Scandal in Babylon Read online

  ‘Good Heavens, how would I know?’ Kitty turned back to the mirror and appropriated a jar of Nick’s moisturizer. ‘I only ever saw it on IOUs, and that was …’ She stopped herself from any specific revelation about how long it had been since her days as Mrs Festraw. ‘That was just years ago.’

  ‘Where were you this afternoon between one fifteen and three thirty, Miss de la Rose?’

  ‘I was looking for my dog.’ She returned her attention to the contents of Nick’s make-up drawers. To Emma, these appeared to contain almost as much high-quality rouge, mascaro, and powder as did Kitty’s own.

  ‘You didn’t get a telephone call in your dressing room at two ten?’

  The question startled her into looking up. ‘I wasn’t in my dressing room at two ten.’

  ‘The studio operator says a call came through for you at that time. A man’s voice answered – in your dressing room, so presumably that was Mr Festraw – and said, Yeah, she’s here, and called you to the phone.’

  ‘The operator actually heard Miss de la Rose’s voice?’ asked Emma.

  Meyer glanced at her, not troubled at being interrupted, and shook his head. ‘She says she doesn’t listen to calls.’ He glanced sidelong at Pugh. ‘Says she’d get canned if she did.’

  ‘She’s gonna get god-damned canned anyway—’ growled the studio chief.

  ‘Anybody go on this dog hunt with you, Miss de la Rose?’

  Kitty’s chin came up defiantly, and Spiegelmann put in, ‘You don’t have to answer any of these questions, Miss de la Rose.’

  ‘Nobody was with me.’ She flicked a glance at Pugh, who flushed an alarming shade of turkey red. Returning to the mirror, she began applying rouge. Fortunately, reflected Emma, Nick Thaxter’s skin tones were reasonably close to Kitty’s. ‘I don’t usually have to take along a bodyguard to find my poor Buttercreme when she gets lost, any more than I need somebody sitting at my bedside all night, in case somebody should accuse me of murder at three in the morning. People do do things by theirselves, you know.’

  And a story that involved Emma and Zal accompanying her, Emma thought with relief, could be too easily checked … particularly by the Pettingers.

  Kitty dusted powder on her face, and pursed her incomparable lips to dab on the reddest shade in Thaxter’s extensive collection. ‘And you can’t arrest me,’ she added, ‘because I really didn’t do it. Is there any mascaro in there that matches mine, darling?’

  Detective Meyer refused to let anyone besides Al Spiegelmann ride down to the Sixth Division Police Station with Kitty. Emma secured a ride in Frank Pugh’s big Pierce-Arrow, clinging to the leather hand-strap in stoic alarm as the furious studio chief roared out onto Sunset Boulevard like a Roman chariot out of the starting gate. The reporters – ejected by Mack Farley and his myrmidons – scattered before him, having clustered around the gates like ants around a jam pot. As they swept full-tilt into the traffic on Sunset, Emma caught a glimpse in the crowd of what looked like Thelma Turnbit’s purple hat and mustard-colored tweeds.

  Since she’d stepped from the train last October into the Moorish fantasia of Los Angeles’ Santa Fe station, Emma had periodically experienced the sensation that she’d wandered somehow into a dream – except her own dreams were generally far more prosaic, involving the purchase of broccoli at the market or the cataloging of Etruscan inscriptions. But looking at the anger-darkened face of the man beside her, the cold set of the heavy lips – remembering the sharp, businesslike bark of his conversation with pale, plump, oleaginous Mr Fishbein and the curl of smoke from Dirk Silver’s ashtray as they burned evidence – the sense of being in a dream of some kind returned. A frightening dream, as it sank in on her: he doesn’t care. A man died, shot to death, and he simply doesn’t care. It was literally no more to him than poor Mr Ackroyd getting drunk and being fired from the picture: an inconvenience. Here, Duchess, you rewrite scenes twenty through twenty-four and it never will have happened.

  Reporters beat them to the station house. Emma supposed they’d telephoned ahead. ‘The bail bondsman should be here already,’ Pugh snapped, thrusting his way before her to the doors – the first words he’d addressed to her since, Get in the car. There was no sign of either Mr Spiegelmann or Kitty in the station’s reception area, but a tall, golden-haired, extremely handsome, young man in a double-breasted suit sprang to his feet as they entered, and moved straight to the studio chief.

  ‘Colt Madison.’ He thrust out his hand. ‘Mr Fishbein told me to meet you here.’

  Emma took a seat on one of the wooden benches, already occupied by a fat, angry looking man in a cheap tweed jacket that smelled of very stale meat. Three reporters pressed briefly against the glass of the outer door, but had evidently been told to stay out in no uncertain terms. Beyond them, the last of the California daylight threw shadows almost all the way across Cahuenga Boulevard, and flashed on the windscreens of passing cars. Somewhere in the station, a woman insisted, ‘I never told him he could stay! He said he just needed a place to sleep for two or three nights …’ Elsewhere, a typewriter clattered, a telephone rang.

  That home would be yours, Aunt Estelle had written, of the green, sweet, familiar quiet of Oxford.

  Emma closed her eyes.

  It wouldn’t be the same, of course. She knew those long evenings would never come back, when she’d helped her father with cataloging all those small and intricate fragments of inscriptions painstakingly copied in Italian ruins, the endless minutiae on variant medieval versions of Livy and Polybius. In the spring of 1914 he’d been planning to return to the purported Etruscan ruins in the Apennines, which would have been Emma’s first field experience. As late as 1916 he’d still spoken as if it would take place. When all this is over …

  At Aunt Estelle’s, she knew, she would be expected to be a sort of senior daughter in the household, a role she was well prepared to play: acting as housekeeper, helping to arrange dinners, chaperoning her cousins when they came ‘out’. She would be the person she had all her life planned to be.

  Like Odysseus, she thought, when he finally made it home from Ithaca and cleared out all Penelope’s importunate suitors … Although presumably I won’t have to kill anybody … Tidying up loose ends. Finding those he had loved in his former life … Except that her father, unlike the wanderer’s, would not be there to welcome her back.

  But his work will be, she thought. Scholarship, friendship, the world she had known …

  And at least nobody will hand me a farrago of a half-written scenario about Babylonian empresses (!) coming to ‘corrupt’ first-century Rome!

  Someone came onto the lot and killed a man in Kitty’s dressing room …

  She opened her eyes again, and saw Frank Pugh, towering over Detective Meyer, beating his hand on the corner of the sergeant’s desk to emphasize his words.

  She wondered where Kitty was.

  On her twenty-sixth birthday – this past September – Emma recalled that she’d been making plans to kill herself. She’d known exactly how to go about it. The Romans were very helpful about such matters. Eripere vitam nemo non homini potest, Seneca had written. At nemo mortem; mille ad hanc aditus patent.

  A thousand doors open on to it …

  She had planned to wait until Mrs Pendergast went out to her married daughter’s for afternoon tea. Then she’d steal a razor from Lawrence Pendergast’s room, fill the first-floor bathtub with hot water (the one in the attic never got remotely warm), lie down in it, and slit her wrists. (Longways, the Romans advised, so there was no chance of a small cut closing up again.) Early authorities were almost unanimous in saying that the method did not hurt much.

  Not nearly as much, she had concluded, as Mrs Pendergast’s constant, resentful fault-finding; as Lawrence Pendergast’s assumption that any woman who worked for her living was lawful prey.

  Not as much as the pain of living without her parents, without her brother … without Jim. As the knowledge that there was nowhere for her to go.


  But that was the day that Kitty had come flouncing up to the Pendergast door, trailing an aura of gin, cigarettes, and dissipation, fresh off shooting Passion’s Smoke for Minerva Films in London and in quest of someone to come back to America with her to brush her Pekinese and balance her checkbook and give her a much-needed halo of respectability.

  That evening, to her own astonishment, Emma had found herself getting on a boat. It had felt very odd.

  The next day she had laughed, for the first time in what felt like years.

  Laughter had almost hurt.

  I can’t leave her. Not at this moment.

  She drew a deep breath, and felt as if Aunt Estelle’s letter – fluttering in the back of her mind like an outraged pale moth – retreated to a shelf marked, To Be Dealt With Later.

  ‘That’s horseshit!’ roared Pugh. ‘Kitty – Miss de la Rose – didn’t even know the sap was in town!’

  ‘Then what was he doin’ with two letters from her in his room?’ returned Meyer calmly.

  Opening her eyes, Emma saw the detective shift his dark gaze from Pugh to the handsome Mr Colt Madison with a kind of smug wariness.

  ‘That was Officer Cusak on the phone. I sent him over there the minute we got his address out of Festraw’s wallet.’

  Judging by the producer’s expression, Emma guessed he would have words to say to Mr Fishbein about not burning the contents of the wallet along with the other evidence.

  ‘They found two letters from Miss de la Rose on the table at Festraw’s place. Pretty strongly worded, I gather. Cusak’s on his way over here with ’em now. One of ’em said, and I quote’ – he produced a notebook from his pocket and glanced at it – ‘“Come near me and I will kill you”.’

  Pugh’s fist slammed the corner of the desk. ‘Those were a goddam plant!’

  ‘Are you implying that the police’ – Meyer’s voice was deadly quiet – ‘would manufacture evidence, Mr Pugh?’

  Madison stepped forward, leading with one shoulder as if squaring up for a fight. ‘Wouldn’t be the first time in this town, Bub.’

  Oh, good. Emma got to her feet. Let’s get the police angry at us … If the wily Odysseus could deal with an irate Cyclops and hungry Laestrygonians, she reasoned, I can certainly deal with one studio chief and a mere detective of the Los Angeles Police …

  She stepped forward as Meyer was opening his mouth, and said, ‘Please excuse me, Detective Meyer, but might it be possible for me to see Miss de la Rose for a few minutes?’

  Short of snapping, Get lost, sister, neither Meyer nor Frank Pugh could very well continue the brewing battle. Both turned to look at her – Emma thought Mr Madison looked a trifle miffed at being upstaged – and she went on in the firm tones she had used when encountering drunken undergraduates on the High Street. ‘Whatever decision is reached about Miss de la Rose’s status, I know she’ll have instructions for me concerning her household affairs. I would very much appreciate it, if you could spare a few minutes for me to see her – under whatever supervision you consider appropriate, of course.’

  Meyer went to the office door in a corner, presumably to ask a sergeant for permission. Madison – whoever he was – turned to Pugh and said, without any effort to lower his voice, ‘Don’t let these goons put one over on you, Mr Pugh. Those letters are a plant. Raymer’ – he jerked his head at the sergeant’s door – ‘would like nothing better than to pin a big one on a movie star – or get the leverage to hit you for a fortune, to make the whole thing go away. Don’t let him make a monkey out of you.’

  ‘Nobody,’ grated Pugh, in a voice just as carrying, ‘makes a monkey out of me.’

  Emma had known Frank Pugh as a powerful man, an intimidating man: a man whom Kitty used as casually as, by her own account, she’d used one or two of her husbands and any number of her admirers. A protector and a source of silk dresses, diamond bracelets, and caviar suppers. There had been something almost comical in the way the glamorous screen star deceived him. But now, looking at him, Emma shivered. He was not, she realized, comical at all, and Kitty was playing with fire.

  Behind her, Zal Rokatansky’s voice asked quietly, ‘What’s up?’ He stood at her elbow, make-up case under his arm.

  She felt exactly as if she had stumbled and, in the act of falling, been caught by strong arms.

  Before she could speak his glance went past her and he said, ‘Jesus Christ, Colt Madison!’

  ‘Who is he?’ She could not help noticing that Madison, while speaking to Pugh, kept one eye on the glass in the doorway of the sergeant’s office, which reflected the room … and himself.

  ‘Just about the least competent private investigator in LA,’ said Zal. ‘But the most photogenic. How’s Kitty? Are they booking her? Ambrose Crain’ – he named the smitten millionaire whose crimson roses had glorified Kitty’s dressing room and her base camp in Stage One – ‘turned up just after Pugh left, and gave me a lift up to the house to drop off the celestial creamcakes. He’s waiting in the drugstore across the street, in case Kitty needs a ride home. He was all ready to shell out for bail on the spot, but I told him Pugh would probably take care of that. And I brought the paint box.’ He patted the make-up case. ‘Nick’s rouge a little too pink for Kitty?’

  In spite of herself, Emma stifled a giggle. ‘Now, don’t speak ill of Mr Thaxter or his rouge! He was very generous to let us all invade his dressing room.’

  ‘Wouldn’t dream of it. And don’t get me wrong, the rouge looks great on him. And how are you?’

  ‘Holding up,’ said Emma. ‘A little to my own surprise.’

  ‘Not to mine.’ He gave her a shy grin. ‘I’ll back a proper educated Englishwoman against the Keystone Kops any day of the week.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure of that.’ She glanced worriedly in the direction of the watch-room’s street door, as the lugubrious Sergeant Cusak entered and crossed straight to the door of Sergeant Raymer’s office. Beyond the windows, the sky was losing its light. Street lamps, yellow in the California dusk, blossomed along the sidewalks; the drugstore window on the other side of the street flung a garish carpet of light over the sidewalk and the faces of the passers-by. ‘Evidently Detective Meyer sent a man immediately to Mr Festraw’s lodgings and they found letters from Kitty there—’

  Zal made the same remark he had made earlier in the day, when apprised of Rex Festraw’s presence on the lot. ‘More of ’em?’ he added after a moment. ‘That’s quite a correspondence …’

  ‘And the letters said, “Come near me and I will kill you”.’

  ‘Fuck me. I mean, Gosh. That’s got to be a plant.’

  ‘Even Mr Madison seems to have figured that out,’ agreed Emma. ‘The identical words … But it makes me wonder who would go to such trouble to have Kitty accused of the crime … and why are they doing such a bad job of it?’

  FIVE

  It was well after midnight when Frank Pugh dropped Kitty and Emma off at Kitty’s miniature pseudo-Moorish villa, far up Ivarene Street in the Hollywood Hills. Only the stars, and the distant glow of an enormous, lightbulb-plastered sign advertising a failed real-estate development called HOLLYWOODLAND, illuminated the velvety blackness. Sagebrush and dust gave the dry air an exquisite savor that Emma would forever associate with California; the eyes of small animals, foxes or coyote, glinted out of the dark. ‘I do hope poor Ambrose understands why I needed to have Mr Pugh bring me home,’ Kitty said, as they mounted the high steps of the porch, and waved after the departing headlights of the studio chief’s car. ‘Please wake me tomorrow in time to telephone him … Christ, I need a drink! Zal?’

  In the Stygian shadow where the ground sloped sharply down from the street, round spectacle lenses caught the porch lamp, very much like the eyes of the smaller prowlers above.

  The cameraman emerged from the darkness, where his battered pre-war Ford had been tucked behind the big eucalyptus tree at the turn of the drive. While Kitty had been cold-creaming Nick Thaxter’s not-quite-flattering cosmetics from he
r face – in the back office generally used, Emma suspected, for the questioning of recalcitrant suspects – and Al Spiegelmann and the bail bondsman were negotiating with the precinct jailer, Detective Meyer, and a district court judge, Zal had asked Emma softly, ‘Does this whole business smell as fishy to you as it does to me?’

  ‘You mean that telephone call to the dressing room?’ She’d set down the nearly illegible carbons of the booking forms and the police report, suddenly aware that she would cheerfully have done murder herself for a cup of tea. ‘Or the duplicate letters in Mr Festraw’s rooms? Somebody knew she’d be away from her dressing room at two ten – and knew that Mr Festraw would be there. Hiding that set of threatening letters in the back of her bureau, most likely.’

  ‘And somebody’d been in earlier,’ pointed out Zal, ‘to swipe the gun and the stationery. God knows how he managed to find the gun. And whoever he was, he came back when he knew Festraw was there, which means he was watching the place – if it was a “he” – and had co-ordinated times with whoever made that phone call. It was a set-up, all right, and a pretty careful one.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Emma quietly. ‘So why was something so carefully arranged done so badly?’

  ‘Darling,’ Kitty had called out, ‘could you give me a hand? This stupid lamp is worse than a klieg light and I can’t see a thing in the mirror …’

  In the corridor outside the little interrogation room, Colt Madison’s voice had rattled like a well-modulated typewriter, pouring out his own theory – conspiracy by figures high in the government and police department of Los Angeles – with a rehearsed lucidity that never so much as stopped for breath, let alone to search for a word. It was like hearing an actor declaim – ‘the whole object of creating scandals like these is to draw attention to the need for censorship of the medium’ – a river flowing freely, rather than an ordinary human’s speech.