationship with one another, those corners of robes, disembodied feet …
A column in Photo Play a month ago.
Kitty’s voice. ‘Did I tell you they struck oil on his Long Beach land? OCEANS of it, darling – this was last month … Standard Oil offered him a fortune for it …’
LOVE’S FATAL TRAGEDY …
Tony himself saying, Unless he was secretly romancing some wealthy widow and her family wanted to rub him out …
We’re seeing what they want us to see.
The mournful dark eyes of King Charles I. He’s been there all along …
Like Ned Bergen’s minions, setting up a scene. Like Zal, forcing perspective.
‘Thank you,’ she said quietly. ‘Thank you.’
She folded the papers and put them into her handbag, finished her tea, and went down the stairs to catch the streetcar on Sunset Boulevard for home.
The dogs rushed to her in a frou-frou of flouncing fur and clattering toenails as she opened the door. It was late, nearly seven – home-going traffic had as usual blocked every intersection along Sunset Boulevard and stopped the streetcar repeatedly – and the sky was filled with the glow of sunset light. Emma called out, ‘Kitty?’ but got no reply. In the kitchen, she saw at once that the dogs hadn’t been fed. When they dashed in at her heels she stopped, taken aback, at the tiny spots of blood on the yellow tile of the kitchen floor. A second glance showed her that Chang Ming was limping. She knelt, and saw that under his long fur he had an abraded bruise on his right foreleg.
Cold to her heart, she ran upstairs.
Kitty’s suitcase was gone.
Descending, she checked the living room – where the dogs’ three wicker crates were still lined up neatly. With a sensation of the shaky cold spreading through the whole of her body, she almost ran through the kitchen and down the back steps to the gardener’s cottage. The Shangs were in its tiny kitchen, preparing a skillet of vegetables and rice – This what real Chinese eat, Mr Shang had told her once. To her query, the old man said, ‘Mr Crain man call, say, he and lady go away together, sudden. She not even wait to pack, he say. Like kids. Run off, be together alone.’
‘When was this?’ Emma
asked.
The long eyebrows puckered over Shang’s nose. ‘Not so long. Six o’clock maybe?’
‘And they phoned the cottage here?’
He nodded, and glanced at his wife for confirmation. ‘Something wrong, Mrs Backston?’
Emma said softly, ‘I don’t know.’ But as she climbed the stair to the kitchen again, she knew there was. Setting up a scene. We’re seeing what they want us to see.
LOVE’S FATAL TRAGEDY …
Zal was at the lot already when she phoned.
Madge will kill him … Frank will kill him …
‘Yeah?’ He had an office the size of Kitty’s upstairs bathroom, where he kept his lenses and his notes. She knew he was sitting at his cluttered desk, feet propped on the wastepaper basket.
‘Zal,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t know what’s happening, but I think something’s happened to Kitty. I think … this sounds so stupid, but I think she may have been kidnapped.’
He didn’t say, Oh, come on! Or, Why would anybody …?
‘Who by?’
‘Sid Gross,’ said Emma. ‘Working for Mr Crain’s son. He – Timothy Crain – was in Los Angeles last Wednesday night, the day of Mr Festraw’s murder. Mr Cornero’s coat-check girl recognized him with Gross at some nightclub in Los Feliz. That was on the paper I got from Mr Cornero this afternoon. When I got home Kitty was gone, and one of the dogs is hurt – it looks as if he’d been kicked. Mr Shang tells me he got a telephone call, supposedly from one of Mr Crain’s employees—’
‘You at the house? I’ll be there in ten minutes.’
She had no idea what he was going to say to Madge Burdon, and didn’t ask. She barely had time to say, ‘Thank you,’ when he hung up.
EIGHTEEN
When she passed through the living room to fetch the first-aid kit from the bathroom, Emma halted, conscious again of the last, fading whiff of a half-familiar smell there. A smell that brought back something, some feeling of horror …
She came back into the kitchen, snipped Chang Ming’s fur clear of the wound and daubed the abraded flesh with rubbing alcohol, a treatment the little dog bore with stoic patience. She manipulated his foreleg gently to make sure no bones had been broken, and indeed, once she’d set down their food bowls the limp almost disappeared. She returned to the living room, cringing at whatever that was …
… whatever that was …
Chloroform. The ambulances she’d driven from the Oxford station out to Bicester Hospital had reeked of it. Sometimes she still smelled it in her dreams.
I was right. I’m not making this up.
Headlights swept across the windows in the growing dusk. Zal said, ‘What happened?’ as Emma opened the door. ‘You’re sure it was Crain?’
‘The woman who saw him was sure. She used to wait tables at a café where young Mr Crain had lunch in New York. She knew him by sight because he was such a bad customer. Mr Crain – Kitty’s Mr Crain – and I spent Saturday evening together and his son’s name came up in the conversation. I’m reasonably sure he would have said something, had he known his son was in town. The man who phoned the Shangs said Mr Crain and Kitty had decided, just like that, to run off on vacation together, but she’d never have left without feeding the dogs. And I honestly don’t think she would have gone without them at all. In either case she’d have left me a note. And Chang Ming was hurt.’ She stooped, to touch the red dog’s head where he sat beside her ankle. ‘Kicked, it looks like.’
Zal said, ‘Momzer. You phone Crain’s place?’
‘I was about to when you arrived. According to Mr Cornero, Crain the Younger has used his father’s property more than once, as collateral on loans, without Mr Crain’s knowledge. I suspect all this has something to do with that.’
‘Why bring Kitty into it?’
‘Because she’s notorious,’ said Emma quietly. ‘Because she’s the Goddess of the Silver Screen. Because she has “It”. Her name has been plastered across every newspaper in the country for the past week and a half. So when Mr Crain – and his scandalous mistress – both turn up dead, nobody is going to run about investigating his son’s financial activities.’
Zal’s eyebrows went up, as if half admiring the scheme. ‘Activities that’d come to light when Standard Oil runs a title check on the property that Daddy Crain’s about to sell them?’
‘Yes,’ Emma said quietly. ‘But only if Timothy Crain isn’t the owner of them himself. Kitty is the obvious suspect in his murder – like the newspaper said, “Love’s Fatal Tragedy”. It’s a story everyone will buy. But only if she’s dead.’
Zal repeated the Yiddish word he’d used when informed of the presence of Rex Festraw in Kitty’s dressing room last Wednesday. ‘Makes sense. She’s trashy, she’s flashy, she’s a “celluloid wanton” and thanks to the Pettingers and Thelma Turnbit, everybody in the country knows her name. You know where this Villa Whatever is?’ he went on, crossing to the telephone niche. ‘It’s the only place where Gross and Junior could set up a show like that … if you’re right. And I think you are.’ He turned his head slightly, frowning. Sniffing.
‘I think – I’m not sure – that what you smell is chloroform,’ said Emma. ‘And no, I’m not certain of any of this. But it makes sense. Kitty said the Villa was right on the edge of a forest, but I’ve never heard of a forest anywhere in two hundred miles …’
‘There is actually one up in Big Bear. Or it could be Angeles National Forest – or any one of a whole string of national forests in the other direction, going up the coast. They might know at Crain’s, if you’ve got the number – there’s no phone at this Villa, is there?’
‘Not hooked up.’ She opened the drawer beneath the telephone cabinet itself, with a whispered prayer of thanks that one of the first things she’d done when entering her sister-in-law’s household last October had been to sort and arrange its contents. ‘Nor is the plumbing, evidently …’
‘You got a California map?’
‘In that cabinet.’ She heard Zal dialing behind her as she went up the stairs. A few minutes later, in the midst of digging through the scented chaos of Kitty’s bureau drawers, she heard his voice, short questions spaced as if he were getting shorter answers. When she came downstairs, empty-handed, he was back in the living room, unfolding one of the California Auto Club’s enormous printed maps on the glass-and-chrome coffee table, the dogs clustering around his feet as if he were unwrapping a sandwich.
‘No answer at his office.’ He spoke without looking up. ‘His butler says he got a call about six o’clock from a voice he didn’t recognize, saying, “This is Andy Wilkins, I’m an old friend of Mr Crain’s and he asked me to phone you and let you know he’ll be late getting home tonight. We met at Joy’s” – that’s the drugstore across the street from Crain’s office on Highland – “and we’re having dinner”. Then he hung up before the butler could ask him where, or could he speak to Mr Crain. No soap on the Villa?’
She shook her head.
‘This look familiar?’ He held up a business card. On one side was neatly printed the name, office address, and office telephone number of Ambrose Crain. On the other, a firm, regular hand she recognized had written: 100 Mint Canyon Road.
Again she shook her head. ‘It’s Mr Crain’s writing, though.’
‘His butler said the Villa Foresta is on the edge of the Angeles National Forest … Here we go.’ He stabbed at the column of infinitesimally tiny print at one side of the map, then scanned the map itself.
‘Kitty said it’s about two hours’ drive north of here.’
‘Back-side of the mountains, then. This would be easier if we knew what Kitty thinks she means when she says “north”.’
Emma sat beside him on the couch, leaned around his arm. Vast pale-green blocks of empty country, threaded with white roads.
‘Here we go. Mint Canyon Road – Christ, that’s a distance. And if it turns out that’s just the address of some lady who breeds Pekinese …’ Zal paused, the map
half folded-up again in his hands. ‘Then I guess we’ll have lost.’ He scooped his cap from the coffee table where he’d dropped it, led the way out onto the porch, down the steps to the waiting car. Emma gathered her coat and handbag, locked the door behind her, descended as the last dove-blue darkness was deepening to indigo.
‘Do you …?’ she began as she got in, and stopped herself, self-conscious and wondering if she’d ever remotely thought that she’d be uttering the words …
Zal glanced at her, headlight glare slipping off the lenses of his glasses as he maneuvered the Ford up the steep drive.
‘Do you have any kind of weapon?’ She almost blushed: I sound like someone in a blood-and-thunder novel …
‘Glovebox,’ he said. ‘It’s Dirk Silver’s.’
She opened it, only long enough to see that the automatic pistol was there.
‘It’s a Luger. I knew he kept one in his dressing room. God knows when it was last cleaned or fired, or whether he has a permit to carry the thing. I sure don’t. It is loaded …’ He braked halfway up the drive. ‘Does Kitty have one? I’d rather have one that won’t blow up in my hand. She had the gun Gross must have swiped from her dressing room to shoot Festraw with …’
‘I’ve never heard her speak of another. Of course,’ she added, ‘I’d never heard her speak of the murder weapon, either … But I’ve just gone through her bureau looking for the address of the villa, and I didn’t see one. If there’s another in the house, I doubt I could find it in under two hours.’
He let in the clutch. Gravel spurted from the wheels as they lunged up the drive. ‘That’s our girl.’
‘There’s two ways of getting there.’ The hills rose up around them. Spots of light amid trees that were no more than dark within darkness, where the Gloria Swansons and Rudolph Valentinos and Charlie Chaplins of the world sat on their terraces, looking down on the electric fires of Babylon, or out towards the endless sea. ‘We can take this road northwest around the corner of the San Gabriels, then follow the Southern Pacific right-of-way back along the feet of the hills. That’s about an hour, hour and a half at this time of night. Two hours in traffic. If we cut straight through the hills through Burbank and Altadena we can probably get there in forty-five minutes – if we don’t blow a tire. That road is pretty primitive.’
Scandal in Babylon Page 22
