Murder by Magic

by Rex Baron

“There is no need to worry,” he said, covering a residual yawn with his hand. “You needn't break your contract. I'll go ahead. There is no reason for me to stay here, when there is so much to do to get ready for the new season. In a month or so, when your shooting is finished, you can join us in New York.”

  “Us?” Lucy repeated his word.

  David looked up into her intense gaze. “Yes, Celia, the company…”

  “And Helen?”

  David ran his fingers through his hair and jolted out of his sleepy state of relaxation.

  “Of course Helen,” he answered with agitation. “She's agreed to take the train back with me on Friday.”

  “But you can’t,” Lucy pleaded.

  David rose to his feet and drew himself up in fortification for her onslaught of objections.

  “I am,” he stated flatly, “and I'll hear no more about it.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Lucy’s villa, Los Angeles

  At midnight Lucy awoke from a dream. She sat up in bed, not sure if she had not been awakened by her own scream.

  She listened to the quietness of the house. David was still, or still out, and poor little Miss Auriel was an outcast, alone in the servants’ wing at the other end of the house.

  She had dreamed of Paulo in a tomb, buried alive, deep under the surface of the earth. She was at his funeral, but there were no flowers. The room, where he was laid on a glistening slab of white marble, smelled pungent and sickening, an odor that took her breath away. She walked through a maze of people, frozen like statues, staring at the beautiful man dressed in white, lying in state like a fallen potentate.

  She saw that he was alive, trapped in his body, unable to speak to her. His eyes fluttered open and a look of recognition registered on his features. He opened his mouth, straining to speak, but a foul smelling vapor issued from his lips. She turned away in disgust. A Chinese man with long Fu Manchu whiskers took her by the shoulders and led her away from him.

  Lucy jumped up from her bed and pulled on a pair of woolen trousers and a heavy sweater. She called for the driver to bring the car around, but there was no reply.

  She pulled back the curtains to see if the touring car was in the drive. It was gone. David was still out. She would have to take the roadster and drive herself.

  She flew down the steps of the entryway without turning on the lights and flung open the front door. She doubled back, remembering the keys on the silver tray in the foyer, then started the engine of the car.

  The windows were covered with moisture. She let the engine run for a while, allowing it to warm itself, as she rubbed her sides with her hands against the chill of the night.

  After a time, she threw the auto into gear and pulled down the drive, heading up the coast road toward the opium den.

  The dream had told her where to look. The unmistakable musty scent issuing from Paulo's mouth was the clue that her subconscious mind needed to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

  She did not know why she was going. She had surely been rebuffed by Paulo, his amorous interests turning indifferent at the very moment when hers began to warm.

  Perhaps she was going in thanks for his small gift of love, however brief. But more importantly, she knew she was going because she had made a conscious decision to say yes to love, and had chosen this man to see it through.

  Helen was the other reason she found herself speeding through the night to a place she remembered with horror. She had become Lucy’s rival. For no apparent reason, this girl had appeared in her life and decided to push her out. She had charmed Paulo past all reason, rendering him unable to think clearly, and worse yet, unable to love her. She had bewitched him and was determined to take him away from her, even if it cost him his life. But this murderously ambitious girl had not been content with that alone. She had no rest until she had charmed David into doing her bidding by taking her back to New York, so that she could continue undermining the career that Lucy had spent a lifetime creating.

  Charm… the word, itself, had lost the potency of fear that had originally been associated with it. It had come, instead, to refer to a coy volleying of sexual favors or a bewitching sensation of enchantment, like a frog in a fairy tale, made handsome again with the stroke of a wand. One seldom looked below the beguilement to see the sinister intents and practices used to bring the effects of the enchantment into the world.

  Paulo had been unaware. He was troubled and confused by all around him. She owed him one last warning in repayment for touching her soul. She hoped, with all her heart, that her own magic might have had some lessening effects on the death-grip Helen exerted over his will, and that once again, he would come to her with love.

  She arrived at a place in the old road where she remembered it curved off sharply to the right. The Weigh Station was not far from there. An auto passed in the opposite direction, the first car she had seen since she left the small beach town of Santa Monica behind.

  As she rounded the bend, the dirty amber lights of the tattered old building lay just up ahead. She eased the car to the side of the road and walked a hundred feet or so until she saw the ramshackle bungalows with their subterranean secret.

  The oblique entry was as obscure as she had remembered. She groped her way in the blackness down the stairs, below the ground, into the labyrinth of tunnels that smelled of sudden joy and lasting despair.

  At the end of a dark passage, Lucy walked toward an opening of violet light. She nervously pulled the rings from her fingers and hid them in the lining of her jacket pocket.

  Without warning, without a sound, an old Chinese man was inexplicably next to her, walking with her as if he were escorting a friend. His hands were hidden inside his long silk sleeves, and he nodded to her the instant she became aware of his presence. He withdrew his hand from his sleeve and indicated for her to follow.

  “Violet light is the colour of devotion,” he said cryptically. “All religions and addictions require true devotion. It is through this love of something that one learns the truth of an idea. With it one lives, without it the Soul perishes. But it is only an idea of devotion, easily replaced and only as nourishing to the Soul as the snow on the mountain tops or the used breath rushing from the lungs.”

  Lucy had decided not to become unnerved or frightened. She had come with a purpose and had taken great trouble to find this place. She had no intentions of listening to his obscure wisdom or being put off by this odious little foreigner.

  “I'm searching for a friend,” she said sternly, breaking the old man's Socratic instruction. “He's a young man, very handsome and sad.”

  “I expect you are after the Portuguese, the man whose life is in his face... he is here. He has many illusions, like serpents that must be called forth and carried away on the winds of deliverance.”

  The old man bowed and extended his hand toward a doorway. He led her down a dark corridor. At one point, she lost sight of him up ahead, yet she did not think of turning back. She must find Paulo.

  She walked along, catching in her peripheral vision the edge of a cot supporting an unidentifiable shape, wrapped in dark blankets, or a glimpse of the waxy features of a face, illuminated for a fraction of an instant by a sliver of lost light. She heard the sounds of coughing and the deep irregular breathing of unseen beings.

  Ancient Chinese men lay clustered together motionless as in death, but their eyes followed her passing. She saw a beautiful young woman lying on a cot, dressed in the latest fashion, silent and unreal like an exquisitely laid out corpse.

  A chill ran through her body, and she knew she could not picture a Hell more frightening. She reproached herself for not paying closer attention to the twists and turns of the labyrinth. She panicked for an instant with the fear of not finding her way out.

  “Where are you taking me?” she demanded.

  “He is here, behind the curtain.”

  The old man drew back a filthy rag of a drape and stood motionless while Lucy lowered her head and
stepped inside. He bowed and was gone.

  On the cot in front of her was a figure dressed in old clothes and covered in the foul smelling dirt from the street. She was overwhelmed with relief for a moment, judging the old man to have been mistaken in his estimation of the object of her search.

  She was prepared to turn away, but a presence, a feeling that gripped her, caused her to draw closer. She peered down into the gaunt features, sorting them in her mind until she recognized them as a pitifully corrupted likeness of Paulo.

  With a shift of perspective, the face was frail and youthful one instant, then wizened with age the next. She bent forward to be certain that his chest was moving with life and she quietly touched his forehead with her ungloved hand.

  The figure stirred with her touch. His shirt was filthy and collarless, and it was evident from the growth of beard on his face that he had been in a state of near catatonic collapse for at least several days.

  “Poor dear Paulo,” she whispered, stroking his hair, “What have we done to you?”

  His eyes fluttered open and he squinted his pupils against the minuscule amount of light that Lucy seemed to bring with her.

  Paulo opened his parched lips to speak.

  “Who's there?” he asked.

  “It's Lucy. I thought I might find you here. When you didn't return home...”

  She did not finish the explanation. His face distorted even further and she was unable to read his reaction.

  “What do you want from me?” he asked.

  “I came to find you. You're not well. I came to help.”

  “I have everything I need in this place,” he said. “I need no help from anyone.”

  “But you must let your friends help you,” she insisted, lifting his head in her hand.

  “My friends are all dead,” he laughed bitterly. “William was my friend. Did you know William was dead? I have no friends now, except the friends I have all around me here. Do you want to see my friends? Then look around you. They are all here. Maybe even William is here. We're all dead here. We just don't have the courage to stop living.” He raised his head to look at her, then fell back weakly and lay breathing unevenly.

  “Paulo,” Lucy began in a steady voice, “I know what you must be feeling. It was a terrible shock to lose your friend, but you must not let it destroy you.”

  “My life is being taken from me, first my career, then the only person I ever loved.”

  “Then why did you bring me here? Surely, you realize that it was because of the way I felt for you that I came West.”

  Paulo turned his face away from her and buried his perfect profile in the filthy blanket.

  “You were famous, I wanted you to be with me,” he choked out the words. “I needed it for my career. My films had not done well… the last five. It was almost over for me, so Lasky suggested that if I brought you out, I might get some publicity for myself and make my pictures sell again.” Paulo wiped the sweat from his face with the dirty cuff of his sleeve. “That's why I came to you that night in the garden, so you would agree to have me at your premiere. Lasky arranged it... but I begged him to do it.”

  The words ran cold through Lucy's blood, but it was too late to think of betrayals or the deceits he had used in making her love him. It had not been the medallion alone that caused his interest to falter. Lucy realized now that it had never really been there in the first place.

  “I have disappointed everyone,” Paulo sobbed. He lifted his body toward her as if in pain, and clutched at the front of his shirt. His eyes were suddenly wild, as if he could see something terrible in the room that she could not.

  “Paulo, what is it. What can I do for you?” she asked.

  “Leave me alone,” he whispered, barely having the breath to form the words.

  He was drugged and exhausted, heartsick beyond saving with a few words of comfort. “I never loved you,” he said, as Lucy stood at the ragged curtain. “I never loved any woman. It was all for my career, to make me the great screen lover. Isn't that funny?”

  Paulo began to sob quietly, as he turned his face away, back into the darkness.

  Lucy did not answer.

  •••

  Train to New York

  It was raining the morning Lucy departed for New York. She had made her peace with the young screen idol and granted his last request of her… that she should leave him alone.

  She left entirely unnoticed, no longer in love, never really having been the object of desire. It was a tactical retreat, to remove herself from this land of sunshine and promise, where the sunshine had turned to rain and every promise remained unfulfilled.

  It had been a simple matter to cancel her contract with Jesse Lasky. She had merely telephoned, informing him that she must return to New York immediately. He had mistakenly tried to cajole her to stay by offering to cast her in another operatic picture play, this time opposite Paulo Cordoba. She laughed into the apparatus and returned the earpiece to the hook.

  The specially outfitted train that had delivered her up to the land of sunshine had now been decommissioned from that purpose and Lucy had to content herself with a return trip on the Chicago Limited, that would change cars when it reached Chicago, then proceed on to New York City.

  She boarded the train without notice from the newspapers. There were no photographers or young girls with cropped hair waving their autograph books and chanting her name in unison, as there had been that first sunny day she arrived. The dampness penetrated her coat, permeating her with a funerary sense of loss and failure.

  She glanced across the steamy compartment of the train to Miss Auriel, who sat fussing with her hair, dabbing away the rain from her hatless head with her handkerchief. The young woman caught her gaze and returned her smile.

  “Well, it's quite a different trip back, I'd wager to say, than the one that brought us here,” Lucy said, pushing the damp leather makeup case and hat boxes on the seat next to her to a less invasive distance. She wiped the moisture from her hands on the front of her coat.

  “It's kind of you to sit with me,” Miss Auriel said. “The trip would be very dull indeed, not to have any company at all.”

  Lucy studied the young woman's face and realized that Ellen knew that she could not bear to sit in the compartment ahead with David and Helen. She had watched them board the train arm in arm, leaving Lucy to give the instructions to the porters, as to where the traveling bags went, and which would be assigned to the luggage car. In the confusion, she had assisted the bird-like Miss Auriel, wrestling the cosmetic and overnight bags inside the compartment, out of the beastly weather, and now sat opposite her in the sweltering cabin, grateful for her trustworthy company.

  “Are you glad to be going back?” Ellen asked, as she struggled to open the window to let out some of the steamy heat.

  Lucy needed no time to consider her answer.

  “Yes. It is long past time that I got back to some real work. I'd almost forgotten how important it is to me to sing… how much a part of me it is. I had no idea how easy it might be to get distracted by much of what life claims to offer.”

  Lucy noticed the look of concern her comment had elicited on the face of her companion, and brightened with a laugh.

  “At any rate, I'm not sorry to be leaving this place,” she said.

  “You'll be wonderful in New York,” Miss Auriel voiced her confidence… “Mr. David will soon see what a mistake he's making.”

  The young woman covered her mouth with her hand, as if to stop any additional improprieties that might let slip out. She lowered her head to avoid Lucy's stare.

  They rode in silence for long miles before Ellen spoke again, trying to re-establish her footing.

  “I meant to ask you… did you see the flowers the studio sent over? They arrived only minutes before we left for the station. It seems such a waste to send perfectly good flowers when no one will be there to enjoy them.”

  Lucy nodded. She had seen them and read the engraved little
card that thanked her, with all civility, for her brilliant work. She had torn the card in half and left the flowers on the hall table, beside the vase of dead ceremonial lilies. She had not put them in water, but left them to die, suffocating in cellophane as a petty act of treachery to express the disappointment she felt in her heart.

  She looked at her reflection between the rivulets of rainwater on the train window. Her face reminded her of the faded facade of the theater on Fourteenth Street, where Paulo had first shown her his film. She was tired and worn. She had made a fool of herself by being in love. She watched the cold rain streaming down the reflection of her cheek in the glass. She traced it with her finger and wished that she could cry.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Mrs. Mullridge’s residence, Fifth Avenue, New York

  Mrs. Mullridge's Fifth Avenue residence possessed all the amenities and freedoms of American households of her class. It was filled with the appropriate pieces of art and furniture that ranged from exquisite and revered to homely and eccentric.

  Other than to appear for meals at appropriately scheduled times, neither members of the family, nor any of the assorted guests were called upon for the slightest attention or comradeship by their hostess. For this reason, Lucy had telephoned from Chicago to inquire if she might stay while in New York.

  There had been no brass bands when she arrived. She stepped from the train, as anonymously as any other well-heeled traveler might, with the usual glances of interest from passing gentlemen and a casual appraising eye of the ladies waiting for the motor taxis out front of the station.

  She did not want to live with David and Celia as long as Helen figured into the scheme of things. She could not bear to look at the amulet around David's neck, fearing the power it represented. She had seen the sinister effects one like it had on Paulo. David must be made to understand the danger surrounding him. Perhaps, if she told Celia, she might find an ally in her. Celia would be puzzled at best and insulted that Lucy was not coming to their apartment, but for the moment, Lucy only wanted the comfort of Mrs. Mullridge's kind face and the disinterested lack of curiosity abundant in her household.