Kathryn bit into another saltine. “Maybe Gwendolyn’s right—it’s just the fleeting temptation of forbidden fruit.”
Bette laughed. “I’m the world’s greatest expect on the subject of forbidden fruit.”
“Did you ever wish you hadn’t given in?” Kathryn asked.
“Every single time.” She caressed her belly. “Including the one responsible for this, sad to say. Let me take a wild stab in the dark here. You rarely find yourself on the receiving end of romantic attention from men, so when it actually comes along, you don’t know who—or what—to trust.” She held out her glass for a refill and stared at Kathryn, daring her to deny her hypothesis.
That’s it exactly, Kathryn thought. Ask me to interview a star who doesn’t want to share anything, and I know exactly what to do. Give me a moral dilemma about censorship, or tell me the boss blew the payroll at Santa Anita, and I’ll swing into action. But when a nice guy with a soft pair of lips smooches me in the moonlight, I’m senseless as a bobby soxer.
“That’s the trouble with women like us,” Bette said. “We’re not the white-picket-fence type, nor do we want to be. We’re intelligent, capable go-getters who want more out of life than knitting circles and meatloaf recipes.”
“Says the woman who’s minutes away from motherhood.”
Bette ran her hands over her stomach. “I’m thankful for the chance to experience motherhood and I fully intend to embrace it, but it’s not the be-all end-all. I don’t want a husband to take care of me; I want a partner, an equal who will take care of and look out for me as I will for him. However, we live in a world where men like that are a rare sighting. And when one comes along, it’s like catching the abominable snowman.”
“So what do we do?”
“We make a decision, then deal with the consequences. What else can we do? But if he is a good guy, you be sure to grab him with both hands.”
“I’m starting to think he might be,” Kathryn confessed.
Bette rested her chin on a palm. “If you’ve learned to tell the difference, I’d love to hear how.”
Kathryn confided what Nelson had discovered about the post office box used for the dress that turned up in the Warner Bros. costume department, and how wonderful it would be if they could track down the dress itself.
“What would you do with it?”
“Persuade Hoover to let Nelson leave the FBI. I even tracked down his favorite tailor in LA and double-checked: Hoover wears a 38 suit jacket, so it all fits.”
Bette started to laugh. “I always knew that little shit had a dark secret, but I never suspected that!”
Her laugh was infectious and soon Kathryn was giggling, too. “Can you imagine? Hoover? In a dress?”
“That’s not why I’m laughing.” Bette flung her arms out. “You’ve got it!”
“Got what?”
“I’m wearing it!”
Kathryn took in Bette’s maternity dress. It was dark green, shiny, and too tight across the chest. “This is the one that arrived in the office when you were visiting Orry-Kelly?”
“I got Jack to insert some side panels for extra room, but Gwendolyn could take them out easily enough.” Bette extended her right wrist and reversed the cuff to reveal the tiny embroidered G on the inside. “You can have it back if you get Gwendolyn to make me something new to wear once I’ve expelled BD from my loins.”
Kathryn’s head spun as she gave Bette a roomy old robe and hung the Hoover dress in her closet, and over pineapple Jell-O, they moved on to how MGM’s rivals were starting to out-gross them, and if now was not the best time for Bette to be leaving Warners. Bette told her not to worry. “There’s more than one game in town. Scrappy old battle-axes like me and Miss Crawford will always find work.”
* * *
After Bette departed, Kathryn decided Hoover’s dress would be safer in the closet. But as she lifted it off the top of her bedroom door and turned toward her room, the dress caught the edge of a statue she’d set on a small credenza against the wall. The sculpture wobbled for a moment, then crashed to the floor. She was picking up the pieces when she noticed a black wire coming from the statue’s foot.
Kathryn yanked the wire free and found something at the other end: a heavy device about the size of six quarters stacked together, black with red stripes and had two wires sticking out. It was warm in the palm of her hand.
She took two steps at a time down to Marcus’ villa, and banged on his door. When he opened it, she thrust the device and the statue into his face. “Is this what I think it is?”
Marcus looked from the broken statue of Mercury, Roman god of communication and luck, to the device, then back again. His eyes hardened. “Remember Bogie? And now they’re doing the same to you?”
She snatched it out of his hand and started to march away.
He followed her. “I’m coming with you.”
A near-full moon peeked through the branches of the eucalyptus tree that shaded both their places. It was light enough for Kathryn to see how fearful Marcus was for her.
“I’ll be fine,” she told him.
“Alone? I’m sure the Black Dahlia thought that too.”
She thought about all those tawdry Black Dahlia headlines.
GIRL TORTURED AND SLAIN
SEX FIEND VICTIM IDENTIFIED BY FINGERPRINT RECORDS
DAHLIA KILLER TAUNTS POLICE
“I don’t know that you coming along is such a good idea. I can take a cab.”
“And what if the Black Dahlia killer is a cab driver?”
* * *
Nelson’s apartment at 5905 Fountain Avenue was one of a mini-court of four whitewashed bungalows a few blocks north of the cemetery next to Paramount. She wasn’t surprised to see that he had his own back door allowing him to slip in and out, unobserved from the street.
She tapped on his back door, then knocked louder until he opened it.
He smiled when he saw Kathryn, but his lips thinned when he spotted Marcus behind her. She held the bug in her palm and raised it to his face. He looked at it, then said, “You better come inside.”
Nelson’s living room was warm and light, with dark orange drapes against apricot walls. Two sofas faced each other across a walnut coffee table. Over the fireplace hung an old California booster poster produced to convince people to move to the West Coast back in the days before the movie industry took over that role.
Kathryn gestured to Marcus. “I’m sure you know who this is,” she said.
Nelson nodded. “Yes, Mr. Adler, it’s—uh . . .”
“Good to meet me?” Marcus asked, thick with sarcasm.
“Please, take a seat.”
“I don’t want a seat,” Kathryn said. “I want the truth.”
“And I want to know how you found out where I live. I’m not in the book.”
“Maybe you’re not quite as mysterious as you think you are.” Kathryn had spotted Nelson’s address on a telephone bill on the counter of his father’s store the day she bought Gwendolyn’s lamp. Accustomed to reading upside-down papers scattered on the desks of movie moguls, she only needed a glance to memorize it. “And maybe your father should be more careful what he leaves laying around on his desk.” She lifted the bug up to face level again. “Can we stick to the subject, please?”
“Where did you find it?”
“Exactly where you put it!” Marcus jeered.
I knew it was a bad idea, Kathryn thought. If this is where I find out he’s been stringing me along, I’d rather not have an audience. Not even Marcus.
“I knocked over a sculpture,” she said, “and found it attached to the base.”
“I can assure you, that thing did not come from us.”
“The FBI bugged Bogie’s villa and you claimed to know nothing about it,” Marcus said. “Your assurances don’t mean diddly.”
Kathryn placed a gentle hand on Marcus’ pounding chest. “Let’s hear him out.”
“We haven’t used those since before the war,” Ne
lson said. “The newer ones are smaller and much harder to find.”
Kathryn felt a ripple of tension leave her shoulders. She looked at Marcus. That does make a certain amount of sense.
“I don’t buy it.” Marcus muttered
Nelson turned toward the desk in the corner. “Let me show you what we use nowadays. You’ll see they’re nothing like that old dinosaur you’ve got there.”
“So you admit that you do use bugs?”
“You know we do,” he said quietly.
“So who’s to say that you didn’t just decide to use some old bug you had lying around from the old days?” she asked. “Nobody at the Bureau would miss it. You could listen away to your heart’s content.”
“Because I’m saying it, Kathryn. I give you my word.”
“Your word!” Marcus scoffed, but Nelson ignored him.
“Tell me, Kathryn why would I go to the trouble of bugging your apartment and risk getting caught out by the one person whose trust I’m trying to win?”
“What do you know about trust?” Marcus demanded. “What do you care about what happens to people? Just as long as the FBI gets what they want.”
“I cared enough the night of that raid,” Nelson shot back.
Marcus turned to Kathryn. “What’s he talking about?”
“You never told him?” Nelson asked.
“Told me what?”
“That raid up in Mandeville Canyon,” Kathryn said.
“What of it?”
“Didn’t you ever wonder why you guys were released?”
Kathryn threw Hoyt a Shut the hell up! look, then turned back to Marcus.
“He was on the phone with the desk sergeant when you were hauled in. He convinced the guy to release the three of you.”
Marcus twisted his neck just far enough to bring Hoyt into his peripheral vision. “Why would you do that?”
“I figured it’d encourage her to trust me.”
“To get her to do what you wanted.”
Nelson had been soft-peddling his voice, keeping it aw-shucks friendly. But now it turned harsh. “If I’d known you’d take this attitude, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. Did you read what happened to everybody else?”
The raid had made front-page news for days afterwards. Every man arrested that night was listed along with his home address and current employer.
Nelson stepped up and poked Marcus in the chest. “Within a week, all those homos were out of a job, and most of them evicted from their homes.”
Kathryn threw her hands up. “What did you say?”
“You heard me. Oh, come on! Let’s lay all our cards on the table. That was a homo bar. You married a homo. Knowingly, I assume. You had your reasons. But what I did that night saved your friend from public humiliation that would have cost him his career. And what do I get for it? A thank you? No. I get accused of manipulating you to get what I want.”
“And how is that any different from what you’ve been doing since the day you walked into my dressing room at NBC?” she challenged.
“It’s different now because I want out. And I want you.”
Nelson had done a damned decent thing getting Marcus and the others off the hook, and he deserved to be thanked for it better than he was. Kathryn wanted to be nobody’s fool, but was Marcus right? Had he done it just to curry favor with her?
Hoyt broke the silence.
“And as long as we’re laying our cards on the line, you want to know the truth? Okay then, here’s the truth: That time during the war when we bugged Bogie’s place? We were supposed to be bugging yours.”
Kathryn reared back. “What?”
“You told her you didn’t know about that,” Marcus said.
“I didn’t. Not at the time. I didn’t learn till much that later those agents who broke in, they got the wrong place. Nobody knew until we started listening and discovered it was Bogie’s. You should’ve heard Hoover when I told him. He sounded like he was literally dancing a merry jig. Bogie was his ultimate target, but he wasn’t convinced the bugs we used back then could do the job, and didn’t want to take the chance with such a high-profile subject.”
Something inside Kathryn gave way. It was almost like she could feel the muscle and sinews in her chest pulling apart.
“My life was fine till you came skulking in!” she yelled. “And it’s been a bottomless rabbit hole ever since.” She pitched the bug at him. It slugged him squarely on his forehead.
She stomped past him, brushing away his attempt to grab her arm, and headed for his door. She clutched the tarnished brass knob to steady herself, and threw over her shoulder, “My mom’s tax bill is paid, and you’ve got your information about the O’Roarkes’ real estate dodge.” She jerked the door open. “I’m out, and if Hoover’s got a problem with that, he knows where I work. Don’t contact me again—ever.”
She hurried down the gravel path that led to the side street where they parked the DeSoto. The night air chilled the damp sheen of sweat coating her face. As she hit the sidewalk, she kept expecting Nelson to open the door again, but it stayed shut and the path remained dark. Part of her was glad he hadn’t followed them; another part couldn’t help but be disappointed.
They said nothing as Marcus opened the passenger door for her. She nodded her thanks as she slid onto the front seat. By the time they pulled away from the curb, she could barely see it through the tears pooling in her eyes. Marcus headed north toward the Hollywood Hills, away from Nelson’s bungalow, away from Paramount, away from the cemetery. She didn’t open her eyes again until she saw the lights along Sunset.
CHAPTER 37
Marcus thought he had his share of problems until he learned about the bug in Kathryn’s apartment. She’d tried to pretend she wasn’t a teary, snotty, shaking mess when she came home that night, but that pretense only lasted until the second whiskey he put in front of her and the pair of Nembutals he left on her nightstand.
Since then, she’d been a far cry from her forthright, chatty self. It was like someone had turned down the volume and mislaid the dial. So when Marcus learned that the last day of filming the new Clark Gable movie, The Hucksters, was also the start of production for The Final Day, he arranged an all-day visit to the studio, where she didn’t need to be followed around by a clingy staff member from Publicity.
The Hucksters featured an all-star cast—Gable, Adolphe Menjou, Sydney Greenstreet, Deborah Kerr, and someone Marcus had his eye on: Ava Gardner.
She’d been at the Garden a few times during her disastrous marriage to Artie Shaw, where she’d endeared herself with her free-spirited bawdy humor. She’d acquitted herself very well on loan out to Universal in The Killers with Burt Lancaster, and now the studio was giving her screen time with Gable—a landmark moment for any up-and-comer. She was now on Marcus’ Actively Seek Properties For This Player list, which was the next rung on the ladder to Hollywood heaven.
Marcus and Kathryn walked down the laneways between soundstages, nodding and saying hello to workers and performers they knew. As they passed under the enormous METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER STUDIOS sign, they found a rare pocket of privacy. He was about to ask her how she was doing, but she spoke first.
“That Purvis guy, the one who sucker-punched you.”
“What about him?”
“I still don’t get why you didn’t fire him.”
Marcus flapped his lips. “In a perfect world, I’d have canned him on the spot. But this is Hollywood, where we only pretend it’s perfect. Fact is, he’s the new golden-boy writer around here. Our two biggest pictures during the holidays are shaping up to be The Final Day and Pacific Broadcast, and he wrote them both. I hate to say it, but he knocked them out of the park, which means I need him more than he needs me.”
Kathryn watched a group of extras costumed in voluminous eighteenth-century dresses for Green Dolphin Street pass by. “How can you trust him?”
The humiliation still stung. He didn’t blame her for bringing up the subject, but t
he sooner he could put it behind him, the better. “We’ve got to be able to trust some people. And others like Purvis and Wardell, you keep your eyes and ears open.”
She shrugged and walked in through the soundstage door.
The last scene to be filmed was one in which Gable and Menjou meet their biggest advertising client, Sydney Greenstreet, in his teak-lined boardroom. The actors were on set, waiting for their next take. Greenstreet, wearing a dark velvet jacket and a tall white homburg, was seated in an elevated, elaborately carved throne at the head of a conference table long enough to seat twenty. At the other end of the table, Gable and Menjou sat chatting in three-piece suits.
When Gable spotted Marcus and Kathryn, he smiled and stood. As they approached, he cheek-kissed Kathryn and thrust out his hand for Marcus. “I was just thinking of you,” he said. “I want my next one to be a war picture. Got anything up your sleeve?”
Marcus mentally searched through the scripts on his desk. “We’ve got something called Homecoming, about a guy who joins the Army Medical Corps.”
“Sounds promising,” Gable said. “I wanted The Final Day, but Mayer flat-out told me I was too old.”
“Isn’t that character supposed to be a greenhorn fresh out of boot camp?” Kathryn asked.
Gable grinned. “Mayer’s never heard of rewrites?”
Kathryn elbowed him in the ribs. “I shall have a stern word with him the next time I see him.”
Marcus was happy to see that Kathryn could still switch on the charm when she needed to. He’d never said anything—not even to Oliver—but he couldn’t help wondering if she’d started to fall for that FBI guy. After her trip to Reno, a girlish quality had seeped into her voice whenever she talked about him. He’d been praying something might come along to jolt reality into her, and was relieved when she appeared at his door with that listening bug in her hand.
He felt someone catch him by the elbow. It was Arlene, and she wasn’t smiling.
“I told my boss I needed to see the nurse,” she whispered.
Reds in the Beds Page 25
