Death Was in the Picture

by Linda L. Richards

  “I guess I did, didn’t I? Sorry. It’s just all so much on my mind just now. So you don’t think so, do you?”

  “Think what?” Steward asked, rightly confused by the track change.

  “Think Laird, you know, did it. You don’t even think he’s capable of it.”

  “No. You’re right there. I know Laird pretty well—maybe as well as anyone—and I don’t think he’s capable of… well, of that.”

  “Someone did it though.”

  “Well of course,” said Steward, back on solid ground, “that’s what we hired you for.”

  “He hit a woman,” I said it softly.

  “Pardon?”

  “I think you heard me.”

  “All right. I did,” he admitted. “I just couldn’t believe my ears.”

  “Couldn’t you? That surprises me. From what I heard, you knew all about it.”

  “Hey, what is this?”

  “It’s nothing, Mr. Sterling. Exactly nothing. Call it a probe, if you will. A test.”

  “A test? How did I do?”

  I opened the door in a single motion. Hopped out onto the curb.

  “I’ll let you know,” I said, closing the door behind me, moving toward the house, not looking back.

  It was after midnight when I let myself in. I was careful to be mouse-quiet and crept along the carefully oiled floors as soundlessly as possible. Though a part of me wouldn’t have been surprised if Marjorie had waited up, I was hoping this would not be the case. I didn’t want to have to explain myself. I didn’t even want to have to talk anymore and I was more relieved than I would have thought to make it to my room without encountering anyone. In my room, I took off my shoes and sat at the very center of my bed with my legs crossed beneath me.

  Sitting there, I calmed my heart; asked my pulse to be still. And I asked myself what I thought I was doing. No matter if Steward’s boss was shaping up to be a bit of a louse, it didn’t follow that he was a murderer. I’d had no business talking to a client like that, none at all. Especially since there had been no direction from Dex to probe in this way. Not even a single hint. Yet I’d wanted Steward to know what I’d discovered, at least the outside shape of it. I’d wanted to see his reaction when he heard the words, when I dropped my bomb.

  What had I discovered with this little bit of independent detective work? As my heart moved toward its normal rate, I sat there and considered. When it came to me, it was humbling to realize, the only thing I’d discovered was this: I was not a shamus, a gumshoe, a P.I. If I were—and, say, if I were Dex—there might have been things about this interview with Steward Sterling that would have been enlightening. But I was no detective, and I certainly wasn’t Dex. If there’d been anything to discover in my talk with Sterling, I’d missed it completely.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  WHEN I FINALLY fell asleep, it was not to peaceful slumber. Shadow figures followed me in and out of dreams. It was meaningless. Disconnected. I woke feeling less rested than I had when I lay down.

  I contemplated going back to sleep, thinking it was still the middle of the night. But when I reached over and fumbled around on my nightstand for my alarm clock, I discovered it had fallen on its back like a sad little turtle. I righted it and gasped: It was six fifteen. I hadn’t gotten a full night’s sleep, but I’d slept longer than intended. I’d have to get the lead out if I was going to get to Culver City anywhere near the correct time.

  By the time I got all organized with subways out of downtown and streetcars to Culver City it hadn’t gotten any earlier and when the Red Car disgorged me in front of the grand MGM gates on Washington Boulevard, it was close to eight.

  “Extras is s’posed to get here at seven in the morning,” the guard at the gatehouse told me.

  “Yeah,” I said with a smile. “That’s what they told me. But I slept in.”

  The guy shook his head but let me pass, telling me to keep an eye out for Mary Watkins at Stage 17.

  Watkins proved to be a rotund woman with a fluffy halo of yellow hair. A long cigarette dangled from her lip as she spoke and yellow stains on the index and middle fingers of her left hand told me the smoke wasn’t an aberration. Still, there was something warm about her. Something likeable.

  “Krikey, but you’re late,” she admonished when she discovered who I was. She sounded lightly exasperated but not unkind.I had the feeling this sort of thing happened on a regular basis and anyway, she told me, she was short a couple of girls.

  “You’re going to need to move those pins if you hope to catch up, though,” she said. I watched fascinated as smoke seemed to spill out of her nose as she spoke. She looked like a fat blond dragon.

  She sent me to the costume department. She said the film was “high concept, high art.” I needed to be properly attired. The filming itself was taking place on Stage 32. She told me she’d have a car pick me up from the costume department and deposit me at the sound stage because, “you ain’t gonna be able to ankle around in that getup. Not far anyway.”

  Though her words filled me with dread, I did as she said and “moved my pins.” When I told the head costumer what film I was working on, my dread deepened when the woman laughed. “Oh, you’re gonna love this one,” she said in a voice that careened off the ceiling. She took my measurements then went away. When she came back a quarter hour later she had an assistant with her. Both women were bowed under the weight of the box they carried between them.

  The dress they drew out of the box was made of lead. I asked them why, but both women just shrugged and smirked. The senior of the two said, “Ours not to reason why …” and though she didn’t continue the quote, both women laughed as they finished fitting me into the complicated costume. None of this made me feel any better, and I never got the feeling it was supposed to.

  When she was done, the senior of the two led me to a mirror. I gasped when I got a load of myself. The dress was fitted to me in segments and while one woman had fit me, the other had added smoky, exotic makeup. The end result was astonishing. I looked otherworldly even to my own eyes. The straw boss had been right: there was no hope at all of me getting very far in this space dress.

  “What’s the idea?” I said to Mary when I stumbled toward her slowly. “What am I supposed to be?”

  “Well, the movie is a re-telling of Ulysses’ epic journey.” She looked approvingly at my costume. Turned me around. I was glad for her help. I wasn’t sure I would have been able to manage the operation on my own.

  “Ulysses?”

  “Right. You know, Virgil, Homer, the Odyssey, that kind of bushwa.” She bundled me into one of the studio’s cars, and sat next to me on the back seat while indicating the driver should get a move on. I couldn’t sit, exactly, but I managed a sort of semi-dignified sprawl that Mary nodded at approvingly.

  “Wow,” said I as the car lurched ahead.

  “Yeah. Only it takes place twenty-five thousand years in the future.”

  “Twenty-five thousand?”

  “Yeah. And, to answer your question,” though I’d forgotten I’d asked one, “you’re one of the legion of handmaidens to the god Zeus.”

  “Zeus. Right. A handmaiden. Gotcha.”

  “Only he’s not called Zeus in this picture. I can’t remember what they call him. Cherniak? Something like that. It doesn’t matter. But it’s something appropriately futuristic.”

  Journey of the Long Night was shooting on a huge soundstage near the back of the lot. Outside it was just a big, featureless building painted beige. No windows, few doors, all of them currently closed. Mary waited until the lights that indicated shooting was in progress were off, then she herded me into the building. No mean feat: if the “dress” I was wearing weighed an ounce it weighed seventy-five pounds. It was like carrying around a Packard.

  “Ah, yet another handmaiden.” No one had to identify the speaker as the director. It was like he’d gone to some directorial supply house for every item of clothing, every mannerism and vocal inflection.
He was wearing jodhpurs and high black boots, polished to perfection. He wore a black beret. It slouched on his head just so but I suspected that, without the hat, he’d be bald as a newborn rat.

  “Who is that?” I asked quietly.

  “Horst von Rauschenberg,” Mary told me,

  “That’s a real name?” I said.

  Mary shrugged. “Probably not.”

  As was appropriate, he paid me no attention, but indicated with an impatient motion of his hand—one, two, three fast chops—that Mary should lead me off to the right. She seemed to know what he wanted because she urged me forward again. I followed her down a hallway at a painful shuffle. Normally I would not have seen it as a great distance, but the lead dress changed my perspective.

  After a while she stopped in front of a closed door that, when opened, proved to be full of young women dressed almost exactly like me. When they saw Mary, a universal whine went up, not directed at me but at my escort.

  “Ladies,” she said, trying to pierce the sound, “ladies, please. I know this is uncomfortable and probably no fun at all, but it’s what we have to deal with today.”

  “How does anyone even know what people will wear on planet Zircon?” a lissome blonde complained.

  “Yeah!” a striking redhead chipped in her two cents. “And why do the costumes have to be so heavy? It’s not like anyone else can feel them.”

  “Ladies,” Mary said again, “please. It’s not as though I have control over any of this. You know that. Oh, I could say, ‘Oh, oh! How horrid. I’ll look into all these things.’ But the reality is: my voice is very small. And, really, my advice is this: pipe down and put up with it. Don’t get me wrong: what you’re doing here today doesn’t strike me as a whole lot of fun. But it’s what we have, all right?”

  It was clearly not all right, but the lead-dressed women understood what Mary was saying: it was out of their control and at least it meant there’d be a paycheck at the end of the day. I wagered that several of these young women were lugging their lead dresses around in order to feed children—offspring in some cases, siblings in others. Spending the day in a lead dress would, in the end, be a small price to pay. One of those things you look back at and tell people about. Maybe laugh. But while we were wearing them? Man, it was hell.

  “Easy for her to say,” a tough looking brunette said once Mary had gone.

  “Yeah, but she’s right though, ain’t she?” said another blonde. “She didn’t invent this damn getup.”

  The exotic planet Zircon makeup obscured the speaker’s face somewhat, but I was fairly sure I recognized the sultry phrasing and the creeping dissatisfaction that featured in her voice in equal measure.

  “Rosalyn?” I said.

  “Hmmmm,” she said, giving me the up and down. “I figure I’d recognize your face if you didn’t look like you were ready to blast off. As it is though, kid, I don’t have a clue.”

  “The other night. The Masquers’ Ball? We ate fish in aspic together.”

  I saw recognition light her face. “Well, well. She of the lovely name. I thought you weren’t an actress.”

  Rosalyn Steele was resplendent in a getup almost identical to mine. I grinned at her, oddly pleased to find someone with whom I had some kind of connection.

  “I’m not,” I insisted. “That’s why I’m wearing the goofy two-hundred-pound dress. I thought you were an actress. What are you doing here dressed like that?”

  “Ah well, you know how it is.”

  I shrugged knowingly, but I did not.

  “I didn’t have anything lined up and my agent told me about this …”

  “And here you are with us untalented types.”

  “Exactly,” she said with a smile that held no sting.

  I shuffled over to stand next to her. There were couches and chairs around the room, but most of the girls were standing. I understood why. The lead was stiff and ungiving. Even though it wasn’t solid lead, just sheets of the stuff fitted around a frame of light wood, it was difficult to move freely in them.

  “If we’re just going to hang around in here all day,” I said, “why don’t we just have the dresses nearby then put them on quickly when they call us?”

  “That would be sensible,” Rosalyn said. “But they want us ready in the blink of an eye. And so …” she indicated the stiff pewter-colored sides of her own heavy frock.

  “I’m going to be pooped tonight,” I said.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Rosalyn warned. “Anyway, I’m glad to see you. You know, after we spoke at the party, I looked around for you. I wanted to apologize.”

  “To me?” I said. “Whatever for?”

  “Oh, you know. I’d had a lot to drink,” she said. “Maybe said some things that could have been better thought out. And after you’d gone, it struck me that I’d been horrible to you.”

  “I wouldn’t have said that,” I said truthfully.

  “Well, I’m glad. Just, I don’t know, the topic you got me started on wasn’t right for my mood, I guess. But maybe I can make it up to you.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You look a little lost, for starters. Maybe I can show you the ropes?”

  “Sure,” I said. “That would be swell.”

  The day was endless. Endless. I cannot convey to you how mind-numbingly endless it was. A score of times—a hundred times—I asked myself what I was doing there. Because, clearly,I wasn’t going to make any big discoveries stuck in a room with between thirty and forty other young women, all set to revolutionize the movie industry with our lithe bodies pressed into lead-covered frames.

  True to her word, though, my new friend Rosalyn stuck with me to show me the ropes. So it was that when we were finally herded onto a set that looked like a bleak, metallic beach on some unimaginably bizarre planet, while the shot was being set up, Rosalyn nudged me in the region of my metalized middle.

  “Psst,” she said, “lookit the swell.” I raised my head in time to exchange glances with Dexter J. Theroux, resplendent in an expensive suit I’d never seen before. He was just as eloquently disguised in a cloak of keep-your-distance. He looked beyond the reach of normal mortals, an impression increased by the manservant who obsequiously dogs his master’s heels. I wanted to laugh out loud, but instead tried to strike an appropriately interested stance.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Swell.”

  “You know, he looks familiar. I feel like I’ve seen him before.”

  “Hmmm,” I said as innocently as possible, “I wonder if he could have been at the Masquers’ Ball too?”

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s it,” she said as though relieved to have solved the puzzle. “I came across him in the garden with a long-legged redhead attached to him. I wonder who he is.”

  “It’s the boy wonder, Irving Thalberg,” a gorgeous brunette offered up. “If you ever wanted to impress someone, you’d do all right to impress him.”

  “No it’s not,” said another girl. “I’ve seen Mr. Thalberg. He’s not as tall. No, no: I think it’s the producer, Hal Roach.”

  “No it ain’t,” scoffed still another girl. “Hal don’t have that much hair.”

  The girls continued on in this vein, quietly, so it couldn’t be heard outside our group, until the director shushed us with a loud, “Quiet on the set!” We all piped down and waited for him to say, “And … action!” at which point we were meant to file out of the screened-off area that had been designated “stage left” and meander around in a sinuous line until we reached our marks at “stage right.” Somewhere in there the director had told us he would cut when he had what he wanted. It sounded incredibly fast. Incredibly easy. Of course, it was not.

  For one thing, the “sinuous line” the director had envisioned was made difficult by costumes that were heavy and awkward. Though the girls wearing them had been chosen for their athleticism and fit young bodies, it was as though all of us were suddenly fifty or seventy-five pounds heavier than when we’d woken up in the morning. Only
it was dead weight, not to mention pounds we just didn’t know what to do with. So while the director had envisioned a jaunty line of lead-clad maidens meandering across his set, what he got were girls who walked heavy-footed, with the grace of baby elephants. We were no doubt cute, but lithe? Not so much.

  He would holler “Cut!” into his megaphone and all of us would rejoice internally at the prospect of upcoming freedom, only to have him, once again, instruct us on how we should be walking and what sort of mood we were trying to achieve and what we should be feeling and who we should be in our heads. What none of us told him—though perhaps we should have—was that mood-casting was quite beyond our abilities right then. Some of us were having trouble just standing upright and moving ahead.

  At some point, I lifted my head and saw that Dex, Mustard and entourage had gone. I tried not to let my brain fill with sour grapes while I thought of him in a cushy bungalow on the lot somewhere, sitting under a parasol, while some girl peeled grapes for him and poured champagne.

  “God no! Cut! What on earth am I to do with you? What’s wrong with you? You should be like gazelles not water buffalo! Like little rabbits not armadillos!”

  And so on. It was endless.

  Midway through shooting what was growing to be the scene from hell, and after shouting “Cut!” in what seemed like a less violent way than usual, the director said, “OK. Let’s take five. Someone get Sutherland down here. We’re ready for him.”

  Though all of us handmaidens were relieved to have five minutes of rest, only a couple of girls actually left the set and I suspected that a few had shuffled off to find a ladies room someplace. I pitied them their need. I had thus far been avoiding even thinking about what I’d do with all that lead if I had to go to the bathroom.

  When Baron strode onto the set, I nearly collapsed in shock. Then it made sense. I worried for a moment he would see me, give me away. Then I nearly laughed aloud at the thought. He didn’t know anything about me. He didn’t know where I lived or worked or who I was. More to the point, though, aside from the fact that I’d been wearing a mask when we first met, it seemed likely I’d be invisible to him, camouflaged as I was by a full bouquet of lead-clad handmaidens, not to mention the weirdly exotic glamour-puss space-girl makeup. I wasn’t even sure Marjorie would have recognized me.