While I Disappear

by Edward Wright

  “Good morning,” Horn said, half turning. “I stayed here last night. Hoped you wouldn’t mind.”

  Richwine wore the same plaid robe. Unshaven and in the light of day, he looked even older and more worn-down. But his voice held the same command.

  “This is outrageous,” he said, remaining in the doorway and looking warily at Horn. “You were not invited, sir.”

  “I know. And don’t blame Cassie. She tried to get me to leave. But…look, I’m not a burglar. I’m just somebody who badly needs to talk to you, and who doesn’t have any time to waste being polite. So I took the chance of offending you—”

  “Bad manners, common behavior, always constitute an offense,” Richwine broke in. He sniffed the air, noting the breakfast smells. “What are you doing?” Emboldened, he took a step forward. “Are you feeding yourself? In my kitchen?”

  “No, sir. This is for you.” Horn poured the eggs into the hot butter and left them to set for a while. He poured coffee into a cup, then opened one of the fresh bottles of milk and carefully spooned into the coffee some of the cream from off the top. Stirring it, he handed the cup to Richwine. “I don’t know how you like your eggs, but I took a guess.” He returned to the skillet, quickly scrambled the bubbling eggs, and raked them into a dish, which he laid on the table. “I added some onions to these. Hope they’re all right.”

  Richwine rubbed a hand across his stubble as he looked wonderingly down at the plate. Finally he shrugged and sat down. “Mr…Horn, is it? You’re an unusual man.”

  “Thank you, sir. I suppose.”

  “And where exactly did you sleep?” Richwine tasted the eggs, nodded his head almost imperceptibly, and helped himself to another forkful.

  “On your sofa out by the fireplace.”

  “Not exactly comfortable, I would surmise.”

  “It was fine. I usually sleep on a sofa at home. My place is small, and I don’t have a bed.”

  Richwine frankly appraised his guest. “Cassie told me your work sometimes takes you into a kind of gray area, Mr. Horn,” he said quietly. “An area where you may come in contact with those outside the law, where it may not be clear if your own actions—”

  “I’ve spent some time in prison,” Horn cut in. “Right now, if anyone asks, I tell them I’m as law-abiding as anybody.” His voice turned abrupt. “But I know what’s on your mind. You live in a big house, and you find a man in your kitchen who’s used to sleeping on a sofa. So you wonder about me. Well, I could have taken anything I wanted from this house while you were asleep, and I didn’t. If you’ll talk honestly with me for a while, I should have no reason to ever bother you again.”

  They sat silently for a moment. Then Richwine said, “You may join me in some coffee, if you like. We can have it in another room.”

  “Thanks.” Horn poured himself a cup. Carrying the whisky bottle along with his coffee cup, Richwine led him down the hall and through the main room to the library, where they sat in tufted-leather easy chairs the color of mahogany. The room smelled of old paper and bindings, with a hint of mildew.

  Richwine set his cup and the bottle on a small, brass-topped table between them.

  “And now you may ask me questions, and I reserve the right to answer them or not.”

  “Fine. Let’s pick up where we left off last night. Do you have any idea who killed Rose?”

  Richwine cleared his throat, and his instrument of a voice softened. “I’ve been asking myself that question since the day she died,” he said. “Since the moment I received the telephone call from the police. There was talk that her murder may have been part of a robbery, since her purse was emptied. At any rate, I do not know who killed her.”

  “I don’t think it was part of a robbery, Mr. Richwine. I think she was killed very deliberately by someone she knew. And I’d be very surprised if you didn’t have an idea or two about it.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because you’re at the center of it. It all revolves around you. I’ve just figured out something important. Rose was not the only person to die in one of your houses.”

  It may not have been possible for Alden Richwine’s complexion to turn even more pale, but that seemed to happen. The man’s jaw went slack as he stared at Horn. He uncapped the Paul Jones bottle and, with a not quite steady hand, poured a generous amount into his coffee cup.

  “Well,” he said. “Well. Do you mind if I ask—”

  “What I’ve found out? Not at all. About twenty years ago you threw a New Year’s Eve party in this house. Rose was your hostess. In one of the bedrooms upstairs, a young woman named Tess Shockley was raped and killed. Oh, she didn’t die right away. But she was dying when someone drove her to a hospital and dumped her on the doorstep. The police called it murder, and they never solved it. They never even found out where she’d been earlier. But we know, don’t we?”

  Richwine was silent, studying the contents of his cup as if seeking to discern the separate swirls of coffee, cream, and whisky.

  “Tess’ death changed Rose,” Horn went on. “You could almost say it destroyed her. She said she was responsible, and maybe she was. All I know is, Rose’s murder leads straight back to that party. She was killed because of what happened that night. Either out of revenge over Tess Shockley or because someone decided Rose had to be kept quiet.

  “And now you know exactly why I’m here.” Horn let that statement hang in the air for a moment. “If you say you don’t know who killed Rose, I just might believe you for now. But you know some things about that night in this house twenty years ago, and you’re going to tell me.”

  “And if I don’t?” Richwine’s feeble smile said he already knew the answer.

  “I’ll go to the police with what I know about Tess Shockley. It was a long time ago, but it got a lot of attention back then, and policemen love to close the file on splashy murders. They may or may not believe everything I tell them, but if they only believe part of it, you’ll become very interesting to them—”

  “I didn’t kill that girl,” Richwine broke in.

  “I don’t know if you did or not,” Horn replied. “Maybe all you did was help keep her death a secret. But here’s a joke for you: The police detective in charge of Rose’s death is a man named Luther Coby, and his dream is to pin something on a big name. For a while, he thought he had me, but I convinced him I was clean—and besides, I was never more than a B-movie actor. You, Mr. Richwine, would be a bigger fish. Maybe your best days are behind you, but you’ve had a distinguished career. My friend Coby would love to get his hands on you.”

  His words were a combination of bluff, conjecture, and flattery, and Horn wasn’t sure of their effect. Alden Richwine looked at him evenly before responding. “You’re quite the cardboard hero, aren’t you?” he said, his voice carefully controlled but the sarcasm clear. “I’ve seen a few of those cheap little morality plays you call westerns. I found them rather ludicrous, with their simplistic notions of good and evil and their neat resolutions, as if life’s problems could be solved by killing a few villains with your—what do you call it?—your six-shooter, and riding over the hill. Well, I doubt that those solutions will translate into real life, Mr. Horn, try as you might.”

  “It was just a living. I never took it all that seriously.”

  “Nor should you have. Five minutes of William Shakespeare, or even your Eugene O’Neill, are worth every line of wooden dialogue you ever spoke. But something tells me you’re acting a part now, Mr. Horn—the lone avenger, that tired cliché of so many second-rate films. As such, you’re not all that convincing. To begin with, you might consider outfitting yourself in some decent clothes.”

  He paused, waiting for a response.

  “Are you through insulting me?” Horn asked.

  Richwine sighed. “Let me see if I understand. Either I talk to you, or I talk to the police.”

  “Something like that.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I want t
o know about the party. Everything.”

  The other man nodded slowly, over and over, obviously thinking hard. “You were wrong about one thing,” he began. “Rose was not my hostess. I offered the use of my house, but the actual host was someone else. A man named Jay Lombard.”

  A dangerous man, Horn thought, recalling Rose’s description. Of course.

  “Why did you offer your house?”

  Richwine laughed wryly. “Because I loved the spotlight. I was successful, I lived in a grand house, and I enjoyed showing it off. Also because Rose asked me. Lombard, you see, had just moved to town and was in the process of buying his own place. And, I should mention, because the idea of having a gangster and his friends in my house appealed to my sense of the dramatic. As it happened, everyone was invited, not just the bootlegging crowd. We had quite the turnout that night. Studio people mingled with gamblers, politicians with jockeys. It was written up in all the papers….”

  “I don’t get it,” Horn said. “With all that going on—”

  “How could the events in the bedroom be kept a secret? A combination of luck—gambler’s luck, possibly—and great care. But I fear I’m getting ahead of myself. May I just tell the story?”

  Horn nodded.

  “Rose and I had worked together on what was to be her last film, a costume drama set in Italy. There was something about a hawk in the title. My blasted memory—”

  “Hawk of Tramonti.”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “I’ll tell you in a minute. You said you were in the film?”

  “I played her father.”

  Horn summoned up the memory of the last reel of the old film. He had been watching Rose, not the other person. The duke. The one who overacted, as Dex described him. Alden Richwine.

  “I see. Well, I learned about it from Dexter Diggs, your director. He even ran part of it for me. And it wasn’t her last film, as it turned out. She made one with me years later. But I doubt that she was any more proud of it than I was.”

  “Dexter.” Richwine’s tone was noncommittal. Horn tried to read his expression, but he saw nothing.

  “Are you in touch with him?”

  “No. Not since we finished working on the film.”

  “Dex told me you two were good friends back then.”

  “I suppose. But over the years….” He gestured vaguely. “Friends lose touch.”

  “You were telling me about working with Rose.”

  “Yes.” Richwine grew suddenly animated, smiling broadly. He got up from his chair and went to one of the library shelves, where he picked through a series of thick file folders, finally selecting one. “I keep souvenirs of everything in which I’ve appeared,” he said. “Playbills and theater programs from stage productions. Later, in Hollywood, I collected photos. These are from that film.” He spread them out on a nearby desktop. Most were publicity photos and lobby cards, the latter meant for display in the theater. A few appeared to be candid shots showing Rose and other cast members at rest between shots or posing for group pictures.

  “Here we are, the happy company,” Richwine said, pointing to one such shot, in which a dozen or so people, some in costume, stood in a row with arms around each other, smiling and mugging for the camera. “Here’s Rose, and here’s the distinguished duke, her father. And, of course, our esteemed director.” Rose, standing near the center, wore ornate jewelry and a gown that trailed to the floor. Richwine was also elegantly dressed. Dexter Diggs, seated at the center, wore the jodhpurs and shooting jacket popular with directors at the time. Except for Richwine and Diggs, most of those in the picture looked impossibly young.

  “Who’s that?” Horn pointed to a tall, striking young woman next to Rose, her head inclined toward her and one arm around her neck. She wore tailored slacks and a silk blouse. But even as he asked, he recognized her.

  “That’s Dolores Winter,” Richwine said appreciatively. “A friend of Rose, which is quite obvious here. She stopped by the set that day, as I recall. Some of us didn’t even know her at the time. A beauty, wasn’t she? And now she’s become quite the movie star. I hadn’t seen her for all these years until just a while ago, when she called me, quite out of the blue. She and that strapping husband of hers popped over here one day and took me out for a very enjoyable lunch.”

  Horn was about to ask if Richwine could recall anything about her from that earlier period when his eyes strayed to another face in the photo. At the end of the line on the right stood a petite young woman, also in costume. She seemed little more than a girl, younger even than Rose, with a face and smile that Horn recognized immediately. It was Tess Shockley.

  “Do you remember her?” Horn asked, pointing.

  “Of course,” Richwine said somberly. “Poor thing. She had a small part in the film. At the time, I’m sorry to say, she was not someone to whom I paid much attention. I’d give anything if she had not been in this house that awful night.”

  As if looking for a reason to change the subject, his hands moved over some of the other items on the desktop, and his face brightened somewhat. “This was taken on the set. It is, I believe, the best picture of Rose.”

  Horn picked up the black-and-white photo. Dramatically lit, with deep shadows and bright highlights, it was a close-up of her profile by candlelight.

  “I lie there in bed, oblivious,” Richwine said in a deep storyteller’s voice. “My sweet daughter stands over me, intent on murder. But then she spies the image of her dead, sainted mother, and her heart melts. My worthless carcass is spared.” He chuckled.

  “Beautiful here, isn’t she? It was part of Dexter’s artistry with the camera, but also something that came from within the woman. They talk about inner beauty. I think we’re being allowed a glimpse of it here. She seems to glow…. I marvel at the way the light illuminates her cheek and her brow, almost as if all of it were outlined in silver.”

  “I know.” Horn studied the picture for a few more seconds, then replaced it.

  They sat down. Richwine took a deep breath, preparing to resume his story, when Horn broke in.

  “Were you in love with her?”

  “Good Lord, no. I was far too old for her. We even joked about that. I suppose I had a kind of older man’s affection for her—who would not? But she was involved with someone at the time, and I chose to be noble about it. So I cast myself as the uncle who would joke with her and be available for gossip and conversation and confidences, and who would always protect her secrets. I think she treasured our friendship. I certainly did.”

  “The secrets. What did she tell you?”

  “I know what you want to hear. The scandalous details. She had been having an affair with Dexter Diggs—”

  “I know about that. And also that Dex was becoming involved with Tess.”

  “Oh? I’m beginning to doubt that I know anything useful to you, Mr. Horn.” Richwine sounded almost regretful.

  “Let me decide that. Please go on.”

  “She also confided in me that she was trying to end another kind of relationship. Someone had attached himself to her, she said. It was becoming uncomfortable for her, and she was looking for the kindest way to end it.”

  “She was a busy girl. Did she name that other person?”

  “No. In fact, she seemed to go to great pains to protect his identity. I was given the impression that revealing the relationship would have caused the man great pain.”

  “Because he was married?”

  “Possibly, but she was quite willing to tell me about Dexter Diggs, who was most definitely married. No, this may have been something else. All I know is, she was very secretive about the whole thing. I never found out who the man was.”

  “Anyway, you were talking about Dex.”

  “Oh, yes. Rose was distraught over her breakup with him. He, it appeared, had taken a fancy to Miss Shockley, who was playing Rose’s maid. Sometime near the end of filming, Dexter had told Rose of his new infatuation and that he and Rose were finished.
”

  “The way I heard it, he told her he really loved his wife,” Horn muttered. “However you look at it, he was lying to somebody.”

  “I suppose,” Richwine said.

  “Tell me about the party. Rose was here, and Lombard, and Tess. Also Dex, I believe. Who else?”

  “Scores of people,” Richwine said, shaking his head. “They came and went. Some left before midnight. Many I recognized, many I greeted. Some were acquaintances, friends, others were faces familiar to me. But many others were totally unknown.”

  “Give me some names you remember.”

  “Oh, let me see. Clara Bow was here, with some football player. Even among this crowd, she caused a stir. Adolph Zukor and his wife—”

  “Who was he?”

  “You obviously don’t know your Hollywood history. Mr. Zukor was head of the company that eventually became Paramount Pictures. They left fairly early in the evening, as I recall. Many mid-level people from various studios were here—producers, directors, screenwriters. A politician or two. I’m afraid I’ve forgotten most of the names.”

  “Was there a guest list?”

  “I never saw it. Jay Lombard and Rose handled the invitations. But even if I had it here, it wouldn’t take into account those who came as part of an entourage, and others who were simply uninvited. We turned away no one that night, as long as they were well dressed.”

  “Tell me about what happened in the bedroom.”

  Richwine paused, thinking. He laid his head on the back of the chair and closed his eyes. “It was about two o’clock in the morning,” he began. “Rose found me in the dining room with some guests. She looked…odd. Almost feverish. She was wrapped in something—a heavy coat. I thought it strange. She looked as if she were going out, which made no sense. She caught my eye, said nothing, but I went to her. She said she had been looking for Jay Lombard. She whispered to me that I should follow her. Upstairs, she took me to the bedroom to the left of the landing. The door was closed. Inside, it was dark. We closed the door, and I turned on the light.”

  Eyes still closed, Richwine swallowed heavily, causing his Adam’s apple to bob dramatically. “There on the bed was a young woman, naked. She had…there was a substantial amount of blood around her thighs. She was very pale. I remember the contrast, the darkness of the blood and the crimson coverlet on which she lay, and the paleness of her skin. She appeared dead. Then I saw she was breathing very shallowly. I approached the bed, and then I recognized her. It was Tess.”