Scandal in Babylon

by Barbara Hambly

  Mr Crain coughed. He whispered, ‘Kitty …’ and made a vague gesture with his hand.

  ‘Gimme some of that water, Em.’ Zal held out his hand. ‘The phone, Kit – does it work?’

  She brushed back her hair with the back of her wrist. ‘I don’t think so. That’s one of the things we were waiting for. And – was that Tim Crain? Oh, Ambrose …’ For a moment she turned distractedly back to the old man. Then: ‘Was he behind it all? I didn’t think he ever left New York! He’ll be long gone—’

  ‘Not really.’ Zal finished giving his own patient some of the water, then helped him lie back again. ‘Not if I can get to Palmdale fast enough. I disconnected the self-starter motors in both cars outside. Kitty’ – he rose to his knees, looking over the back of the couch at her – ‘are you OK? I mean, could you read a map while Emma drives? I think the closest hospital is Olive View – you feel all right, Mr Crain?’

  The old man managed to say, ‘I … I think so. Is that Kitty?’ He groped for her hand, and shook his head woozily. ‘Tim – My son … I – I thought he was here – I mean I thought he was at my office …’

  ‘Get the map out of my car. What’s left of my car.’ Zal glanced ruefully at the Ford, sitting with four blown tires and its radiator hissing as water streamed from it onto the glass-strewn carpet. ‘Easy come, easy go … You know Sylmar, Kit? Think you can get Emma there?’

  ‘I can drive.’ She lifted her chin proudly while steadying herself on a corner of the couch as she rose.

  ‘Darling’ – Emma had heard those words in that tone of voice before – ‘we have no idea what Mr Gross might have injected you with after he chloroformed you. And if you’d had anything to drink—’

  ‘Only some gin.’ Kitty refilled the glass, and re-emptied it, with the virtuous air of one who has abstained all night. Then she looked down at the bosom of her dress, and brushed at the drift of white powder. ‘And I’ll swear I never took so much as a sniff of dope …’ She turned, and hastily checked her reflection in the mirror. ‘Oh,’ she gasped. ‘Oh, I look terrible—’

  Zal was right, Emma reflected. Kitty never disappointed.

  ‘Get me to a doctor,’ whimpered Mr Gross, at Emma’s feet. ‘For the love of God, get me to a doctor—’

  ‘It would serve you right if we left you here.’ Kitty put a knee on the couch to look over the back of it at him. From her expression, Emma almost expected her to add, Fools, where is your Redeemer now? ‘I mean, the police are going to be along—’

  ‘Soon as I can get to Palmdale and call them,’ said Zal. ‘But I think …’ He came around the couch and felt Crain’s hands, something Emma had done already. They were ice-cold. ‘I think Mr Crain, as well as First Murderer down here, should get looked at pretty quick. And I for one don’t like the idea of leaving you ladies here with Junior running around loose out there in the dark. You don’t happen to know if Junior knows anything about cars, do you, Kit?’

  Mr Crain was unconscious again.

  Feeling rather as if she’d blundered into one of those nursery riddles about fox, geese, and a bag of corn, Emma followed Zal out into the darkness, with the electric torch from the wrecked coupe in one hand and the Luger in the other. She divided her attention between the blackness of the hills beyond the glow of the villa’s lights, and the stage-set brightness of the living room on the other side of the broken windows, half fearful that Timothy Crain would come springing out of the night with a gun in each fist and three previously unaccounted for henchmen at his heels. If Sam were writing this, he would …

  The larger – and newer – of the two cars outside the villa was a long-nosed monster with a collapsible roof – fortunately in its raised position – velvet upholstery and gold-plated door-handles. Zal reconnected the starter, and drove it up the shallow steps onto the terrace, so that he and Emma could move Gross into it, using a tarpaulin which the plumbers had left on the bathroom floor as a makeshift stretcher. Kitty followed, pointing the Luger in all directions around her at the hills.

  ‘We really do need a henchman …’ Emma panted, as they gently maneuvered the wounded man into the back seat.

  ‘If we had one,’ returned Zal, ‘he’d be in the kitchen even as we speak, making coffee.’

  Mr Crain could be brought back to consciousness long enough to stagger to the car, but he was clearly under the influence of something.

  ‘Which makes sense,’ said Emma, ‘if his son planned this to look like a … a murder-suicide during a drug-addled lover’s quarrel. Don’t they test a victim’s blood and stomach contents?’

  ‘If somebody hasn’t slipped the coroner a thousand dollars they do,’ agreed Zal. He fetched a pail, a rubber tube, and, after a little searching, a funnel from among the plumber’s things in the bathroom, and siphoned the remaining gasoline from the disabled Ford, to pour into the tanks of both other vehicles. ‘That should get you back to town all right. Take a left at the top of the drive, another left on the road when you get down out of the mountains, and follow that trail along the Southern Pacific tracks into Sylmar.’

  Emma took a deep breath. ‘All right.’ If Queen Boadicea could lead an army to sack Londinium, I can certainly cope with this.

  Zal helped her into the driver’s seat, then leaned down again to kiss her lips. ‘You OK?’ His mustaches tasted of gasoline. Emma didn’t care.

  She nodded, not terribly certain whether this was true and wondering when the blood-rush of battle – which both Jim and Miles had told her about – was going to wear off, and what she’d do if this happened before they reached the hospital. Men she’d nursed in London had spoken of this, too: Like as if somebody’d thrown a switch, miss, was how one Devonshire man had put it, when she’d moved through the ward from bed to bed, making sure the men she’d ferried from the station were well and resting on the following day. And another had told her, If we’d had a push on, an’ come back to the trench, I knew I dasn’t sit down ’til the whole show was over, for once I let mesel’ get a bit cold I knew I’d never stand up again.

  ‘I think so. Yourself?’

  And, when he’d nodded, she added, ‘Thank you. I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to see anyone in my life.’

  He kissed her again. ‘Scipio Africanus has nothing on you, Em.’ And, as Kitty clambered into the passenger seat with the Luger in one hand and the Auto Club roadmap in the other, ‘See you ladies in Babylon.’

  Two Los Angeles County sheriffs were waiting in the driveway when Emma drove up to Olive View Sanitarium, so she knew Zal had successfully reached a telephone. Olive View was a low building in the Spanish style that reminded her powerfully of the original hacienda back at Foremost Productions, and lit up like a Christmas tree. Kitty had fallen asleep within minutes of leaving the Villa Foresta. In between picking her way cautiously down the graded – but barely paved – road from the hills, and the scarcely-better ‘trail’ that paralleled the railway tracks, Emma had braked a half-dozen times to consult the Auto Club map by the light of Zal’s electric torch. Even with the windows down she could smell, faintly, the scent of blood from the rear seat, and prayed that this was only seepage from Mr Gross’s wounds and not a major hemorrhage (Not that he doesn’t deserve it … but still …).

  The car was eerily silent, the stars above the hills cold and steady in the bleached landscape of indigo and silver. The metallic awfulness of gasoline still lingered on her lips, and she shook her head a little, that Zal would have retained the presence of mind to check that after a drive of some eighty miles, there would still be enough fuel to get back to town.

  Of course Zal would check.

  It occurred to her how completely she trusted the man.

  And, she reflected – if she read his voice and his words and his touch aright – how completely he trusted her. When she had telephoned the studio, it had never occurred to her – though she knew how dedicated was his commitment to his work – that he’d say, ‘Em, we’re about to start filming! Call the police.�
�

  The brown-uniformed officer opened the car door for her, asked, ‘Mrs Blackstone?’ and two orderlies hastened from the hospital door with a wheeled stretcher. ‘Is this Mr Gross?’ He nodded toward the man being gently lifted from the back seat.

  ‘Mr Sid Gross, yes,’ said Emma. ‘He attempted to murder me – and Miss de la Rose’ – the men’s eyes got big as they recognized Kitty, who raised her head and pushed the dark maelstrom of her hair from her face – ‘earlier this evening. Mr Crain as well.’ Another orderly was helping the groggy millionaire to stand. ‘I believe he’s been drugged, as well as chloroformed earlier this evening.’

  ‘Drugged, hell.’ Kitty rubbed her forehead with a look of agony in her eyes as she climbed from the front seat of the car. Emma noted with relief that she’d already brushed the cocaine from her frock. Questions about that would be all they’d need. ‘I feel like I’ve had about half a bottle of gin poured down my throat, darling – and I didn’t even enjoy it. I don’t even remember it. Please don’t tell us we’re under arrest,’ she added, widening those beautiful eyes at the nearest sheriff.

  He capitulated with the speed of the leading man in any one of her past fifteen films. ‘Not arrest, m’am – Miss de la Rose. But we do need to ask you some questions, and probably the Los Angeles Police will be along to ask you some more … and you really should see a doctor—’

  ‘And don’t try to tell anyone anything,’ warned Emma, ‘until you’re talking to the sheriffs. Oh, dear,’ she added. ‘I wonder if anyone’s thought to call Mr Fishbein?’

  And she realized as she said it that she had definitely been in Hollywood too long.

  What had begun as a tiring afternoon turned into a very, very long night. It seemed to Emma that she had taken the streetcar along Sunset Boulevard to the Bel Giardino in some other year – or some other lifetime. Part of this, she realized at about one o’clock in the morning, was simply the effect of hunger. When Zal walked into the sanitarium’s small lounge bearing a greasy paper sack of sandwiches from a railroad workers’ bar in Palmdale, she flung herself into his arms, kissed him, and almost wept.

  ‘Wow,’ said Zal. ‘This works better than booze!’

  Conrad Fishbein came in fifteen minutes later – pink and cheerful with his hair combed and his beard trimmed – trailed by Al Spiegelmann, who looked as if he’d been pulled, still damp, out of the bottom of a laundry bag. Both men stared hungrily at the sandwich she and Zal had been saving for Kitty, until Emma rose and went into the corridor, found the little cluster of nurses and orderlies chattering excitedly at the nurses’ station, and asked, ‘Is there any possibility that the kitchen could be opened up? The police are going to be here shortly, and it looks like we may be here for quite some time. Of course,’ she added, ‘it goes without saying that Mr Crain will reimburse the hospital for whatever inconvenience this causes you.’

  By the time the police arrived, an orderly had brought in a tray of vegetarian sandwiches (healthful but nowhere near as good as the ones from Rennie’s Railway Café) and enough coffee to revive the American Expeditionary Force.

  Emma told her story to the sheriff’s deputies and then to Detective Meyer, and produced from her handbag (which she had managed to keep with her through mayhem, destruction, vehicular assault and attempted murder) the papers Tony Cornero had given her what seemed like a hundred and fifty years ago at the Bel. ‘I had reason to suspect that Mr Sid Gross was the driver of a car that attempted to run myself and Mr Rokatansky off the coast highway Saturday night,’ she said. ‘I was told that the car itself was found by the Pasadena police in the Santa Susanna mountains. Mr Cornero had very kindly offered to use his resources to find out what he could.’

  ‘We know all about Sid Gross, m’am.’ Avram Meyer fished a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, then replaced it a little self-consciously. ‘He came out from under ether singin’ like a canary. But I’d like to get your story before I tell you what his is.’

  ‘You don’t have to answer anything, Mrs Blackstone,’ said Spiegelmann, around a mouthful of Swiss cheese and wholemeal bread. ‘And I would like it to go on record that it was Mr Crain, Senior, who hired Mr Cornero, on the recommendation of a private detective, and that Mrs Blackstone had no previous connection or acquaintance with Mr Cornero or any of his associates.’

  ‘So noted,’ agreed Meyer, as Mr Spiegelmann rather ostentatiously fished for something – a billfold, perhaps? – in his breast pocket, and Emma made herself look as innocent as she knew how. ‘Can I have one of those sandwiches?’

  And in fact, though she felt a little odd about it under the circumstances, the story she told was the unvarnished truth: how she had recalled Mr Crain’s remarks about his son never leaving New York; how a remark made by someone at the Bel Giardino – she did not recall who (Well, REASONABLY unvarnished, anyway …) – seemed to indicate that the younger Mr Crain might easily have been involved in financial chicanery with his father’s oil property in Signal Hill; how she had returned to the house at seven to find Miss de la Rose gone, one of the dogs injured, and the air smelling faintly of chloroform, an odor she recognized from her days driving an ambulance during the War.

  ‘It occurred to me, you see,’ she said, ‘that if anything happened to Mr Crain, the first person to be suspected would of course be his son – particularly if this was not the first time he’d used his father’s property as collateral for his own financial speculations. But if his father were linked with a notorious screen star, who would even then be on trial for the murder of her ex-husband – particularly if Miss de la Rose were found dead at the scene herself, with a gun in her hand – no one would so much as glance at his son’s dealings. Particularly,’ she added, ‘if he could produce witnesses that he was in New York at the time.’

  Meyer’s smile slowly widened in his villainous Van Dyke. ‘Well, aren’t you the clever girl – m’am,’ he added. ‘From what Gross has coughed up so far, you guessed it pretty much down the line: he’s the one who got onto the Foremost lot the week before last and swiped the gun and the stationery from Miss de la Rose’s dressing room. And he’s the one who plugged Festraw, the minute Festraw was done takin’ that dressing-room phone call from Tim Crain. He knew all about Stan the Mark payin’ for Festraw to come out to LA …’

  ‘Did Mr Festraw actually intend to blackmail Miss de la Rose?’ asked Emma curiously.

  ‘Sounds like he thought that was what the whole thing was about, yeah,’ agreed the detective. ‘Crain using Festraw to put the squeeze on Miss de la Rose. Festraw didn’t know a thing about the letters – Gross planted those in the dressing room, and on Festraw, after Festraw was dead … and in Festraw’s room …’

  ‘Sounds like Gross had a lot to say for himself,’ remarked Fishbein, without losing his perpetual, friendly smile.

  Meyer scratched a corner of his mustache. ‘I’d be talkative too, if after all my trouble my boss turned around and plugged me on general principles. You mind if we take this, Mrs Blackstone?’ He held up the stapled sheets Cornero had given her.

  Spiegelmann reached across and plucked them from his hand. ‘Our office will have a copy for you in the morning, Detective Meyer.’

  Emma wondered if Tony Cornero’s secretary had made a carbon-paper copy of the list, and how much of a battle there would be if Spiegelmann’s copy turned out to contain information different from the original …

  And then gave it up. She had to let it out of her hands sometime, and couldn’t imagine how anyone could profit from exonerating either Crain or Gross. And she felt, simply, too tired to try to untangle further conspiracies that may or may not have existed.

  ‘Mr Spiegelmann, Mr Fishbein – you may want to be with me while I talk to Mr Rokatansky and Miss de la Rose. If you don’t mind, Mrs Blackstone …’ He paused on the way to the door, turned back. ‘Oh, Mr Rokatansky said to give you this. It’s from the sanitarium’s library.’

  He handed her a copy of Macauley’s Lays of Ancient Rome.<
br />
  TWENTY

  Emma finished the night in one of the sanatorium’s rooms reserved for the families of patients.

  Waking late the following afternoon, she was informed by Nurse Alvarez that Mr Crain’s servants had appeared with a large touring car at eight, and had carried off Mr Crain – much improved by sleep and saline draughts – Miss de la Rose, and Mr Spiegelmann back to Los Angeles. But, said Nurse Alvarez, Miss de la Rose had telephoned only an hour ago, begging everyone’s pardon for not remembering that Mrs Blackstone was still asleep at the sanatorium, and would they please give her whatever she asked for – and of course bill Foremost Productions for whatever inconvenience this might entail – and ask Mrs Blackstone to telephone her at Mr Crain’s – or at her house – or at Foremost Productions – when she woke up?

  She could just imagine Kitty getting out of the car at the house, looking at the dogs, and gasping, Oh, nertz! We forgot Emma!

  As Zal had said, That’s our girl.

  If I go back to Oxford, Emma reflected with a sigh, at least people will remember where they left me …

  But the whole idea seemed a very long way off.

  She was consuming tea and toast in the shade of the cloister garden, feeling rather like Odysseus having a quiet dinner with King Alcinous and reading Macaulay’s long, deliciously scholarly preface, when Zal appeared.

  ‘There are times,’ he said as he crossed the flagstones in the mild California sun, ‘when I want to dunk Kitty in the rain barrel. Only Kitty would forget you were here – after you saved her life …’

  Emma smiled, marked her place and stood. ‘Did you think she wouldn’t?’

  ‘As my mother would say,’ sighed Zal, ‘oi gevalt. You OK?’

  They kissed. It felt as natural as smiling.

  They kissed again, and stood for a long time, arms around each other, sprinkled with the dappling of pepper-tree shade. I could have been killed last night, thought Emma. Or last Saturday. Zal could have been killed.