The Devil's Stronghold

by Leslie Ford

  Colonel Primrose got up and moved over to the fireplace. He stood watching her intently without seeming to be more than casually interested.

  “When did you decide you wanted to come to Hollywood, Mrs. Shavin?”

  She was silent for a moment, her thought processes as slow and plodding, I supposed, as her steps had been down the terrace walk.

  “From the day she was born,” she said at last. “God gave her to us in our middle age, when we’d lost hope of having a child to love and work for. We’d both been in service out here. We knew it was a place where there was opportunity for a girl, no matter where she came from. She almost never cried, like the other girls—she was always laughing, and she danced before she could walk. She made the two rooms we lived in like a big house full of sunshine. It was in Galveston, you can look in the court records. The place not fit for human beings to live in, and she made it happy and good for us from the day she was born. We’d do anything for her, sir.”

  Colonel Primrose watched her silently for a moment.

  “I would be glad to help you do something for her,” he said then. “So I’m going to ask you this question: You wouldn’t steal a diamond bracelet for her, would you, Mrs. Shavin?”

  If you’ve ever picked up a mud terrapin marauding the strawberry patch and seen it draw in its small, angry head and become an apparently lifeless shell, you have some idea of the way the woman withdrew into herself. A hard, impervious surface was all that was left of her.

  “I think that needs to be answered, Mrs. Shavin,” Colonel Primrose said quietly.

  Her eyes lighted up slowly with sullen fire.

  “I’ll answer it. I would. But I didn’t. It’s a lie if anybody says I stole it.”

  “In a photograph the police have, your daughter is wearing a diamond bracelet, Mrs. Shavin. Where—”

  “I gave it to her. It was mine. She told him I stole it. The insurance detectives came, but I buried it. I knew I couldn’t prove I had a right to it, and she’d lie her own mother into the grave. I kept it buried till she paid back the insurance money they got for it. I kept it so my girl would have something when she came here. I’d worked for it. She never paid us for the work we did for her. She borrowed money from us and never paid it back and never told him, and never told him she used the money he gave her for our wages for her own self. She gave us the bracelet and then tried to let the insurance people catch us. She knew nobody would believe what we said against her. She knew we couldn’t fight her. You can ask her. She knows it’s the truth. She wouldn’t dare deny it now.”

  “And Mr. Gannon—” Colonel Primrose began.

  “Mr. Gannon is a good man. He doesn’t know us now. He doesn’t even look at the maid that comes in his room. Our girl has a part in his picture. If he knew she was ours, he wouldn’t be so kind to her, because he thinks we’re thieves. We don’t want him to know. We asked the police not to tell him.”

  “Mr. Sype?”

  “Mr. Sype knows. He’s been very kind to us too. We live at his house, and he pays us well to do the little work we do for him. We didn’t want him to pay us, because it’s a place Molly can come to and see us. If other people come they think it’s because he’s her agent that she’s there. It works best for Molly.”

  Colonel Primrose was silent for a moment, his eyes sparkling with some inner satisfaction, derived from what I didn’t know.

  “One other thing, Mrs. Shavin. How did Mrs. Kersey find out that Molly McShane was your daughter? I understand her real name is Doreen Shavin.”

  Rose’s face hardened, her lips compressed to a thin line. “We’d like to know, sir.”

  It was a simple thing to say, but there was nothing simple in its connotation. This was anger, and deep and intense anger.

  “She knew as soon as we’d come. She didn’t start writing us until three months ago now—when Molly’s first picture came out. It was only a small part, but it showed what she could do. That’s when she started to write us. That’s when—”

  “Rose! Rose!”

  It was Molly’s voice, and it came from outside, on the flagstone path between our tripartite cottage and Mrs. Kersey’s lush establishment on the terrace below.

  “Rose!”

  It was a frantic cry. All the heaviness and angry lethargy drained out of the woman’s stolid body. She was at the French windows with a speed I wouldn’t have believed her capable of, and pulled them open. Molly was there, her face pale.

  “Oh, Mother, quick! Something’s happened! Dad’s gone—he’s gone to Eustace’s. And Bill’s gone—”

  “Be quiet!”

  “But Mother—”

  “Be quiet, I tell you.”

  Then there was only Colonel Primrose and me in the room and I was staring at the empty French window where they’d been. I turned and looked at him in a kind of blank alarm.

  “Bill—”

  Colonel Primrose had dropped for once all his amiable composure and all pretense at fine, dispassionate objectivity. His face was very grave.

  “Get your coat,” he said curtly. “Be quick. I have a car outside. Hurry, will you please?”

  I was hurrying, as fast as I could. For a moment I was completely distracted. The passionate alarm in Molly’s voice vibrated in my ears.

  “Those young fools,” Colonel Primrose said quietly. “Why do they have to get mixed up with Shavin in this?”

  I was too alarmed by now to ask him what he meant. “Can’t you see what’s happening?” he said impatiently. “Shavin’s gone up there to Sype’s house. It’s Sype who put Viola Kersey on the trail of their girl—it couldn’t be anybody else. Just try to use your head, won’t you, Mrs. Latham?”

  He was holding the door open for me.

  “And that woman was lying—she’d rather be dead than have Viola Kersey take her child.”

  Chapter Twenty: Second victim

  COLONEL PRIMROSE’S CAR outside the front entrance of the Casa del Rosal was one of those long, sleek, shiny jobs with driver in the glass-partitioned front seat that in Washington, D.C. indicates a diplomat or a funeral. He gave the man Eustace Sype’s address.

  “I’d like you to make as much speed as you can.”

  He ran up the glass panel and switched off the communicating instrument.

  “I can’t make these people out,” he said.

  Somewhere in the course of our progress between Room 102 and the fancy equipage we now occupied I’d calmed down considerably. Sheep had been at Eustace’s too long to have got into any passionate row with him. If Bill had followed him there at once, they could easily have got into a blind rage and beaten the living daylights out of him. That was something I could have viewed with only mild regret, inasmuch as they were hardly likely to bruise their knuckles considering how well Eustace’s bones were covered. Nor were they likely to let Morris Shavin do more than give him a formal punch in the nose, which he had coming to him out of ordinary courtesy. I wasn’t, thinking it over, too much alarmed. Colonel Primrose could call them young fools, but they were a pretty level-headed pair. Little Morry Shavin could hardly be thought of as savage. Rose would have been a horse of a different color, but neither she nor the little hellcat, her daughter, was there.

  “What people?” I asked. “You wouldn’t be jumping to any conclusions? There’s a whole theory about everything that doesn’t touch the Shavins.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He was seldom that abrupt with me. I could feel his eyes fixed sharply on me in the dark.

  “I’m talking about what happened to the girl from Seattle. I seem to be the only one who ever does. Who killed her—even if he was aiming at Viola Kersey?”

  “What about it?” His tone was a little more interested. “Lucille Gannon’s sure her husband did it, from all I can make out. She thinks he left Viola in his room, whipped out and down his patio steps, grabbed the cord from the chrysanthemum stakes, tore around to the front, set up the booby trap, and got back inside before she
missed him. He hops around like a monkey on a string, anyway. Maybe he could have done it. She’s convinced that if he ate stuffed squab with the lady at her luncheon today he must be planning a second go at it. He usually eats raw garden produce.”

  “You aren’t trying to make me eat a whole red herring at a mouthful, Mrs. Latham?”

  He sounded like a man irritated but determined to be patient as long as he could.

  “That doesn’t sound like you. What have you got against poor Lucille now?”

  “A lot,” I said. “She writes me a frantic letter saying my son’s going to hell fast. When I get out here she’s in Palm Springs, and she arrives and brushes the whole thing off by saying she got burned up because Bill and Sheep wanted her to do something for Molly. Establish some kind of guardianship the state law requires for minors working in pictures. She hates Molly with a virulence that doesn’t make any sense.”

  He was silent for an instant. “Are you sure it doesn’t?”

  “It doesn’t make sense for any middle-aged woman to act the way Lucille does about that child,” I retorted. “She’s really fantastic. If anything happens to Molly you’ll know where to look. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder anyway. I’ll bet she never was in Palm Springs.”

  “You’d lose,” he said. “The police did a routine check on all of you, including Lucille as soon as they found out her husband was staying at the hotel under an assumed name. They phoned her at Palm Springs and got her out of bed, which she wasn’t very pleased about. She flew up here this morning and got in at seven-thirty in a private plane that belongs to Jerry de Voe, who’s the lead in this picture Gannon’s shooting out in the Valley. He flies back and forth because his wife’s in their Beverly Hills house until the divorce is final. I thought you were a friend of Lucille’s. You surprise me. Furthermore, Mrs. Latham, Lucille has a big stake in keeping Mrs. Kersey alive and well. So has Gannon. He’s an independent producer sailing close to the wind. He can use money, and Mrs. Kersey’s got it. He’d eat horse meat au jus to keep in with her, and so would his wife.”

  He paused. “I know Lucille’s exasperating—”

  “She is, indeed,” I put in hotly. “She pretends she can’t stand Eustace Sype, and I go to see him without warning—at her suggestion—and find they’re pals. She’s called him up and they’ve had a cozy chat about how I can be persuaded to help them turn Molly over to Kersey to keep either Bill or Sheep from making a misalliance.” Colonel Primrose chuckled.

  “And she’d already told me about the string over the steps being an original idea of Gee Gee’s—straight out of Agatha Christie—so he must have done it, but he couldn’t possibly because he adores his former wife. She defeats me. She’s the one that told me about the diamond bracelet. I assumed she’s burned up about that because Gee Gee didn’t get his cut, but if the insurance company paid him—”

  “He may not have told her that.”

  “But it’s none of her business. She wasn’t married to him then.”

  “All right, all right,” he said. “Relax, my dear. Gannon’s interest, and Lucille’s, is keeping Viola Kersey alive. Anything either of them says to the contrary is balderdash. Gannon gave Crawford a tirade about it this morning, and he ate stuffed squab with her at lunch. It’s an old Hollywood custom, Mrs. Latham. Read the columnists. They’re always confirming something they’ve printed that was denied. It gives double the publicity—”

  “You’ve got Hollywood wrong, Colonel,” I said. “They don’t like publicity. I get that through the walls from Mrs. Ansell. She’s been trying to see Lana Turner for I don’t know how long.”

  He chuckled again. “Then Miss Turner’s the exception. She doesn’t need publicity, or she doesn’t like Mrs. Ansell, whoever Mrs. Ansell is.”

  “All right,” I said. “Then what is it Lucille’s afraid of? Why is she coming to the hotel tonight? Why is she afraid to stay in her house? She’s afraid of somebody.”

  “Of course she is,” Colonel Primrose said. “She’s got a little common sense and she values her expensive hide. I wish you were like her. She knows a murderer isn’t trustworthy. He has a thousand suspicions that a normal person would reject at once. He can’t afford to—he can’t afford to take a chance.”

  He looked out the window. We were passing the lights of the main Bel Air gate.

  “I wish I could remember the number of times I’ve tried to make you see that. You get mixed up in this sort of thing, and you get hold of something you think is perfectly innocent knowledge. You don’t even know it is knowledge. The person who has bloodguilt on his soul doesn’t think about that. He lives with a dark terror, Mrs. Latham. He isn’t likely to stop and ask whether you know the meaning of what you’ve got… Take the example of what you just said.”

  “What did I say?”

  “You said Lucille thinks Gannon whipped out and got the cord off the chrysanthemum stakes. That’s dangerous knowledge, my dear. Crawford hasn’t got it. They’ve hunted high and low to find out. And don’t think some guilty mind hasn’t been watching them… Did Lucille say that?”

  “No,” I said. “I—it just came to my mind. It’s just a pure guess.”

  He drew a deep breath. “I’m serious about this.”

  “Do you really think the Shavins set that trap for Viola Kersey?”

  I knew I ought to tell him about Rose down at the border of chrysanthemums below the stone steps, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  He said slowly, “I think Viola Kersey is an actress. It was actually someone else who tripped over the cord, wasn’t it?”

  I turned and looked at him in the shadowy darkness of the car. We’d turned off Sunset Boulevard and were rounding one of the blind, narrow curves on the upward road. I thought it over a moment. It wasn’t Viola Kersey who’d tripped.

  “But that doesn’t make sense, Colonel Primrose.”

  “Crawford thinks it does.”

  Our car made a crazy swerve to avoid a low, almost lightless monster that zoomed around the curve going as if all the jackals in hell were at its tail. It swerved too, and sped hideously on. It was my son’s hot rod, but he wasn’t in it. The white glare of our headlights as he swerved through them had thrown Sheep Clarke into ghostly relief just long enough to leave him a vivid afterimage in my mind. I caught my breath.

  “That was Sheep, Colonel.”

  He grabbed the broadcloth hand-loop beside him and pulled himself forward to run down the glass panel between us and the driver.

  “Are we about there?”

  “Yes, sir. A couple more curves and to the right and that’s it.”

  He speeded up still more. Colonel Primrose sat on the edge of the seat. I was still back in my own corner, still seeing the white, set blur of Sheep’s intent and urgent face behind the wheel of the hot rod. I was praying he would get wherever he was going, and I was curdled with the fear that he wouldn’t—not at that rate, not on that road.

  Then we were where we were going. The iron gates stood open. Eustace’s car was in the drive, sleek and handsome in the box of yellow light from the open front door. There were no dogs yapping. Our own motor and our tires crunching to a stop behind the other car were the only sounds around us. It seemed an almost monstrous silence, magnifying the sound of our door slamming and our footsteps quick across the white sand and up the four steps into the empty hall. And still there were no dogs. The black lacquered doors at the end of the hall were closed, but abruptly one of them opened. It was Bill, and there was surprise on his face, seeing the two of us there. It wasn’t us he’d expected to come. It was someone else. It took a moment for him to speak.

  “Come in, Colonel. Mother, you stay there.”

  I didn’t stay there, but I wished I had. Much as I disliked and mistrusted Eustace Sype, I never wanted to see him the way he was then. Or see the shaken, cowering figure of Morris Shavin against the door over by the fireplace. He was actually green, as if it took all the physical control he was capable of to kee
p him from being actively sick. Or see all the little dogs, frozen to immobility, sitting halfway across the room, a lot of small fluffy creatures each studded with a pair of bright, anxious, waiting eyes.

  A sudden impulse made me clap my hands twice.

  “Go away, boys and girls!”

  It was a dreadful sound in the hideous silence of that fantastic room, but they were waiting for it. They broke and ran pell-mell through the terrace door, not a yap out of them. They ran straight past their master. He was lying face down on the floor, the whole back of his coat a wet red mass.

  Chapter Twenty-One: Museum of death

  “WE TRIED TO SAVE HIM, SIR,” Bill said quietly. “Sheep’s gone for a doctor. But it’s too late.”

  Colonel Primrose was kneeling beside the bloated figure on the floor. He held his fingers to the wrist for an instant.

  “Call Captain Crawford, Bill. He can call the city police.”

  His eyes moved around the room. Bill came over to me.

  “Come on. Let’s get out.”

  “I’ll stay,” I said. “Go and phone.”

  It wasn’t the thing on the floor that had once been Eustace Sype that I was concerned with. It was the other thing—the thing in his cherry-red silk cushioned seat. It was a bayonet, sticking up from the back, a gaping hole around it where the silk had torn. It had fallen forward, bloodstained, its point pricked into the silk where it had fallen. Colonel Primrose was standing over it, bending forward, not touching it, putting his hand carefully against the back of the seat to see how it had done what it had. I remembered seeing Eustace Sype waddle in and stand there, and give his feet that absurd outward thrust that let his grotesque body collapse down into his luxurious throne, with his temple bell and his jade-headed gong on the low Chinese table to his right. I could see him now. He was like Victoria, I’d thought. He didn’t have to look to see that his seat was ready behind him. In the dim lights of that exotic room he wouldn’t in any case have seen the weapon fixed there, hidden in the heavy silks, and once he’d collapsed down on it he was lost. Whoever had fixed it there knew Eustace Sype. They’d watched him thrust his feet out, as I had. They knew he never looked before he sat there.