The Devil's Stronghold

by Leslie Ford

  He looked at me questioningly. “And I didn’t think it would be him. Was it a dame, Mother? Did some dame get you on our trail?”

  “What do you mean by ‘our’ trail?”

  I asked it as casually as I could, but to my surprise his face brightened.

  “The big Sheep. You’ve seen him. Sheep Clarke—he’s your waiter. He called me at the lab and said you’d come. I wouldn’t have got your wire till I got home at seven. You’ve seen Sheep.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ve seen Sheep. Is he a friend of yours too?”

  “Oh, Sheep’s my pal. Sheep’s tops. He and I were shipmates. Sheep’s a right guy, Ma. You’ll be nuts about him.”

  “Good,” I said.

  I didn’t add anything. His enthusiasm for Sheep was too warm and too spontaneous for me to start right away asking him why, if Sheep was such a right guy and knew who I was, he’d turned Miss McShane loose on me. And I didn’t want to bring up the little McShane. I thought others had better bring her up—not me.

  His face had sobered again. “But come on, Ma—come clean. Did somebody give you a sob story about us? Because you’ve got to be on our side, Mother. That’s why we wrote you. We need you—boy, do we need you! You see, just as everything gets set, this dame sticks her snoot in, and we’re damned if we’re going to take it. We tried to explain in the letter, but we didn’t want to worry you—”

  “Who is this ‘we’?” I asked. “You and Sheep still?”

  He grinned at me. “No. All three of us cooked that up. Molly was supposed to mail it. That was about a week ago. But if you didn’t get it, and it wasn’t this dame I’m talking about that told you, why, I guess you don’t know who our Molly is, do you, Ma?”

  He grinned again. “I mean, mine and Sheep’s. She belongs to us, and this dame’s going to get her dirty mitts chopped off at the elbow if she doesn’t keep ’em off our girl.”

  Chapter Four: Star-makers

  ONE THING AT LEAST seemed clear to me at this point, if only one. It didn’t take much mental effort to figure out who it was Molly McShane had thought I was. It was relieving, in a sense; it cleared up the little matter of Sheep’s note. He’d meant me, and Molly had jumped to another conclusion. But if anything else was clear, it had escaped me. Bill evidently didn’t know “this dame’s” name, for one thing, or he’d have used it, and for another thing, Molly McShane quite evidently didn’t know what she looked like.

  “Who was it, Ma?” Bill demanded again. “What made you come out? I mean, it must have been something—”

  “It was, angel,” I said. “A friend of mine wrote me. She seemed to have the idea you were going to hell, jet-propelled. Also not doing any work. It was Lucille Gannon.”

  “Oh, cripes. Lucille Gannon. She gives me a pain. The hell I’m not doing any work—we’re both on the Dean’s List. That’s not what she’s beefing about, Mother. It’s her Gee Gee. That’s her beef—and our mistake.”

  He gave me a sardonic and rueful grin.

  “I guess we’re just boys from the country. We figured she’d want to help out—Molly’s under contract to her husband and the best bet he’s got. But, boy! were we crazy. She hit the ceiling. We gathered the less Gee Gee sees of Molly, even if it costs him money, the better Lucille’s going to like it. And how.”

  “She didn’t mention her husband, dear,” I said.

  “She wouldn’t. But that’s the dope. You’d think she’d have more sense than to try to get her hooks into Molly.” I wondered whether he might not have something. Lucille’s letter about his moral dissolution could easily enough be a smoke screen to cover what she thought was really her own husband’s wayward trail. She might have thought that if I came out and raised holy hell it would scare Gee Gee back into harness. But it’s hard to confine an irrational woman in a rational pattern, so I had no idea really what was in her mind.

  The broad grin came back to Bill’s face. “Let me tell you about the little Moll. Did you see Farewell, My Life?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, she was in that. George Gannon produced it. She was mostly on the cutting-room floor, but that was because the star put up such a beef. George was afraid she’d walk out of the new picture he was making.”

  He was genuinely indignant. I waited, trusting that if I sat tight and listened carefully, sooner or later something that was simple and comprehensible would come out of this mare’s nest.

  He relaxed then and grinned at me again. “You see, Ma, Molly McShane’s our girl.”

  “So you said,” I observed. “I’m still a little fuzzy.”

  “I mean, we’ve got a deal.” He began to laugh. “Me and Sheep. We’ve got a deal. We’re star-makers.”

  “You’re what?” I demanded.

  “Star-makers. We’re making a star out of Molly McShane. And she’s a honey, Ma—you’ll love her. Now wait a minute—don’t go eastern or maternal on us. I promised ’em you wouldn’t. So you’ve got to wait till you see her. She’s got everything.”

  “I’m going to see her some time?”

  “Sure, tonight. It’s my night to take her out. It’s Sheep’s night on.”

  I looked at him blankly. That seemed to amuse him too.

  “Didn’t la Gannon tell you? I’m a waiter here. Sheep and I work a staggered shift. We figured it was a neat way to meet a lot of the big shots. You know, they like to be democratic. All kinds of people come here, glad to give you a hand because you’re a waiter and going to school, that wouldn’t let you past the front desk if you tried to see ’em at the studios. You’d be surprised—”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised at anything, any more,” I said. “All I’d like to do is find out what you’re talking about. Why don’t you begin at the beginning? I’ll try not to go maternal and eastern on you.”

  “Okay. I wish old Sheep was here.”

  He disappeared into the hall and came back in a moment with Sheep, apparently materialized out of thin air except that he was carrying a table, on it the most extraordinary assortment of raw vegetable matter—some whole and recognizable, some grated and partly so, some juiced and not recognizable at all. An herbivorous animal was clearly in residence at the Casa del Rosal, maybe the Yearling, in person.

  Sheep put the table down and came in. “Hello, Mrs. Latham. It’s swell of you to come out here to help us—” He stopped as Bill kicked him in the shin, his freckled face getting redder and his grin more sheepish by the second.

  “She didn’t get our letter. Lucille wrote to her about us—she’s come to rescue us from sin and vice. Wait till she finds out what we’re really in.”

  Sheep turned a still deeper brick red. His sleeves seemed to have shrunk another inch.

  “But first we’ve got to tell her about Molly.”

  Sheep nodded earnestly. “It’s like this, ma’am. We were in Galveston—”

  He sounded a little like Sergeant Buck, the only other person who calls me “ma’am,” but this time it was only Texas.

  “And we got plastered one night, Ma.”

  While the solid vegetables wilted and the liquid ones precipitated in the bottom of their glass, I heard the story. And reduced to some kind of order, the facts were simple if fantastic. They got plastered. They met a girl who took them to a juke-box joint that ran amateur talent shows. That night the hot number was Doreen McShane. They wanted another girl, but Doreen’s mother was there. They couldn’t have been too plastered, or at least they managed some way to convince Mrs. McShane they had important Hollywood connections. It was a dilapidated, white-bearded gag of such crippled antiquity that they never expected to be taken seriously—and when they woke up next morning, Doreen and her father were downstairs in the hotel lobby.

  They thought of the fire escape, but there wasn’t one. Then they remembered they did have Hollywood connections—they knew Eustace Sype. Furthermore, Bill knew Mrs. George Gannon. They knew one or two others, including stars of greater or less magnitude, who’d sweated it out on
rain-drenched coral islands entertaining the Navy and the G.I.’s and who might or might not remember them. They had a pretty impressive bank roll between them, thanks to their aviators’ pay, no dependents, and usually abstemious habits. They took a cold shower and went downstairs with a deal cooked up, depending on what Doreen McShane’s father was like and what Doreen looked like in the light of day. And her father was sweet and sort of pathetic, and Doreen looked fine. In fact, Doreen looked wonderful—young, and scared, and wonderful.

  “And you forgot to mention all this when you were home on terminal leave,” I said.

  They both grinned.

  “We were plenty scared ourselves,” Bill said. “We didn’t know how we were going to swing it. You see, they believed us. We’d have felt like dirty dogs to—well, you know. It was more than a good gag, by that time. But it sure takes a lot of dough to keep a gal in the right places where the right people can see her with the right clothes on. We wouldn’t have got to first base if we hadn’t taken Eustace Sype in on it.”

  “And you wait, Mrs. Latham,” Sheep added. “She’s not just cheesecake and cream. She’s got something. She can act. Can’t she, Bill?”

  Bill agreed she could. And they were going to show me. That set them off again. If anything was so hilariously amusing as they seemed to think all this was, I dare say it was worth it.

  “She’s going to put on an act for you, Mrs. Latham,” Sheep said. “She knows you’re here. We weren’t going to tell you. We wanted you to see she really can act. It’s something Bill dreamed up—”

  He was interrupted by an angry bellow, a violent one-man upheaval, out in the tiled hallway.

  “Waiter! Where’s my order! Sheep!”

  The herbivorous client was plainly impatient. Bill jumped to the door. “On your way, boy! It’s You Know Who. Got to keep him happy.”

  He held the door open. Reflected in the mirror across my room, dancing up and down in his own open door, was a very short roly-poly little man with peeled, popped-out, brown eyes. He looked like an irate pygmy on the warpath, compared to the two six-footers now rushing his sustenance to him—though few pygmies would have had the courage of his sartorial convictions. Electric-blue slacks and a plum-colored shirt with short sleeves, open at the neck and with its tail hanging out, made him a startling figure. He was gesticulating with a cigar chewed to soggy shreds at one end and stone cold at the other. He hadn’t shaved for some time, and there was much more black bristly hair on his face than had ever been recently on his shiny barren pate.

  “I call!” he shouted. “I wait! What happens? Nothing! This, I don’t like!”

  He jammed his cigar into his mouth and jerked it out again.

  Bill hastily pulled my door shut. Through it I could hear him and Sheep pouring on oil and soothing sirup.

  You Know Who, I gathered, was a person of considerable importance, whose name was not to be bandied loosely about. When Bill came back he didn’t mention it. He was looking at his watch.

  “Gee, I told her I’d get her at seven,” he said. “I’d better shove. She’s at the other end of the hotel. Shall I bring her here, or do you want to meet us in the cocktail lounge? I’ve reserved a table.”

  “Are waiters allowed to eat with the guests?” I asked.

  I saw now why Lucille Gannon had felt it was necessary for Gee Gee to explain me so I could get a room in this exclusive caravanserai. And I supposed also that the terrible thing had been explained—the one really unpardonable sin, the thing Bill was doing that was so awful she didn’t feel free to tell me and that I’d have to see for myself. Bill was a waiter. That would be like Lucille. Unless, of course, there was something I still didn’t know.

  “I’m not a waiter till noon tomorrow, Ma. I’m a young man about town tonight. You’re in the democratic West now, lady. Anybody’s as good as anybody else as long as he’s got the dough to prove it.”

  “All right, sweetie,” I said. “I’ll meet you in the lounge.”

  I washed my face and changed my dress. Being relieved at not finding my son wallowing around in dens of vice among the grosser fleshpots, I suppose, I could afford to be amused rather than alarmed at the fantastic nonsense he and his friend Sheep were involved in. Or so I thought at the moment. As for the girl, I was anxious to see her. What kind of an actress she was, was going to be shown far better by the ordinary course of events than by any amateur script Bill and Sheep could ever cook up for her to perform. When she found I wasn’t “this dame” who was going to get her dirty mitts chopped off at the elbow, she was going to need to be some kind of an actress.

  Chapter Five: Hunter or hunted?

  THE COCKTAIL LOUNGE was back along the flower-bordered flagstone path in the main group of low, white, stuccoed buildings surrounding a small central patio. The glass doors opened into a narrow foyer with walls of eggplant-tinted glass, the dining-room on the left, the lounge on the right. A wood fire was burning in a huge ranch-type fireplace on one side, with maidenhair fern and orchids and showering begonias growing from niches in the rock chimney breast. The rest of the room was chartreuse and lemon-yellow, the rugs, the intimate leather seating compartments softly lighted from behind the cornice at the top of the eggplant-tinted walls. A curving panel of glass formed the side of the room opposite the fireplace, and gave a long lovely view sweeping the whole length of the narrow Canyon. The room was not crowded. Fifteen people or so were standing or seated on high yellow leather stools at the bar curving in around the corner opposite the door. The tables were empty except for one large but pleasantly secluded arrangement, at the left end of the glass wall, that looked like a luxuriously padded semicircular bathtub. A man’s head and a woman’s head with shoulders were sticking up out of it, looking around to see who else was there.

  The steward belonged to an older school of hotel personnel than the others I’d seen around. If he didn’t approve of a waiter’s mother being his guest he didn’t show it. He led me with the dignity of the presiding bishop to the table Bill had reserved. We had to pass the table in the corner, and as we did I was startled to hear my name.

  “Grace! Bless me, my dear! It isn’t actually you, is it, darling?”

  I turned. It was the man in the overstuffed bathtub— though that seems a vulgar thing to call its chartreuse leather elegance—and he was someone I had never laid eyes on before. He was unbelievably fat, with a thin black mustache dripping, Chinese fashion, at either end of his mouth. His brows had an Oriental upward curve, and his eyes were somewhere in the glistening rolls of fat, shining and twinkling. He was very short, so short his elbows could hardly reach the table. He was holding his right hand out to me—the last third of his stubby index finger entirely covered by a carved jade Buddha— and still I had never seen him before.

  “Grace! It’s been years, darling. Years and years and years! Eustace—Eustace Sype. Don’t tell me you’ve—”

  “Oh,” I said. “Hello, Eustace. I didn’t recognize you.”

  “No one ever does, darling. None of my old friends.” He shook, as if a subterranean disturbance was causing considerable surface reaction. “I couldn’t be the tallest man in the world so I decided to be the widest. I’ve done very well, wouldn’t you say, dear?”

  “Superbly,” I said, and with just cause. Still, anything that changed the Stinky Sype I’d known, was all to the good. And he had been nice to my son. I thanked him for it.

  “Oh, he’s divine, Grace! He’s a divine young man. The Navy did a first-rate job on him. He’s enchanting, dear!” He put his left hand out and closed it over his companion’s bejeweled hand. “And you must meet my friend.”

  His friend, silent and a little watchful up to then, responded with a quick surface smile. She was blond, not young, pretty dazzling, opulently dressed, a sable coat casually drooping from her plumpish black-satin shoulders.

  “Mrs. Kersey, Grace. Viola Kersey.”

  Mrs. Kersey’s smile switched on and off again. As she started to raise her han
d Eustace plopped a hand down on it, fluttering his other toward the door.

  “But, wait, darling. Here they come. Here are Bill and Molly. Come, darlings—come and join us. We’ll all dine here.”

  I turned quickly. They were just coming in. Some sixth sense told me that Eustace Sype should not be a witness to Molly’s meeting and mine. His bright little eyes were too eager. And perhaps it wasn’t a sixth sense at all but just a common one, based on the known fact that fat though a leopard can get with good hunting, his spots are still the ones he was born with. Or perhaps it was just the instinctive desire of the female to protect her young, which in my case seemed to have taken on a tripartite division, consisting for the moment of my first-born, his friend the Sheep, and their personally adopted ward the tiger kitten.

  Whatever it was, it occurred to me irresistibly to avoid a meeting in front of Eustace Sype and his lady friend Mrs. Viola Kersey. Bill and Molly were still far enough away for me to do it.

  “Later, Eustace,” I said, “f haven’t seen Bill for ages.”

  I went toward the two of them, so that I was between Molly McShane and Eustace Sype when she first became aware of who I was.

  “Mother, here she is. This is Molly.”

  Bill was six feet of pride and pleasure. It was very nice. It beamed from him. And the girl at his side—she didn’t stop moving exactly, but her legs seemed to have turned to sticks of wood, and she swallowed, and swallowed again. Her hyacinth-blue eyes had the stunned look a small child’s eyes have when it’s made a hideous mistake it never meant to make, and knows no possible excuse and no conceivable way out. It wasn’t a tiger kitten that was looking at me. It was a little shorn lamb of a soul that didn’t know which way to turn.

  “Hello, Molly,” I said. “It’s nice to see you.”

  I put out my hand. Somehow she managed to get her hand up. It was frozen, every nerve in it quaking and quivering.