The Devil's Stronghold

by Leslie Ford

  And yet I had the impression that somewhere back of all this frenetic hopping and seething was a genuinely nice guy but one so harassed by intrigue, real or imagined, and the frantic pace he lived at, that he simply didn’t dare relax. The way his bright, peeled brown eyes popped out at me as he snapped his head forward to acknowledge Captain Crawford’s introduction, led me to believe his wife was exaggerating when she said he was dying to meet me. I didn’t mind, however, because it was all too obvious that my presence wasn’t the supreme irritant. It was Viola Kersey’s, which was no doubt the reason I was sure there was a heart of quiet gold concealed somewhere behind all the irascible jumps and jerks. His eyes were popping at Mrs. Kersey now as Captain Crawford asked if she’d expected to see him in the hotel.

  “Never!” cried Mrs. Kersey. “Never in the whole wide world. I did call his office, but his secretary said he was in Palm Springs with his wife. It was entirely by accident I learned he was here. The telephone operator was sending a telegram over the switchboard. I always think other people’s telegrams are so interesting, so I listened. One was to Mrs. George G. Gannon in Palm Springs. She spelled out the signature, ‘Gee Gee,’ and said the room charge was 101.”

  She smiled at Captain Crawford, ingenuously. “So it was quite a coincidence, although I so often think coincidence is only the unbeliever’s way of admitting the hand of fate in our puny lives.”

  I had the feeling that it was almost more than George Gannon could take. And Mrs. Kersey then turned her coconut-cream smile on him. “I do think ‘Gee Gee’ is awfully sweet, and so perfect for you, George, dear. Perhaps if I’d thought of that, our marriage would never have ended the way it did.”

  I thought it would probably have ended with a shotgun or old-fashioned razor and George happily doing the last mile up to the Thirteen Steps, if his present state was any indication of an earlier one. His sparsely thatched skull was dotted with shiny globules of inner brine. If I were Viola Kersey, I thought, I’d shut my mouth and take the next train back to Chicago. But she was enormously pleased with herself. She had her former husband right on the griddle where it was hottest, and exactly where she wanted him.

  “You see,” she said, “it was not a personal call, Captain. It was entirely business. My husband, Samuel C. Kersey, of the Kersey Foods Incorporated, has given me a few pennies to play with. I’m so interested in the motion-picture industry, and an independent producer like Mr. Gannon is exactly what I’m hunting for. I have a story too, and the girl I want to play it is under contract to George. So I think we’re going to be able to do something. George is really most enthusiastic about it. And I’m a very good business woman, Captain. Have you seen this girl Molly McShane they were talking about last night?”

  She didn’t look at me, nor did George Gannon. Captain Crawford did, briefly, before he turned, without answering the question, to George.

  “You admit now you did see this girl.”

  “That’s right, I do admit it, but I don’t want the papers screaming it all over the country. I don’t want my-wife to get the idea I hole in here for any flapdoodle. I come here to work, by God, and I don’t want everybody from Maine to Florida thinking I’m not working. These damned reporters and columnists’ll crucify you.”

  Mr. Gannon jumped up and spread his arms out to show us. Then he jumped around the other way, jabbing his cigar at Captain Crawford.

  “Here I’m working. This girl barges in. This girl I never see before. So she’s tight. So she’s lost her bag. So what? I gotta get her out before somebody else comes in. I gotta get her out before everybody from Maine to Florida yells, ‘Hey, what’s he doing with a dame in his room when he says he’s working? What’s he doing?’ So I’m getting her out when Viola comes. I’m getting her out and keeping my mouth shut. I’m not telling anybody! Police—anybody! See?”

  His idea that a minor incident in his private existence would have such impact as to rock the East Coast seemed to me distorted, but I live a secluded life. That his ulcers were due for a more soothing diet than his raw produce was something to be considered, however. He was all over the room acting his parts—the girl, Viola, and the population of the Eastern seaboard—before he dropped into his chair.

  Mrs. Kersey smiled at him again. “I wouldn’t have told a soul, Georgie, dear. I have a clean mind. I assumed it was your wife, darling.”

  I thought he was going into another state, but he just looked as if he could have strangled her with the utmost pleasure.

  “Well, there’s no use you two quarreling,” Captain Crawford said amicably. “Especially if you’re going into business together. I expect that’s what you were down talking about, around three o’clock, was it, Mr. Gannon? One of my boys says he saw you.”

  George Gannon clenched his fists and drew in his breath and held it. He exhaled it with terrific self-control.

  “Look. Look, Captain Crawford. I’m trying to go to sleep. You come in. You tell me this girl’s dead on the steps. You’re going. I’m trying to go to sleep another time. I’m nearly crazy, not knowing what this bitch’s got in her mind. I get up. I take a shower. I take a drink. I take another drink. I’m nearly crazy. I decide I’ll go see her. I want to see what she’s after. If I go the front way I run into your flatfeet. So I go the back way. I go in her house. She’s got on every light in the place. She’s in the bathroom with the door locked. So she comes out. And to make a long story short, she says she’s going to break my contract with Molly McShane. She says you play ball or I take Molly. This I don’t like. This makes me see red. And then she says we do business together!”

  George Gannon flung his arms up with special violence.

  “What about those lights, Mrs. Kersey? It isn’t that you’re worried about anything, is it?”

  “No. I like lights.”

  “So you have a chair and pillow in the bathroom?” George Gannon demanded. “And the door locked—because you like light.”

  I thought that tor an instant Viola Kersey felt little more kindly toward him than he did toward her. But she covered up quickly.

  “Well, Gee Gee. You were so cross at me, dear, and you’ve got such a violent temper. I thought I’d feel a little safer—”

  “So you opened the bathroom door and came out and talked to him.”

  “Yes, of course, Captain. I knew your men were outside. He wouldn’t dare do anything, with them around.”

  She smiled sweetly at him. Captain Crawford hesitated a moment. “All right. I’ll see you all later.” He turned to me. “Just check this statement you made last night, Mrs. Latham. See if there’s anything you want to change or amplify.”

  It was the police stenographer’s report, all neatly typed, and there was nothing I wanted to add or change. All I wanted to do was get out and go over to Eustace Sype’s. It seemed even more important now than it had before, and I was naive enough to assume that all I had to do was look in the telephone book. He wasn’t listed, of course, nor were the George G. Gannons. But that was reasonable, as it was obvious Gee Gee wouldn’t want everybody from Maine to Florida able to call him up as the impulse seized them. I might have asked him, but I didn’t have a chance. He strode past me along the flagstone path without speaking, disguised in dark glasses, which was also reasonable considering the trouble he had escaping the Pursuit of Women.

  It was one-thirty before the simple expedient of asking the girl at the desk occurred to me. She put in a call for a taxi, which was how I saw Molly McShane in a totally new light.

  She was sitting on the low white brick wail under the entrance awning. I didn’t recognize her at first. She looked like any bobby-soxer from Los Angeles to Baltimore waiting for the school bus. Her hair was slicked back and caught with a curved barrette at the nape of her neck. She had on a blue sweater and plaid skirt, scuffed brown moccasins and short white socks. A camel’s-hair coat was on the waif beside her, one book on top of it and another open on her crossed knee. She was chewing her pencil and looking as dejected as
all her class when confronted with the grim problem of unfinished homework. The bright red polish was gone from her finger nails and her lipstick was of a much milder hue than it had been the day before. She glanced up as I came down the walk, a pretty unhappy and disturbed kid, nothing defiant or sultry about her.

  “Hello, Molly,” I said.

  “Hello, Mrs. Latham. Have you seen Sheep? He’s supposed to take me to school.”

  I looked at her books. One was the Elements of Euclid, the other Plato’s Dialogues. I must have looked as startled as I was.

  “That’s Sheep and Bill,” she said. “They say I have to train my mind.”

  She said it so dolefully and without inner conviction that I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  “You only have to finish high school out here, but Sheep and Bill say I have to do two years at U.C.L.A. They say it makes a lot of difference, some way.”

  The idea of my son and his shipmate having developed such academic standards was something. The contrast between that and Lucille Gannon’s harrowing alarums and excursions over their moral disintegration seemed to me fairly typical of the trend of middle age deploring the youth. If Molly was a trollop, I thought, she had certainly fallen into the hands of a couple of Platonic wolves. I felt really sorry for the poor lamb. She put Euclid on top of the Dialogues and sat studying her folded hands.

  “I’m sorry about last night, Mrs. Latham,” she said slowly. “I had a letter in my bag I didn’t want anybody to see. It would have made a terrible lot of trouble for— for everybody. For just everybody. I didn’t want Sheep and Bill to be worried about it. They’ve been so sweet to me I didn’t want them to think— Well, they might have thought somebody was double-crossing them. And it isn’t true. It really isn’t. But it’s bound to look like it. I guess that’s the reason it’s always best to tell the truth in the first place, isn’t it? That’s what Socrates would have said. I guess that’s one of the reasons it’s good to train your mind. You find out that people knew the same answers a long time ago, don’t you?”

  She looked up at me, her eyes a little blind and tearful. She swallowed, and looked down at her quiescent hands again.

  “It’s just all so miserable,” she said simply. “It makes it look like we were lying to them. I said we—we ought to tell them. Because it’s not our fault, really. We did the best we could. It was the only way we knew.”

  “What do you mean, Molly?”

  “Well, I mean—”

  She looked up quickly. A cab was streaking into the driveway. It skidded around on the outside of two wheels and came to a stop in front of us.

  “You ladies 102, Room 102? Mrs. Latham?”

  The moment when I might have got the truth from a subdued and contrite Molly McShane was gone. The driver had whipped out and opened the door for me. Molly was blowing her nose and sniffling a little.

  “Where to, lady?”

  “Saks-Fifth Avenue,” I said. It was the only place I could think of quickly, knowing nothing about Los Angeles. If I’d given him the address I had in Bel Air, I doubt if Molly could have sat there so meekly. When we came to the parked intersection at the end of the Canyon I gave him Eustace Sype’s address.

  Before we got to Stone Canyon Road a low-slung, dilapidated monster streaked by us. It had a sheep’s head and a billy goat’s head painted on the back. The Sheep was at the wheel, Molly beside him. I took it my son the goat was doing his staggered shift with trays and things back at the hotel.

  “That’s one of them hot rods,” the driver said. “They ought to be a law. But I guess they don’t kill themselves unless they get in too big a hurry.”

  “Where’s U.C.L.A.?” I asked.

  He waved his arm out to the left to an enormous straggling plain of pseudo-Byzantine buildings lying below us as we turned right into Stone Canyon Road. And from then until we ended way up on top of the immediate world I heard what the Trojans were going to do to the Illini—were going to do, but didn’t. I’ve always been a little sorry about the driver’s hundred bucks. At the moment I was concerned about how Sheep, after delivering Molly for her mental training, was going to get to Pasadena without getting in too big a hurry—and about how I was going to get inside the raspberry stuccoed mansion with the forbidding raspberry stuccoed wall flanked with mountains of a blue flowering stuff that has a name that sounds like lumbago and that I’ve never seen anywhere else.

  I had a copy of The Coming of Age of E.P.S., but it was in the attic of the yellow brick house on P Street in Georgetown, and I was at E.P.S.’s front gate in Bel Air. I got out. The gate was open a foot or so, with a large sign that said Private, No Tourists. I went in and up the white coral roadway to the front door—Private. Beware of the Dogs. I could hear them yapping like mad inside the house as I rang the doorbell and set up a series of tintinnabulations that sounded like all the temple bells of the forbidden city. And to my great surprise, Eustace Sype opened the door.

  I could tell it was Eustace by the sheer breadth and poundage, because otherwise he looked very odd. He had on a white embroidered mandarin robe, red slippers with their toes turned up, and a curious little hat that I presumed was also Chinese. Pekinese dogs swarmed around him like a cloud of pug-nosed bumblebees.

  “Darling, how sweet of you to cornel Dear Lucille phoned me to expect you. Hasn’t she turned into a dreary bitch? I’m so fond of her. Do come, dear. You’ll forgive my servantless house—they were called away on business. This way, darling.”

  He waddled in front of me to a pair of black-lacquered doors and pushed them open into an enormous room that opened out into the most extraordinary panorama of ocean, city, and mountains, or would have if a heavy smog, as they call it, hadn’t obscured everything below us. The room itself was what I imagine a sybaritic sultan of the Chinese Ottoman Empire would admire, and lovely in a way, although my knees creak when I sit on overstuffed divans six inches from the floor. Eustace fluttered a white hand for me to sit on an old gold brocaded one some ten feet from the cherry-red silk one that was apparently reserved for him. It had a back and one side, the other side missing so he could reach out to a low teakwood table on which there were carved jade and silver ornaments and a jade box of perfumed cigarettes. The cherry-red throne seat, as it were, was like a billowing feather bed fluffed out, not a crease or wrinkle in it.

  It was basically also about six inches from the floor, and how Eustace was going to get into it without the aid of an electric crane I didn’t see. I was fascinated at the way he did it. He reminded me of Queen Victoria, who never had to look to see if her chair was there—it always had been, it always would be. Eustace’s own derriere was royal to that extent. He stood fluttering me to my place, and then he gave his silken-shod hoofs an absurd little outward thrust on the polished floor and sank, collapsing into his down cushions, lolling there luxuriously, his dogs around him, a grotesque sybaritic Buddha, white against the cherry-red damask squeezing itself out around him.

  He surveyed me then, a humorous and not wholly unmalicious smile under his curved-up eyebrows.

  “What can I do for you, Grace, darling?”

  Chapter Thirteen: A horrible price to pay

  PUT SO SIMPLY, it was hard for me to say what it was I wanted and have any hope of an honest answer, now that Lucille had taken all the surprise element out of my visit.

  “You can tell me about Viola Kersey,” I said.

  “Viola Kersey? Oh, dear.”

  At least I’d surprised him with that question.

  “Dear Vi. She’s such a bore, isn’t she. A really profound bore. But she has a great deal of money. Which gives her a certain patina. Go away, boys and girls. Go away. Go away quickly!”

  He took his hands out of his sleeves and fluttered them around, shooing the flock of Pekinese off his person and place. They flew pell-mell out of the open windows onto the terrace.

  “Quiet, boys and girls,” he called. As they shut their yapping off like so many little spigots, he turned to
me again.

  “Viola has a great deal of money. I hope we can relieve her of a large chunk of it. That’s what I was discussing with her last evening. She wants to settle herself in Hollywood. Frankly, I think she’s yearning to get back at a few people she feels didn’t appreciate her. And then, of course—”

  Eustace shrugged.

  “Her husband is making fabulous amounts purveying congealed foods to hoi polloi, and dear Viola feels she might as well have the fun of throwing it away herself instead of having the government do it for her. It’s quite simple, darling. It’s done with race horses and scientific yachting expeditions, and with motion pictures. I think dear Viola’s really going to enjoy herself.”

  He looked at me thoughtfully.

  “And make restitution, in a sense.”

  “Restitution?”

  “Precisely, darling. I think the dear girl feels she treated poor old Gannon pretty shabbily, so she’s chosen him for her producer. He needs the money. Dear, dear— we all need the money. She has it.”

  Eustace shrugged again and smiled at me, squinting up his globular face in a very un-Chinese fashion except that his eyes were still as warm as bits of green jade.

  “Yes, I think it’s a highly satisfactory arrangement for all of us. Especially for Molly. She’s such a sweet child, isn’t she?”

  The face was wreathed in that specious smile again, but the eyes were bright and intently fixed on me, calculating, weighing my reactions with completely scientific detachment.

  “How does it affect Molly?” I asked.

  “Oh, dear. I do wish people’s emotions didn’t so befog their business acumen,” Eustace Sype said plaintively. “I don’t mean you, dear. I’m so glad you’re here, because you can be a very real help to us all. You see, Viola can do so much for dear little Molly. Let’s be completely realistic about it. It’s for her own good. I’m sure if someone like yourself could explain it to those two charming young men, they would see it in its true light. I’m sure they would never for an instant stand in her way. They must realize that delightful though their adventure has been, it can’t go on. I’m really afraid, Grace, they’re neglecting their studies, and as they’re working nights I’m afraid for their health. Truly, my dear.”