“Sixty-eight grand, and I’ll see this Purvis guy.”
“Deal.”
It was now time for Marcus to jab a finger in Wardell’s face. “I’m making no promises that I’ll give him a job.”
“Anson understands that it’s up to him to get the ball across the line. Now gimme your pen and tell me where to sign.”
* * *
Marcus opened the door to Quentin’s Chevy. He said nothing while he closed it and let his head fall onto the back of the seat.
“So?” Quentin urged. “What happened?”
Marcus pulled the contract from out of his jacket and dropped it into Quentin’s lap.
“Shit! You actually got him to—wait, why aren’t you smiling?”
Marcus closed his eyes. “I think I just made a pact with the devil.”
CHAPTER 19
Kathryn sat her empty champagne coupe on the concessions counter of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. She let out a quiet burp and wondered if that had been her second or third glass as Bogie and Bacall approached her.
“Did you manage to get it all off?” she asked Bogie.
He held up his hands to show her that they were clean of wet cement.
“He had a hell of a time,” Bacall said. “Damn near got it all over my new suit!”
“You’re a part of history now,” Kathryn told him. “Your handprints and footprints will outlast us all.”
She grabbed the edge of the counter. Three. That was definitely my third.
Bogie pulled at his necktie. “I don’t know how I managed to get cement inside my collar. Would it be rude if we just left?”
“But you’re the guest of honor!” Kathryn pointed out the two dozen people gathered in the red and gold foyer to toast the latest recipient of the ceremony that was becoming the measuring stick of a star’s worth.
“Kathryn’s right,” Betty said. “They’re all going to want their five minutes with you.”
Bogie curled a lip.
“Why don’t you make one lap?” Kathryn suggested. “Wave and say hi without actually stopping, then slip out the back.”
“This wet sand is driving me nuts.”
“It’s the price you pay for landing at the top of the mountain.” Betty tugged at Bogie’s sleeve. “One lap.” She turned to Kathryn. “We’re having a bite at Chasen’s if you want to meet up later?”
“After we make a pit stop,” Bogie interjected, “for a change of shirt.”
But Kathryn had a pit stop of her own to make. Three champagnes had given her enough pluck to follow her original plan. “Maybe a rain check?”
* * *
On the sidewalk outside Grauman’s, a Warner Bros. flunky asked her if she needed a taxi. She told him that home was within walking distance, thanks all the same.
She headed for Sunset toward a store whose orange neon sign flashed on and off with clocklike rhythm.
Kathryn had spent two months rethinking every presumption she’d made about Nelson Hoyt. FBI agents weren’t supposed to have families or personal lives or childhoods. And they certainly weren’t supposed to have kindly fathers who ran lamp stores that anyone could walk into at any time of any day, like for instance a late-summer Wednesday evening.
The shock of seeing Hoyt with his father had hurled Kathryn through such a loop that she hadn’t even mentioned it to Gwendolyn or Marcus. She couldn’t articulate the emotions duking it out inside her every time she thought of him. He was the face of the FBI. The one she wanted to get away from. The one who had her best interests at the bottom of his list.
But watching him greet his father with a hug, observing how the two men spoke to each other and made each other smile, was a disturbing jolt.
You need to know that your Mr. Hoyt ain’t all bad.
Sunset Lamps and Lighting had two display windows on either side of a glass door. On the left, half a dozen antique lamps were arranged on two levels. The vibrant jewel tones glowing through the stained glass lampshades carpeted the sidewalk. The opposite window held only a matching pair of bedside lamps with bases made of eye-catching aqua crystal.
The tinkling of a small brass bell above the door brought Nelson’s father from behind the long counter at the rear. A rush of lightheadedness forced Kathryn to wonder whether she’d downed an extra champagne without noticing.
As the man approached, she was struck by how much his son resembled him. Nelson was a carbon copy.
The gentle light of an elaborate crystal chandelier fell across his face. He looked like one of those character actors who played the wise father able to set things straight whenever Mickey Rooney or Jane Powell got themselves into a scrape. “If you’re looking for something in particular, I’m here to help. Otherwise, take your time, browse around.”
“I have a friend,” Kathryn said. He almost looked startled. “A seamstress. She does a lot of work at home, but her place is kind of dark.”
“So she needs something with a downward-facing bulb?”
“Uh-huh.”
“With a goose neck so that she can direct the light?”
He smiled knowingly—as Andy Hardy’s father might do when Mickey Rooney had confessed his latest calamity—and led her through a maze of lamps that pointed beams of light in a rainbow of hues. They arrived at a brass lamp with a clamshell shade on the end of an adjustable neck shaped like a question mark.
Kathryn beamed. “Perfect!” Gwendolyn’s birthday was months away, but she’d had tired eyes and headaches ever since she took on her Midnight Frolics clients. The poor thing had been making do with a coffee-table reading light.
“I’ll take it.”
He ushered her to the counter along the back wall. “It’s rather heavy,” he said. “Do you have your own vehicle?”
Kathryn admitted that she didn’t, so he suggested she leave her name and address so they could deliver it the next day. He pushed some paper across the counter to her while he made out her receipt. When she was done, she slid it back and started making out the check. As she was signing her name, she became aware that the gentleman was staring at her, almost bemused.
He handed her the receipt. “Do I pass muster?”
“Excuse me?”
“You are the girl, aren’t you?”
She wondered if he recognized her voice from Kraft Music Hall. It happened from time to time.
“Which girl?” she asked lightly, slipping the receipt into her pocketbook.
“The one my son is keen on.”
What?
She tried to keep her face noncommittal. “Am I?”
He rummaged through one of his drawers until he pulled out a photograph. He held it under the light of a frosted glass Art Deco fixture suspended from the pressed metal ceiling and studied it for a moment. He nodded silently as he handed her a photo of herself on the stage of the Hollywood Canteen on its closing night.
“Nelson has talked about me?”
She jumped at the sound of a slamming door at the rear of the store.
“DAD?” Nelson called. “I know I said I’d drop by tomorrow, but we just heard The Hoov will be in town.” The door swung open. “So I went to the Gotham Deli and—”
Nelson’s face fell when he saw Kathryn. It only took him a moment to recover, then he dumped his homburg and a brown paper bag on the countertop. He shouldered the office door open. “If you don’t mind?”
She thanked Hoyt Senior for his help, then trailed behind Junior as he led her through a windowless office to a back door that opened onto a service alley.
He thumped the door behind him. “What the hell are you playing at?”
Kathryn regretted her third champagne. “My ex-roommate, Gwendolyn, is doing a lot of sewing these days, so I thought I’d surprise her with a new lamp.” She crossed her arms. “Coincidences do happen. People need lamps. Not everything is a conspiracy.”
The two of them faced each other like a pair of dueling musketeers for what seemed like an hour until he jutted his head toward the sto
re. “Did he say something?”
She heard the old guy’s voice again. Do I pass muster? This back alley was neither the time nor place she needed to digest that question. “Are we done here?” she demanded.
She went to walk past him, but he blocked her path. “What did he say?”
Kathryn opened her mouth but nothing came out. Even at the end of the day, Hoyt Junior’s clothes were crisp and clean; his jacket fit snugly across his broad shoulders. “He asked me if he passed muster.”
Without warning, Nelson leaned over and kissed her on the mouth. He pressed his lips—so warm! so soft!—and a full second—maybe even two—slipped past before she yanked her head away and pushed against his chest until he let go of her waist. “What the hell was that?”
“You’ve never been kissed before?”
She sputtered with indignation. “Let’s get things straight, mister. You’re the enemy.” An enemy who sure knows how to land a kiss.
He crossed to the sagging wooden fence on the other side of the alley and thumped it with the side of his fist. A flock of seagulls on a telephone line overhead flapped away.
You’ve gone from kissing me to punching fences in no time flat. That makes you a little bit scary, but at least you’ve dropped the façade.
“Tell me, who exactly is the enemy?” he demanded. “And how can you be so sure?”
“Because you coerced me into ratting on my friends and neighbors. From where I’m standing, the whole situation is pretty black and white.”
“Have you really failed to notice that we no longer live in a black-and-white world of easy answers?” He hung his fists on his hips and jutted out his chin, but had regained control of his voice. “That changed the day we bombed the Japs. Sure, if we hadn’t, we might still be at war, wasting thousands more lives. But we unleashed a holy hell most of us never thought possible. You’ve seen the photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
Like most people, she’d rationalized those bombs as the necessary evil that ended the war. But those photos out of Japan were haunting and painful to look at. How the hell did we go from that kiss to atomic bombs? Is he trying to confuse me?
“That may well be,” she stalled, “but unlike Louella and Hedda, who jumped at the chance to inform on their peers, I really wasn’t given much option. You, on the other hand, chose to join the FBI.”
He spun away from her, then turned back. “I joined the FBI for the right reasons.”
“And what might they be?”
“Ten years ago I saw war coming. I knew the military wouldn’t accept me because of a twisted aorta, but I still wanted to do my bit. The Nazis and Japs aren’t the only bad guys trying to defeat our way of life, and I happen to think that the American way is worth fighting for.”
“You can rationalize what you do any which way you see fit, but don’t go pulling some cornball stars-and-stripes routine. Not on me, buster.”
“Then stop making me out to be the bad guy.”
“I hate to break this to you, but you are the bad guy. You had me cornered since that day you walked into my dressing room at NBC. I even got married because you threatened me with vicious rumors if I didn’t do something!”
“That order came from Hoover.”
“Now you’re sounding like one of those Krauts at the Nuremburg trials. ‘It wasn’t my fault. Hitler made me do it.’”
He let out a long, low whistle. “Where does that leave us?”
A flicker of movement flagged her attention in the corner of her eye. Hoyt’s father was watching them through the office window. “That bank statement for Linden Holdings Company, the one I gave you at Don the Beachcomber. Any news?”
“I’ve seen some tangled webs in my time, but that one’s a humdinger. It’s going to take us time.”
“Let me know when you do. And for the record there is no ‘us.’”
She walked past him down the alley. It was the wrong direction for the Garden of Allah, but this was Hollywood where a great exit is sometimes all a girl needs to make her point.
CHAPTER 20
It was hard for Gwendolyn not to stare at the blonde sitting next to her in the starched white suit. She tried to train her eyes on the cab driver’s head as he negotiated the hairpin curves in the woody folds above Beverly Hills. In a city teeming with beauty, Gwendolyn was used to encountering exquisite women of all kinds, but this creature was something else again.
Lana Turner opened her alligator skin purse and pulled out a compact to study her reflection. “I can’t believe how nervous I am,” she muttered.
“Haven’t you and Howard been dating?” Gwendolyn was glad for an excuse to look right at her. That flawless skin! And I always thought it was just good lighting.
Lana snapped the compact shut. “We were, thanks to Miss Massey.”
Kathryn turned around in the cab’s front seat. “Guilty as charged.”
She’d kept her promise to Howard Hughes and teed up a date between the two of them. Things started cooking quickly, and news of the romance circulated at Ciro’s and the Mocambo until the day Howard crashed his plane. He’d refused all visitors until he called Lana a few days ago. Scared of what state she might find him in, she asked Kathryn to go with her, and even to recruit a friend as backup.
Gwendolyn was still working her way through her list of cross-dressing clients—there were still five outfits she hadn’t even started—so she could scarcely afford to take a whole Sunday afternoon off. On the other hand, what fool would pass up an opportunity to meet Lana Turner, Howard Hughes, and Cary Grant?
The cab pulled up in front of an eight-foot wrought iron gate that stretched between columns of creamy concrete. Kathryn paid the driver and the three women got out of the taxi and lined up across Cary Grant’s driveway.
“Why is he recuperating here?” Gwendolyn asked.
“They’re very good friends,” Lana said. “Howard’s always taking Cary up in one of his planes. They have lunch in San Francisco, or fly over the Grand Canyon. I guess he didn’t want to be alone.” She fanned herself with her purse and adjusted a wide-brimmed sunhat, white as her suit. “What if he’s banged up real bad?”
The horrific shots of Howard’s mangled aircraft made all the papers and newsreels. How anybody survived was beyond Gwendolyn’s comprehension. Had Leilah and Clem O’Roarke lived one house over, they’d be waiting for the Hughes Aircraft Company to build them a new home.
“If he was still that bad, I doubt he’d have asked to see you,” Gwendolyn pointed out.
The fanning stopped.
“If it’s really too awful to bear,” Kathryn said, “tell him your Aunt Cora is leaving for the East Coast tomorrow and you promised to visit with her.”
Lana let out a smirk. Cora was the role in The Postman Always Rings Twice that made Lana an even bigger star. “I like that,” she said, nodding. “Oh and girls, thanks for coming. I’ve never been great around doctors and hospitals. Gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
She pressed the intercom button built into the pillar and identified herself to the haughty voice that answered. A long buzz sounded and the gate glided to the left.
* * *
Cary Grant’s house was every bit as tasteful as Gwendolyn expected. Lots of teak and mahogany, drapes in warm maple brown, thick carpets in hunter green, bookshelves neatly stocked and spotlessly dusted. But there was no evidence that Grant was at home, leaving her more than mildly disappointed.
At the rear of the house, a uniformed butler drew open a glass door that led to a spacious back patio. Beyond the glazed terracotta tile, an expanse of lawn half the size of a football field stretched, and to the left stood a guesthouse bigger than three Garden of Allah bungalows combined. A courtyard shaded by jasmine jutted out into the grass. Underneath it, Howard Hughes reclined on a chaise lounge angled to take in the panoramic view of the Pacific. A magazine was in his lap, but he seemed to be asleep.
The butler asked them to wait. He approached Hughes and tapped him on th
e shoulder. Hughes looked up and smiled, then beckoned the women to come join him.
Gwendolyn was relieved to see that Hughes wasn’t nearly the appalling mess Lana had feared. Red jagged scars crisscrossed his face, but they looked like they’d fade with time and the help of a skilled plastic surgeon. While his skin was puffy and blotched in places, the bruising was mild, and there was no sign of burns. His brooding eyes were sharp and clear. He accepted Lana’s kiss and Kathryn’s handshake, and nodded politely when Kathryn introduced Gwendolyn.
“Have a seat,” he told them. “I’ve sent my man to fix us some coffee.”
The women sat down in the three patio chairs that were discreetly arranged on the side of his good ear. Kathryn and Gwendolyn let Lana take the seat closest to him.
“Why, Howie,” Lana exclaimed a little too brightly, “don’t you look wonderful?”
“I don’t know that ‘wonderful’ is quite the word I’d use.” He kept his eyes on Gwendolyn. “But I appreciate you saying so.”
“All I had to go by was the papers and newsreel footage.” She laid what struck Gwendolyn as being a territorial hand on Hughes’ arm, but he recoiled so she pulled it away. “It’s a wonder you survived at all.”
“Things look different from this side of the bed. Thank you for coming. I’ve been a mite short on company lately.”
From the nascent pout starting to form on Lana’s mouth, Gwendolyn could see she wasn’t very happy that her banged-up beau was focusing on someone else.
“I’m sure Mr. Grant hasn’t left you alone.” Gwendolyn made a show of looking at Lana. “Don’t you think, Lana?”
The man glanced Lana’s way, but only for a few seconds. “I don’t know what I would’ve done without his support. But there comes a time when a guy needs companionship of the tender kind.”
Lana shifted in her seat so that Hughes could see her more clearly without having to twist his neck at too great an angle. “When I got your call,” she said, “I took it as a sign that your recovery was on its way. I can see now that it is. You’re not in the most terrible pain, I hope?”
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