“I won’t touch her body,” I promised, “but I’m going to talk to her. Move.”
I expected more of an argument than I got. Apparently these two were like the Corsican Brothers—the kick I’d given Sammy had taken the fight out of Murph as well. Or maybe the boy with the shaven head was the non-violent type.
We walked back to the house. Sammy was limping, but otherwise okay.
At the top of a flight of wide stone steps, I rang the doorbell. Murph made a noise. I asked him what was wrong.
“We—well, we aren’t supposed to go in through this door.”
“You won’t have to go in.”
I rang the bell again, then started when a hard-faced female person opened the door and asked me what I wanted. Since she was wearing a black dress with a white apron and cap, I figured she was the maid, though what she looked like was an early makeup test for Star Wars.
“Good afternoon,” I told her as cheerily as I could manage. “May I speak to the lady of the house?”
The illusion that the maid’s face was a fright mask was reinforced by the fact that it never moved, not even her eyes. When she was sizing the situation up, she moved her whole head, as though her eye sockets were hard to see out of. First she looked at Sammy, then Murph, then Llona, then me. Then she said, “What?”
I made it simpler this time. “We want to see Miss Bascombe,” I said.
Again, the maid swiveled her head around the scenic route before looking at me. “What for?”
I tried to think of an explanation this creature would buy, but while I was working on it, the maid stepped aside, and I found myself looking into the famous face of Wilma Bascombe.
CHAPTER 9
“Any reproduction...of any descriptions or accounts...without...express, written consent...is prohibited.”
—STANDARD DISCLAIMER FOR TELEVISED SPORTING EVENTS
SOME PEOPLE SOFTEN AND sag when they age. Some tighten up, and take on a sharper appearance. Wilma Bascombe belonged to the second group. The bone structure of her face, classic though it was, was too easily discernible under her skin. Her dark blue eyes were as intense as ever, but in their new environment, they looked feverish, even unhealthy. Two taut cords marred the delicate long throat. She seemed to have become all angles and edges. Only softly curling hair that had gone snow-white broke the pattern—that, and the heavy silk brocade house gown she was wearing.
I don’t want to give the wrong impression. She was still a very handsome woman. It just came as a surprise that she had aged so much since she had commanded the public eye, though of course, it shouldn’t have. I watch too many movies on the Late Show.
“Yes?” she said.
“My name is Matt Cobb,” I said, “and this is Llona Hall. We work for the Network.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t talk to reporters.”
“We’re not reporters,” Llona said. “But we would like to ask you some questions.”
“I don’t answer questions, either.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Not even about a murder?”
Wilma Bascombe turned up the corners of her unpainted mouth. She seemed to notice Sammy and Murph for the first time, though they’d been standing there looking miserable all along. “Do you suspect my employees of murder?”
“No, ma’am,” I said. At my side, I heard Llona make a skeptical little grunt. I told the former movie star that we’d have to do some talking about them, too. When Wilma Bascombe asked what I meant, Llona piped right up and told her.
She directed a cold look at her employees, and they seemed to feel it strongly enough to shiver. She told them to get back to work. “I promise they’ll be available, Miss Hall, if you wish to take legal action.”
She opened the door wide to let us in. “I’ve been called a number of names in my life,” she said over her shoulder as she led us through an oak-paneled hall. “Can I add murderess to the list?”
“No one is calling you a murderess,” I said.
Wilma Bascombe smiled a lovely smile, but said nothing. After some seconds had gone by, she said, “Well?”
“Well what?”
“ ‘Yet,’ ” she said. “Robert Taylor said that line to me in a movie: ‘No one is calling you a murderess—yet.’ You resemble him, has anyone ever told you that? You are larger, of course, but there’s the same quality—”
Miss Bascombe stopped abruptly and changed the subject. “Of course,” she said, as though that was what she had been talking about all along, “I want to apologize for Sammy and Murph.” We entered a big, dark drawing room.
“For their existence, or only their conduct?” Llona asked.
“I’m not responsible for their existence, thank God,” Wilma Bascombe said. “They were students in my last class at the university before...before I stopped teaching. They were terrible actors; they are a little better as handymen. And they’ll work for me. A lot of people won’t. Would you like some tea?”
“No, thank you,” I said. She pointed to some chairs by the fireplace.
She turned her attention fully to me, and it felt like an honor. I couldn’t help thinking that if Wilma Bascombe hadn’t been born in a country that has nothing but commoners, she never would have been used by the government, she would have been the government.
“You say you are not reporters, then, Mr. Cobb. Are you actors?”
“Not unless it’s necessary,” I said.
“Some of us are lucky,” she said. “You will have to excuse me. I don’t follow the news any more, for reasons you probably understand. Who has been murdered, and how am I concerned?”
I answered both Miss Bascombe’s questions at once by saying, “Jim Bevic. His books were published by a company the Network owns.”
Silence. She crossed her hands in her lap.
“Reactions, Miss Bascombe?”
“Well, Mr. Cobb, I hardly know what I should say. I only met the man once...Of course it’s terrible, but...”
“It doesn’t arouse any emotion in you? Fear? Happiness? Sorrow? Shock?”
She shrugged. “Well, surprise, certainly.”
I shook my head. “The police don’t think so.”
She didn’t go to pieces over it, or anything. She simply said, “I beg your pardon?”
“The police claim you’ve known about Jim Bevic’s murder since the day it happened.”
Actually, that statement was slanderous. Wilma Bascombe may have been in California when the body was found, but since Bevic wasn’t found until twenty-four hours after he died, the only one who knew he was murdered the day it happened was the killer.
Miss Bascombe’s face showed disappointment; whether at me, herself, or life in general was hard to say. With a ladylike sigh, she said, “All right, Mr. Cobb, I admit it. Deceit is a tactic that has never rewarded me. I trust you can appreciate my desire not to be involved in this.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, “I sure can. Especially since that was your first trip to California since when? Nineteen seventy-two, right? Especially since you flew back to New York right after word got out the body had been discovered. Police get suspicious about things like that. Especially about reports that you were traveling in disguise.”
“I was visiting my son,” she said. “My son is an artist; he lives in Los Angeles.”
“The police out there talked to him,” I said.
“Of course.” She was looking intently into the palms of her hands, as though she expected to read her own future in them.
“Why did you leave Los Angeles immediately after the murder was discovered, Miss Bascombe?” I asked. “If you don’t mind telling me.”
“Why do you think? You know how my name is associated in the public mind with Bevic’s. People suppose I hated him, though I...I didn’t.”
Suddenly, she smashed a delicate fist into the arm of her chair, and turned on Llona and me the cold, contemptuous fury she had counterfeited so well in front of the Senate committee. “I didn’t want to answer questio
ns!” she hissed. “My life has been ruined by questions, and I’m sick of them!”
Llona could no longer hold herself in. She leaned forward. “But, Miss Bascombe, there are always questions. They only get worse if you run away.” Llona sounded exasperated.
Wilma Bascombe laughed, very bitterly. “I didn’t want to embarrass my son, Miss Hall, that’s the extent of it. In the circles in which my son travels, being related to me is a distinct drawback. I’ll have you know that I wore a wig and dark glasses—you may call that a disguise if you like—when I flew to California, as well as when I came back.”
Llona wasn’t satisfied. “But why did you run away? If you’re innocent, you should have stayed and fought.”
“Aren’t you aware of who I am?” she asked in mock surprise. “I’m the woman who lived a lie for nearly thirty years; the spy; the traitor. I tried to escape the questions, because I know how unlikely it is anyone would believe me about anything. Just as I know you aren’t going to believe me when I tell you this: I had no reason to hate Jim Bevic—that in fact, I rather liked him.”
“If it weren’t for Bevic’s book,” I said, “you wouldn’t be known as any of those things. That sounds like a reason to me.”
“Don’t be a fool,” she said.
“Then enlighten me,” I told her. “The way it seems to me, the only person you might hate more than Jim Bevic would be the person who gave him those documents.”
She laughed at that, a loud humorless laugh that seemed to dance on the edge of hysteria. Finally, she took control of herself enough to say, “Excuse me, please. You can’t appreciate how really funny that is.”
She wiped a tear from a dark blue eye. “You see, I gave him the documents.”
Well, Cobb, I said to myself, didn’t expect that one, did you? Life sure is educational, ain’t it? I could feel my eyes open wide in surprise. I probably looked as stupefied as I felt. I asked her to explain.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. Explanations. Questions and explanations, always.” She stood up and walked to a window, where she lifted the curtain aside to let in a wedge of bright autumn sunshine. Then she dropped the curtain and the light disappeared.
“I was going to marry a man,” she said. “It was only after I’d fallen in love with him that I realized I’d gotten to be nearly forty years old without ever loving anyone. Oh, my son, of course, but that’s different.
“I was weary of my career, and it was no sacrifice to give it up. Then the war—excuse me, the ‘Police Action’ broke out in Korea, and he had to go—wanted to. He was a pilot. After a few months he was shot down and captured.
“He died under torture at the hands of the Communist Chinese.
“I had taken the position at the university to pass the time until he got back. When I learned I had nothing to wait for, I stayed on.
“One day, a young man came to my office. He was from Washington. He offered me,” she said with great precision, “a chance to serve my country.”
She came away from the dark window. I was startled to see how soft and vulnerable she looked all of a sudden. It was as though that one blast of sunlight had melted the ice Empress.
“The young man from Washington told me,” she went on, “that there were communists all around us—that the people who had hurt my...” She groped for a word, didn’t find it, gave up. “...hurt him over and over until he died, were planning to take over the country he had died for. They were all through the entertainment business. They were all through the academic community. If I were only to gain their confidence, I would be in a perfect position to aid the government in the struggle against them—to report on their actions.
“And don’t think for one second there weren’t actions to report,” she said, suddenly stern. “There were, and still are, people who want to hurt this country in any way they can. The idea that I was some kind of—of heroine to these people made me sick, but I did it because it was important.
“At least I thought so at first. But as the months went by, I was asked for information on people who just disagreed with the government—they weren’t out to destroy it.
“So I gave less and less information all the time, but I could never stop completely, or they would have revealed me. I didn’t want that. I had come to love teaching young actors, helping them find their talent, and use it. But then—”
I was beginning to get the drift of where she was going. “But then there was Watergate,” I said.
“Exactly, Mr. Cobb. Watergate. Everything was cut out from under me. Mr. Hoover died. That young man from Washington, no longer young—well, you know what happened to him. Every day, there were new revelations. Secrets going back years, decades, were raked up. There were ‘leaks.’
“I’ve never been so afraid of anything as I became afraid of leaks. I knew it was inevitable that one night, some smirking reporter would turn up to reveal what I’d been doing all those years, getting other people’s dirt all over me.”
Then, Wilma Bascombe told us, Jim Bevic asked to interview her for his book. She put him off at first, but he was persistent, and she finally agreed to talk to him.
“We talked,” she said, “in the same office where I’d spoken to the young man from Washington.” She swallowed, then went on. “Jim Bevic told me what he had in mind, showed me his notes. He expected me to be angry, because he planned to do an honest job of it for once.”
I told her I knew what she meant, there. A lot of facts tend to get ignored these days when the Red Scare is discussed. Jim Bevic hadn’t ignored them. He didn’t try to say the witch-hunting mentality was anything but a disgrace (“I have higher standards for my own country than I have for any dictatorship,” he wrote); he hadn’t hesitated to remind the smug that while some citizens of the United States were being “martyred” with forced unemployment, unforgivable as that was, the Stalin government a lot of them admired so much had devoured half of Europe, and was systematically murdering its political opponents by millions, or even tens of millions.
“I thought people might understand, if it came out in that context,” Wilma Bascombe said. “Maybe the country did go mad with fear, but there was something to fear. Bevic planned to point that out. I thought that way the truth could come out without my being seen as some kind of monster. I—I was wrong.”
Her naïveté astounded me. In the communications industry, we know better. People love scandal. Let a juicy fact become public, and people will pick it up and repeat it who have no inkling of the existence of a context, let alone what it is or what it means. Let somebody come up tomorrow with incontrovertible proof that Franklin D. Roosevelt was a closet transvestite, or something, and the phrase “New Deal” will never be heard again—people will be too busy telling each other (a) they never even suspected it, or (b) they knew it all along, or (c) their brother-in-law is the same way.
Wilma had been a symbol of refusal to succumb to the pervasive paranoia of her era. When it was revealed that she had in fact been one of the chief victims of it, the shock drowned out everything else.
“Why didn’t you make the papers public yourself?” I asked. “Why didn’t you tell your own story, instead of letting Bevic do it for you?”
She shook her head angrily. “I won’t beg for anything, Mr. Cobb, especially forgiveness. I’d like to be understood, but I won’t tolerate being forgiven. I’m not ashamed of what I did. The communists understood that.” She laughed bitterly. “They didn’t degrade themselves the way the young man from Washington and all his cronies did. That’s why I made Bevic promise he wouldn’t reveal where he learned the truth about me. I wanted to find out what the public would think.”
Well, I thought, she certainly found out. I said nothing.
After a while, Wilma Bascombe said, “You think I’m lying.”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’ll tell you one thing—if it is true, you owe it to yourself and to history to come out with it.”
“If it’s true,” Miss Bascombe sai
d. Her voice was very cold.
“It would be nice to see a little evidence.”
“Wait here,” she commanded, and swept from the room.
When the door had closed behind her, Llona said, “What’s she up to now?
I shrugged. “Getting evidence. I don’t know what it could be, but if it holds up, scratch one suspect. What did you think of her, Llona?”
Llona let out a breath and blew her bangs askew. “She makes me furious. She has this image of queenliness, and she lets men use her like a dishrag. Why didn’t she fight? For her good name? Or at least for her good intentions? She was an incredible fool.”
Llona got up and leaned against the mantelpiece, looking at Wilma’s Oscar. When she turned back to me, her brown eyes were very soft. “But I feel sorry for her, too,” she said. “Look at all she had. I used to watch her movies; my mother used to worship her. Lots of women did, I bet. Men probably dreamed about her. Now she has to hide here, with Sammy, Murph, and that Charles Addams maid. I don’t think she deserves anyth—”
Llona stopped because Wilma had rejoined us. I didn’t know how much of it she had heard.
Without a word, she handed me a piece of once-white paper. It was a receipt, handwritten in gray felt-tip pen. It was signed “James M. Bevic,” and it enumerated certain documents. Wilma Bascombe had given him these documents (the receipt said) on the condition that he not reveal where he had gotten them without written permission from Wilma Bascombe.
“I could have this authenticated for you,” I said.
“How do I know you won’t destroy it?”
Llona looked like she wanted to cheer. Wilma Bascombe was finally wising up.
“That’s an excellent point, Miss Bascombe. I’ll tell the police, and they’ll send a man for it.” She hesitated. “It would establish your innocence, or help to,” I said.
“My innocence,” Wilma Bascombe said wistfully. “Very well, Mr. Cobb. You have a policeman sent to get this receipt.”
“I will. And make sure you get one too, when you give this to him.”
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