Cast the First Stone

by James W. Ziskin

  “Did you recognize anyone in the photos? Anyone famous?”

  She shook her head. “You could barely see anyone’s face. All dark and shadowy. Very . . . well, artistic.”

  “Were you able to tell if any were missing?”

  “I’m not in the habit of looking at Mr. Wallis’s things. Sure, I’ve seen some of those photos from time to time because he kept them around. But I can’t say if anything was taken. And I told that lady from the studio the same.”

  I felt a jab in my right temple.

  “She’s been here?” I asked. “Miss Fetterman?”

  “Nice Miss Fetterman, yes. She came by to check on me. Offered me a job, I’m happy to say. I start next week at the studio.” She beamed. “Wardrobe department.”

  Damn that Dorothy.

  “What about Mr. Wallis’s movie scripts?” I asked. “Did you notice any of them in the study?”

  “Sure. The place was full of them. He was always reading new movie scripts. He was a producer after all. Sometimes he’d throw them away when he was finished, but usually he put them up on a shelf in the study.”

  “Did you happen to notice one called The Colonel’s Widow?”

  “I didn’t read the titles.”

  Patricia Gormley turned out to be a dead end. The only bit I’d learned from her was that Dorothy Fetterman continued to be a step ahead of me. That was about to change.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “Miss Stone,” called Mr. Cromartie from behind the front desk. “You had a call from someone named . . .” He read from a scrap of paper. “. . . Blanchard. Dr. Nelson Blanchard, ASC. Don’t know what that means,” he mumbled. “He left his number. Said it was urgent.”

  I took the scrap of paper from the clerk.

  “And there’s a gentleman waiting for you over there.” He indicated one of the armchairs across the lobby.

  In the low light, my eyes couldn’t quite make out who the large figure was. Then it hit me. Harvey Dunnolt, the reporter from the Schenectady paper. How had he found me? I’d told him I was staying at the Beverly Hilton, after all. Seeing no escape, I approached Harvey and took a seat opposite him, realizing too late that the dullard had been asleep. I could have skirted around him quietly, but my arrival roused him.

  He coughed a few times, rubbed his eyes, and straightened himself in the chair.

  “There you are,” he said, smoothing his walrus mustache. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about the show you put on the other day. Sending us all on that wild goose chase to Barstow. The boys were hopping mad. They wanted to find you and teach you a lesson. Not very gentlemanly of them. But what you did wasn’t nice either.”

  “What do you want, Harvey?”

  “Some information. After your little trick, I think you owe me a favor.”

  “What kind of favor?”

  “I want you to tell me where Tony Eberle is.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Maybe because you don’t want Artie Short to know about your moonlighting.”

  “Moonlighting?” I choked.

  “I saw that piece you and Eugene Duerson wrote for the LA Times. Highly irregular to write for two newspapers at the same time, isn’t it?”

  “That was a different E. Stone,” I said in a pathetic attempt to wriggle out of the corner where he had me trapped.

  He chuckled, shaking like a bowl of Jell-O in his chair. “Yeah, Artie Short’ll believe that. . . .”

  “I’m not sharing anything with you,” I said.

  “Suit yourself. Maybe I’ll phone Short collect just to make him even angrier.”

  He had me. But I thought I might be able to hold him off for a few more hours, maybe longer if I was lucky. I put on a good show of conceding defeat and told him Tony was hiding out in Malibu in a trailer near the beach. Harvey would investigate, and, provided my name didn’t come up, Bo Hanson would tell him that Tony had indeed been there but was now gone. There was a chance Harvey might be satisfied and resist the urge to rat me out to Artie Short.

  “If this is a trick . . .” he said as a warning.

  “I saw him there last night. Spoke to him. I swear.”

  “All right, Eleonora. If this checks out, I’ll keep my mouth shut.” He smiled at me. “See you around.”

  I watched him waddle out the door and down to the street. Was I wrong to be disappointed that he didn’t trip and fall down the stairs?

  I telephoned Nelson Blanchard. He sounded out of breath.

  “Did I interrupt your dinner?” I asked, consulting my watch. It was just past seven.

  “Not at all,” he panted. “Lucia and I were just working on our Kama Sutra. Nearly broke my back, but we managed the Bridge. Lucia is tout à fait épuisée. By the way, you’re welcome to join us anytime for a reprise. But I must warn you, there’s a toll to pay on my bridge.”

  “Is that what was so urgent?” I asked, furiously scrubbing the image of a wheezing Nelson Blanchard and his twisted sexual positions out of my head.

  “Actually, no,” he said. “A strange thing happened this afternoon. It’s probably nothing, but I thought you should know. I saw that friend of yours.”

  “Which friend?”

  “That girl who stayed here. What was her name? April.”

  “You saw April? Where?”

  “Here. At the house. She was skulking around. Lucia spotted her through the window and let me know. I went out and called to her, but she jumped into a car and drove away.”

  “What do you suppose she was doing there?” I asked. “Did she leave anything behind when she disappeared on Monday?”

  “I doubt it. The cottage was cleaned after she left. Our girl didn’t mention anything.”

  “I’d like to have a look around, if you don’t mind.”

  “Why don’t you pop up for a bite to eat? We’ve finished our exertions for the evening, so you needn’t worry about your virtue. I’m preparing a cheese soufflé for a chilly wet evening. And wine, of course.”

  It sounded tempting. Especially the wine. And I wanted to get to the bottom of April’s mysterious visit. Why would she return to the Blanchards’ place? The draw was too much. I stepped into a black wool skirt, wrestled myself into a turtleneck sweater, and put on my face.

  “Ellie, ma chère,” said Nelson Blanchard at the door. Pablito had followed him to investigate the visitor. He sniffed my wet shoe, looked up at me, perhaps deciding if he recognized me, then wandered back into the big room and his place in front of the hearth. I am a constant source of indifference to dogs. “Please come in and give me your coat,” said Nelson.

  I complied, and he asked if there was any other clothing I’d like to remove. I flashed an indulgent smile.

  “You’re relentless. I’ll say that for you.”

  Lucia emerged from the bedroom in a black silk kimono. Her hair was wrapped in a turban, also black. Not exactly Japanese, but she was stunning as always.

  “How beautiful you look,” I said.

  “You must be admiring the glow in my cheeks,” she cooed, fluttering her long eyelashes at me. “Nelson and I were just enjoying some intimacy before you arrived.”

  “That’s lovely,” I said, wincing through my discomfort.

  Nelson stood by grinning, without even the decency to look abashed.

  “May I mix you something to drink?” he asked.

  “Whiskey is fine,” I said, and he set about dispatching the task. “Tell me about April.”

  “Nothing more to tell. Lucia spotted her out the window, and I went to investigate. Scared her off. Ice?”

  “Yes, please. I’ve been asking myself, what would prompt a person to return to a place where she spent one night while on the run?”

  “And what did you conclude?”

  “There’s only one possible explanation. She left something here and came back for it.”

  “But our girl’s been through the cottage with a broom and mop. She would have mentioned it if there’d been an
ything left behind.”

  “Unless April didn’t want her to find it.”

  “Are you saying she hid something in the bungalow?”

  I shrugged. “It’s possible.”

  “Let’s have a look,” said Nelson.

  “There’s time, mi amor,” called Lucia from the divan where she’d taken a seat. Assumed a pose reminiscent of Olympia was more like it, except that Lucia was wearing the aforementioned kimono. But unlike Manet’s model, I doubted she would have bothered to cover her . . . pulchritude had she been nude. “This is the cocktail hour,” she continued. “I’m sure Ellie would like to enjoy her drink.”

  After drinks and an airy soufflé, Nelson popped open a large umbrella and led me down a pebbled pathway to the guest cottage. Lucia was still weak-kneed from her bridge crossing and begged off, opting to wait for us in front of a roaring fire in the hearth.

  The guest cottage was a cozy, single-story bungalow that looked to have been there for decades. Nelson explained as he rattled the keys in the lock that the cottage had been on the lot when he purchased the place ten years earlier.

  “I thought it might come in handy as a study or a guesthouse,” he said, throwing open the door. He stepped inside and switched on the light. “It took me two years to build the house, so I stayed here for a while back then. Now, we almost never use it.”

  I surveyed the place. Adorable if tiny. A small galley kitchen at the entrance, then the parlor and shoebox bedroom beyond. There was a fireplace that looked inviting, especially on a cold, rainy night like this one. I laughed at myself. After ten days in Los Angeles, did I really consider fifty degrees cold? I crossed into the parlor, whose wooden plank floors creaked under my feet. Nelson explained that he’d renovated the cottage after he’d moved into the new house.

  “I opted for a genteel-backwoods decor,” he said. “Nothing modern about this look. I thought it would be fun to create an anachronistic contrast with the main house.”

  “You’ve succeeded. It’s terrifically romantic. A quaint little love nest.”

  “Cheep, cheep,” he said, his grinning lips revealing his long teeth.

  “Not just after dinner, Nelson. You’ll get a stitch.”

  I set about looking for April’s hiding spot. The parlor was clean. The bedroom, too. And nothing in the kitchen. Nelson and I rummaged through drawers, end tables, and books on shelves. We knelt down to peer under the sofa, chairs, rugs, and the bed. We threw open every cabinet in the house, stuck our heads inside the icebox, the oven, and up the flue in the fireplace.

  “Looks like you’ve got a leak,” I said, pointing to a spreading wet spot on the ceiling in the kitchen.

  Nelson inspected the affected area and pronounced himself stumped. “I put in a new roof seven years ago. Workmanship isn’t what it used to be.”

  “Does everything else seem in order to you?”

  “Nothing out of place,” he said, shrugging. “Let’s get ourselves another drink.”

  Back in the main house, Nelson mixed up a sampler of South Seas rum cocktails, including a Babalu, a Tahitian Pearl, and a Wahine. I broke my rule of never mixing liquors and sampled them all. A little too sweet for my tastes, but Nelson took such joy in preparing them—like a mad chemist—that I couldn’t refuse him. He looked crestfallen when I declined a refill of a Shark’s Tooth, and I said I had better go.

  He pouted. “But I just made a pitcherful.”

  “I really can’t. It was delicious, though,” I added to be polite.

  “Then I’ll give you a thermos to take with you for a nightcap back at the hotel.”

  Nelson embarked on a mission to locate a thermos in the kitchen. After a few minutes he returned empty-handed and asked Lucia if she’d seen it.

  “You’re always lending things to people, mi amor,” she said. “I think you gave it to that April girl the other night.”

  Nelson snapped his fingers. “That’s right. I made her some Irish coffee to keep her warm. I’ll just go fetch it from the guesthouse.”

  “Don’t bother,” I said.

  “Ellie, darling, I can’t send you home empty-handed.”

  “No, I meant don’t bother going out in the rain. There was no thermos in the bungalow.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I checked every cabinet in the place,” I said. “There’s no thermos.”

  “This is why you shouldn’t take in stray cats. No matter how pretty. They steal.”

  “I’ll have that Shark’s Tooth, after all,” I said, sensing a familiar itch that told me something was off.

  Nelson filled our glasses then put some soft music on the hi-fi. The opening strains were a rhythmic strumming of guitar, followed by a deep, sensuous Brazilian voice.

  “¡Dios mío!” said Lucia, laughing. “João Gilberto? Bossa nova? You’re never going to seduce Ellie, mi amor. Give up!”

  Nelson put up a flimsy defense that he’d merely played what was already on the turntable, but I think Lucia knew every ploy in Nelson’s bag of tricks. We sat quietly for another half hour, listening to the music and sipping our Shark’s Teeth.

  I was bothered about the thermos. Why would April steal something so banal? Why not take something more useful or valuable? Like a cigarette lighter, silverware, or wine? And what had she wanted with the guesthouse if there was nothing inside to recover? Nothing that we could find, at any rate.

  I asked Nelson where exactly he’d spotted her outside.

  “She was near the porch. Just a few feet from the cottage. Why?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s go see what might have interested her.”

  Under the protection of Nelson’s giant umbrella, we stood there in the rain staring at the guest bungalow. It was just a cottage with a wooden porch attached. The rain plopped on the canopy of our umbrella in heavy drops, and we considered the view in silence. Finally, Nelson asked me how much longer I needed.

  “That’s enough,” I said. “It’s time for me to go.”

  I lay awake in bed, wrestling with the riddle—if that was what it had been—of April Kincaid’s odd reappearance chez Blanchard. There had to be an explanation for her visit, three days after she’d decamped from the safe haven I’d so carefully arranged for her.

  The rain was steady, not heavy. At one, still unable to sleep, I rose and lifted the shade to peer out the window. The same brick wall with its Selma Hardware sign greeted me. I found comfort in the contemplation of the city under the cover of night. It reminded me of the hours I’d spent gazing out the window of my childhood apartment in Greenwich Village. I used to count the cars as they passed, uptown and downtown along lower Fifth Avenue. The traffic ran in both directions back then. And I listened to the honking horns and roaring buses, at least in the years after the war. Everything was quieter and darker during the war. Blackouts and gasoline rationing.

  I lowered the shade again and returned to bed, wondering why I was thinking back to my childhood. Sometimes the mind takes its own route and steers your thoughts where it will. Recollections of my youth and growing up in the throes of world war continued to trouble my sleep. I recalled listening to the radio, lying on the floor, sketching pictures of cats with a pencil on paper as my father fiddled with the dial. Sometimes it was an FDR fireside chat or a baseball game or a quiz show. Serials were my favorites. Occasionally my father would allow broadcast music to enter the house. And that was when I grew to appreciate the big bands, Benny Goodman especially. I think my father secretly enjoyed it, as well, though it was not an appreciation he was about to concede.

  I pulled the covers tighter around my neck, savoring the warmth of my Hollywood hotel room, and willed myself into a comforting dream of my youth. But my mind drifted back to the war, to my mother and father sorting through ration cards as they prioritized how to feed Elijah and me, to air raid drills in the basement of our building, to our small victory garden on the window sill next to the drainpipe. Concrete memories dissolved into an eddy of riddles about wayward
girls and missing boys. I thrashed in my bed, butting up against the impasses of my investigation while groping at strategies that might lead me to a solution.

  I sat up in bed wondering for a short moment exactly where I was. In Hollywood, of course, hopelessly marooned at a stubborn dead end. Only I wasn’t. The jumbled memories, dreams, and nightmares had cleared a path for one idea—one sudden inspiration. This was a triumph. I jumped from bed and climbed back into the clothes I’d removed a couple of hours earlier.

  Mr. Cromartie was snoring away in one of the lobby armchairs. I breezed past him and out the door into the rain. Minutes later, I was roaring west on a deserted Hollywood Boulevard before turning up Nichols Canyon Road.

  The main house was dark, except for some lights outside. I’d parked far enough away so as not to wake the Blanchards. Sheltered by my umbrella with the fractured ribs, I slipped past one of the plate glass windows, praying I wouldn’t rouse Pablito on the other side, and found the pebble path to the guesthouse. I stood before the small bungalow, considering it from the same angle Nelson and I had done several hours before. Nothing had changed, but this time I knew what I was looking for.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The rain continued to fall, soaking the roof, before collecting in the drainpipe mounted under the eaves that routed it safely to the ground. Only the drainpipe wasn’t dispatching its duties. A leak had formed above the kitchen ceiling, and studying the scene more carefully now, I could see why. Runoff water was bubbling atop the vertical drain. The pipe was blocked and overflowing.

  Using a broken stick I found nearby, I snaked the drain from the bottom, soaking my coat, skirt, stockings, and shoes in the process. But I needed barely ten seconds to clear the clog. A small object flushed out of the tube and dropped into the puddle on the ground. A gush of water from above followed. I should have expected it, of course, but my mind had been otherwise occupied. I recoiled, leapt backward, before losing my footing and landing with a splat on my rear end in the mud.