Scandal in Babylon Read online

  ‘Good thing it was,’ pointed out Zal, turning over the booking sheets. ‘Or else our girl would be spending the night in the slammer, and then Pugh and Madge really would have coronaries. They don’t usually give bail on a murder charge.’

  The last form in the pile, Emma had seen, had set a special hearing for the twenty-eighth.

  ‘I told you they wouldn’t arrest me,’ Kitty had declared, and before Emma could explain to her that they had, in fact, arrested her – and that she had only a combination of studio clout and police corruption to thank that she wasn’t going to spend the night in the cells – Pugh, Fishbein, Spiegelmann and Detective Meyer had returned, filling the little room and all talking at once. Zal had slipped quietly away, presumably to cross Cahuenga Boulevard to the drugstore and let Kitty’s lovestruck millionaire know that his services wouldn’t be required.

  But Emma had not been at all surprised, to glimpse Zal’s car in the shadows of the eucalyptus tree as Frank’s big Pierce-Arrow had turned down the steep drive. And now, as he emerged from the darkness and approached the high, tiled steps of the house, she saw that he carried an assortment of small paper bags and boxes, and wafted about him the astonishing scents of egg foo yung and chop suey. Kitty squealed in delight and flung her arms around his neck, at the risk of getting lo mein sauce on the studio wardrobe’s dress, ‘Darling, if you weren’t in love with Emma I’d marry you on the spot!’ She kissed him on both cheeks. ‘I can’t tell you what it means! I’m absolutely dying—’

  She scampered ahead of them up the steps, and Emma, pausing to relieve the cameraman of some of his awkward burden, whispered, ‘Thank you!’

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ called Kitty over her shoulder as she entered the house – surrounded immediately by her three miniature guardians – and made a beeline for the elaborately carved Chinese liquor cabinet. ‘Oh, Zally, did you make sure to tell Mrs Shang to feed … Oh, I see you did!’ She put her head briefly through the door into the kitchen. ‘The gin is nothing to worry about – my bootlegger tells me it comes straight in from Canada, not like that awful bathtub rotgut they serve at the Dome café …’

  ‘Hey,’ protested Zal good-naturedly, following her across the tiled floor of the dining room and down the five steps to the kitchen. ‘I know the guy who runs in the Dome’s supplies and those come from Canada, too.’

  ‘Well, he should be reported and locked up for fraud, then.’ Kitty rummaged in the cabinet. ‘Or attempted murder …’

  She followed them down, a bottle of Tanqueray and three glasses in hand. ‘Not that any of them ever tell the truth. Did you tell poor Ambrose what was going on, Zal? I saw his car as we drove off the lot, with those awful detectives …’

  ‘I did.’ Zal spread the paper boxes out on the table as Emma filled the tea kettle. ‘I told him Pugh has already hired a gumshoe but that I don’t think much of him. He says he’ll put up whatever cash we need, to get to the truth. He said – and I agree with him’ – he held Kitty’s chair for her, then started opening boxes – ‘that if whoever really killed Festraw works for Foremost – or for one of the bigger studios, Universal or UA – we might not be able to trust our Fearless Leader to give a straight story to Meyer and his boys.’

  Emma, her hands full of plates, hadn’t thought of this. It was like discovering that Patroclus had really been spying for the Trojans. ‘Oh, dear!’

  ‘But why would somebody who works for Universal or UA want to kill Rex? Do you want any of this, darling?’ Kitty paused, gin bottle in hand. ‘No … Zal? More for me, then …’

  ‘If they actually wanted to get Kitty out of the way,’ pointed out Emma, ‘they’d have made those notes more convincing.’

  Zal took a bottle of olives from his pocket, opened it and handed it to her. ‘If we knew any of that,’ he said quietly, ‘we’d have a better idea of what we need to watch out for … if anything.’

  ‘Watch out for?’ Her glance went from Zal to Emma and back again. ‘Watch out for what?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ said Emma gently. ‘We not only don’t know who killed Mr Festraw, but why he was killed. But the facts that have come to light so far: the telephone call to your dressing room, at exactly the moment when you weren’t there; forged correspondence from you to Mr Festraw and vice versa; the fact that whoever killed him did so in your dressing room when there are probably ten thousand less conspicuous places in the Los Angeles area where it could have been done; all tells us that it was worth somebody’s while to arrange his murder in exactly this fashion. Mr Spiegelmann would tear the case against you apart in court.’

  Kitty sat down in one of the kitchen chairs, and fished, rather blankly, in the pockets of her dress – which, having come from Foremost Productions’ wardrobe department, didn’t contain a single cigarette. Emma opened the kitchen drawer that contained the household supply. Both the Shangs smoked like chimneys. Zal lit a kitchen match and held the flame to the cigarette as Kitty took it, but his glance crossed Emma’s. ‘And whoever’s behind this,’ he pointed out quietly, ‘would know that.’

  Emma said, ‘Yes.’

  She was silent, as Kitty thought this through.

  ‘I think,’ Emma went on after a moment, ‘that until we get some idea of who is behind it – someone, I assume, with a good deal of money – I would suggest that none of us, whatever we find out, talks to anyone about it, until we’ve talked to each other. Not Mr Crain, not Mr Pugh, not Mr Spiegelmann … nobody.’

  Zal said, ‘I agree,’ and Kitty, after a swallow of gin, nodded.

  ‘The way people blab in that studio, God knows where anything will end up. You know, just the other day when they were getting ready for the banquet scene with Nick – darling, did the Romans really eat things like swans and mice? No wonder they died out! – I heard one of the wranglers – the wranglers, dearest! – tell an extra about me and that gorgeous young man in the wardrobe department up on the catwalk above Stage Three … and nobody knew about that …’

  ‘Presumably the gorgeous young man did,’ pointed out Emma.

  ‘Yes, darling, but he’d never let it on to anyone because Connor Stark – that’s his agent, you know – is terribly jealous, and would disown any of his young men who so much as looked at a girl … though I don’t see why he should care. Not to mention all those stupid stories about Mr Crain taking me to dinner that ran in Photo Play … But it just goes to show you—’

  She picked a fragment of lobster from one of the plates, handling her chopsticks as if she were the Empress of China rather than Babylon. (The motion picture industry, Emma had observed, seemed to survive on Chinese take-out. Zal was teaching her to wield chopsticks, one of several skills – along with mixing cocktails and tallying baseball scores – which she had not expected to learn in America.)

  Emma refrained from pointing out that in fact Mr Crain had taken Kitty to dinner, repeatedly … And one never knew when columnists were watching.

  ‘But that brings us back to the question,’ she said. ‘Why would someone who worked for Foremost, or Universal, or anywhere for that matter, want to murder Mr Festraw? He looked very down-and-out, and of little use to anyone, though of course appearances might be deceiving. And why would they want you blamed for the deed?’

  ‘Me?’ Kitty’s dark eyes widened. ‘I didn’t have anything to do with it!’

  ‘Sounds like somebody’s going to a lot of trouble,’ observed Zal, ‘to make a lot of people think that you did.’

  ‘That’s silly,’ said Kitty firmly. ‘And anyway, like he said in the car, Frank isn’t about to let $250,000 worth of filming get washed out to sea.’

  From the moment they’d gotten into Pugh’s Pierce-Arrow outside the Sixth Division station – leaving Al Spiegelmann to hunt for a taxi for himself – the studio chief had poured forth his plans to deflect bad publicity, and to paint Camille de la Rose as the wronged, martyred woman struggling to clear her name (‘And believe me, baby, some of that evidence sounds pretty hinky to
me.’). ‘Don’t cry, baby,’ he’d said, taking one hand from the wheel to put it around Kitty’s shoulders as she’d wept – convincingly – with gratitude on his chest. ‘It’s one thing for the papers to go after a big lug like Arbuckle for rape, or make a stink about some director’s shady past when he’s knocked off. Fishy’ll make Festraw the villain, persecuting you … we’ll get the papers to drag in how the police are persecuting you as well.’

  Now, poking thoughtfully around in the egg foo yung with the end of a chopstick, Kitty said, ‘Ambrose is a major stockholder in the Hearst chain and Scripps-Howard.’ For all her appearance of a scatterbrained flapper, Kitty had an unerring instinct about where money came from, and where it went. ‘I can’t imagine someone like Lou Jesperson over at Enterprise would think he could push Frank into selling the studio to Enterprise, just by causing a scandal over me. Even if he does have that slick tramp Anita Tempest under contract. He has to know Fishy would use a mysterious accusation like this one to make me even more fascinating with the public, than to hurt me. Especially since the handwriting on those silly letters doesn’t look a thing like mine.’

  ‘You get a look at them?’ asked Zal.

  ‘The ones that Mr Pugh didn’t burn?’ Emma couldn’t keep herself from adding.

  ‘Oh, yes. That awful flat-foot practically waved them under my nose. I said, if he doubted my word, he can check them against my contract and a whole bunch of things I’ve written at the studio.’ She frowned, and her dark eyes grew distant as she considered the implications of the evidence.

  ‘Darlene would want me out of the way,’ she said at last. ‘She’s ready to do murder, to get herself elected the Goddess of the Silver Screen in that Screen Stories contest … and to get her claws into Frank. I guess you could say the same for the others – Anita Tempest and Gloria Swanson and Clara Bow and Peggy Donovan, though I will say I wouldn’t think Peggy would do something like that. Screw Lou Jesperson, yes. But I don’t think she’d do dirty to a friend. Well, not that dirty. And that new girl Norma What’s-Her-Name at Goldwyn. And I hear Theda Bara’s trying for a comeback …’

  ‘But would any of them,’ pursued Emma, ‘actually kill a man, to get you out of the way?’

  ‘Gloria Swanson,’ replied Kitty promptly, ‘would kill a man who beat her to a taxi-cab.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Kitty,’ put in Zal. ‘Swanson never takes taxis.’

  ‘Well, that’s true. But whoever wins that Screen Stories contest is going to make headlines in every photo-play rag in the country. If I could get an extra two thousand a week on my contract, or an extra film … or make a comeback if I hadn’t made a picture in a couple of years … I’d sure kill Rex for it. Even if he hadn’t been my husband.’

  Emma considered for a moment. The impossible probable, Aristotle had said, is always to be preferred to the improbable possible. Mostly, her father had generally added, because we seldom actually know the limits of the impossible.

  So what are we actually looking at here?

  Aristotle – and her father, studying a chart of the Etruscan ruins at Orvieto – would have said, Start with what you know.

  ‘Tell me about Rex,’ she said. ‘How long did you know him?’

  Kitty counted on her fingers. ‘About six months.’

  ‘And how long after you married him?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘In all. I mean, we were really hardly married at all …’

  ‘Did you love him?’

  ‘Oh, passionately!’ Kitty clutched her bosom and raised her face to an imaginary key-light. ‘I was crazy for him – he was gorgeous, and amazing in bed. This one time, just after I got the job with Ziegfeld, he came home with three bottles of cognac and a Hungarian lion tamer …’

  ‘And that’ – Zal held up a finger – ‘is all we need to know about that.’

  ‘Oh, I suppose so. But I honestly didn’t know that people could do things like that.’ Her face clouded. ‘It’s hard to tell, you know, looking at someone who’s dead, when the last time you saw them they were alive … But he didn’t look like a Greek god anymore, did he? You said you talked to him …’

  ‘Briefly,’ said Emma. ‘And, no. The years hadn’t been kind to him.’

  ‘Good.’ Old anger briefly quenched the old pain in the dark eyes. And behind it, a flicker of remembered fear. ‘He always drank, you know. More than he let on, when he’d come to the stage door. He could hold his liquor better than anyone I’ve ever seen, at least he could then. I think he was really trying to catch Lillian Lorraine – the dancer, you know – between husbands. But he and I …’ The fatigue-bruised flesh around her eyes puckered again, as if she’d accidentally leaned her elbow into an open safety pin, and she took another long drag on her Camel.

  Emma recalled what Jim had told her, about what his parents had said of his younger sister’s leave-taking.

  ‘Well, I’d just left home.’ She exhaled a thin line of smoke. ‘And I was living with three other girls in a fifth-floor walk-up on Pearl Street, and I was wild to get out of there. One of them had given up the stage completely by that time and I’d come home and find three of her boyfriends all sitting in the front room – which was where I was supposed to sleep – all sort of glaring at each other, while she was in the other room with number four. She kept trying to get me to do a sister-act with her, and I wouldn’t go back to my parents, even if they’d take me. And Rex had a really nice apartment, and lots of money – at least, then he did. And, like I said, he was phenomenal …’

  She waved the recollection away, as if in those days, at the age of fifteen, she hadn’t been terrified at where she knew it would end.

  ‘You know, sometimes we were really rich. I’d have a maid, and he’d have a valet, and we’d have a cook, which was a good thing, because I wasn’t any better in the kitchen then than I am now … And we’d live in these beautiful apartments in classy buildings like the Ansonia and the Apthorp, and go out to dinner every night. But then the jewelry he’d buy for me would sort of disappear, and he’d announce we’d have to move, to these awful dives in Harlem or Brooklyn. He was a gambler, and he’d get into debt with the gangsters over on Eleventh Avenue – that’s when he wasn’t buddies with them, lining up rich patsies for their card games. I guess you’d call him a stage-door johnny.’

  It wasn’t what Emma would have called him, but she held her peace.

  Kitty sighed, and drew in another lungful of smoke. ‘He knew everybody on Broadway, and all the respectable out-of-town businessmen who’d come to New York looking for a good time. He was an actor himself – he was in The Spring Maid – so they were flattered as hell. He’d either cheat them himself, or steer them into scams or crooked games or Gyp the Blood’s whorehouses, and he’d get a percentage of the take. I was working the whole time – either for Ziegfeld or in the line with A Winsome Widow – but some of the men he’d have over to drink when I came home scared me. I don’t mind tough customers …’ Her eyebrows, still dark with mascaro, dipped again, making that angel face suddenly old, and weary. ‘But these guys … You’d look in their eyes and there was nothing there. Just … like beads. And a lot like beads, some of them, with their pupils all down to a pinprick from dope. I remember one of them got angry at one of the others – I don’t remember why, but it was something silly, like who was opening pitcher for the Giants that Sunday or something like that. He knocked him off his chair and kicked him, then picked up the chair and beat him with it, beat him ’til he broke his ribs and his pelvis, while all the rest of them just sat and watched. Rex included.’

  She ground out what was left of the cigarette on the saucer that Emma silently handed her. ‘The rest of them, it was just a day’s work to them. And for all I know the bastard really deserved it. He could have robbed orphans or beat his wife or burned down hospitals for the insurance money. But Rex didn’t do a thing, because he was scared.’

  She fell silent then, as if she had returned to that tiled apartment kitchen, pressed up
against the wall beside her handsome husband’s chair, watching one man beat another almost to death on the floor. For a time the only sound was the tick of the clock, which read quarter past one.

  Emma found herself remembering Frank Pugh’s heavy features, red with anger but set and almost expressionless. ‘You didn’t see anything, you didn’t hear anything … Didn’t happen …’

  Zal asked, after a time, ‘Why’d you leave him?’

  ‘He was jealous.’ She looked up at them, returning to the present. Her real self, Emma thought, without the overlays of the gorgeous maneaters she played, or the dazzling, flamboyant star who figured in every screen magazine in the country as the glittering embodiment of ‘It’ (Whatever ‘It’ is …). With just a trace of a defiant sixteen-year-old girl who realizes that she’s in over her head and has no place else to go.

  ‘Like he had any business bellyaching about my love life … When he was sober he’d yell at me about even talking to other men …’

  Her beautiful eyelids lowered for a moment as she concentrated on lighting another cigarette, made Emma certain that talking was not what her sister-in-law had been doing …

  ‘But when he got drunk, he scared me. One night we got into an awful shouting match, when I came in late. He said he was sick of being married to a tramp, he was going to throw me out on my ear. Well, I’d already heard he’d been out on the town with Minnie Mazzola – she was a vaudeville singer and the sweetest person … she had a lot of money, too, so I knew he was sort of looking for a reason to divorce me so he could marry her. So I said not to put himself to the trouble, and I put on my coat again – the most beautiful chinchilla, silver-gray and black: Ruggy Breevoort bought it for me … Or was it Bottles Findlay? – and I walked out of the flat. It was four in the morning and it took me forever to get a cab on Ninth Avenue, but I went to a friend’s flat, and a few days later I left town with Solly Rosengo, who danced at the Tivoli and had just gotten a job at the Silver Shoes in Jersey City … Or was it Ted?’