The Devil's Stronghold

by Leslie Ford

  “Eustace wanted us to join them, but I thought it would be better if we didn’t.”

  “Good,” Bill said. He couldn’t, being so much taller than the girl, see the agony in her face, or the quick relief at not having to face two more people, but he could feel the wooden hesitation in her body as he took her arm. “What’s the matter, Molly? Come on. She won’t bite.”

  Molly McShane moistened her full red lips. They stood out against the chalky whitewashed look of her sun browned skin as if they had no proper relation to it. She was scared, scared of what I was going to say and what I must be thinking. Nevertheless she was game about it. She even managed to toss Eustace a gay little gesture as we passed his table. Her voice was still lost even when we sat down; she was still holding her breath, waiting for the thin ice to break. When it didn’t, when I said nothing to indicate I’d seen her before or that she’d practically torn me verbally limb from limb, a puzzled disbelief crept into her eyes.

  Only once did they meet mine directly, as Bill and I sipped a Martini. There was a sudden mute and naked appeal in them that I couldn’t interpret. I didn’t know whether she was begging me to be silent or to say what I had to say then and there. I thought a cocktail would help her out, but it was tomato juice Bill ordered for her.

  “We don’t let her drink. She’s too young, and anyway it’s bad for her skin.”

  Now that she wasn’t in a passion of fury, she did look a lot younger than I’d thought of her as being, and so fragile that I decided they didn’t let her eat either. That was before I knew the camera adds its own ten pounds and one has to be a cadaver in private life not to be a fat lady on the screen. He ordered her a minute steak, however, and it was just as she was recovering enough to treat it as food and not a coiled rattlesnake to be poked gingerly at with the fork that I put an abrupt end to everything. It was entirely in the interests of keeping some kind of conversation going too, because I didn’t, at that time, care at all who Eustace Sype was with.

  “The woman with Eustace looks familiar to me,” I said. It was true, though until I found myself saying it I wasn’t conscious of having thought it. “Who is she? Mrs. Kersey; I think he said.”

  Bill glanced around. Molly was without interest in anything but the steak. “I don’t know. She’s new to me. Kersey?”

  He beckoned to the waiter. “Who’s the dame with Mr. Sype?”

  The gray-haired waiter leaned over the table. “One of the old-timers. Viola Van Zant, she used to be. Joe’d know her.”

  Molly McShane had her bite of steak halfway to her mouth. Her hand stopped, her mouth stayed half open, as if she had turned to sudden clay. She shut her mouth and put her fork down. The color began to seep slowly up along her throat and her high, delicately molded cheekbones. She seemed for a moment to have stopped breathing, and then her breath came in short, quick waves she had to control to keep quiet. She was the little jungle cat again, silent and intent, as wary and watchful as if the wind suddenly shifting had made her aware that the hunter was dangerously close.

  The hunter or the hunted? I couldn’t tell, not knowing how much was fear, how much anger. The hyacinth-blue eyes were black, sultry, and smoldering again. Her hands moved to her lap. I saw her open the crystal clasp of her black faille bag. She took out a good compact the size of a saucer, snapped it open, and held it up to her face. She wasn’t looking at herself. Her eyes were fixed beyond her own image, the mirror turned so she could see the woman sitting with Eustace Sype.

  “He always has some dame in tow,” Bill was saying. “You wonder where he picks some of them up. Business is business, I guess.”

  The name Viola Van Zant had meant nothing to him. It meant something to me—as the name Betty Grable would mean something to Bill someday if he found his own sons had never heard of her. And it seemed to mean a great deal to Molly McShane. She’d closed her compact and put it back in her bag. She was sitting there taut, withdrawn into herself, burning like an intense little flame, forcing herself to be quiet and controlled.

  Then she moved abruptly. “Excuse me, please, will you, Bill? I’ve got to go to the powder room. I’ll be back in just a minute.”

  Her words were so clipped and breathless that he looked around at her blankly.

  “Please, Bill—let me out.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing at all. Let me out, please.”

  He moved then, and she was out of the seat and across the room, looking neither to right nor left, swift as a burning arrow.

  “I don’t know what’s got into her tonight,” Bill said. “I don’t know what the hell’s the matter with her.”

  I didn’t either but I seemed to know or to guess rather more than he did.

  “What is the name of this dame you were talking about, Bill?” I asked. “The one you’re going to chop off at the elbows? What’s her name and what’s she got to do with Molly McShane?”

  He looked at me for a long moment, and then very deliberately turned in his seat and looked at the woman with Eustace. The two of them had their heads bent together, intently concerned with their own private business. Mrs. Kersey was talking, Eustace listening. Bill turned back. There was something about the set of his jaw that I didn’t like.

  “Come on,” he said shortly. “Let’s get out of here. Don’t look back. I don’t want them to know we’re interested. Make it snappy, will you?”

  I wished profoundly then that I’d kept my mouth shut. I wished I’d left it all—whatever it was—to Molly McShane.

  Chapter Six: Blackmail job

  WE WENT ACROSS THE LOUNGE to the foyer. Eustace Sype and Mrs. Viola Kersey were too intent on their own affairs to notice us until we’d passed them. Their eyes followed us then. I could feel them boring into our backs, and see them watching Bill when he left me in the foyer and went over to the bar to sign the check. Her eyes still on him, Mrs. Kersey was asking a question. When Eustace answered with an elaborate shrug, they both laughed, and somehow it didn’t look to me like pleasant laughter. Bill was talking to the gray-haired man behind the bar. When he turned, Eustace beckoned to him. He went over to their table and stood there a moment talking to them.

  “He wanted us to get Molly and come over to his house for a nightcap,” he said when he’d joined me again. “I told him we were busy.”

  We went outside and down the steps in silence. He seemed to be thinking things over seriously, and I let him think.

  “I was talking to Joe, over at the bar,” he said then, “tie’s been around a long time. He was one of the old originals—Keystone cop, Western bad-man stuff. Knows every jerk in town.”

  “Does he remember Viola Van Zant?”

  He nodded. “That’s the point. He says she was hot stuff—one of the old guard that bit the dust when sound came in. She tried to stick, but no soap. Then a big hunk of dough from Chicago came along and she grabbed him and got out. Joe says she blew in on the Chief this morning. He wanted to bet me a sawbuck she’s trying to stage a comeback. She’s taken 31-B. That’s the best suite in the whole joint—sixty-five smackers per diem, and, boy, it’s a honey. It’s just below you, on the bottom terrace. Oh, well.”

  He shrugged. “She may have been hot stuff in her day but nobody knows it now. Sic transit gloria mundi. They ought to put that in neon lights in every star’s dressing-room.”

  “Would she be ‘this dame’ that you people are so scared of?” I inquired patiently.

  He was silent for a moment.

  “I know it sounds screwy, Ma.” He was making an unsuccessful attempt to be casual about it. “But… we don’t know who she is. We don’t know her name. We just know she exists. We didn’t know that till a month ago, when we got our first real publicity break for the Moll. She was right on our trail from then on. And Molly’s never seen her. She doesn’t know her name either—or she didn’t when we were cooking up the deal to try to get you to come out.”

  He looked at me with a half grin.

  “I said i
t sounded screwy. You’ll just have to take our word for it. It’s a—a sort of blackmail job, in a way, Mother. This dame’s got some kind of hold on Molly and her parents. She keeps calling Molly and me and Sheep up long distance, from New York. I mean, it’s screwy as hell.”

  “Well,” I said, “I suppose you at least know what she wants.”

  “Oh, we know that. She wants us and Molly’s parents to get out of the picture. She’s going to take our little gal over. And I’m damned if I can see how it could be this Viola Van Zant woman. My guess is, Molly’s just got the jitters. She’s been a wreck ever since this started, the poor little devil.”

  I couldn’t tell whether he was dismissing the idea on my account or whether it was the truth he was telling, or thought he was telling.

  “You might have a look-see in the powder room,” he said. “I’ll stroll up to her room, just in case. If you aren’t here I’ll be along to your room in a jiffy.”

  We were in the central patio then. It was like a small, private walled garden, with a lighted fountain in the middle and a few other lights discreetly placed among the flowering trees. A pergola ran along the end of the main lobby building, with unobtrusive signs over the doors opening out into it. The first one said Telephone, the last said Powder Room.

  I didn’t expect to find Molly McShane there any more than Bill had expected me to. And I didn’t. There was no one there until just as I started to leave. Then a girl burst in. She was blond and slightly disheveled, and she could have stood rather less to drink than she’d had.

  “Is this yours?”

  She balanced herself against the door frame and shoved a black faille bag out at me. It was Molly’s, the one she’d taken the saucer-sized compact out of to get a look at Mrs. Kersey. Or it was one just like it.

  “No,” the girl said. “You’ve got yours. But here, you take it, anyway. I found it in the telephone booth, and I’m getting out of here. I don’t want some screwy dame to start yelling I lifted her crown jewels. If it’s a booby trap they can have it.”

  She came on in, dropped the bag on the glass-topped table along the mirrored wall, and looked at herself.

  “Gee. I look awful, and I feel awful.”

  She put one hand out to steady herself, and closed her eyes. Then she opened them and looked around.

  “What was I doing? Oh, I know. I was calling a taxi. I was going somewhere. I know—I was going home. That’s what I was going to do. I was going to get the hell out of here and go home.”

  She wove out, leaving Molly’s bag on the powder-strewn table. I picked it up and brushed it off. I could feel the big round compact through the cloth. If it was a booby trap, it was one in which Molly McShane herself had been caught, in a way. She’d whipped out at top speed, not to go to the powder room but to the telephone booth, and it was urgent enough for her to go to the nearest one and disturbing enough to make her dash off forgetting her bag.

  Bill had said she had the jitters, which was obviously the case—but it seemed to me, in spite of my son, that even if he and Sheep Clarke did not know the name of their persecutor, Molly McShane appeared to know it very well. She not only knew her name—she knew she was to be in the hotel that day, which was another fact she’d neglected to tell Bill and Sheep. There didn’t seem to be much doubt, I thought, that they were much deeper in the dark about the whole thing than their little Moll was.

  I thought back to her blistering attack on me. You’ll not get one cent of money out of me, and not one line of publicity. We’ll see you in hell first. I wondered. Unlike Bill and Sheep, again, Miss Molly McShane appeared to know, exactly and specifically, what “this dame” wanted. That, however, was stranger still. If Mrs. Kersey could wear the clothes and jewels she did, and pay sixty-five dollars a day for a suite of rooms, money of the sort Molly and the two boys had couldn’t be expected to interest her. As for the publicity, they seemed to have to work for all they got. If Mrs. Kersey, qua Viola Van Zant, was trying to stage a comeback, she’d chosen very weak reeds to lean upon so far as I could see. Bill was surely right about one angle of it. It was screwy. It was about the screwiest business I’d heard of. Still, this was Hollywood, and I was just a woman from a far countree, where if one found an evening bag left in a hotel telephone booth the idea that it was a booby trap would never remotely present itself.

  I put Molly’s bag under my arm with my own and went back outside. Bill was nowhere in sight. Mrs. Viola Kersey and Eustace Sype were, however. They were coming down the flagged steps from the lounge. Eustace fluttered his hand at me.

  “Oh, Grace! Viola’s decided she’ll turn in early too. You both go the same way, so I’ll leave you together. Come for tea tomorrow, will you, darling? I’ll send my chauffeur at five. I don’t get up till four. Good night, dear. I’ll see you tomorrow. Not you, Viola. Just Grace. I’ve seen enough of you tonight, darling. It’s nice having you back.”

  He looked at his wrist watch.

  “I must run, darlings. I’ve got some people waiting for me at home and I’m terribly late. Good night.”

  “Isn’t he a lamb?”

  Mrs. Kersey said it with a warm, throaty chuckle.

  “He’s one of my oldest and dearest friends. Utterly sweet and utterly malicious. I wouldn’t trust him around the next corner, unless his own selfish aggrandizement was involved. He simply adores your son Bill.”

  “I think Bill’s fond of him too,” I said.

  “One is so blind when one is young,” said Mrs. Kersey. “One is the victim of so many disabling semantic reactions.”

  I was the victim of a disabling reaction of some kind, myself, if stubbing my toe on a flagstone could be so called. I couldn’t have been more surprised. Along with her cultivated voice, the star of the silent screen had picked up the words to go with it. It was startling. I hadn’t heard her speak till then, but I’d never have thought of her as zooming along on that conversational level. If she kept it up, I could see why Eustace Sype had had enough of her in one evening.

  She stopped and lifted her face to the evening air, and drew a deep, savoring breath, her jeweled hand raised, resting lightly on her full bosom.

  “Ah, Hollywood! It’s so wonderful to be back! Even the air—the soft, lovely air of it—has its memories, Mrs. Latham. Some happy, poignantly happy—some sad, poignantly sad. If we could only know. If we could only start our lives at the end, and know when we’re young, and be innocent and unsullied and ignorant when we’re old! Don’t you think so, Mrs. Latham?”

  “No,” I said. “I think it would be horrible. I like the present arrangement.”

  “Ah, but I’m a romantic, Mrs. Latham. I love romance. Hollywood is so full of romance.”

  “I believe that’s one of the chief complaints about it, isn’t it?” I remarked. “And it’s probably changed a lot since you were here.”

  She glanced at me quickly.

  “Then you remember me. Oh, how wonderful that is. It’s wonderful to be remembered. I’ve been happy away from here but never as happy as I once was. My husband tore me away. He said Love is a jealous god. He couldn’t share me with a hundred and twenty million people. And I was so young! I believed—and believing, I left—I left, and went with him.”

  “Are you back now?” I asked. “I mean, are you going back into pictures?”

  “I can’t decide. Dear Eustace insists, and there’s a producer—there’s always a producer, you know. But I’ve been so happy just being a simple wife. I can’t really decide. But I so love it here. The air is like wine. The wine of life.”

  She drew another deep and lingering breath of it.

  “It’s good to be alive, Mrs. Latham. I believe Life is the one great good.”

  I believed she had something. Most of the other goods were fairly useless without it, anyway. And I hoped she kept it. If she really was who Molly McShane seemed, to me, at any rate, to think she was, and had thought I was earlier, she only had until tomorrow noon to do something about it.


  I’m not sure Mrs. Viola Kersey didn’t sense a certain cynicism in her present audience, however, because she moved on beside me, rather abruptly leaving the Hollywood air to seep into her lungs by ordinary processes.

  “Your son said he and Miss McShane were coming to join you,” she said.

  I’d had the idea that was why she was dawdling. She wanted them to catch up with us.

  “I’m so interested in those dear young people,” she went on. “Eustace tells me how sweet and how unselfish those boys of yours have been to Miss McShane. It must be wonderful to have sons, Mrs. Latham. I never had a son. It was the great price I had to pay, my dear. Because Hollywood has changed. It’s all so different. We could have husbands—I had two before my last one, or was it three?—but we couldn’t have babies. They were afraid the fans wouldn’t approve. But, ah, how little they knew! And now, now, Mrs. Latham, they go to bed on December 31st and make a New Year’s announcement they’re going to have a baby the last of September, and never let you forget it. It’s so sweet, and so different. And it’s divine of the public—they love vital statistics. It’s sweet, isn’t it, Mrs. Latham?”

  I said I supposed it was. It happens not to be one of my major interests. I wasn’t really competent to discuss it.

  “And Miss McShane. Of course I’m interested in her too.” Mrs. Kersey spoke with less soul and ardor. “I knew her mother. She was a bad and wicked woman, Mrs. Latham.”

  I looked at her quickly then, and not unstartled, I may say.

  “You doubt me,” she said. “I see you doubt me, Mrs. Latham. But I know. Believe me, I know. Wisdom is a rare quality, Mrs. Latham. Perhaps her mother thought she was doing her best—but such a place, for a young girl! Eustace told me. Those sweet boys found her in a juke joint. Imagine, Mrs. Latham—that dear child in a juke joint!”

  She had whipped up such a warmth of devotion for Molly McShane at this point, and was apparently so absorbed in her passion, that it gave me a chance to glance back quickly to see if Molly and Bill were about to head into this too. They weren’t in sight, but someone else was. Even at that distance, and dimly lighted as the patio was, there was no mistaking the figure of Eustace Sype. He was moving not in our direction but in the opposite one, the way Bill had taken to go find Molly. It seems absurd to say he was moving stealthily, but that was definitely the impression he gave. And as if Mrs. Kersey were equipped with eyes in the back of her head, she went on without so much as stopping for a breath after she finished with the juke-box joint: