Devil's Breath

by G. M. Malliet

  “Oh? Why’s that?”

  “I suppose because there really aren’t that many roles in movies anymore, so they all scratch around like chickens after the leftover chicken feed. It’s like Norma Desmond in that movie—you know, Sunset Boulevard: ‘I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.’ Imagine a whole roomful or, in this case, a shipful of that sort of look-at-me nonsense. Actually, what’s happened these days is the movies got big, bigger, biggest. It’s only keeping the stuntmen and the special effects experts employed, filming these action movies. And the lead parts go to the same handful of actors every time. Tom Cruise and his boyish grin will keep appearing until they have to wheel him off the set. It’s a cutthroat business—in fact, we need a new word for cutthroat.”

  “How about murderous,” said Max mildly.

  “Well, yeah. But surely you’re not suggesting Margot was killed because she was threatening to take some other actress’s part, are you? That is unlikely in the extreme, if only because if Margot were the last actress standing she’d still have trouble landing a role, any role.”

  “Because of her age?”

  “Well, yes, frankly, there aren’t that many parts for mature women.” He was picking at the tear in one knee of his jeans, pulling on the loose threads. “But it’s more than that. She had a reputation for being difficult. That’s poison in this industry—in any industry, I guess. The fans may not care, so long as they get the escapism they paid for up there on the screen or on the stage. They might even think a reputation for difficulty enhances the fantasy—the star so powerful she can bend directors to her will. It adds some spice to their illusions. Margot was never all that. She was famously unreliable: she’d show up late on set three sheets to the wind more often than not. Rumors of cocaine use and even worse abounded, although I really don’t think the ‘even worse’ was true: her chosen poison was booze. If she took drugs it was to help her sleep, and I think she may have been slightly hooked there, yes. Maurice—you’ve met Maurice?—he’s a saint, really. Saint Maurice—I like the sound of that. He was the only one who could put up with her. After a while, he was the only one who even tried. But even Maurice—you don’t want to push him too far, saint or no. He’ll lose it when he’s had enough.”

  “Do you think he’s capable of this crime?” Max asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Not really. No.” Addy’s clear gaze slid away, then returned with the full force of a basically honest nature owning up to the truth. “Well, sure. Everyone is capable. The question is, would he break like that? I think not. He’s a decent sort, if a little high-strung.”

  Max couldn’t help but agree: Maurice seemed unlikely, by nature and by lack of motive. But Maurice might have motives that couldn’t yet be guessed at.

  “Besides, there’s an angle the police may be missing. I overheard something one night…”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, oh. It was Margot and she was below deck talking to the chef. I’ve no idea what she was doing there but her voice carried up the companionway to where I happened to be standing. She was saying something like, ‘Julie was only thirteen, wasn’t it?’”

  Max grew very still. “You’re sure she was with Zaki?”

  “That voice, that accent of his—they’re unmistakable. Let’s say I’m ninety percent sure. If she’d been with anyone else, I might have thought she was rehearsing a play or something. Then she said, ‘No wonder you left Hollywood on the next boat out.’”

  “And what did Zaki—or whoever—reply to that?”

  “About what you’d expect. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’”

  “But you took it to mean … What?”

  “Given that I never could stomach the sight of Zaki? That he just gave me the creeps so much I didn’t even want to eat the food he’d prepared? I think Margot had something on him. At a guess, something involving an underage girl.”

  However would Margot have got hold of that information? Max supposed the Hollywood grapevine had deep, tangled roots. How foolish of her to confront Zaki with what she knew—if there were truth behind her words, it was an extremely dangerous thing to do.

  “When did you first meet Margot?” he asked Addy.

  “I met her when she was starring in a play in New York called Lyre, Lyre, Pants on Fyre—some kind of Celtic detective musical, as I recall. Don’t ask. I was hired as a sort of script doctor to punch up the play book, breathe some life into it. But it was DOA, really, long before I got there. The play folded within a couple of months, and it was an absolute freaking miracle it lasted that long. How it made it out of the fringe theaters is likewise a wonder. And all my rewrites went for nothing. Margot would get out there and ad lib for all she was worth—she was constantly going off-script, wandering around, moving the props. The poor guy playing opposite her felt like he’d wandered onto the wrong set, and would start to flub his own lines. Or his lines would make no sense in the context she’d just created. God, the memories. I’d stand in the wings grinding my teeth as she warbled her way through “Lord of the Wells,” flitting hither and yon and upstaging all the actors. If you’re looking for motives, you could start with the entire cast of that play.”

  “She could sing, then? I wasn’t aware of that.”

  “No. No, she could not sing. At least, I wouldn’t call it singing. Could Marilyn Monroe do more than sort of breathe and heave and shimmy her way through ‘Happy Birthday’? I mean to say, no one was there to learn whether or not Margot Browne could sing. Despite the march of years, she appeared all but topless in that play.”

  “Did she often appear on the stage? I thought she was more a film star.”

  “She did both, although she was a better film star. Which is like saying malaria is a way better disease than typhoid—she could barely act in either case. But at least you can do a retake of a scene on film; what happens on stage is ground indelibly into memory.”

  “Why did she persist in it, do you think?”

  “Oh, that’s easy. She wanted to be taken seriously as an Actor—that’s Actor with a capital A. Very early on she badgered some director into letting her appear in his play. The play was called Shopgirl—I think that was it. It didn’t do too badly, really: had quite a long run in London—see ‘topless’ as above. They say she had exquisite breasts then, like the Venus de Milo’s or Pamela Harriman’s.”

  “Hmm.” Max failed to see how Margot’s anatomy could end up being the key that would unlock the investigation, but Addy was a willing and articulate witness so he let him ramble on.

  “And then of course there were the porn films. Or perhaps, just the one. Soft porn, I should add.”

  “You don’t say,” said Max. Might yet more blackmail play into this? If Margot had been trying to threaten or blackmail Zaki, for example, might he have countered by threatening to reveal something in her own past—if he knew of it? Was Margot likely to say, with Wellington, “Publish and be damned” to a blackmailer? Max thought she might.

  “I don’t judge her for that, do you? The porn? She was never in high demand and this … well, it paid the rent. She only did it because she was young and hungry, and the real parts were so few and far between. I think it’s where she learned that if you can’t act, you can at least take your clothes off, and you’ll get by.”

  Max felt that in the grand scheme, people had done much worse things for money. The bigger problem with the entire porn industry, in his view, was that it was so exploitative—generally only the men profited from it. He said, “I wonder when all this was? The Celtic play, for example. A chronological telling might help.”

  “Lyre, Lyre was about five years ago. Maybe less. Mercifully, my memory fails me on many of the particulars. But there’s nothing simpler than to find out.” He reached for his laptop, tapped a few keys, and pulled up his own Web site, “Addywood,” where appeared a list of all of Margot’s roles throughout the years. It began with Bad Cattle, “the Western that made her famous,” Addy assured him.
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  “I don’t see how I missed that one,” said Max. “I do like watching old films.”

  “Count your blessings. I was forgetting—no doubt you count blessings as a matter of course.”

  “I do try.”

  “Here we go,” said Addy after a moment of scrolling up and down the screen. “Here’s Shopgirl. If you want the dates for that one, you’re looking way back: June 1981 to May 1983. God, to have been there to see it, but I wasn’t born yet. It ran not quite two years but by West End standards that’s practically Mousetrap. The play died a natural death once half the males of London had been by to ogle Margot’s cleavage.”

  “After which, presumably, she returned to Hollywood.”

  “I guess so. There’s a gap before she started rehearsals for El Paso Posse, another Western—a return to her roots, so to speak. She’d done well with her first Western and this was probably another trip to that well.”

  “Did it work? Was it successful, I mean?” It all sounded to Max like quite a climb down from her glory days in London.

  “It did okay, but nothing like Shopgirl. With Margot, the only thing that mattered was the costume, and wearing jeans and a plaid shirt didn’t allow her to show off the full range of her talent. She was hardly Barbara Stanwyck, after all. So after El Paso Posse she moved on to mysteries—what I believe you call crime stories in this country. The first of those was called Bad Actress—and didn’t the critics just cry for happy over that title. But that’s where she found her métier, in that sort of noir, pulp-revival thing. You know, the dame goes into the PI’s office to beg for his help, only she ain’t got the jake to pay him. But she’s a nice kid so he takes pity and takes on the case pro bono and the next thing you know he’s up to his neck in bullets. You know the kind of crap. And it turns out she ain’t such a nice kid after all. Cut to the final reel, where she tries to leave him holding the bag from the big bank heist. I swear to God, I could write this stuff in my sleep. Anyway, Margot would take a bullet at the end every time, only to reappear in the next film, looking none the worse for wear.”

  “Actually, after talking with Maurice, I doubt that is true—the part about her being none the worse for wear. Her private life must have been showing up on her face after a few years, even with his expert attentions.”

  There was a still pause while Addison considered this. Finally he made a slight tsk sound and said, “The rumor mill started working overtime, yes. From the interviews I’ve conducted to date in Hollywood, and in London, with people who worked with her, she was on a slow but irreversible decline. Apparently, she wasn’t too careful about the company she kept, or about where she kept it. Or how many she kept it with. I gather it didn’t bother her if her lovers were married—the more married the merrier, in fact. Plus, there was a tangential sort of descent into the opium dens of L.A., if the gossip is anything to go by.”

  “Do you believe it? The gossip?”

  Addy sat back in his chair, crossing his arms in a defensive posture. “It’s neither here nor there if I believe it. I’m not writing an authorized biography or even an unauthorized one. And of course now that she’s dead … well. I’ve barely cut through the concertina wire around her personal life—some, but not all of it. Anyway, I’m not claiming to write the absolute truth. Who can do that, anyway? You have to leave things out and put things in, and what’s left may or may not be a fair portrayal of the subject. I’m writing a ‘based on’ story, or trying to, but I’m changing the details so much no one can ever come back to me and claim I’ve held them up to ridicule or caused them harm or something. I’m thinking about the married lovers here—I’m not going to get into some legal imbroglio as easily as all that. Of course, as I say, with Margot dead now it changes things.”

  “But the book you’re writing—it’s definitely about Margot. You’ve said as much, and not just to me.”

  Addy held up an admonishing finger. “Nope, and nice try. I am writing a story about a terrible actress of minimal talent who is coasting by on her looks until one day, she realizes she’s nearly sixty, the parts have dried up long ago, and she’s staring a lonely death in the face. But she never realizes it’s her own behavior that has brought her to this sorry pass. That, my friend, is a description that could apply to half the people in Hollywood; at least, those of a certain age. And not necessarily just the women, either. It’s not about Margot, which at some level must really irk the crap out of her—have irked the crap out of her—because its being all about her is what she lived for, for so long. It’s about ‘Everyactress,’ if you will. If you want to get really deep or pretentious, we could say my book is about the human condition as much as it is about Margot. In fact, let’s just say that it is and be done with it.”

  “But Margot inspired it,” Max insisted. “Why Margot and not some other actress then?”

  Addy shrugged. “I’d spent time with her during Lyre, Lyre. She really was one of a kind. I don’t know—I was just drawn to her as a subject. Writers don’t pick their topics; their topics pick them.”

  “How near are you to completing the book?” Max asked.

  Addy replied with a shake of his head. “Honestly, I don’t know. The writing’s ground to a halt with her death and even I am not sure why. I may have to shelve the thing and go do something else.”

  Chapter 24

  SUSPICION

  Max left Addy after another half hour in which they examined some of Addy’s online photo stills and video clips of Margot Browne. Nothing relevant turned up.

  Apart from a scandal column that had run with a photo of Romero and Margot emerging together from a nightclub. “Reunited and It Feels So Good?” was the headline. Addy insisted the photo had been Photoshopped, and he pointed out the areas that indicated this doctoring. “Her head looks twice as big as his, for one thing. And his hand round her waist doesn’t match the size nor the skin color of his other hand.” His theory was that it was a story Margot had planted in the media herself. Max was inclined to believe Addy was right.

  The true story of her past, Max decided, was not to be found in images of the various stage and film personas she had adopted, but in the personas she had assumed when not in front of a camera.

  Max had gained no sense of Addy as a tormented soul hiding secrets, least of all that he was a murderer attempting to cover his tracks. Max had to allow that Addy could be a good actor as well as scriptwriter, but so often the two different talents were at odds with each other. A person operating behind the scenes required a different personality from one who sought the focus of the camera lens. If anything, Max gained the impression that Addy was just anxious for Max leave him alone so he could return to his writing.

  Max imagined all the suspects were hoping he would leave them alone. If they made a fuss about having to hang about the hotel, with the Americans threatening to call their embassy (“Like they’d care,” had been Patrice’s comment), he supposed Cotton would have to release them all unless he could demonstrate more was to be gained by further questioning. Max had wondered why they stayed on, docile as lambs—wondered until he heard about the upcoming party at the hotel, in the planning for weeks. Something to do with the launch of Romero’s latest picture, he supposed. No, wait, it was something to do with the premiere of a local film. Whatever the excuse, few of the people in this crowd could resist the siren call of Hollywood magic and the many photo ops the party would provide for the entertainment media. Once the party was over—well, it certainly gave Max and Cotton a deadline to aim for.

  But keeping them all in place kept the murderer in place. While that might be convenient for the investigators, there was always the risk that anyone who had killed once might kill again. Might there not be someone besides Margot who, in the murderer’s mind, needed to be silenced, for whatever reason?

  Was there even a possibility they were dealing with a serial killer, someone who killed out of some uncontrollable bloodlust? It seemed unlikely, but Max supposed it was always just possible.
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  In any event, he knew that a case solved sooner was always better than one solved too late. Memories faded, witnesses disappeared, innocent people got tripped up—held for decades, sometimes, in a net of suspicion.

  Sooner was always better than later.

  Max spent the next few hours at his computer, putting his thoughts into coherent order—or trying to. Fighting down a growing sense of unease, he decided on a walk through Monkslip-super-Mare, tempted by a sun that had by now dissolved most of an earlier drizzle. Before he left, he had a word with one of the younger constables guarding the hotel. The police were stretched thin as far as manpower, but the goal was to keep an eye as much as possible on the inmates of the hotel and the hallways leading to their rooms. It was an impossible task in a hotel with such labyrinth passages, but Cotton’s team had been told to do its best. The constable had nothing to report—no strangers had been seen prowling the hallways, at any rate.

  “The baron and his lady are starting to make noises about leaving,” he told Max.

  “No one is to go without explicit permission. Warn them they may be detained if they try to leave without authorization.”

  “That’s legal, is it, sir?”

  “It is for now.” Max patted the constable’s shoulder encouragingly. The members of Cotton’s team on guard duty had, in a way, the tougher job, standing alert for hours, waiting for they knew not what. Max knew from his own early days in MI5 that the duty amounted to days of boredom interspersed with moments of heart-stopping terror. “Good man, Constable Robinson. Carry on.”

  For the next hour, Max Tudor skirted the edges of the harbor, trying to assemble his thoughts on the case. A light mist clung to his skin and hair, and masked the sea as it fretted its way along the shoreline. The pigeons of Monkslip-super-Mare scattered about his feet as he walked; they were fearless, and made their livings panhandling from humans.