Gary walked slowly toward the girl. She seemed to be frozen where she sat. And then, just before he reached her, she was on her feet and took the few quick steps that carried her into his arms. I turned away. Her hunger for him made me an intruder.
“He may be helpful,” Madison said quietly.
“He wants to be,” I said.
“I’ve been trying to persuade her that she needs psychiatric help,” Madison said. “I’ve put Chambrun’s theory pretty solidly to her. As long as she can’t remember these last three weeks, she’s in serious danger. She doesn’t even have the choice of telling or not telling whatever it is she’s hidden from herself. Meanwhile, Teague has time to make dead sure she is permanently silenced before she does remember.”
“And she won’t get help?”
Madison’s smile was grim. “She’s frightened,” he said. “She’s afraid of the dark, and she’s afraid if she does remember, it may destroy any chance of any kind of future. She’s intelligent enough to know that she’s probably hiding her own guilt with this amnesia.”
“It’s a hell of a situation to be in,” I said.
“I’m convinced of what I tried to tell you and Chambrun,” Madison said. “That this is a fundamentally decent person. She’s been wild, undisciplined, reckless, thoughtless of other people—but not vicious. She’s wanted out for a long time, and found herself in a trap. She’s being eaten alive by remorse. At almost the moment she finds a solution to her life in the person of Craig, she cracks up under pressure from Teague. She can’t choose a course of action because she can’t remember some key fact. She’s tangled up in psychic dangers, plus very real physical danger from two directions.”
“With her money she can go hide anywhere in the world until the fog clears,” I said. “Take Craig with her!”
“And with his money Teague can follow her,” Madison said. “I hope I’m right. I think I’ve convinced her there’s no future in flight. The showdown should be here and now, where she has Craig, and me, and I hope Chambrun and you, to help her. At least we can physically protect her here—from Teague and from the person Chambrun called X.”
Across the room, Doris and Craig were sitting together on the big overstuffed couch, talking earnestly together, her hands held tightly in his. I wondered what I’d be saying to her if she was mine; if I cared for her as much as Craig did. The unknown thing that lay at the center of her blackout must have scared him as much as it did her.
Madison and I wandered into a little study to the left of the front door, intent on giving them as much time together as we could. It seemed pitifully brief when the doorbell rang and Madison opened it to Chambrun and Hardy.
When we joined them, I saw there’d been a change in Craig. His eyes were bright. She’d restored his lost energy and strength, somehow. They sat side by side, her hands in his, but the desperation I’d sensed in both of them before seemed to have evaporated. Together they’d found courage to face whatever it was they had to face.
“I’m in your hands—all your hands,” Doris said. “Madison has convinced me that I should stay where I am and fight. Gary has given me the courage, if that’s what you want me to do. But, oh, God, Mr. Chambrun, it’s not that I’m afraid to face death. I’m afraid to face what I can’t remember. Gary says that no matter what it is, he’ll stand by. But can he? Suppose it’s something—”
“Stop supposing,” Gary said. He lifted her hands and kissed them gently.
“One thing we’re very sure of, Miss Standing,” Chambrun said, “is that the thing you’ve hidden from yourself happened on last February twenty-fifth. We shot that arrow at Teague a few minutes ago and it almost brought him down. I have two suggestions to make to you.”
“Please,” Doris said.
“I think we should call in a first-class psychiatrist. Possibly he could help you to remember. There are drugs, properly administered, that might break down the barrier. Hypnotism has been used to get at things hidden in the subconscious. That’s my first suggestion.”
Doris’s lips trembled. “If you say so.”
“So far as you know, you were in California on the night of February twentieth?”
“Yes. I was at home, in Beverly Hills. I started out for dinner with Emlyn and the others—and that’s where the curtain comes down.”
“Then I suggest you authorize Madison to hire the best private detectives he can find in Los Angeles to pick up your trail on the night of the twentieth and follow it as far as they can. Do you know where you were going that night?”
“To Emlyn’s for cocktails. And then—then I don’t know.”
“I suggest you put both plans into motion at once,” Chambrun said. “We don’t want to wait for one to fail before we try the other. We don’t have time. We can protect you from Teague and his friends, but we’re working, blindfold, against a murderer who may have you high up on his fist.”
“You handle the detective end of it then, will you, T. J.?” she asked.
Madison was already headed out of the room toward the study.
“Will you trust me to find the right medical man for you?” Chambrun asked.
“I have to trust you, Mr. Chambrun.”
“I have connections who will recommend the right man,” Chambrun said. “I don’t know how soon we can get him here, but we’ll whip the horses.” He smiled at her reassuringly.
“One other thing, Miss Standing,” Hardy said. “Stay here, in this place. Don’t be tricked into going anywhere else.”
“Tricked?” she asked, her eyes widening.
“You might get a message that I want to see you somewhere, or Chambrun wants to see you. Know that it’s a trick if you get such a message. If any of us want you for anything, we’ll come here.”
“I understand,” she said in a small voice. Then: “What’s going to happen to T. J.? Is Bobby pressing her charges? What a vile thing to do to him.”
“Nothing is going to happen to him,” Chambrun said. “I think we’ve successfully put a spoke in that wheel. You trust Madison, don’t you?”
“Completely,” Doris said.
“Get some rest if you can,” Chambrun advised. “When the doctor we find gets here, the going may be pretty rough for you.”
Three
I FELT RELAXED. I guess I wanted to think that everything was under control. Teague couldn’t move secretly. He had an army, but it was competently covered by Hardy’s army. Doris was in an inaccessible fortress on the top of a high building, with a cop, and Madison, and Gary to protect her.
I felt it was time for a double martini.
I said something of the kind to Chambrun on the way down in the elevator.
“Care to have it with your lady love?” he asked.
“Shelda’s gone home,” I said, “but if you can spare me for a while—”
“I’m talking about your first and true love,” he said, smiling at me. “Veronica.”
“Why not?” I said.
“Let me make the phone calls necessary to dig up a doctor for Doris and I’ll go with you,” he said. “You might call Veronica and find out if it’s convenient.”
The lady was delighted at the prospect. “Gail’s gone out to spend the evening with some friends. I was beginning to frizzle up with boredom.”
I waited for Chambrun to make a series of calls. It was perhaps a half an hour before he joined me in his outer office.
“I’ve got on to a top man,” he said. “He can’t get here for a couple of hours, but I gather he’s worth waiting for. Veronica say yes?”
“Tickled pink,” I said. “The secretary’s gone out. What is there about her? The name’s vaguely familiar. Gail Miller.”
Chambrun lit a cigarette as we waited for an elevator to take us to the eighteenth floor. “She was what I think was called a ‘starlet’ back in the forties,” Chambrun said. “She had one big moment—some wartime epic with Gary Cooper, I think it was. Second lead, but it attracted attention. Then she faded out. She m
ade some U.S.O. tours with Veronica. I think that’s where they teamed up.”
“She must have been very young when she quit trying to be an actress,” I said, “She can’t be much over forty now.”
“You can’t be sure about women’s ages these days,” Chambrun said. “Only the very young and the aged can’t fool you. If you didn’t know Veronica’s history, what would you take her to be?”
I laughed. “A very well-taken-care-of forty-five,” I said. “Only twenty years off the mark.”
I would have said the same thing five minutes later when she opened the door of her suite to us. She was ageless. She had on a black cocktail dress with a very full skirt that went all the way down to her slippers, a fitted bodice that accented a still-lush figure, and a wide V that went out to the very tips of her still-lovely shoulders. The sleeves were long, with a touch of white lace at the cuffs. At sixty-five she dared to leave her neck and throat bare of any jewelry.
“My very dear Pierre,” she said.
He bent over her hands with a kind of old-world courtesy.
“I know it’s been a bad day for you, Pierre, or you wouldn’t have stayed away from me so long. Please come in, sit down, and take off your shoes if it will make you feel at home. You understand I’m not letting you out of here until you bring me up to date on all your excitement.”
Room service had provided her with one of our traveling bars: ice bucket, glasses, a half a dozen different liquors and a fine sherry, sliced lemon and orange, lemon peel, bitters, sugar, soda and tonic—the works. There were hot canapés in a covered dish, crackers, cheese, nuts.
“Please be bartender, Mark,” she said. “A very mild gin and tonic for me, with a twist of lemon. Pierre?”
“Forgive me if I just have a tonic without the gin,” he said. “The night stretches out far ahead of us. Mark will do the heavy drinking for us. I think he was weaned on martinis.”
It was very pleasant for a while. The room was softly lit. There was a little fire burning on the hearth. I make the best martini I know of for my own taste. I call it an ‘in-and-out.’ You put a little vermouth in the pitcher, swizzle it around, pour it out entirely, and add gin.
Veronica’s conversation was for Chambrun. I didn’t mind. I like to watch and listen to her. Her hands were expressive. Her voice was the low, throaty one that had sent chills up my back at age fifteen. They disposed of mutual friends and a few old memories. Then she gave a little luxurious, catlike stretch.
“I’ve been a fool to stay hidden away so long, Pierre. But I wasn’t really sure of it till I got here today. I used to think I hated being trailed around and gawked at by fans. And yet, in a way, they were my life’s blood. I could be making pictures now if I wanted to, you know. I was a good actress, Pierre, but the image was romantic. When I saw the rushes on my last picture, I knew I was going to have to start playing John Wayne’s mother! I didn’t want that. I didn’t need it. So I just shut the gate to my house and lived inside it—with Gail, poor child.”
“Poor child?” Chambrun raised his heavy lids.
“Twenty-two when she gave up,” Veronica said. “A love affair that went very badly wrong for her. She’s missed a whole life, staying with me. I should have pushed her out, but in a way I needed her, so I was selfish and let her stay.”
“How did you come to spring yourself?” Chambrun asked.
“A tragedy,” Veronica said, her face clouding. “Norman Terry. You remember him? We must have made a dozen pictures together. Suicide. He was one of the last of the great names in my day. I had to see him on his way, Pierre.”
“Of course.”
“So Gail and I came out into the world for that, and suddenly I wanted more. On the spur of the moment, we decided to come to New York—but, oh, so secretly. Eddie Schramm, the producer, offered me his apartment and we came—still hiding, you understand. Ten days of hiding behind black glasses, window-shopping, eating in modest little side-street restaurants where there’d be no chance of being recognized. And then we said, to hell with it! Let’s come out in the open. Let’s have fun! So where else but here, my Pierre! And now I’m going to do the town up brown!”
Chambrun sat staring at the coals on the hearth. “I don’t know,” he said, in a faraway voice, “whether or not I’ll forgive you for being here ten days without letting me know.”
“I had to feel my wings, Pierre. I couldn’t come to the Beaumont and hide! Not this wonderful, glamorous place. But I’ve waited quite long enough to hear about your excitement.”
He gave her a fairly detailed account of the last twenty-four hours at the Beaumont.
“Mark tells me you’ve had a brush with Teague,” he said, when he’d finished.
She’d listened with bright interest and what I thought was growing outrage when he came to the part about Bobby Towers and Madison.
“I got the minor-league treatment, I guess,” she said, but she sounded bitter. “I met Emlyn Teague during the war, when I was overseas doing shows for the troops. He was an amusing creature. You understand, Pierre, I wasn’t Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard when I went into retirement. I saw a few friends; I gave a few parties. I just stayed out of the public eye, and out of reach of the sightseers and the autograph hunters. Emlyn looked me up. He used to drop in occasionally for a drink. I knew his reputation. I allowed myself to believe, however, that I was a friend. He got the idea somewhere along the way that I should give a big party for a lot of the old-timers who’d been around in the old glamour days. An anniversary party—celebrating the making of my first picture. The idea appealed to me. There were a lot of the old stars around, many of them not so well off as I am. Emlyn said he would take over all the details for me—the caterer, the music, the guest list. I had invitations engraved and Emlyn sent them out.” Her face hardened. “The night of the party was a beautiful night. We had tables set up all over the terraces; there was music, and flowers, and champagne, and a full moon. And no one came.”
“What?” Chambrun said sharply.
“No one came, Pierre—except Teague and his friends. And they came—to laugh.”
“And no one else?”
“No one else. I made my big entrance—my big return to life, Pierre—and there was no one there to see it, except the laughing Teagues.”
“But the guest list—the invitations!” I heard myself ask.
“The invitations had gone into a trash can, somewhere,” Veronica said. “Of course, I didn’t know it at the time. It was a long while before I realized I wasn’t forgotten, abandoned by my friends.” She drew a deep breath. “I do not love the Teagues, Pierre. I do not love them at all.”
“Then you really did shut out the world after that?” Chambrun said.
“Until two weeks ago,” she said. “Oh, I knew the truth about my party long before that, but, somehow, I didn’t have the energy or the courage to come out of the hiding I need never have gone into.”
“They are nourished by cruelty,” Chambrun said.
Veronica held out her glass to me. “I’ll have another small gin and tonic, Mark,” she said. And then as I went over to the bar, she went on. “It’s part of a new world that I find very hard to adjust to, Pierre. Everything is so marvelously efficient that there’s no place for individual achievement any more. The whole Northeast was blacked out one night last fall. Why? Because when something went wrong, man wasn’t able to do anything about it. You look around and the great efficiencies are all threatening destruction. So something went wrong with the great machines and our lights went out. Tomorrow something may go wrong with another machine and before anyone can do anything about it, the whole world will be destroyed. There’s no place left for sentiment, or warmth, or traditions, or even good manners. Maybe we have to concede that Emlyn Teague is on the beam. There is nothing left for the individual to do but laugh at his own vanities, his own futile self-importance, his miserable little household gods. No single heroic voice can be heard directing us back on the rails. If
one tries, he is shouted down by mobs with signs, or by hate groups who’ve lost track of what to hate, or by an assassin’s bullet—fired by one man who actually represents a faceless, directionless mob. It’s too late for me to become part of that mob, Pierre. I have to fight for meaningless things—like honor, and reason, and genuine friendship. I think of you as fighting for those things, Pierre; for a dead or dying way of life represented by the Beaumont.”
“You’re not making me feel cheerful,” Chambrun said, staring at the red coals in the grate. As he turned his head to look at Veronica from under his hooded lids, I wasn’t sure he’d been listening. “What went wrong with Norman Terry?” he asked. He had remembered our little coincidence. “I understand he was well off, financially; not ill.”
“Poor Norman,” Veronica said. “For forty years he was a romantic hero to the women of the world. And then we moved into the age of the un-hero. The matinee idol is dead. People today must laugh at sick jokes, or sit yogalike, examining their miserable childhoods. The image of the romantic hero has been ground up in the sausage machine that is television. Norman couldn’t take it. He couldn’t bear to be laughed at.”
“His funeral was on the twenty-eighth of February,” Chambrun said. “When did he shoot himself?”
“On the twenty-fifth,” Veronica said, sipping the drink I’d brought her.
Chambrun’s bright eyes flashed my way quickly, but his voice was quite casual as he asked Veronica if there’d been some specific incident that had set Terry off.
“I don’t know, Pierre. If I had, I might have saved him,” she said. “He came to see me on the afternoon of the night he killed himself. I guess it’s no secret that Norman and I had been more than an acting team in the old days. We might have married, but back then, the studios controlled our lives. We were a romantic couple. If we’d married, the studio felt we would have lost our box-office appeal. And also, Norman had a wife, locked away in a mental institution. A divorce would have turned him into a villain in the public mind. So he and I had what we could have in secret. In the end it died a natural death. There was nothing to nourish it. I was growing older. Younger, more exciting women camped on his trail. He was the big romantic figure of the day. We separated without bitterness, but with a continued affection and regard for each other.”
Evil That Men Do Page 14
