Murder among the Stars

by Adam Shankman

  Another group of scavenger hunters arrived, and the screams started anew. Lulu wiped her face. She would talk to Freddie later, and he would understand, and they would kiss and have a glorious laugh about it. But right now Dolores came first.

  Holding Charlie carefully, Lulu made herself look into the cage.

  Her eyes squeezed shut with a will of their own, but she forced them open again. Why had Dolores gone into the cage? Lulu tried to remember when she’d last seen the tall, voluptuous actress. Dolores had been at dinner, definitely. Had she seen her in the morning? No, Lulu had gotten out so early to meet with Freddie that the other girls had barely been stirring.

  A shadow passed over her, and she felt Sal move beside her, his bare arm brushing the ruined silk of her blouse. “I wonder when it happened,” she said.

  She didn’t really expect Sal to have an answer, but he said, “It was definitely not last night. She was with me until dawn.”

  A chill shot through Lulu, her breath growing strangely shallow.

  “Poor kid,” Sal went on. “She didn’t deserve to end like that. She was so full of life.”

  Lulu tried to push aside the strange feeling that washed over her when she knew that Sal and Dolores had spent the night together. She felt her cheeks tingle with heat, but why? Flustered, she made herself focus on the matter at hand. Freddie had no reason to be jealous, so why should she?

  “Did she seem okay to you? Was she sad or upset about anything?”

  Sal’s lip twitched in an almost smile. “She seemed like she was enjoying life to the utmost.”

  Lulu cringed. “And she left in the morning? And went back to our guesthouse?”

  “She left around four or five,” Sal confirmed. “I went to sleep for a couple of hours afterward.”

  Lulu made herself keep staring at the carnage. It helped her focus on what was important, and wash out the images of Dolores and Sal that wanted to flood her mind.

  She couldn’t help but ask, “Have you known her long?” Lulu tried to keep her voice neutral and pretend the question was only about the investigation.

  “A few weeks,” Sal admitted. So he met her not too long after the situation with Ruby, Lulu thought. Right after he went to such great and immoral lengths to make Lulu his own.

  “You . . . you seem pretty close to her.”

  “She’s a hell of a girl, and a really swell actress. She’s got the chops. Had the chops.” He pressed his thumb and forefinger briefly to the corners of his eyes. “I was doing everything I could to help boost her career.”

  Lulu knew exactly what Sal could do to help an actress’s career. She wasn’t sure how he did it, with threats or money or both, but when he sent Lulu to Hollywood in exchange for her favorable testimony, every door had been opened to her. Now that Sal had established himself as a Hollywood presence, she imagined his influence would be even more far-reaching.

  “I’ve got such a good hookup with Hearst now, supplying him with liquor . . . and a few other necessities of life. I just about had this part in the bag for the kid. We shook on the bones of the deal last night but still had to flesh it out.”

  Lulu drew in her breath sharply. “You mean you’d talked Hearst into giving her the starring role in the movie Anita Loos is writing? The role we’re all competing for?”

  She was stung by the unfairness of it. Here were a bunch of talented girls working their hardest to get the role of a lifetime, and the part was going to be handed off based on commerce and sex. The men are wheeling and dealing, Lulu thought, and we girls are hardly more than commodities traded on the open market. Lulu knew she shouldn’t be surprised. This was Hollywood, after all. But it was still galling.

  Never in a million years would she admit it was galling that Sal was doing it for another girl instead of for her.

  Sal seemed to think she might feel that way, though, because he said sincerely, “You’re all set in this place, Lu. I might have given you a boost, but you’ve made your own way since then. Besides, I didn’t think you’d like the idea of me doing any favors for you.”

  “Of course not,” she snapped. “It’s just . . .” Then she remembered that the girl she was definitely not at all jealous of was dead, and she bit her lip.

  “I know. Life ain’t fair. It wasn’t fair to this poor kid.”

  The part isn’t important, Lulu had to remind herself. She shouldn’t let herself be dwelling on unrelated things like Dolores being handed the part when the statuesque young actress was dead. She tried to focus on that.

  “Why didn’t the keepers find her before I did?” Lulu wanted to know.

  “Let’s ask them,” Sal said, his voice a menacing growl. He cornered a man in picturesque khaki jodhpurs and a pith helmet.

  “She’s such a nice tiger! So playful and gentle,” the man was saying to other Ranch employees. “Still, I wouldn’t ever be in the cage with her.”

  “Why didn’t you find her before now?” Sal asked, looking like he wanted to grab the man by the shirt and lift him off the ground. “If someone had been here earlier, this might not have happened!”

  “The big cats like to eat in the afternoon,” the keeper said, obviously distraught, though Lulu couldn’t tell if it was because of Dolores’s death or Sal’s sinister menace. Probably both, plus a natural fear of losing his job when Hearst found out. Where was Hearst, anyway? Word must have spread to him by now.

  “So you didn’t check them this morning?” Lulu asked.

  “No. We fed the elephant, and the chimp, and all the grazers. But the carnivores are active at night, and lazy in the morning, so we leave them alone until later.”

  “The cage wasn’t locked when I went in,” Lulu pointed out. “Can anyone just walk into the cage?”

  “There’s a bolt and a padlock,” the keeper said. “But the padlock wasn’t on, for some reason.” Lulu raised her eyebrows. “I always lock it, and I always double-check,” he swore to her.

  “I’ve heard that the lion got out before,” Lulu accused. “So not quite all the time.”

  The keeper threw up his hands in exasperation. “I get days off, you know, and I don’t sleep here. I always lock up. But I can’t speak for my assistants. They’re just guys who get paid to chop vegetables and shovel dung. If a cage is unlocked, it’s their fault. I’ve told Hearst over and over—”

  Lulu cut him off. “So it was locked last night. Where do you keep the keys?”

  He pulled a key ring from his pocket and held one of the cluster out to them. It was a large brassy key with a stylized lion’s head. “This is the key to every one of the carnivores’ locks. I always have it with me.”

  “Does anyone else have a copy?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t think so. They shouldn’t, anyway. I never really thought about it, though. What kind of an idiot would go into a tiger cage?” He looked at the gory scene behind the bars and shook his head sadly.

  “Everybody back inside.” Hearst’s voice boomed through the menagerie as he strode in. It was so loud it set the chimpanzee, in some unseen cage, hooting and chittering. “There’s no need for us all to gape at this horrible accident. I’m sure if it were you in there, you wouldn’t want gawkers surrounding you. Have a little sensitivity.”

  “WR is right,” said Lolly as she slithered around his bulk, craning her neck to get a look at the carnage. “Only necessary people should remain.” She made a shooing gesture and herded Lulu and Sal away from the cage. Once the path in front of it was clear, she squatted down, took a Brownie camera from her ostrich-skin handbag, and started snapping pictures.

  “The papers will never print those!” Lulu said.

  “Private collectors,” Sal whispered in her ear. “She’ll make a killing, so to speak, off all this ugliness.”

  “Really?” Lulu asked, astonished. “Who would buy awful photos like those?”

  “Kid, you’d be surprised at all the kinds of evil there are in the world. Fans who get their kicks looking at torture and disfi
gurement. Looking at—and doing—all kinds of things that you and I would never dream of.”

  Lulu shuddered at the mere idea that Lolly would participate in such hideous enterprise. Her eyes strayed reluctantly back to Dolores.

  How had she ever thought it was a prop? Her skin, once so tropically tan, was pale as vellum, and the glint of drying moisture in her staring eye . . . Ugh, how could anybody get a thrill out of looking at a scene like that?

  Then she noticed something she hadn’t seen at first. When there’s so much blood, and body parts strewn hither and yon, small details get lost by the wayside.

  “Sal,” she began hesitantly, “did you . . . ?” She stopped and bit her lip. This was far beyond her realm of experience. Sure, other girls had gossiped about their exploits, so strangely free of shame that Lulu assumed they were making half of it up. But Lulu had never done anything beyond passionate kissing and perhaps a little innocent petting. She knew a great deal about what came next from accumulated hearsay, but no one had ever taught her, or answered her questions—and she’d never been brave enough to ask.

  She blurted it out as fast as she could, her face burning. “Sal, did you tie Dolores up last night?”

  He looked at her with astonishment.

  “I mean . . . for fun?” She looked down, deeply ashamed. An actress she knew had told her that some people enjoyed that during intimate moments. “It’s just that she looks like she has marks on her wrists. Bruises, and a red shiny weal. I had bruises like that after I was handcuffed.” When she’d been arrested under suspicion of attempted murder, she’d been interrogated for hours. Although she’d been completely innocent, she had technically pulled the trigger. Investigating officers might have learned the truth sooner if Sal hadn’t bribed them to charge Lulu right away. He’d wanted to make her afraid so she’d have no choice but to turn to him for help.

  “No,” he said gently. “I didn’t do that.”

  “Well, look at her wrists,” Lulu told him, stepping closer to the cage herself. “Doesn’t it look like . . . ?”

  At that moment a dozen burly men stomped into view. They were all in their shirtsleeves, and wore shoulder holsters openly. Lulu recognized some of them—a footman who had stood in livery behind Hearst during dinner, a gardener she’d marked as being particularly able-bodied but not otherwise noteworthy.

  “Hearst’s personal security force,” Sal said. “Incognito most of the time. I guess now they’re on official call-out.”

  “At least he seems to be taking this seriously. Do you think it’s possible that . . . ?”

  But four members of the security team imposed themselves between Lulu and the cage, blocking the scene. “You have to leave now,” one said sternly. Elsewhere, other guards were hustling away the guests who had been reluctant to leave the exciting scene even after Hearst’s command.

  “But I have to check something! I discovered the body!” Lulu tried to explain, craning her neck to see around them. It was no use. The security force made a solid phalanx between her and the crime scene.

  “There’s nothing more to see here, miss. Go along back to the house.”

  She looked hopefully at Sal, but he didn’t seem to like the odds. “Come on, babe. I need a drink, anyway.” He put his arm around her and walked her back toward the house. Across the way she saw Freddie. Something was strange about him, she thought. He looked so imperious. His stance was uncharacteristically upright, far from the more casual and inviting slouch she so loved. His arms were crossed over his chest as he watched her. He’s on duty, she mused. That’s it. Admittedly he might still be miffed, but surely that will pass, and he knows how I love him! She broke abruptly away from Sal and ran to Freddie.

  “Freddie, you have to take a closer look at Dolores. I don’t think she went in there on her own. At first I thought she might just have been drunk, or foolish, or maybe suicidal, even. But now I think maybe she was forced to go into that cage. I’m almost sure I saw marks on her wrists. Freddie, I think Dolores was murdered too!”

  For a long moment Freddie didn’t speak. She gazed trustingly up into his face, but he looked eerily different than she had ever seen him. His face was pleasant, but formal and remote. There was a wintry distance in his eyes. The change, though subtle, was thorough, and chilling. He was that person again, she realized with disbelief. The billionaire he claimed to have despised and so thoroughly abandoned. He’d gone back to the personality he must have had when he was still living in New York on his father’s ill-gotten fortune. He looked like a sophisticated autocrat who was so rich that nothing could possibly trouble him. Not death. Not love. He was above it all.

  “Freddie,” she asked carefully. “What’s wrong?”

  He regarded her with that insufferable, unflappable expression of the rich and said, “You get carried away with yourself, seeing murder everywhere, my dear.” His voice was cold. “It’s time to let the professionals handle this.”

  Even the words “my dear” sounded heartless falling from his downturned lips. There was no warmth in them. Was this all because of Sal? How could he possibly think that Sal meant anything to her?

  “But, Freddie!”

  “It’s true, a pretty girl will be humored for far longer than the rest of the world,” he said. “But even someone as beautiful as you gets tiresome after a while if she persists in ludicrous theories. You need to concentrate on your work, and I on mine. Mr. Hearst needs me to focus on the blackmail letter, which is what I fully intend on doing. If you want to meddle in things that don’t concern you, you’ll do it without me. I don’t have the time or inclination to engage in wild-goose chases.”

  “But, Freddie, you have to help me,” she pleaded, thinking all the while Where has he gone? Oh, please be my sweet Freddie again.

  He shook his head. “You want help? It appears as if Sal is more than able to take my place. And you seem happy enough to let him.”

  She gasped in disbelief, torn between reactions. She wanted to scream and slap him. She wanted to very calmly explain that he was being an ass, that she was naturally grateful to Sal for saving her life, and possibly she didn’t hate him quite as much as she should, but her heart belonged completely and unequivocally to Freddie. Didn’t it?

  But if he could turn on her like this in a petty fit of jealousy, was he really the Freddie she knew and loved? Her life was so full of actors, of people skilled at pretending to be what they were not. Had he only been acting like a good and decent and loving and moral man, when in fact he was still the heartless young billionaire?

  No, she told herself firmly. I know Freddie. He’s being stupid now, but I know his inmost heart. We’ll get through this. We’ll laugh about it later.

  She composed her face into a tentative smile and tried to explain everything to him in a calm and rational way. But he had already turned away, and her pride wouldn’t let her call him back or chase him down. She stood, bereft, and watched him go.

  Fourteen

  Knock it off, van der Waals. This means nothing. Just keep your head down and walk. One foot, then the other. But if I see that lousy thug touch her one more . . . No, focus on the crime. What is it Mugsy used to say? Keep your head in the game, not on the dame? This is just a moment. One extremely aggravating moment. I’ll be fine. She loves me. Doesn’t she? But what if she’s just playing me? I told you! Knock it off! Nothing happened. Nothing except that lowlife criminal pulled my girl out of the jaws of death and I wasn’t there to do a thing about it. But that’s the past. Just keep walking. You have a job to do.

  Freddie grimaced numbly as he strode away from the woman he loved, forcing himself with every fiber of his being to not offer her anything resembling a backward glance. When there was any question of a moral right or wrong, he always knew the answer. What’s more, he was always able to do the right thing, no matter how difficult it was. Where honor was concerned, there was never any disconnect between what he should do and what he did.

  That wasn’t the case n
ow. He knew in his heart that he was being petty, unreasonable, and small. He knew he should turn right around, take Lulu in his arms, and apologize for being such an ass. Why did he want to beat Sal to a pulp, then throw Lulu over his shoulder and carry her away? This was all pure ego and irrational foolishness. This insane jealousy had to stop. This was not a self he recognized, or could take any pride in.

  But somehow he couldn’t help himself. Even while he yearned to go back to her and make things right, he found he couldn’t. It was some sickening remnant of the rich man he’d once been, the man who was so far above everything. Like a child throwing a tantrum, he knew he was doing the wrong thing, hurting Lulu and himself with his petty childishness, but he felt that if he ever saw Lulu in Sal’s arms again, plain and simple, he would kill him. That was too much emotion for Freddie, so he needed to just keep walking. For now he needed to focus on his job.

  Waters and Hearst need me, he repeated to himself over and over again.

  Only, that brought him around to Lulu again. He’d come looking for her to talk through his new suspicions about the blackmail. It was a disturbing notion, but he couldn’t quite shake it, and he’d wanted to get Lulu’s opinion before he broached the idea with his boss. He didn’t relish the thought of telling Hearst that the most logical prime suspect was, in fact, Marion Davies herself.

  Marion had access to all of Hearst’s secrets and was the only person with unhindered entrée to Hearst’s private office at all hours, and to everywhere else in the castle. She could order the staff to be out of the way. No one else could move around without suspicion the way she could. She might easily have slipped the blackmail notes right under Hearst’s nose.

  But though she clearly had the opportunity, what about the motive? And the strange dollar amount? That’s what Freddie couldn’t fathom. Hearst gave her everything she wanted. Her latest shopping spree had probably totaled more than the blackmail amount. But there might be secrets he wasn’t privy to. He knew all too well that every family had them, and despite their unconventional relationship, Marion and Hearst were very much family in every way that mattered. Maybe Marion was jealous of Hearst’s wife back in New York—or of some other woman. It wasn’t rational for her to blackmail Hearst, especially, given his extraordinary wealth, for this comparatively measly amount. But then again, Freddie was beginning to understand exactly how irrational jealousy could make a person.