Kathryn gave him a friendly nudge. “I wouldn’t have missed this for all the diamonds in Harry Winston’s.”
He studied her for a few moments. “How are things with the married man?”
“Still married.” She studied the stripes in the sparkling terrazzo floor. Its golden flecks picked up the flashing lights of the marquee. “It really is a remarkable picture, Orson.”
“Thank you,” he said quietly, and took a long drag of his cigarette, which had nearly burned through to its end. “I’d be disappointed if you didn’t like it.”
“Orson, there’s something you need to know. I have an inside source at the FBI.”
“Why does that not surprise me?”
“Listen to me, Orson. The FBI is questioning people about your homosexuality.”
Orson’s cathartic laugh echoed off the foyer’s twelve-foot ceiling until he was gasping for breath. “Me? A fairy? Jumping Jehosaphat, Hearst is desperate.”
“Did William Alland tell you the FBI grilled him about your living arrangements?”
That sobered him up. “No, he didn’t.”
“Did you live with him?”
“We shared a place for a while, yes.”
“So why didn’t you just rent the place yourself?”
“I needed for someone else’s name to be on the lease.” He shrugged off the subject, waving the cigarette smoke away. “Did you really stand up to Louella at the Press Club?” he asked.
“I did.”
“I heard you threw your dessert at her.”
“If I’d thought to, I would have. I certainly owe her a dish full of something.”
“And nobody stood up to support you?” He offered her a cigarette from his pewter holder.
She took one and let him light it. “Let’s just say I won’t be invited back anytime soon.”
“I don’t think I quite realized what your support was costing you,” he admitted.
You don’t know the half of it. “You wouldn’t have received it if you’d made a crappy movie.” An unvoiced sentence hovered on his lips; he seemed unable to push it out. “What is it?” she asked.
“I have a confession to make to you, Kathryn.”
This sounded intriguing. “I’m listening.”
“Remember when we first met?”
“At Schwab’s?”
“I already knew who you were.”
Kathryn straightened her spine. “Oh?”
Orson nodded meekly. “My driver pointed you out when you were standing in the street. I’d been reading your column for years, of course, but didn’t know what you looked like. So when I saw you standing there, I—well, you might say I hatched a plan.”
Kathryn felt about an inch tall. She hadn’t realized how smugly clever she thought she’d been, trapping Orson like that. Turns out he was the spider and she the fly.
“Don’t be mad,” he told her. “I wasn’t sure how Hollywood would receive me and I needed an ally. I couldn’t believe my luck when you started talking about Kenosha.” Orson raised his eyebrows. “It didn’t occur to me until much later that it wasn’t a coincidence. Well played, Miss Massey. Very well played, indeed.”
Kathryn bent her head in a subtle curtsey. “So the matchbook?” she probed. “The one for Don the Beachcomber you left on your table was a plant?”
“Like your pal in the plaid jacket?”
She rewarded him with a touché smile.
He nudged his shoulder against hers. “Tell me truthfully, did you really know George Schaffer at RKO and his plan to offer me creative control?”
Kathryn let a bubble of a laugh pop out. “As long as all the cards are on the table,” she said, “it was pretty much the only fact to come out of me that day.” She could see the memory of their first kiss among the potted palms and jungle music surface in his eyes. “Aren’t we a couple of clever Claudes, vain enough to assume we’re pulling one over on the other when all the time it was the other way around.”
“You had the advantage. At least you knew what I looked like.”
“Did I look like you thought I would?”
Orson shook his head. “God, no. I figured you looked like Louella. Imagine my delight and surprise when I peeked over the Marmont’s fence and spotted you.”
She loved it when he looked at her with an ever so slight twinkle in his eye. She opened her purse and pulled out the folded page of the Examiner. “And speaking of Miss Parsons, have you read her column today?”
“I gave up reading that shit months ago.”
“You ought to read this one. Just the second paragraph will do.”
When Orson was done, he handed the page back to her, letting out a long, low whistle. “This is a new low, even for her. And probably libelous.”
“She’s too canny to use my name. I have to hand it to her, though. I’d never have guessed she was capable of such economy with words. She’s managed to insult me five different ways in one paragraph.”
“Six,” he corrected.
“No, five.” Kathryn lifted the page and read off Louella’s slurs. “Tramp, adulterer, drunk, Commie, lesbian.”
“You missed one,” Orson insisted. “Illegitimate.”
“She should talk. We’re both the bastard children of journalism.”
“You think that’s what she meant?”
Kathryn turned to face him squarely and found a look she didn’t know how to interpret.
CHAPTER 36
Gwendolyn was testing the gods and she knew it. The absolute last thing she ought to be doing was walking into Romanoff’s—Beverly Hills’ newest see-and-be-seen eatery on its newest shop-and-be-shopped street, Rodeo Drive—wearing the most breathtakingly gorgeous bracelet she’d ever seen.
The fact that she was wearing the bracelet in public wasn’t how she was testing the gods; it was the fact that Bugsy Siegel had sent it to her.
It arrived at the Garden via special messenger in plain brown paper wrapping bound with string. No name, no return address. So she wasn’t prepared when she pulled a bracelet out of a blue velvet box. The dozens of pinpoint diamonds made her gasp out loud. Then she read the card.
Quite sensibly, Kathryn admonished her. “You’re not going to accept it, are you?”
Of course not, Gwendolyn thought. After what happened at C.C. Brown’s? Even Gwendolyn, jewelry addict that she was, knew where to draw the line. No, no, no, she’d just keep it for a short while, pull it out a few times, admire it, maybe even try it on, but then she’d return it.
She gave herself two weeks to watch it sparkle and glitter in the light. Two weeks of clasping it around her wrist and admiring the cool platinum against her skin, the way the diamonds reflected shards of light like an aura. Two weeks of resisting the urge to take it out in public wasn’t very difficult, she told herself. Easy peasy.
However, there was something about knowing she was leaving the state that gave her the courage of a David to Siegel’s Goliath. A Goliath who’d somehow guessed Gwendolyn’s weakness was jewelry, and who’d never know if she wore it. Rumors of an eyewitness to the Greenberg murder had started to surface; nobody had spotted Siegel on the social scene for weeks.
A plan started to form.
Marcus had been blue after his Judy Garland pitch fizzled, so Gwendolyn told him he needed a glitzy night on the town. As soon as he agreed, she saved every penny from her tips and made a spectacular silver and white beaded dress to match the bracelet.
After more than a dozen years of watching ambitious actresses make memorable entrances at the Cocoanut Grove, Gwendolyn Brick knew a thing or two about walking into restaurants. Marcus held Romanoff’s front door open while she swept into the dining room, undulating her hips to let the beads shimmer in the lights. When every man turned to look, Gwendolyn couldn’t help but think, Sorry, fellas, you had your chance, but I’m off to Hawaii now. You all blew it.
But between the soup and the salad when she was walking back from the ladies’ room, she caught a doughy-fac
ed guy with wild boar eyes watching her. She didn’t recognize him, but couldn’t escape feeling like she should. She rejoined Marcus at the table and watched the guy vamoose to the public phones in the foyer. Still, she wasn’t prepared when Marcus dropped his fork into his Waldorf salad.
“Siegel just walked in,” he whispered.
“So?” Gwendolyn shrugged. Strangely, she felt quite calm.
Marcus covered the bracelet with his hand. “Don’t you—”
She shrugged it away. “If Mr. Siegel starts walking over here, go to the men’s room and stay in there as long as you need to.”
Marcus jumped to his feet. “You don’t need to tell me twice,” he said without moving his lips. As she watched him scamper away, the thought occurred to her that now that she’d made the decision to move to Hawaii, nothing scared her anymore. Not even Bugsy Siegel.
He sat down into Marcus’ chair.
It wasn’t as though Siegel was a no-neck street thug with a cauliflower nose and a flat lip. With his graphite-black hair and his sky-blue eyes, the guy was movie-star good-looking. And it wasn’t as though he didn’t know how to dress. He’d perfectly matched his deep sage-green cashmere jacket with an amber-yellow silk tie. It’s just that Benjamin Siegel was one of those guys who looked at you as though he was deciding whether to screw you first and then slit your throat, or the other way around.
She drew her arms off the table and tucked them underneath it. Suddenly she didn’t feel quite so Ida Lupino in The Lady and the Mob. “If I didn’t know better, I’d wonder if you were following me,” she said.
“C.C. Brown’s was a coincidence. Tonight, no coincidence. My boy Mickey called me as soon as he saw you here.”
Mickey Cohen was the brass knuckles to Ben Siegel’s kid gloves. The silence hung between them for a moment until Siegel broke it.
“So you like the bracelet? It suits you. I knew it would.”
“Oh?” Gwendolyn went all wide-eyed. “It was from you?”
“Don’t you read cards that come with expensive gifts?”
“There wasn’t any card,” Gwendolyn lied. “Must have fallen off.”
“I expected you to return it, but it pleases me to see you wear it. Pleases me a lot.” Another silence. “So, ain’t you gonna thank me?”
Gwendolyn tugged the bracelet off her wrist. “I can’t accept it.” She slid it along the table toward him, then tucked her hands away again. The last thing she wanted him to see was how they trembled.
“Sure you can.”
Siegel pushed the bracelet back at her. The diamonds caught the light of the flickering torches dotted along the wall of the restaurant and shimmered like tiny fireflies.
“I’m not fond of strings, Mr. Siegel.”
He nodded thoughtfully, then picked the bracelet up. “Your friend Alice has been seeing a lot of my buddy Raft lately. Did you know she’s got a part in a new movie at Warners? Raftie helped get her cast. It’s a good break for her, so we’re having a dinner to celebrate.” He grabbed Gwendolyn’s handbag off the table, popped it open and dropped the bracelet inside. “It’ll be a Monday, on account of that’s your only night off.”
The last rats of courage deserted Gwendolyn’s sinking ship. She feigned disinterest and eyed the door to the men’s room. “I don’t—”
“Let’s say two weeks from tonight. Eight o’clock, my place up in the Hollywood Hills. You know where it is. Oh, and wear that dress—it goes with the bracelet. Wear the bracelet, too, and if you still don’t want to keep it, you can give it back then.”
* * *
Two weeks later, Gwendolyn sat in the back seat of the Buick and stared through the window at Siegel’s house. The roof of the pointed turret caught the light of the half moon as it slipped out from behind a cloud. “You didn’t need to go to all this bother,” she said to Kathryn and Roy in the front seat, and wanted to add, But I’m so, so, so glad you have.
“Of course we did,” Roy replied. He had a protective, calming way about him that she hadn’t appreciated before.
After Romanoff’s, Gwendolyn and Marcus rushed home to find Kathryn and Roy knocking off a bottle of champagne. Kathryn was all for putting Gwendolyn on the first boat heading west, and so was Marcus, but Roy knew Siegel’s reach extended to all corners of the country, including the Alaskan and Hawaiian territories.
“You have to go,” Roy told her, “and make it clear you’re not on board with what we can assume are his romantic intentions. You need to use all your womanly wiles to head him off.”
Roy’s bright yellow Packard was hardly suitable for surreptitiously keeping an eye on Gwendolyn, so Roy arranged to borrow a friend’s black Buick Roadmaster. The plan was to park a discreet distance from Siegel’s house and wait until Gwendolyn reappeared either safe and intact or running screaming into the night. Either way, they’d be there.
Gwendolyn got out of the Roadmaster and walked toward Siegel’s castle, cursing her decision to wear that goddamnably glorious bracelet to Romanoff’s. Mama had always warned her that jewelry would be the death of her. Naturally, Gwendolyn hadn’t paid the slightest attention, but now she wished she’d marked Mama’s words more carefully. As magnificent as it was, the cursed bracelet almost hurt when she put it on now.
It was Siegel himself, dressed in a snugly cut tuxedo, who opened the door. He displayed an oily smile she hadn’t seen on him before. “I just won a hundred clams.”
He stepped to one side. “You look incredible.” Without asking, he slipped the white chinchilla wrap she’d borrowed from Madame Alla from her shoulders and guided her into the vast living room, where a trio of people were talking on a sofa. The room had a vaulted ceiling with crossbeams painted glossy black and walls jammed with paintings of seminude Rubenesque women draped in translucent cloths. They were interspersed with Cubists, which Gwendolyn had never understood.
Siegel swept his hand toward the middle of the room. “You’ve met George, and of course you know Alice.” Alice observed Gwendolyn over her martini glass with the superiority of a reformed virgin. Siegel jutted his head toward the third person sitting on an easy chair. It was the moose with the wild boar eyes she’d seen at Romanoff’s. “This here’s Mickey.”
Raft and Alice were seated on one of a pair of black leather sofas, he in a tuxedo identical to Siegel’s and she in a metallic gold dress. Gwendolyn had seen that material when she was shopping for her own outfit. She remembered how it slid through her fingers like oil. It must have been hell to sew, but it shimmered magnificently in the glow of Siegel’s subdued lighting. Even so, Alice still looked like a five-and-dime Harlow.
“So it’s just us?” Gwendolyn asked.
Siegel balanced a tray of cocktails in his hand. “Martini?”
“You better catch up,” Raft said. Even in an expensive tuxedo, the actor managed to look sleazier than the doorman at a dollar-an-hour hotel. No wonder he and Alice got on so well. “We’re on our second round.”
Gwendolyn hesitated for the briefest moment before picking up the martini. Of course there would be cocktails, she thought.
Gwendolyn wasn’t much of a drinker. In the first place, her mother had died of alcohol poisoning. And in the second place, it didn’t take much booze to make her sick. Upchucking on Errol Flynn was enough embarrassment to last a lifetime. But she was loathe to commit any faux pas that was going to get Siegel offside, so she took a glass and wondered how the hell she was going to fake her way through.
Siegel followed her to the leather sofas and glided alongside Gwendolyn. He raised his martini. “Here’s to The Maltese Falcon.”
“To the what?” Gwendolyn asked.
“Maltese Falcon, honey.” Alice’s words came out slurred. “The picture I’ll be shooting over at Warners real soon. Got a nice little part in it.” She indicated Raft with her elbow and managed to spill some of her martini on her dress, but neither of them seemed to notice. “Georgie-porgie was offered the lead, but he’s knocked it back.”
&
nbsp; “So who’s getting it?” Gwendolyn lifted the martini to her mouth, but only pressed it to her lips, repressing a wince at the taste of bitter vermouth.
“Bogart,” Raft grunted. “It’s a remake of a picture they’ve filmed twice before and it’s flopped both times. Eh! He can have it.”
“On the other hand, I said yes right away,” Alice said. “You gotta grab those opportunities and run with ’em. Am I right?” She kept her eyes on Gwendolyn as she drained her martini.
Gwendolyn crossed her legs. Look at you, she thought, wanting me to act like I’m your best girlfriend now that you’ve got a part in a big Warners movie. She pictured her martini glass filled to the brim with navy blue India ink and how easy it would be to throw the whole thing in Alice’s face and stain the bitch for months.
“Something wrong with your drink?” Siegel asked.
It wasn’t hard to miss how much closer now his left knee was to her right one. “No, it’s perfect,” Gwendolyn assured him. “I just like to savor my drinks. Don’t y’all worry none; I’ll catch up by the end of the night.”
For the next twenty minutes the conversation floated around Alice’s part in The Maltese Falcon and how she would ace the role of the receptionist’s sister. It didn’t take a genius to figure out the evening had more than one goal. For Alice, it was about lording her big break over Gwendolyn. But Siegel’s knee had its own agenda. When he picked up a cracker piled with bleu cheese, he did it with such concentrated deliberation it almost forced her to look at him. Instantly, she saw why. He wanted her to see the revolver strapped under his left arm.
By the time the others finished their third round, Gwendolyn knew Siegel was keenly aware she was barely halfway through her first. He kept looking at her even when one of the others—Alice mostly—was talking. There was no sign, smell, nor sound from the kitchen indicating any dinner in progress. Were the bleu cheese and water crackers going to be the only food tonight? No wonder all three of them were pie-eyed.
Citizen Hollywood (Hollywood's Garden of Allah novels Book 3) Page 25
