The Wrong Girl

by Donis Casey

  “I would, darling,” Doug said. “I’d pay money to see you mow the lawn. And listen, little Blanche, there’s nothing wrong with stunt work. Just make sure you learn to do it right. There’s an art to it, you know.”

  Alma gestured with her wineglass. “Now, Doug, don’t start swinging from the chandeliers. I’m making sure she has the right instruction.”

  Doug laughed. “Blanche, Mary and I have been thinking of producing a series of flicks featuring an intrepid girl who gets into all sorts of trouble, and Alma tells us that you have the talent and plenty of moxie. Lois Weber is writing a script for us, but before we make any casting decisions, would you like to take a bit part in a little picture I’m shooting right now called The Three Musketeers? I need a girl who’s willing to jump off a balcony.”

  Blanche felt the color drain out of her face. Was she dreaming? Did he even need to ask? She tried to speak, but her mouth was like cotton, so she nodded so enthusiastically that a couple of hairpins went flying.

  ~Becoming Dangereuse ~

  Between her lessons, her exercises, and her wildly exciting week on the set of Douglas Fairbanks’s movie, Blanche didn’t have time to give much thought to plotting her revenge on Graham Peyton. Her one brief scene in the picture required her to climb over the railing of a balcony, slide down a curtain that didn’t quite reach the ground, and drop six feet to the cobblestones below. She rehearsed the move only once. There was nothing to it. For her, the fun part of the shoot was being fitted out as a seventeenth-century lady-in-waiting to the Queen of France, having pancake makeup troweled all over her face, and her hair squashed under an elaborate wig with dozens of ringlets. She was sorry that Doug wasn’t in the scene with her. No one was, actually. But Doug and Alma did come to the studio to watch.

  The dress was gigantic. She felt like she was swathed in fifty pounds of material. Blanche expressed her misgivings to Alma before she mounted the makeshift wooden steps to the back of the false balcony, but Alma simply said, “You can do it.”

  Blanche stood on the rickety balcony for half an hour before Mr. Niblo, the director, had all the cameras and lights arranged to his satisfaction. She spent the time pondering on how fake the scene looked in real life. The palace she was escaping from had a front and no back. It was all an illusion that the paying public was happy to buy into. She was still lost in her own reverie when Niblo yelled, “All right, girl, let’s go.”

  Blanche grabbed the curtain, threw it over the balcony railing, struggled to lift her skirt-encumbered legs over the rail, and launched herself over. She was infinitely more bottom-heavy than she had been in rehearsal, so rather than slide gracefully down the material, the unaccustomed weight sent her flying to one side like a pendulum. She hung on for dear life as the pendulum swung back in the other direction. She could hear Niblo yelling, but couldn’t understand what he was saying. It was too late to worry about it. She decided to make the best of the situation and purposely swung herself back and forth, gaining altitude. Finally, at the top of an arc, she let go and flew over the top of a prop hedge at the side of the pretend courtyard and disappeared from the shot. She landed in a roll, like Mr. Hashiyara had taught her, and stood up. She heard Niblo yell “Cut!” and walked out from behind the hedge as though she had planned the whole thing. Alma and Doug were both laughing hysterically. Niblo looked like he was about to have a stroke, though Blanche couldn’t immediately tell if it was because he was overjoyed or ready to commit murder. Apparently, it was a mix of both, for he scolded her until her ears burned, then praised her for her ingenuity.

  But all she cared about was the thumbs-up sign that Douglas Fairbanks shot her.

  * * *

  There was no call-back the next day, or the next. Alma was between projects, so there was no stunt doubling for Blanche to do. She fell back into her routine of study, exercise, and occasional housework. She read a lot, and played with Jack Dempsey, who was becoming her closest confidant. Even more so than Mrs. Gilbert, for the dog never gave her speculative looks or well-meaning advice about forgiveness.

  The old familiar yen for vengeance began to gnaw at her after a week or so. Rather than have to come up with another excuse for a surveillance trip to town, Blanche decided to simply slip away one evening. She often went up to her room to read or study after supper anyway, and no one usually expected to see her again until the next morning.

  The sun had set and darkness was falling as she slipped out the back door of Alma’s house and made her way down the hill to catch the trolley into downtown. She casually walked down Hollywood Boulevard, past Philippe and past Graham’s office on the other side of the street. The light was on in the office window. She strolled up and down the street a few times until she began to feel conspicuous, then walked around the block, circled back, and walked around the block again.

  Still a light in the window, still no movement. She rounded the corner once again, but rather than walk all the way around the block, she turned up the alley, and stopped in her tracks. Graham’s big, maroon, seven-seater Pierce-Arrow was parked behind his building.

  She went up to the auto and stared into it for a long time. The top was down, and the back seat was deep and wide. The interior upholstery was black, and she was wearing a black and purple dress. And it would soon be dark.

  ~Dare she?

  She dared.~

  Blanche crawled into the back seat and made herself comfortable. There was no reason to hide until she needed to, and who knew how long she would have to wait until he showed up? Every time anyone crossed the mouth of the alley, she ducked down, but no one turned in her direction. She sat there until night had fallen, alternately berating herself for being a fool, then working herself up into a frenzy of hatred. She heard Graham coming before she saw him. He was feeding his line of bull to some poor idiot. Blanche would recognize that jaunty banter anywhere. It was so dark in the alley that she figured she could have just sat there in the back seat and he would never notice. When she could finally make out two human-sized shapes walking toward her, she hunkered down on the floorboard behind the front seat and held her breath. She heard Graham open the passenger-side door for his companion, then circle around to let himself into the driver’s seat.

  As he stepped on the starter, turned the key, and shifted into gear, Blanche made a vow to herself that if she ever owned an auto, she would be sure to check the back seat for intruders every time she got in.

  He pulled out of the alley and drove off, still loudly talking to his companion over the engine roar. Blanche didn’t dare look up or try to judge where they were going, but they drove for a long time. They stayed in the city. She knew that much from their speed and the number of stops and turns he made. Finally the auto slowed and pulled to a stop.

  “Here we are,” Graham said, his voice loud in the silence. Blanche made herself as small as she could and tried to quiet her racing heart. He got out and opened the door for his passenger, and they walked away. Blanche let her breath out in a whoosh and chanced a glance over the side. The auto was parked on a residential side street. She could see the two figures walking up a sidewalk running between two hulking shapes that she took to be houses. The two disappeared around one of the houses, and Blanche unfolded herself from the floorboard and climbed out.

  She had no idea where she was. She ran on tiptoes up the sidewalk where Graham and his tootsie had gone, staying close to the wall of one of the houses. She peeked around the corner in time to see the pair mount the stairs and go into the very house by which she stood. She could see now that this was a bungalow complex around a central courtyard. The Los Angeles area was full of them. When she was on the road with Graham—could it really have been more than a year earlier?—he had told her that he lived in a bungalow. She had visualized a small house, but this complex was hardly small. It consisted of eight expensive Spanish-style duplexes arranged in a U shape around a central courtyard with a vine-covere
d gazebo in the center.

  Blanche crept down the sidewalk and around the side of the duplex that Graham had gone into. It was located at the end of the complex, where one arm of the U met the bottom. When Graham’s ground-floor lights came on, Blanche hoisted herself up on the windowsill and peeked into the living room. Graham was shucking his companion out of her coat. Blanche recognized her as the same blond girl she had seen with him at the restaurant a few weeks earlier. The girl sat down on a long couch while Graham walked over to a sideboard and mixed a couple of drinks. Blanche let go of the sill and dropped to the ground. Seeing him again had stoked the fire of her fury, but the feeling was tempered by a small satisfaction. Now she knew where he lived. She sat on the ground and leaned back against the wall with her eyes closed, savoring the feeling for a few minutes before she had to wrestle with the problem of finding her way home.

  By the time Blanche finally made her way back from the Westlake district of Los Angeles to Hollywood and Alma Bolding’s house, on foot and by trolley, it was nearly dawn and Graham’s address was imprinted on her mind.

  ~If she hadn’t been an actress,

  she could have made a living as a cat burglar.~

  After her first foray into Los Angeles as a stowaway in Graham’s back seat, Blanche studied the trolley route maps and planned out her trip carefully. She dressed in boots and trousers, threw a lightweight black stole over her shoulders, and sneaked out of Alma’s house after supper to catch the next car into Los Angeles. She had to change cars twice, but the trip took less than an hour, and she arrived in the Westlake area a little after seven o’clock in the evening. Graham’s Pierce-Arrow was not parked in its former spot on the side street so she turned right off the sidewalk and circled the row of covered garages. No sign of the familiar maroon roadster. Still, to be extra careful, she took a peek through the side window of Graham’s duplex. No sign of movement. She tried the window and found it unlocked. She slid the sill upwards, hoisted herself through, and dropped lightly onto the kitchen floor. The modern kitchen was equipped with a refrigerator and a gas stove and looked as neat and tidy as if it had never been used. Blanche hunkered down on the floor for a minute, listening, but the house was quiet. Confident that she was alone, she stood up and walked into Graham’s impeccable living room. It was the room of a man who entertained frequently. The plush couch and chairs were arranged for conversation. A well-stocked drinks cart held pride of place close to the front door.

  She went through the house, every room, upstairs and down. Through the closets and drawers, under the bed. Looking for what, she didn’t know. Blanche went back down to the parlor, where her eyes locked onto a secretary’s desk sitting in front of a picture window. She pulled down the writing surface and began going through the drawers and cubbies. She found a photo album tucked neatly into the largest drawer and sat down at the desk to look through it. It was full of pictures of women, mostly publicity shots, but she didn’t recognize any of the actresses. She thumbed through, half-expecting to see a photograph of herself, even though she hadn’t posed for one. It wouldn’t have been beyond Peyton to take a snapshot of her as she slept. Under the album she found a green leather-bound ledger containing what looked like lists of random numbers and letters. A code? It meant nothing to her. A large clock sitting on a credenza struck eight, and she closed the ledger and put it back into the drawer. It was late, and she had to get back to Alma’s before she was missed, or before the trolleys stopped running. Or Graham came home. She walked through the house, upstairs and down, memorizing the placement of every piece of furniture. She intended to return. After making sure everything was just as she’d found it, she slipped out the kitchen window and slid it closed behind her.

  * * *

  After she got her routine down, Blanche managed to get into Los Angeles once or twice a week, sneaking out in the evening and taking the trolleys to Peyton’s bungalow. If his Pierce-Arrow was parked on the side street, or in one of the complex’s garage buildings, she would hover around the neighborhood for half an hour or so, memorizing the landscape, and then make her way back to Hollywood. If his auto was nowhere to be seen, she would march up the sidewalk as though she belonged and walk around the side of Graham’s place. Then it was the work of a moment for her to crawl in through an unlocked window and steal something.

  She had no plan. There was no endgame in mind. She only knew that it gave her a tremendous feeling of satisfaction to violate his space. She only took things that she felt he would not miss. A snapshot of a random girl from the photo album. One highball glass from the set on the drinks cart. A pencil. After a few weeks she felt bolder and a bit more whimsical. She took one sock from his dresser drawer. The next week she took one shoe from his closet.

  She always approached his house from the back side, toward the street, and never went into the courtyard of the complex lest she be seen and eventually remembered. As it was, she seldom saw anyone on the street at all. A man walking his dog in the evening. A family having an after-dinner stroll. And she was lucky to never meet even those people twice.

  She would think about and savor her intrusions for days afterwards. She wished she could have seen Peyton’s reaction when his shoe disappeared. She hoped he thought he was losing his mind. It amused her no end that the kitchen window was always unlocked, the only downstairs window in the house that faced the space between two units and was invisible from either the street or the courtyard. How long would it be before it occurred to Graham that he was being burgled? She expected she’d know when he started locking the windows.

  ~But she wasn’t as clever

  as she thought she was.~

  Mrs. Gilbert had retired to her room after supper and was sitting next to her bed with her knitting in her lap when she heard the distinctive tap tap of dog toenails on the kitchen floor outside her bedroom door. What was Jack Dempsey doing out of Blanche’s room at this time of the evening? Usually Blanche took him upstairs with her after supper and he spent the night on her bed. Sometimes the girl left her balcony door open to catch the breezes and Jack took the opportunity to explore. Perhaps he had made his way downstairs in hopes of a treat. Mrs. Gilbert sniffed and laid her knitting aside. She liked the feisty little mutt, but she didn’t want him wandering around the house on his own at night.

  She pulled on a robe and went into the kitchen to find Jack with his nose pressed to the glass door leading to the kitchen garden. He woofed and looked back over his shoulder long enough to see who had come in, then resumed his staring.

  “Jack Dempsey, what are you doing out?” Mrs. Gilbert picked him up, but he whined and wiggled in protest. “What’s going on? Do you see something outside?” Mrs. Gilbert put the dog back on the floor and watched him trot back to the glass door. Curious, she joined him.

  The kitchen garden was long and narrow, leading to a walkway lined with short fan palms that led around the house and to the front drive.

  Someone was out there, moving away from the house on the path. Mrs. Gilbert caught her breath and stepped back. A half-moon illuminated a cloudy sky, giving off enough lambent light to make out shapes but not much detail. Yet Mrs. Gilbert could tell by the way she moved that the figure gliding into the distance was Blanche.

  Mrs. Gilbert scooped up the dog, tossed him into her room and shut the door before she slipped out the back to follow Blanche.

  Where was this girl going? Her form looked bulky, like she was wearing a hat and coat. The fall nights were cool in coastal California, but if Blanche was just taking a walk around the property a shawl would have done the trick.

  Mrs. Gilbert clutched her robe closed with one hand and tried to maintain enough distance between herself and the shadowy figure of the girl to keep her in sight without being noticed. She lost sight of her a few times, but she was easy enough to follow. The concrete staircases between homeowners’ properties led inexorably down the hill and out to Highland Avenue. Indeed, Bla
nche was standing next to the curb when Mrs. Gilbert reached street level. Mrs. Gilbert faded into the cover of a bougainvillea hanging over someone’s perimeter wall.

  Blanche stood with her hands in her pockets, doing nothing but staring into space. After a few uneventful minutes Mrs. Gilbert was about to give up on the spy mission and make her way back up the hill. She had taken a few steps up the stairs when she heard the trolley bell. The trolley stopped long enough for Blanche to get on before resuming its route.

  Mrs. Gilbert was baffled by Blanche’s furtive behavior, and curious, but her dominant emotion as the trolley pulled away was disappointment. Mrs. Gilbert liked Blanche. She thought the girl was something special. She was whip smart and a hard worker. But for a teenager who had already proved herself impulsive and willful, sneaking off in the dark couldn’t mean anything good.

  Mrs. Gilbert sat up for a while in hopes of seeing Blanche return to the house, but eventually gave it up and went to bed. She was relieved when Blanche came downstairs for breakfast at the usual time. She had half expected that the girl had taken off for good.

  She said nothing to Blanche about her nighttime adventure and Blanche behaved perfectly normally, offering to fry the bacon, feeding tidbits to Jack Dempsey as they ate. The day progressed as usual and Blanche retired to her room after supper. Mrs. Gilbert kept an eye peeled out the back window all evening. And sure enough, the teenaged night prowler made her shadowy way through the garden that night, and the next, just as the last trace of daylight disappeared.

  Alma was making another picture, a costume drama at the Pickford-Fairbanks Studio on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. The picture was a light romp with lots of romance, so there was no need for a stunt double, but Alma took Blanche with her to the studio several times during the shoot and introduced her to the director and to her costars. Mrs. Gilbert would have thought that between her studies and the excitement of the movie set, Blanche would be too tired to take secret trips to who-knew-where every night. But youth has its advantages.