The Devil's Stronghold

by Leslie Ford

  He disappeared. He didn’t want to talk about it himself. I could tell from the way he put it off on Colonel Primrose and the sleepless drawn look around his eyes. In the back of my mind I was thinking again about George Gannon weeping on the patio. That it could have been sheer, heartfelt relief that Lucille was all right hadn’t occurred to me, somehow. I was too conditioned to storm and stress at the moment to remember, even, that there were simple emotions. Even in Hollywood there could be simple ones. They didn’t all have to be road shows in Technicolor. That was the trouble with Lucille that I’d been objecting to from the beginning. The emergency long-distance calls about nothing at all, the telegrams, the Air Mail, Special Delivery letters— especially the one that had Bill doing a nose dive down the primrose path. I glanced at the three orange memos by my telephone. They were marked Urgent. It was the cry of Wolf, Wolf once too often. When she really had an urgent need, I hadn’t believed her.

  But all that was highly futile. I relaxed, or tried to, and opened my paper. On the front page was a signed piece by a Hollywood columnist. It said Flash! at the top of it, and there was a woman’s picture. I looked three times before I believed it. It was an old and very coy, not to say very sappy, pose of the young Viola Van Zant, with bobbed curly hair down over one eye and her skirts above her knees, cheesecake of another day. Below it was the story.

  I promised Viola Van Zant—she’s Mrs. Samuel C. Kersey now, and very happily married to more moola than you and I will ever see—that I wouldn’t tell anybody she was back in Hollywood. When she called me she was all excited about a story she wants her former husband, Producer George Gannon, to do. She believes in it so much she’s ready to put up the money for it, and that’s believing in something, believe me. I wouldn’t mention it now except that last night George Gannon’s present wife, the former Mrs. Baldwin James, had a terrible accident out at the Casa del Rosal. They say she forgot to turn off the gas in the bathroom heater. I for one don’t believe for an instant that it was anything but an accident, and just because it happened when George’s first wife was at the hotel isn’t any reason for their friends jumping to any other conclusion. Mrs. Gannon is a gracious and charming woman and I hope she’ll be all right very soon. It’s hard on George when he’s had so much trouble getting started on “Death on the Back Stairs,” which he’s shooting over in the Valley. Of course I’ve always said it was such a pity he and Viola broke up before success came to him. When they got their divorce she was very sad about it. She said she and George loved each other very deeply but they had decided it was better for each of them to go their own way, and I was glad when both of them found happiness. And for those people who think marriage can’t be a success in Hollywood, I’d like to point out that the George Gannons have been very happily married for three years now. It would make me very unhappy to think anything was upsetting it, because just a few months ago George called me up and said, “Mabel, I’ve never been so happy in my life.” I hope there hasn’t been any misunderstanding between him and Lucille because Viola is a sincere, loyal, and lovely person, and we’re all glad she’s back with us again.

  Lucille Gannon had tried to commit suicide. It didn’t say so, but implication could go no further. It stood up like the Tower of Babel on the plains. I looked through the paper, trying not to think about it. And it was a queer thing. If there was anything at all in that paper about Washington, D.C., or Lake Success, I didn’t notice it. For me, the rest of the world had become a suburb of Los Angeles. What happened outside of its magnetic environs seemed completely unimportant—it was the center of the new universe. Normally, I’m told, people make a feeble and frustrated effort to hang on to the old world at least for a week, when they’ve come to this new one. They all give up sooner or later, though not usually as quickly as I’d done. It was all too vivid and exciting, the rest of the world dim and old shoe. What was happening on Capitol Hill hadn’t the slightest interest to me, compared with what was happening in the Casa del Rosal, or Bel Air, or Hollywood, or even Los Angeles, where the police had that morning found another body under a pepper tree and another starlet had married another millionaire whose third wife was suing him to get back her jewels and fifteen hundred a week to buy the baby a new pair of shoes. The rest of the world was weary, stale, and flat, and unprofitable too in any agreeable way.

  Nevertheless, I couldn’t stop thinking about Lucille, try as I might—and I knew her turning on the gas and saying goodbye to it all made no sense whatever—not even out here, in this brave new world where people pay ninety cents for an avocado on the Sunset Strip when they have a treeful of them in their own back yard. Lucille was not the suicide type. I stopped for a moment. Or was she? Could that explain her husband’s soul-racking sobs at ten minutes past four in the morning? I decided that instead of racking my brains if any, I’d wait and rack Colonel Primrose’s.

  He came at half-past nine. At nine the bellboy had brought me a telegram. It was for the Colonel. I’d almost opened it when I saw it was in care of me, not to me. He read it and put it in his pocket without comment. He was in one of those difficult moods, uncommunicative but brusque, and his usual amused and urbane detachment from the foibles and follies of less disciplined mortals was gone. He was a man with much on his mind and apparently not getting too far with getting it off.

  “Lucille told the hospital people she was coming here,” he said. “I want to see her as soon as she gets here, and I want to see her husband. I also want to see this Mrs. Kersey.”

  “What about Eustace?” I asked.

  I had the awful feeling that Eustace Sype, dead, was going to be like the dead girl from Seattle, quietly shunted into the grave because Captain Crawford didn’t want Viola Kersey killed.

  He shrugged. “The Shavins are trying to put their heads in a noose. They don’t know what was in the papers Shavin burned. They were at the house all day. Nobody could have come and gone without their knowing it, because of the dogs. Except for that, it would have been simple for anybody. It wouldn’t take five minutes to come in, grab the bayonet off the wall, slit the back of the seat, puff up the cushions, insert the bayonet, see the base was firm against the lower chair frame, and be on the way—except for those dogs. It would have been a noisy five minutes, and the Shavins couldn’t have missed it. So, their story being true, one or both of them did it, or knew who did. And they deny it.”

  “But they could have missed it very easily, as a matter of fact,” I said calmly. “For the simple reason that they weren’t at the house all day.”

  The look he gave me had a little bayonet quality itself.

  “Nobody was out there to answer the phone when Lucille kept calling. Rose was right out in back here, at half-past four. I saw her. I told you I had some stuff to tell you.”

  He drew a deep breath. “You wouldn’t like to hold it out another week or so?”

  I’m sure Mrs. Kersey would have had some involved semantic cliché ready. I wasn’t fool enough to expect any gratitude, but I wasn’t prepared to have my head snapped off in place of it. I remembered one is supposed to count ten when an irascible male is present.

  “Go ahead. What stuff have you?”

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Curious double talk

  I TOLD HIM. I told him about Rose winding the hemp string off the stakes under the chrysanthemums and about the section of it near George Gannon’s steps that was already gone, where the plants had fallen over. From there I went back and told him all I knew—about Molly’s bag and what I presumed to be a letter from Mrs. Kersey, and the girl from Seattle, and about Mrs. Kersey and Eustace Sype, and the scene at his house with Rose and Morris Shavin and Molly McShane. I told him about Lucille, and about George Gannon weeping on the patio. Once started, I must have sounded as Niagara Falls would if it was damned up and let loose again. Then I started to show him the morning paper.

  “I’ve seen that.”

  He reminded me a little of George Gannon pacing up and down his patio, only Colonel Primrose
confined himself to the inside of my room.

  He stopped at last and stood looking at me with an oddly puzzled expression on his face.

  “I can’t really believe it,” he said. “It’s all there, in plain sight. But it’s incredible. It’s—incredibly stupid.” Lucille came then. She looked really awful. I could still smell the nauseating aura of gas around her—in her hair and the clothes she had on. She was a sort of near olive green, the lines at the corners of her mouth etched deeper than ever. She sank down in the bamboo chair and closed her eyes.

  “You should have stayed in the hospital.”

  “I couldn’t. I couldn’t stand it there.”

  “I want to be sure you knew what you were telling me last night. Your husband came to your room. He turned on the gas for you because it was chilly. You had a drink out of a bottle of whisky he’d brought. You went to bed as soon as he’d gone, and you don’t remember anything more. You didn’t touch the gas heater at any time. Is that right?”

  She nodded slowly. Colonel Primrose went to the phone. “Will you ask Mr. George Gannon to come over to Mrs. Latham’s room, please.”

  “Oh, no Colonel! I can’t see him!”

  “I’m not interested in Mr. Gannon’s orders. I’m representing the County Sheriff. Tell him to come over here at once, please. Room 102, across the hall.”

  Lucille bent her head forward in her hands. “He won’t like it. He was furious with me when I called him last night. He came to my room, but he hated it. And he hated me.”

  “What time did he come there?”

  “Just before I went to bed,” she said wearily. “I called Grace to ask her to come, but she wasn’t in. We had a drink, and he seemed to have calmed down. I was so sleepy before he left I didn’t care much what mood he was in. I just went to bed.”

  “And you don’t know anything else about it at all?”

  “No.”

  She let her head rest on the cushion, her eyes closed. She looked ghastly, and frightfully ill, and when we heard the door across the hall open and George Gannon coming over, she was shaking so she had to close her teeth on her lower lip to steady it.

  Gee Gee had on a yellow T-shirt and emerald-green slacks. The perspiration was already blooming in ever-increasing blobs on his nearly unthatched skull. He looked at the Colonel, and at me, and at Lucille.

  “How is she?” He asked it of Colonel Primrose.

  “Not too good. She says you were in her room last night. You brought a bottle of whisky. You turned on the gas heater for her. She got sleepy and went to bed. You went away.”

  George Gannon nodded. “That’s all correct.”

  “You had a drink together?”

  “I had a drink.” Lucille’s voice was dull. “He didn’t. He brought the whisky but he said he had to work. He wouldn’t take a drink.”

  Colonel Primrose looked at Gannon.

  “That’s right. I’m not drinking after dinner. I’ve got a new bottle of Scotch. I think she’ll like it. So I take it over to her.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  George Gannon looked surprised. “It’s given to me as a present.”

  He added, when Colonel Primrose waited, “Mrs. Kersey gives it to me. It’s out of her husband’s private stock.” Colonel Primrose nodded without apparent interest. “I understand Mrs. Kersey is your former wife?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And that she’s putting up her money for you to produce a story she’s got. I’d like to know what her story is about.”

  Up to that point George Gannon had been fairly calm. This was as if Colonel Primrose had touched at one time all basic centers of his reflexes. He whipped a cigar out of his pocket, his peeled eyes popped out, he was off.

  “Her money! That, I don’t need! That, I don’t want! Her story! That, I got to see before I buy it. That, I don’t buy unless I see how much she throws in the pot. Does she bring it to me? No! She gives it to Eustace Sype—I sign, then I read. That, I don’t do, not if she’s Fort Knox and gives me the door key. She says they buy up Molly McShane’s contract. For this story they take Molly McShane. They don’t get her. I keep her. She’s terrific! She’s got everything! I don’t sign her up for a story till that story I see!”

  Colonel Primrose listened gravely.

  “Did you ask Sype to let you see it?”

  “Do I ask him? I am down on my knees begging him to let me see it. I go up there. I take time to go up there after Viola’s lunch to say ‘Let me see it; if it is any good I want to do it!’ ”

  “What does he say?”

  (I was happy to see Colonel Primrose lapsing momentarily into Mr. Gannon’s jargon.)

  “What does he say? He’s not there! Nobody’s there! No servants, nobody but those screwball dogs of his yapping their heads off out in the kitchen!”

  “You know Sype is dead?”

  George Gannon was suddenly quiet again. “Yes. I know it.”

  “You know how he was killed?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m told it was an idea you and he cooked up together one afternoon.”

  I didn’t understand him, but George Gannon did. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. It needed wiping badly. He was quite pale, and for a moment he just nodded at Primrose without speaking.

  “That’s right,” he said then. “It’s an original idea we get from the Old Testament. There is a king. He is stabbed. They can’t see the dagger because he’s too fat. It’s in his right side because a port-sider is the one who stabs him. I think if Sype will play it we can do a Biblical murder story with Arabs maybe trying to take the Holy Land. It’s a dilly!”

  George Gannon warmed to his story.

  “This fat king’s out by the marble swimming-pool. The handmaidens are staying him with flagons. This Arab slips in, grabs the bayonet off the wall in the next room, slits the silk on the back of the divan, sticks the bayonet up at an angle through the swansdown, jams the hook against the lower frame, and gets out the other door. It’s simple—an Arab boy can do it in two minutes! The fat king comes in, one handmaiden is with him— she has a zither because this fat king likes music. He sinks down on his cushions, and there he is! Nobody sees the bayonet. The cushion is puffed out. Nobody looks for a slit in the back. They all think he has got a Stroke. By the time they get him up he is a dead duck! Nobody sees this Arab; by this time he is a mile away! It’s simple murder, see? Simple murder you can tie in with a costume picture and an up-to-the-minute international slant!”

  Colonel Primrose’s composure was outwardly unruffled, but I thought he had some difficulty about not choking a little when he spoke next.

  “Do you have to do stories about murder?”

  “Do we have to do murder? Sure, we have to do murder. There are only two subjects—a woman’s chastity, and murder. Nobody’s interested in chastity any more. Murder’s all we got left to write stories about.”

  I supposed that was a George Gannon original too. It seemed to me I’d heard it quoted from more gifted sources.

  “I hear in the middle of the night it’s the way Sype is killed. Sheep Clarke calls me at four in the morning to tell me. He tells me he and Bill let it out when you’re talking to them. I say it’s okay. They got to tell what they know. I don’t hold it against them.”

  I had the horrible fear that Colonel Primrose was going to ask him why, then, he’d stumbled out onto his patio and wept so bitterly, if that was why Sheep had told him then, and if it was all right. But instead he went back.

  “That whisky,” he said quietly, “has been analyzed, Gannon. It was heavily drugged.”

  Lucille leaned forward and put her head in her hands. It wasn’t a kind thing for me to do, but I couldn’t help thinking just then about her two other marriages, and how merrily she’d kicked over the traces and left a pair of bewildered and pretty decent men gasping for breath with her suddenness. It would only be a kind of poetic justice, after all, if her third husband should turn out
to be a different breed of cat.

  After the first look he gave her, he seemed to want to forget she was there. I thought I could understand it when he next spoke—very quietly, this time, and in part at least not in his peculiar idiom.

  “I realize, Colonel Primrose, I’m in an awkward situation. I believe there’s nothing wrong with the Scotch when I took it there. The bottle’s been opened—it’s open when Viola gives it to me, because she offers me a drink, and that I don’t want because I am eating too much anyway, so I bring it to my room with me. I think it’s good Scotch… But I see you’re collecting a lot of circumstantial evidence against me. I look at it. I say, I wonder did I do it? Am I drunk when I go out and these things happen or am I crazy?”

  There was something very dignified in the way he said that, and it’s hard to be dignified in a yellow open-neck shirt with short sleeves and the tail hanging out over a pair of bright green slacks. But George Gannon did have dignity then, and sincerity. I thought Lucille must feel it, as I knew Colonel Primrose did. But fear is deafening as well as blinding, and she was listening to it and not to her husband. Knowing what she believed, I couldn’t blame her. And again, I realized suddenly that George Gannon hadn’t actually denied he’d done any of the things the circumstantial evidence pointed to his doing. When he asked himself if he was drunk or crazy he could answer yes to both, for all I knew.

  “What do you know about Miss McShane’s background, Mr. Gannon?”

  It was a question that surprised me, and George Gannon opened his eyes so they looked like billiard balls with iris and pupil painted on them.

  “Do you know her parents, for instance?”

  “I know if she’s got parents there’s something wrong with ’em.”

  “Wrong with them? Why?”

  “Why? Because they’re not trying to cash in on their daughter’s contract. That, I have never heard of in all the years I am in the motion-picture business. That is new. I ask Sype where are the parents, when are they coming, wanting a lot of money, wanting a house in Bel Air, a motor car, a spot on the payroll, wanting me to pay them for taking care for their own daughter. Sype says they aren’t, they are keeping out of it. That, I don’t believe. I do a quick double take. I say, Sype, they’re either both dead, or they are in the pen for life. Parents are the worst chiselers in the motion-picture business. Parents, aunts, brothers, sisters, cousins, half-sisters, great aunts four times removed, baby comes to Hollywood and they’re all on the lot trying to cash in. It’s—”