Scandal in Babylon Page 9
The thought of Gloria Swanson or Peggy Donovan murdering a rival in order to win a Screen Stories contest – additional picture or not – was almost, but not completely, ridiculous on the face of it. Someone like Theda Bara – a sultry vamp now pushing forty, according to Zal, who hadn’t made a picture for nearly five years – might conceivably think it a good idea, especially if she regarded Camille de la Rose as her only real competition.
But Camille de la Rose – even without the cachet of being arrested for a crime of passion – wasn’t the only competition.
And an actress who had even a chance of being named the Goddess of the Silver Screen would presumably have the money to hire someone to do the job for her. (How much do assassins charge in Los Angeles these days? I wonder if Mr Madison knows?) Would one of them be so silly as not to realize that an accomplice would blackmail her?
Baroque scenarios of Gloria Swanson taking a murderer for her lover and then shooting him herself (What would she do with the body?) flitted briefly through Emma’s mind … I think I’ve been in Hollywood too long …
Peggy Donovan – the red-haired hot tomato over at Enterprise who was Kitty’s bosom friend – would probably consider that a perfectly reasonable plan.
And it did occur to her to save the idea for a future scenario …
Now I KNOW I’ve been in Hollywood too long …
Emma sighed, and crossed to the small side-door of the Hacienda which opened into the studio telephone exchange.
Vinnie Lowder – very young, very stout, her blonde hair screwed into a wispy pompadour and a look of cornered anxiety in her lovely blue eyes – sat at her switchboard, trying to read another copy of the Herald but, Emma thought, not able to concentrate. The girl looked up quickly and said, ‘Oh, Mrs Blackstone! I’m so sorry about what I said to that police detective—’
‘Was it true?’ Emma took one of the room’s wooden desk chairs and spoke in her gentlest voice, as if calming a shopgirl who’d just spilled nail varnish all over a customer. ‘Of course you had to speak the truth, and it’s a good thing that you did! I think even Mr Pugh will see that, once he calms down. Think what a horrid mess there’d be, if you came up with a lie and they caught you in it – which they would, you know. Then everything would look even worse.’
‘That’s what I thought!’ Vinnie’s rosebud mouth puckered briefly, in an effort not to cry. ‘I mean, I didn’t exactly think it at that moment, but I’ve always felt that. That if you tell a lie and get found out, it always makes things more complicated. But Ginny Field – she was outside Mr Thaxter’s dressing room – says she heard Mr Pugh say he was going to f-fire me …’ She almost couldn’t get the words out.
‘I’ll speak to Mr Pugh,’ said Emma. ‘And I’ll tell Miss de la Rose to speak to him as well. You know he’ll listen to her.’
The girl nodded, desperate for reassurance. The switchboard buzzed at that point and she quickly plugged in a wire, saying into her speaking-tube, ‘Foremost Productions … Yes, Mr Goldwyn, I’ll connect you …’
She changed over the wire. ‘Thank you,’ she said simply. ‘I just can’t lose this job. People always want to know why …’
‘You won’t.’ Emma leaned a little forward. ‘What time did that call come in?’
‘Ten minutes after two,’ replied the girl promptly. ‘A man called, asking for Miss de la Rose. When I connected to her phone, a man’s voice answered in her dressing room.’ She looked a little self-conscious. ‘Which doesn’t mean anything, you know, Mrs Blackstone. It could have been Mr Volmort from Make-Up, or someone sent over to fetch something from the set, you know.’
Actually, Emma was well aware that in Kitty’s case, a man in Kitty’s dressing room often did mean something, but not, as a general rule, in the middle of the day. Unless he was very good-looking … or Kitty had had a bit more gin than usual …
But it took a good deal of gin to make Kitty that careless (or the man in question had to be extremely comely), and in general, she answered her own telephone.
‘The man said, “Yes, she’s right here”, and then, “Camille, come to the phone”.’
‘He called her Camille? You’re sure?’
‘Oh, yes. I didn’t think anything about it at the time, but would her former husband call her Camille and not Kitty? Though I suppose if they’ve been separated for so long …’
Like pretty much everyone at Foremost, Vinnie was under the impression that Camille was Kitty’s real name.
‘And you didn’t hear Miss de la Rose’s reply?’
‘Oh, no. I disconnected myself from the call at once.’ She blushed a little. ‘I know better than that. Even when … well, certain people … would pay me to listen, it wouldn’t make up for losing a steady job.’
Thelma Turnbit, presumably … and a dozen like her.
‘And you didn’t recognize the caller’s voice? Or that of the man who answered?’
Vinnie shook her head. ‘The man who answered would have to have been poor Mr Festraw, wouldn’t he? Wasn’t that awful, what the newspaper said he did to her? I never knew – she’s so brave … I didn’t know the caller’s voice. It wasn’t one I’ve heard a lot – or at all, probably.’
‘Young man’s voice? Old man’s?’
‘A regular man,’ said the girl, after a moment’s thought. ‘Not a boy, and not creaky like a very old man gets. Sort of light – not deep like Mr Pugh’s – and well-spoken. No accent, I mean, and – well – upper-class. Like someone with an education. But of course he only asked me to connect to Miss de la Rose’s dressing room …’
‘Of course,’ said Emma, recalling Taffy the Bootlegger’s slangy New York patois. ‘Thank you. It doesn’t sound like anyone Miss de la Rose knows, or at least not anyone I’ve met. I promise I’ll tell Miss de la Rose to speak to Mr Pugh, and to Mr Fishbein, but I don’t really think you have anything to worry about …’
The switchboard buzzed again and Vinnie plugged in another wire. ‘Foremost Productions. Oh, yes, Mrs Pugh. I’ll connect you right away. But I know Mr Pugh is away on location this morning—’
Emma had seen him ten minutes previously, crossing from the canteen to the Hacienda.
‘Of course. Of course …’
Thoughtfully – as yet another line buzzed – she waved her farewell with a smile, which Vinnie returned, and took her leave.
She stood for a moment outside the door, watching as the property men carried armloads of costumes, shoes, kimonos, gramophone records, and wicker dog beds up the outside steps to the shaded gallery along the upper floor of dressing rooms. A wrangler passed across the square, leading four horses in what Hollywood fondly believed to be Roman saddles (meaning blankets strapped over English saddles, with anachronistic stirrups visibly dangling).
Father would turn in his grave.
A man emerged from Kitty’s door bearing Ambrose Crain’s silver vase of crimson roses, blown-out now and beginning to shed their petals. These strewed the steps behind him as he climbed, like a trail of dripped blood on the stairs.
SEVEN
The canteen was still full of people.
Only a few of them – guards, drivers, Darlene Golden’s stand-in Evvie Parton, a little crone whom Emma recognized as one of Mary Blanque’s seamstresses from Wardrobe – weren’t glancing irritably at their watches and then at the little cubicle of screens. Emma was surprised at how many of the people in the line she knew, at least by name. Even some of the extras – Ricardo Diaz from Spring Street downtown, who had a face like a sixteenth-century buccaneer, and Peachy Blume, as always resplendent in an evening gown sufficiently elegant to get her hired but not eye-catching enough to compete with the star in any scene – ‘Heya, Duchess, you going by Stage Two? Would you be a doll and tell Larry I’m still sittin’ in the verkakte line? Bless you, sweetheart …’
Emma stepped around the screens just as Sam Wyatt, the studio’s regular scenarist, was saying, ‘Where was I? I was behind my desk where I’d been since eight
o’clock yesterday morning and where I was until midnight last night, tryin’ to come up with some kind of endin’ for that bag of sugar-coated moonshine they’re filmin’ over on Stage Two, is where I was, and if Larry comes bangin’ on my door this afternoon askin’ where the hell is scene eighty-five, I’m gonna refer him to you, buster …’
‘Yeah?’ Madison’s chin came forward. ‘So when the LAPD hauls Miss de la Rose away in handcuffs and the studio closes and everybody, including yourself, are out of a job, and they come to ask me how come? I’m gonna refer them to you.’
Drunk, Sam Wyatt’s responses to self-important provocation were legendary – and Emma saw the shy little secretary that Fishbein had lent Madison getting ready to bolt. But Sam only rolled his eyes, shook out a smoke from his pocket, and said in a patient voice, ‘At one fifteen yesterday I was at my desk working, and I was there until I heard the commotion and the cops downstairs. After they all went away I went back to work. I didn’t go to the windows, I didn’t hear a shot. Nuthin’.’
He even ignored Madison’s smug nod of triumph, as if the refusal to get into a quarrel over the matter were an act of cowardice. When the detective said, ‘You got that, kid?’ to the secretary, Sam picked up his hat and quietly departed. ‘Yeah, beautiful.’ This to Emma. ‘What can I do you for?’ He had very bright, very lazy blue eyes under dark lashes which contrasted strikingly with that corn-silk hair. A short, straight nose and a mouth made for kisses, at present occupied by most of a cigarette. His glance was an invitation: I can have you for the asking, baby, and you’ll beg me for more.
Emma wanted to pour the secretary’s tumbler of water over his head.
‘I won’t keep you but a moment,’ promised Emma, stepping aside to let Sam past her. ‘You wouldn’t happen to have made a note of Mr Festraw’s address, would you?’
‘You bet I did.’ He fished in the pocket of his wide-lapelled jacket and produced a notebook. ‘But I warn you, honey, the bulls went through that place like Sherman going through Georgia and I doubt you’ll find so much as a laundry ticket there now.’
‘It can’t hurt to have a look. Is this his telephone number?’ Just above the address – 202 East Third Street, # 4H – was a string of letters and numbers: MI 59063.
‘You ain’t planning on going down there, are you, doll? ’Cause I’ll bet you, that hotel – the Winterdon – has already got that room cleaned out, hosed down, and rented to some other sucker. The phone number’s Frannie’s, a deli over on Flower. Good pastrami.’
He shrugged, and gave her another visual once-over, as if adding up the pale-brown silk of her old-fashioned bun, the neat challis skirt and plain shirtwaist. ‘You’re Camille’s … secretary? Don’t tell me you’re her sister …’ He was clearly comparing her height and long-legged slenderness with Kitty’s pocket-Venus sensuality.
‘Sister-in-law.’ Emma held out her hand. ‘Mrs Blackstone.’
He grasped it, firm, warm fingers and, she noticed, manicured nails. ‘I understand you wanting to help, sis,’ he said. ‘Frank tells me she fished you out of some pretty grim bouillabaisse in Blighty. But I have an instinct about these things, and this stinks of politics. Anything aimed at the studios does.’
‘You don’t think it would be worthwhile to try to find out a little more about Mr Festraw?’
His grin was engagingly boyish. ‘Don’t tell me you believe Fishbein’s applesauce about bootleggers! No, baby, it’s pretty clear to me Festraw came to town to put the touch on Camille, and somebody in City Hall – or the police – heard about it and followed him to the studio, hoping to touch off a scandal that would look real good on their record, come election time. Studios are always big news. Camille de la Rose – the Goddess of the Silver Screen, the Queen of “It”.’ His hands framed an imaginary movie screen. ‘What more could any crooked cop want?’
Emma parted her lips to object that this view took no account of the phone call – at precisely the moment to establish that Kitty was in her dressing room with Rex – but Colt Madison patted her hand with another dazzling display of perfect teeth.
‘If you want my advice, sugar, don’t get yourself mixed up with this. I know what I’m doing. I’ve dealt with these goons for years. Unless’ – his blue eyes got suddenly sharp – ‘you know something about where Camille really was between two and four?’
Emma made a swift decision, withdrew her hand from his, and widened her eyes. ‘I think she was in the backlot, looking for her dog.’
Filming would go on, she knew, for as long as daylight lasted; it was barely nine fifteen. After Mr Madison’s cloying caresses her first urge was to go wash her hands, but as she stepped around the screen she was intercepted by Sam Wyatt, a thin sheaf of scenario pages in his hand. ‘Say, Mrs B, you wouldn’t know why snooty rich ladies fire their maids, would you? I mean unfairly – this girl ain’t no thief or nuthin’.’ He gestured with the pages. Medium-sized, dark, and thin, Sam Wyatt had run guns to the Arabs in the War, driven a taxicab in El Paso and operated a saloon on Zanzibar. Nevertheless, he frequently came to Emma to double-check the likely behavior of the wealthy aristocrats about whom he was required to write tales, as if they were inhabitants of an alien planet.
‘Spilling perfume,’ said Emma promptly, remembering Mrs Pendergast. ‘Accused of stealing something that’s been mislaid. Or if Mrs Snooty has a son of marriageable age who tries to kiss the poor girl, or thinks she’s beautiful, that would do it. Is East Third Street in Los Angeles a decent neighborhood?’ she inquired, into Sam’s expression of shocked outrage. ‘I mean, safe for a woman to go to alone?’
‘Oh, sure, sure. I mean, it’s not fancy – it’s just a street, you know. You’ll be plenty safe, unless you step in front of a taxi or somethin’.’
‘And are you familiar with a delicatessen called Frannie’s? On Flower Street?’
‘Yeah, Eighth and Flower.’ He thumbed his scenario pages to find one so scribbled-over as to be useless, then fished a pencil from his pocket and sketched a map. ‘For a buck they’ll sell you some of the worst bootleg tonsil-varnish I’ve ever got drunk on, out the back door. Good pastrami.’
Armed with these reassurances, Emma took the bright yellow streetcar along Sunset Boulevard, and thence down Broadway into Los Angeles itself. Big frame houses nestled in the sunlight on hillsides behind St Vincent’s Hospital; the slopes bright with white and golden wildflowers against the dusty-gray background of brush that had made the town look so dreary when she’d arrived with Kitty last Fall. Here and there weird plants punctuated the general sage, fleshy leaves with spiky tips, or weird clusters of things like sword blades, more suited to Mr Burroughs’ Barsoom than to Earth. Leaving England, Emma had known she would miss the beech and oak and ivy of the woods … but hadn’t been prepared for this outré otherworld flora.
Any more, she reflected, than she’d been prepared for Chinese and Mexican food.
As the Yellow Car approached the hills of the city’s center, more and more dilapidated adobe structures appeared, amid the stretches of weeds and cactus. Then rather grim brick apartment buildings and residence hotels, and automobiles that blocked the streetcar’s progress at every intersection under a thickening spiderweb of telephone and electrical wires overhead.
At one such delay, Emma consulted Sam Wyatt’s sketch-map, to see how far it was from the Winterdon to Frannie’s, and was momentarily distracted by the strong, black scribble of titles, names, and cryptic plot-notes on the back.
Stop the Clock. Kentucky Derby Katie. Turn Back the Clock. Time. Years. Cash or Check? The Monkey’s Eyebrows.
Ellie McCall. Goldie McCall M’Gurk. Blind Pig M’Gurk. Hammie Blackie Denham
Ted tries to stay away (Blackie threatens)?
Building burns, Ellie disappears (?)
Amnesia – marries Roger
Kidnapped – switches clothes with maid – secret love-child
Oscar finds
Who’s Oscar? Emma wondered. And what happened to Ted?
Sinister Chinaman pursuing Goldie – really father’s servant – twins
Higginbotham murdered, father Roger accused
As the streetcar lurched into motion again, Emma lowered the paper and wondered what any of the stirring events hinted at had to do with a monkey’s eyebrows. As the buildings around her grew taller and grimier, she pushed aside the uncomfortable sensation behind her breastbone, and told herself firmly not to be silly. London was a much larger city than Los Angeles, and presumably a more dangerous one, with its crowded tenements, concealing fogs, and miles of dockside flophouses …
But I KNOW London.
She had trodden London’s sidewalks a thousand times: with her father, from Paddington to the British Museum; with her mother or Aunt Margaret to their dressmaker on Jermyn Street or to the Regent’s Arcade. With her family, via Underground, to Kensington, to marvel at the great, gray, threatening shapes of the dinosaurs outside the Crystal Palace …
Los Angeles, with its surreal palm trees and grubby gray-green weeds growing through the cracks of every sidewalk, with its brown faces and black faces mingling with the white, its glaring billboards (What on EARTH does a candy bar have to do with playing baseball …?), was an alien place.
Hot, dusty, and threatening.
Ante omnia tempus habent, she told herself firmly. There is a first time for all things. The Winterdon Hotel on Third Street was, a little to Emma’s surprise, not the sordid flophouse she had extrapolated from Rex Festraw’s seedy coat and liquor-laden breath. It was a four-story brick building stuccoed white, its shallow porch flanked by bougainvillea bushes already gorgeous with magenta flowers. The lobby, when she climbed its three low steps, though starkly plain, was spotless and smelled of bleach. The leather couch and chairs were old but in good repair. The middle-aged man behind the counter – backed by a wall divided equally between keys and pigeonholes for mail – was clean, prim-faced, clearly sober, and redolent of soap and piety.