“You used to call her ‘baby.’”
They shared a smile, and then even though she had a perfectly good window on her side of the Peerless, she leaned across his lap to look out his side, pressing her palm on his thigh to brace her weight, fooling around…
“A couple of inches to the right and higher,” he said.
She laughed and raised the green silk taffeta window shade a couple of inches. They were almost at the theater, finally. She could see the red carpet, and Mayor O'Keefe standing next to a blue ribbon with a giant pair of scissors in his hand. The crowd lining the curb and sidewalk all had their heads craned way back, peering at something high into an evening sky that was being swept with giant violet spotlights.
“Good heavens, Day. I'm not sure my vanity can stand it, but there appears to be something going on out there that's more interesting than me.” She sprawled further across his lap trying to peer sideways out the window and up into the drizzle coming out of clouds the color of soot. “What are they all looking at?”
“Some fool…” His breath hitched as she wriggled some more, pretending that she was trying to get a better look. “Some fool who hasn't got the sense to get down off his pole and come in out of the rain.”
They laughed together and then couldn't stop, and because, Remy thought, you couldn't live on the knife edge every second, they were able to let some of it go.
She pulled apart from him to touch his face with her fingertips, tracing the planes and angles as if she would sculpt him again later from memory. “I guess I'm not so tough. When I saw what he'd done to the 'Cat, when I thought I'd lost you…”
“Sssh. I'm here, baby.”
He cradled her face in his hands, but before he could kiss her the car door opened to the chant of Re-my, Re-my, Re-my Le-lourie and the explosions of dozens of flash lamps.
Rourke got out first and turned to give her his hand. Remy Lelourie gathered her cape around her shroud and emerged from the Peerless. She paused at the end of the red carpet, turning in a slow half circle to let the cameras get their shots, and she could feel the acceptance, the admiration, the worship coming at her from the screaming crowd in pulsing waves, like blood pumping through a heart.
And then she smiled, showing her fangs.
The Saenger Theatre was being hailed by those who'd built it as the “Florentine Palace of Splendor,” but Remy had been a guest in a real Florentine palace once, and it had nothing on this. This was like walking into a fairy-tale piazza at night. Statues lined the tops of the loges that were decorated with friezes and columns. Water cascaded from marble fountains, and above their heads the azure ceiling twinkled with stars.
The owner of the theater made a speech up on the apron of the stage and Remy made a speech. Then, just as she was about to push the button that opened the thick red-velvet curtain, another vampire bat emerged from behind it and swooped Remy up, wrapping her in his black satin cape. He bent her over his arm and sank his fangs into her neck, and the audience erupted into sighs and screams.
“Lord, I can't believe it's you,” Remy said as they ran off stage right on a thunderous wave of applause. “You about stopped my heart, you wretch.”
Once in the wings, the vampire bat whirled to face her, his cape flaring. “Remy, love,” he said. “I forgot how deliciously fun it is to suck you.”
Laughing, Remy took a mock swing at his head. “You are worse than a wretch. You're a vulgar…” She couldn't think of a word. “Wretch.”
Hugh Granger spat his celluloid bat teeth out into his hands and rubbed the mouth that had set the hearts throbbing of thousands of women across America. “Dammit. I forgot how much these bloody things hurt.”
“So what are you doing in New Orleans?” Remy said. “I thought you were in Mexico making a Western.”
“No, I finished with that three weeks ago, and when the studio asked me to make an appearance at this tedious affair…” He lifted his shoulders in an elegant shrug. “I decided to be obliging for a change.” He gave a sudden start, widening his eyes. “Good God, do you think I've turned over a new leaf?”
“Fat chance,” Remy said, laughing again.
She took his hands in hers, squeezing them, then leaned back to look him over. The expression “tall, dark, and handsome” seemed coined for Hugh Granger. His looks were so classically aristocratic—the high forehead and pronounced cheekbones, the wide mouth and thin nose—that he was almost always cast in the “bloody duke roles,” as he called them. His haughty demeanor with the press and his fans had only added to that image.
It had taken Remy the first month of making Lost Souls to get to know him, but once she did she realized that what had seemed to be vanity and aloofness was really a deep reserve, and after he warmed up to you he could be charming and funny and sweet. Still, Remy had sensed—perhaps because she had one herself—that there was an opaque barrier he'd put up between himself and the world, and beyond which even the closest of his friends were never allowed to penetrate.
“Oh, Hugh,” she said now. “It's so good to see you. When this ‘tedious affair’ is over, I'm bringing you home with me and we can catch up on old times over some of my world-famous mint juleps.”
“Well, I, uh…”
“Got a hot date tonight?”
“Yes,” he said, and to Remy's secret delight he actually blushed a little. “Sort of a date, anyway.”
Remy smiled and leaned into him, standing on tiptoe to kiss him lightly on the cheek. “Never mind. We'll do it later,” she said, whispering now, because the lights were dimming and such a hush of anticipation had fallen over the house that you could hear the leader film clicking through the projector.
Then the organist struck the first chord of the eerie cemetery music that had been composed especially for Lost Souls, just as the first title card appeared on the screen:
In a castle deep in Transylvania…
After the screening they went out into a lobby that was all gilt and mirrors, where a jazz band was playing “Dixie.” Waiters carried around trays of fruit punch, and within seconds flasks had emerged from pockets, sashes, garters, even hats, to spike it with. Buffet tables groaned beneath the weight of spiced baked beans, fried chicken, Saratoga chips, and coconut cake.
Almost everyone was in costume: harem girls and their sheiks, cowboys and Indian maidens, matadors and flamenco dancers. Once Remy saw a Romeo arm in arm with a Juliet, and her stomach clenched with a residual of that morning's fear, but this Romeo seemed too young to be the owner of the voice on the telephone, and he was making puppy-love eyes at the girl on his arm.
She waved at Freddy Ramon, who was dressed as a harlequin, and then she saw a Bright Lights cameraman, a sound technician, and an assistant director all in harlequin costumes as well—black and white diamond-patterned shirts and fat-legged pantaloons, floppy shoes, and silly pointed hats with red pompoms on top. Apparently the studio's press agents had decreed that everyone involved with Cutlass except herself was to have come as a harlequin.
“What do harlequins have to do with Louisiana pirates, though?” she wondered aloud, but her lover hadn't heard her. Daman Rourke's gaze searched through the crowded lobby, as if he would know Romeo right off when he found him, and there was almost a heat radiating off of him, of violence barely held in check.
He stuck to her side like a cocklebur while she signed autographs and made nice to all the dignitaries and distinguished guests. Yet she, too, could still sense Romeo's presence nearby, in the way that she could feel the air on her bare skin.
Then a man's hand clasped her arm beneath her elbow from behind, and she nearly jumped out of her skin.
“Why so nervous, darling?” Peter Kohl said as he slipped around in front of her.
“Peter…” She smiled to hide the hitch in her breathing. She thought she could actually feel her pulse beating in her neck. “You shouldn't sneak up on a girl like that. Especially one with such long, sharp teeth to bite you with.”
She
held out her hand to the director, palm side down. With his jutting beard and monocle, he looked just a little ridiculous in his harlequin costume.
He took her hand, turned it over and kissed the palm. “Remy, darling. You look like the living dead.”
“Why, Peter. Darling. Your words are like a stake in my heart,” she said back at him. From beside her, she thought she heard her cop snort under his breath.
Her director nodded at her cop. “Rourke.”
Her cop nodded at her director. “Kohl.”
The first time she'd introduced them, they'd circled each other like curs in an ally after the same bone, and they would probably be doing that here again, she thought, if there had been room to perform the maneuver.
The band was playing “Runnin' Wild” and quite a few couples were trying to dance the Charleston among the press of people. Her name was being shouted at her from all directions. Hey, Remy…Smile, Remy…Over here, Remy…And flash lamps were popping with her every breath. The theater lobby was awhirl in flashes of color, light, and sound, like a merry-go-round spinning wildly out of control.
Her director was feeling in the pocket of his harlequin suit for his cigarette case, all the while keeping his eyes on her cop. He had his cigarette lit and smoking by the time he turned back to her. “Have you talked to Max yet tonight?” he asked, then went on without waiting for her answer. “He's got the perfect vehicle for you, Remy. A gangster flick about a beautiful moll who falls for the G-man who's hunting her brother. And if The Jazz Singer isn't laughed out of the theaters this month, he was saying we might even use the Vitaphone process for a few feet of film. Maybe have you sing a number draped over a piano or something.”
“God, Peter,” Remy said on a laugh. “You know I'm practically tone deaf.”
“Nonsense, darling. There isn't a scenario written that you can't pull off beautifully.” He turned as another harlequin came up to them, too perfectly timed not to have been arranged. “Isn't that right, Max?”
Remy had never seen Max Leeland in anything other than a cheap suit bought off the rack, but the harlequin costume he had on tonight looked as if it could have been worn to a fancy dress ball at Versailles by the Sun King. The black and white diamonds were fashioned of jacquard silk and embroidered with gilt thread. The buttons that ran down the front were the size of plums, and they looked like they'd been carved out of black jade and then studded with real pearls.
It must have been by Max's orders, then, that everyone from Bright Lights had come to the party dressed as harlequins, and she wondered what point he was trying to make with it. That the world was full of clowns? That the movies he made were entertainment, not art? That he had the power to make an entire film crew dress to his whim?
The studio boss stared at Remy from beneath the thick shelf of his eyebrows. He didn't have any natural charm, and as long as she'd known him he'd never tried to fake it. “You know where I'm staying, Miss Lelourie. The Roosevelt Hotel. I'll be there until the end of the week. I trust you'll be bringing me the signed contract before I leave. A word, Kohl,” he said and walked away without even a “so long” or “good evening.”
The director looked at Remy and lifted his shoulders in a very European shrug, then he followed in Max Leeland's wake.
Rourke had gone perfectly still beside her, as if he'd suddenly been emptied of air. She was afraid to look at his face, so she grabbed a glass of punch off a floating tray. The band was doing a drum solo now, and the dancers had formed a conga line. It was wending its way through the knots of conversation and the buffet tables, getting longer and longer as it went along.
Remy flapped her hand in front of her face like a fan and laughed. “My, it smells like a bull ring in here, what with all the snorting and pawing at the ground that was going on between you and Peter.”
“What contract?”
“There isn't one, Day. I'm not going to sign it.”
She took a drink of the punch; it was so sweet she almost choked. When he didn't say anything more, she turned to look at him and got his cop face.
“You think I didn't feel a little of what you were feeling out there on that red carpet?” he said. “There isn't another rush like what you get from being on top of the world. You can't stop being Remy Lelourie because of me. You can't put that kind of burden on me, but more importantly, you can't put it on yourself.”
She looked away, blinking, swallowing down the tears that had been threatening on and off all night. “Do we have to talk about this here and now?”
“Well, hell,” he said, smiling a little. “Did you expect me to wait until after you were gone to show off to you how noble I can be?”
She tried to smile back at him, but she couldn't manage it. He was telling her he understood and had already accepted that it was inevitable she would leave him someday soon, and she wanted to throw up words of denial in the same way you would cross your fingers against a voodoo curse.
“I'm not—” she said, but she got no further. The line of dancers snaked between them, separating them as Rourke took a step back. A man in a pirate's costume jostled Remy, spilling spiked punch down the front of her shroud. Then a hand grabbed her arm from behind, and she thought the person was only trying to steady himself in the crush until she felt a sharp, stabbing pain lance into the crook of her elbow.
She cried out loud, as much from the pain—it hurt—as the shock.
Rourke broke through the line of dancers and was at her side in an instant. “My arm,” she paid, holding it up to see what was causing the pain—a short, deep gash near the bend in her elbow that was almost pulsing blood.
“Jesus…” He whipped a white silk handkerchief out of his pocket, folded it into a pad and pressed it against the bleeding cut. He held it there for about a minute, pressing hard, although after that first shock of sharp pain, the cut was only throbbing now.
He took her other hand by the wrist and put it in place of his own. “Hold that there and bend your arm up tight against your chest. That's it…” He searched her face, and she wondered what he saw. She felt oddly detached, as if she were watching herself in a film she'd made years ago. “I think you'd better breathe, darlin',” he said.
She breathed and felt so light-headed she swayed a little on her feet, and that made her angry. She was not the fainting type.
He brushed the hair back off her face and then trailed his fingers down her cheek and along the line of her jaw. “Remy. Jesus, baby…I hate to ask this, but can you tell me what-all you saw while it was happening?”
She closed her eyes to replay it in her mind. “It happened so fast, it was like getting a glimpse of a room by a lightning flash on a dark night. It was some kind of knife, but a strange one. It had a hooked point on it, like a can opener. And his sleeve…I got an impression of black and white.” She opened her eyes, a little surprised to realize how much it hurt to think that someone she knew could have attacked her in that way. “I think he could be one of the harlequins, Day.”
“The damn place is half full of harlequins.”
Although, oddly, as they looked around the press of people closest to them, those dancing and the others chatting and drinking in their little groups, there wasn't a single harlequin. She did see Garrison Hughes of The Movies, though. The reporter waved and lifted his camera for a shot, and her cop went right for him.
“Hey…” he said, retreating a couple of steps, but Rourke kept coming.
“Hey…” Hughes turned and ran, pushing his way roughly through the crowded lobby, with Rourke on his heels and Remy following close behind.
Hughes disappeared into the men's toilet facilities, and Rourke went in after him. Remy stopped outside the door, hesitating, and then she heard the reporter's voice, high-pitched and cracking on the edges. “I got a right to be here. I'm with the press. They want me here taking pictures, for crissakes.”
She pushed the swinging door open and went in. “Don't hurt him, Day.”
“I wasn't going to,
” he said, looking wounded that she'd even think it. He was leaning up against the sink, his hands braced on the porcelain behind him. Garrison Hughes was standing across the room, by the urinals. Her cop was smiling, though, and his smile could be scary.
“I want you to take pictures, too, Hughes,” he said. “In fact I'll pay you a hundred bucks if you take some pictures for me tonight.”
The reporter's mouth opened as if he'd been punched, and even Remy was surprised. To pay a guy a hundred dollars for a couple of hours work was a lot of money, even for Rourke, who supplemented his detective's salary by playing the cards and the ponies and being good at it.
Garrison Hughes stared at Rourke a moment longer, then his head snapped around to Remy as his reporter's instinct kicked in. His eyes widened a fraction as he took in the way she was holding her arm and the drops of blood splattered on the white tile floor. “Holy cow…”
Rourke pushed himself off the sink and took a couple of steps toward the reporter, moving like a boxer dancing up to his opponent. “You could be a world of help to Miss Lelourie and the police if you would go around the lobby this evenin' and take a picture of everybody you see wearing a harlequin costume and then get their names, if you can.”
The reporter's gaze clicked back and forth between them, then he nodded. “Yeah, I can do that. Everybody and his brother wants their picture in The Movies and their names spelled right. I also want the story, though. Exclusive. And on top of the hundred bucks.”
“Sure,” Rourke said, and he smiled again. “Only I decide when you get it.” He cocked his head toward the door. “Now, beat it.”
Remy could almost see the gears and wheels turning in the reporter's head. He could trust that they were playing square with him and maybe get the scoop of a lifetime. But with every moment he held back what little story he already did have, he risked getting scooped by someone else.
He finally nodded, a bit reluctantly. “Okay. But how and when do I—”
Wages of Sin Page 30
