“You didn’t!” Gwendolyn started to fan herself, scandalized, impressed, and fearful in equal measure.
“The funny thing is that it didn’t take me long to find the box. It’d fallen off the back of Clem’s desk in his downstairs study. So I grabbed it, jumped out the window, and hightailed it home before I even looked at what was inside.”
“What did you find?”
“Details of every visit made to their brothels by each one of their clients.” Linc tilted his head and squinted at her, his eyes tinged with disappointment. “I recognized every single name on those cards. Movie stars, studio chiefs, directors, politicians, policemen, captains of industry, diplomats—I knew them all, either socially or I’ve done business with them. It was all there. Dates, fees, preferences. The O’Roarkes were keeping records as a way to blackmail their clients if they ever needed to. Can you beat that?”
I might have known it was something as down and dirty as this. “No wonder they were going bananas.”
“Imagine that file falling into the hands of the vice squad? Or worse, Bugsy Siegel.”
Gwendolyn let out an involuntary groan. “Speak of the devil, he’s been moving heaven and earth to find you.”
“It wasn’t me he wanted; it was the O’Roarke’s filing box.” His smile fell away. “After reading through all those cards, Hollywood suddenly seemed so tawdry and sordid that I was repulsed by the whole place. I talked my way into Bertie’s room to get my money out of her safe, went home to throw together the bare minimum of what I could get away with, and left town. I kept driving until I reached Mazatlán.”
Gwendolyn opened her bag and pulled out the picture postcard Linc’s father had given her. She handed it to him. “Your father found it while he was packing up your house. He had to sell it, by the way.”
“Why?”
“He’s broke.” Linc looked up in surprise. “And divorced. Last I heard, he was living at the Hershey Arms. Write to him, Linc. Even if it’s just to tell him you’re okay.”
“I’m more than okay.” He led her to the worktable covered in reeds. “I’m a weaver now! Wicker and rattan, mainly. I sell baskets and furniture and hats all over town. They call me el tejedor americano.” Linc sounded like a native. “Tejedor means weaver. There’s a store in Puerto Vallarta that wants to stock my humble wares.” He cast a fatherly eye over a half-finished basket. “I don’t earn much from them, but then again I don’t need much.”
Without warning, he pulled Gwendolyn into a full-body hug, just like he used to. It felt so familiar and so comforting that she allowed herself to melt into his arms. They stood there for a while, molding themselves into each other’s bodies, listening to the tinkle of a brass wind chime outside Linc’s kitchen window.
After a few minutes, she felt him raise his hand and begin to stroke her back. “Stay.” He whispered the word so gently she barely heard him. “Here. With me.”
“Linc, I—”
“You’re good with your hands. I’ll weave baskets while you make dresses. The local señoritas will flip their sombreros over your stuff.”
Gwendolyn thought of the creations she’d built for her Midnight Frolics boys. She’d made everything from slinky body-huggers like something out of Lena Horne’s closet to overblown explosions of sequined ruffles with rhinestone cockatoos perched on Crawfordesque shoulder pads. They were a hell of a lot of work, but enormously rewarding.
“I’m sorry, Linc,” she whispered back, “but this isn’t the place for me.”
“How much time do I have to convince you?”
“I’ve got to be at the airstrip at noon tomorrow.”
She’d forgotten how tender Linc’s kisses were—unhurried, and soft like rose petals—until he pulled her tighter and pressed his mouth against hers. His lips invited hers to open with a gently tantalizing promise of passion lurking in the shadows. When her knees buckled, he lifted her off the cool tiles and carried her to the bed.
CHAPTER 28
The Chateau Marmont Hotel was built in the style of a French chateau from the Loire Valley transplanted to the Sunset Strip. As the head telephone operator, Kathryn’s mother qualified for subsidized housing in one of the employee bungalows at the rear.
Despite the fact that Francine lived within spitting distance of the Garden, Kathryn and her mother rarely saw each other. They got together for birthdays and Christmases, and the occasional lunch when time and opportunity permitted, but they both worked jobs that devoured most of their waking hours—or at least that’s what they told themselves. However, the truth was there’d always been a wedge of sandpaper chafing the tender points of contact whenever they came within scraping distance of each other.
As she rapped on her mother’s front door, Kathryn knew this encounter wouldn’t be any different. In fact, it would probably be a whole lot worse.
Francine answered the door in her uniform. It wasn’t a “uniform” as such—Francine was allowed to wear whatever she wanted, as long as it was a tasteful mixture of black and white. Now that she was steaming into her late fifties, Francine had given up obscuring the fact that her hair was going gray. It suited her, especially in her black-and-white ensemble, and Kathryn made a point of telling her.
“Thank you, dear,” Francine said, closing the door behind her. “I must say, life’s a lot easier now that I only have it styled without bothering to dye it, too. But you’ll find that out for yourself soon enough.”
Francine headed straight for the kitchen and offered her the usual. Kathryn wasn’t particularly fond of brandy and ginger ale, but it was her mother’s favorite, so she went along to keep the peace.
They took their drinks to the sofa, which sat amid a forest of potted dahlias whose leaves glowed with vibrant colors embracing the entire rainbow. Whatever maternal instincts Francine Massey lacked, she made up for by nurturing bulbs and seedlings to verdant ripeness.
“I have some news,” Kathryn said. “I’ve been handed a bill from the IRS.”
“Back taxes?”
“Ten thousand.”
Francine nearly choked on her drink. “But you’ve always boasted about how persnickety you are with your taxes.” Kathryn bristled at “boasted” and “persnickety,” but swallowed her resentment with a mouthful of brandy.
“Should I pay it?”
“Darling, with the IRS, it’s pay up or else.”
“Or else what?”
Francine strummed her nails on her glass. “Jail, I expect.”
“So you’re saying I should pay this ten-thousand-dollar tax bill I was handed in Reno?”
“When you were getting your divorce? So they aren’t yours alone? They’re Marcus’ too? Well, then, that’s quite different.”
“So he should pay the bill?”
“If he incurred the taxes. That’s only fair.”
“So the person who incurred the taxes should pay them?”
“Naturally—” Francine broke off when she caught the triumph in Kathryn’s eyes.
“This tax bill was neither mine nor Marcus’.”
As comprehension bloomed on Francine’s face, the color drained away. In equal measure, an unexpected surge of disillusion supplanted the gratification Kathryn expected to feel. By the time she left Reno, she’d decided that the tax bill was probably just a ruse. But her mother’s blanched face told her the head of the FBI had all the edge he needed.
“You’ve never paid your income tax, have you, Mother?”
“I—uh . . . guess I never got around to it.”
Kathryn placed her drink on the coffee table. “The sort of people who never get around to paying their income tax are usually the ones whose mug shots we see pinned up on post office walls.” Kathryn paused long enough for Francine to picture herself under a sign proclaiming Ten Most Wanted. “How can you not have paid your taxes?”
“What I want to know is if it’s my tax bill, then why is the IRS handing it to you?”
“It wasn’t the IRS, mother. It was th
e FBI.”
“The—? Why would they involve themselves in something like this?”
“During the war they recruited me as an informer.” Kathryn watched closely, but Francine’s face scarcely registered a flicker. “Did you hear what I said?”
“I’m fifty-eight, not deaf,” Francine snapped. “I was thinking about a conversation I had with Louella a little while after Pearl Harbor. We bumped into each other at the Hollywood Brown Derby. She told me the FBI had approached her, and I asked if she thought that meant they’d asked Hedda as well. She said it was likely, so I wondered about you. You never said anything, so I assumed they hadn’t, which I thought was a trifle insulting.”
The labyrinthine logic of her mother’s mind often baffled Kathryn. “Insulting?”
“You’re every bit as well connected as Louella and Hedda, and you’re certainly a lot sharper. I’d have thought you’d make a more useful spy.”
“So it doesn’t bother you they asked me to snoop on my friends and colleagues and neighbors?”
“Not if it was for the war effort.”
“But at the end of the war they all but forced me to continue.”
“With all these Communists coming out of the woodwork, I’m sure they need you.”
Francine’s lack of outrage illustrated just how different they were. Most people Kathryn knew would be appalled at the FBI’s tactics. “I don’t share your brand of patriotism, Mother. I’ve been trying to disassociate myself, and they’ve tried to keep me tied to them. They must really be getting desperate because the person who showed me your tax bill was no less than Hoover himself.”
There was no cloaking the dismay that blew across Francine’s face.
Kathryn said, “I have to ask: How did you think you could get away with not paying your taxes?”
“You have to remember, I came to California with a new name, and an illegitimate baby. I told nobody back home where I was going, and I planned to stay hidden for the first year and then slowly build my new life. But one year bled into the next, and then the one after that, and before I knew it so many years had flown by that it seemed ridiculous to poke my head up. Remember, we didn’t have income tax back then.”
“But did you really think they wouldn’t notice?”
The lively notes of a jazz quartet floated in from the hotel’s dining room. They were playing one of those Let’s all pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off tunes popular for keeping up everyone’s spirits during the Great Depression, but Kathryn couldn’t put a name to it. The jaunty melody brought into sharp relief the awkward silence permeating Francine’s little bungalow. Kathryn silently begged her mother to say something as the tea dance crowd applauded the musicians, but Francine stayed tight-lipped.
“So about this tax bill. Do you have ten thousand dollars?”
Francine threw Kathryn a withering look.
“I have a theory he’s using your tax problem as leverage,” Kathryn said.
“Against what?”
“Hoover wants me to supply them with information that will help get Bugsy Siegel behind bars.”
Francine laughed dismissively.
Kathryn jumped up from the sofa and headed for the kitchen. Pulling an ice pick from a drawer, she hacked at a brick of ice, cleaving chips in all directions. Marcus’ advice came back to her: You have a very public profile now. If Kraft learns that your mother is a tax dodger, you’ll get dumped faster than a mob witness in concrete shoes.
“You think that’s funny?” Kathryn asked.
“I mean to say, what could you possibly know about Bugsy Siegel that’d land him in jail?”
“My boss is in cahoots with him over the building of that casino in Las Vegas.”
Kathryn took a measure of satisfaction in seeing her mother’s jaw drop. “He is?”
“Siegel’s been coming into the office. Frequently. So it’s not as preposterous as you might imagine.”
In truth, Kathryn still found the whole idea preposterous. What did Hoover expect her to do? Sneak into Wilkerson’s office and scour it like some private eye in a halter neck? She returned to the sofa.
“What are we going to do?” Francine asked.
“Obviously we have to play nice with the FBI so they can make your tax bill go away.”
“But Kathryn, dear. Bugsy Siegel?”
“It’s either that or come up with ten grand to pay off the IRS. Got any banks we can rob?”
The two of them sat on the sofa, mute as clams.
Eventually, Francine said softly, “I’ve put you in an awful predicament, haven’t I?”
A lump rose in Kathryn’s throat. Her mother was usually so brittle, and defensive, and used her voice like the ice pick Kathryn had left on the sink. She laid her hand on top of her mother’s and said, “We’ll think of something,” though she couldn’t imagine what the blazes that might be.
CHAPTER 29
Marcus sharpened his red pencil while he stared in despair at the script on his desk. The five screenwriters who’d worked on Song of the Thin Man had done their damnedest, and William Powell and Myrna Loy would try hard, but it was clear that the movie series had run its course. All Marcus could do was make a few suggestions where plot logic could be improved, and warn Mayer not to expect the colossal profits its predecessors had enjoyed.
He was still drafting the memo in his head when Arlene called him from the legal department.
“I heard from my pal at Doubleday,” she whispered down the line. “Deadly Bedfellows arrived the other day.”
Marcus curled his finger around the telephone cord and squeezed it until his knuckles hurt. “Is it really about the head of a studio writing department?”
“Uh-huh.”
That miserable son of a prick. “What else?”
“The lead character’s name is Mathias Addison.”
“He’s about as subtle as he is original,” Marcus said. “Quentin will be pleased to know it’s not about him.”
“He hasn’t escaped untouched. The plot revolves around how this Mathias Addison guy recruits into the Communist Party a talented new screenwriter by the name of Quinn Lubbock.”
“That bastard’s not going to be happy until he’s pissed off every last person in Hollywood, right down to the guy who peels the potatoes in the commissary.” He was going to ask Arlene if her pal could write up a synopsis of Deadly Bedfellows, but before he could, Anson Purvis marched into his office.
“Here’s your goddamned pile of cockeyed baloney.” He slammed a screenplay onto the desk and thundered back to his office.
Marcus told Arlene he’d call her back.
Months ago, when Marcus informed Purvis they’d not only be buying The Final Day, but offering him a generous contract, the guy was happier than a puppy with his first bone. He arrived at the studio in a gray checked suit with the price tag intact, all handshakes and thank-yous and yes-sirs. His face darkened, however, when Marcus told him that he wouldn’t be polishing The Final Day but had been assigned to adapt a picture from a Saturday Evening Post short story called Happily Never After. It was about a commitment-shy divorce lawyer and the girl in the newsstand out front of his office building, and Marcus pointed out that if he did a good job, it could be the first postwar movie Gene Kelly made after his discharge from the navy. And if that happened, his co-star would probably be Judy Garland or Melody Hope or June Allyson—not bad for a first movie.
But Purvis had just stared at him, his mouth curved down in a sour huff. In the end, Marcus told the guy, “Just write the damned movie,” and figured his best tactic was to give him enough time to realize how childish he’d acted.
An hour and a half after Purvis slammed Happily Never After onto his desk, Marcus finished the script and buzzed Purvis on the office intercom. “Get in here.” When he heard the guy’s footsteps stomp toward him, he thought, You picked the wrong fucking day, mister.
Purvis appeared in the doorway, his arms crossed.
Standing five foot n
ine to Purvis’ six foot three, Marcus needed all the intimidation he could mount, so he told the guy to take a seat while he stayed on his feet. He glanced down at Happily Never After, then looked up, glad he’d had the chance to rehearse this scene with Yip Wainright. “You got one thing right. It’s baloney.”
“I told you.” Purvis bristled.
“Let me clarify,” Marcus said. “It’s not baloney because you think it’s a frivolous love story set to music. It’s baloney because you’ve handed in a shoddy piece of work. The Final Day wasn’t perfect, but it pole-vaults what you’ve done here, and that’s a problem.”
Look at you, you big pouting baby. You’re only here because I went against my instinct, and you don’t even have the decency to do your best. You’ll be lucky if I don’t can your ass.
“No,” Purvis said, “that’s not the problem here.”
“Oh, yeah, Mr. I’ve Been In The Business Two Minutes? Why don’t you give me your considered assessment?”
Purvis slid forward to the edge of his chair and started tapping Marcus’ desk. “The problem isn’t that this movie’s a waste of time. As far as a Kelly and Garland musical goes, it’s fine. Guy meets girl; guy ignores girl; girl gets guy. This studio—this whole industry—has been churning out this junk since Edison invented the Kinetoscope. They know exactly how to nip-and-tuck it so the thing’ll mint money. That’s not the issue. The problem is that folks like you think the people who went to the movies before the war are the same ones going to the movies now.”
“Of course they’re the same,” Marcus said.
Purvis sat back in his chair, smirking. “You don’t come out of D Day, or Guadalcanal, or the Battle of the Bulge, or Iwo Jima the same person you went in.”
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