Bride of the Rat God

by Barbara Hambly

  Christine raised her head from Frank Brown’s shoulder, where Brown had been self-consciously comforting her. “I thought Charlie’s mother was dead.”

  Brown cupped a hand over her artfully disarrayed hair. “His father,” he said, and glared at Fishbein. “His father was taken ill at his farm in Vermont. The call reached him at my party.”

  “How did they know he was at your party?” inquired Christine, sitting up and reaching confidingly into Brown’s jacket for a cigarette, which she carefully fitted into the amber and diamond holder she withdrew from her kimono pocket and permitted him to light.

  “Oh, come, Christine, his father’s housekeeper would have known he’d be at the premiere,” Norah pointed out helpfully. “Of course she’d have deduced there’d be a party at Mr. Brown’s house afterward.”

  “Oh...oh, of course.” She exhaled a long stream of smoke. “God, and what a party, Frank, simply too divine for words.” Her voice slipped out of the throaty, Chrysanda Flamande tones into her usual breathless baby coo. “Though I thought it terribly unfair that you’d have all those dancing girls from the Cocoanut Grove for the men to look at and not one single dancing boy for us girls. Tell me, darling, does that seem right to you?”

  She turned to Norah, gesturing with her cigarette. There was a nervous brightness to her eyes, a restlessness to her movements that told Norah she’d resorted to the little ivory box of white “pick-me-up” powder that lived in her top right-hand dresser drawer. “All those girls in pink tights and not one pair of masculine thighs upon which to feast my attention.”

  “And Charlie sent Keith back to his house with the car?” Mr. Mindelbaum, standing behind Norah’s chair, reached down to scratch Black Jasmine’s head. His brown eyes rested on Brown with a sharp, calculating watchfulness.

  “Keith’s apartment is only around the corner on Redondo,” Fishbein said. “He must have gone into Charlie’s house to leave the car keys and empty champagne bottles. From the looks of it, Ch...er...someone attacked him in the living room with a broken bottle, probably cut his throat there. Keith stumbled or crawled down the hallway to the bedroom, the attacker cutting him all the way. The body was on the bed. Most of it, anyway.”

  Norah shut her eyes and put her hand over her mouth again, trying not to think about the scene.

  “Charlie’s cleaning woman called us,” Brown went on after a moment, his eyes on Mindelbaum’s. “We told her to wait for us in the foyer and not go farther into the house for fear of mixing up her prints and having the police think she knew something about it but not to stir outside, either.”

  “Oh, my God,” whispered Christine again, and passed a theatrical hand over her forehead. “Frank! How dreadful!” She was, Norah could see, sincerely shocked, but Christine was never one to let even genuine horror interfere with a chance to show how sensitive she was. “I will never, never get over this! Oh, my God.”

  “What a lucky thing Charlie was called out of town,” murmured Mr. Mindelbaum.

  “Has anyone telegraphed him?” Christine turned immense brown eyes on the studio head. “He’ll be destroyed by the news! He was so fond of Keith; they were so happy together!”

  “It was lucky Charlie was called out of town,” Brown replied heavily, continuing to glare at Mindelbaum. “Because in two weeks The Midnight Cavalier comes out, and we don’t want another Arbuckle scandal on our hands.”

  “Not to mention the fact that he himself might have been killed by the unknown assailant,” added Norah.

  Fishbein nodded eagerly. “That’s good. We’ll put that in the press release, SCREEN IDOL’S NARROW ESCAPE...”

  “I guess we’ll never know how narrow,” Mindelbaum remarked cynically.

  “No,” said Brown, “we won’t. Now, he didn’t happen to say anything to you, Alec, about plans for the evening other than coming to my place? Just so we can find anyone he was intending to meet and let them know what happened to him.”

  The cameraman smiled a little and shook his head. “As far as I know, we were the only ones he talked to at Enyart’s, but all the regulars were there and saw him. Doc LaRousse, the two Neds, Hans Schweibler, Alice and the Rothstein boys, Dale Wilmer, a couple of stunters, I think, from Universal, and Jack himself. Doc and Hans talked to Keith; God knows who they ran into in the back room.”

  “Damn,” Fishbein muttered, and shot Brown an anguished glance.

  Brown shook his head regretfully. “Well, when they read in the paper about his mother—father—they’ll know it was an emergency. How was he acting?”

  “Drunk,” Norah replied, a little surprised at the question.

  “Not that it has any bearing...”

  “At the party he was so gay, so devil-may-care, laughing and telling jokes,” Christine provided, languishing once again and drawing on her cigarette as if only nicotine stood between her and collapse from grief.

  “Hadn’t drunk himself melancholy yet,” Mindelbaum said.

  “You can’t drink yourself melancholy on champagne,” said Norah. “You fall asleep first.”

  “Well, God knows what was in that champagne, darling.” Christine raised her head and picked aside a stray thread of Pekingese fur that had adhered itself to her crimson, pouting lips.

  “It was Enyart’s champagne,” Mindelbaum said, “so it probably actually was champagne. Oleson ran it in last night. I think he talked to Wilmer, but Wilmer was so coked, he probably doesn’t remember anything about it. Like Chris says, Charlie seemed pretty chipper, but considering how much he’d had to drink, if he hadn’t been chipper, he should sue his bootlegger. So if they had a quarrel, it would have been on the way over to your place or on the way back.”

  “Who said anything about a quarrel?” Brown demanded fiercely. “Charlie walked Keith out to the car, Keith drove off, then I took Charlie to the train station. I was with him the whole time.”

  “And he didn’t go home to pack a toothbrush?” the cameraman asked. “When did all this take place? The police are gonna want to know. It’s...how far from your place down to the station? Fifteen miles? Seventeen miles?”

  “At a guess,” Norah said firmly, “it took place within fifteen minutes of Mr. Fairbanks leaving the party. He left early, didn’t he? Before midnight?”

  “Before the dancing girls came out, and that was midnight, wasn’t it, Frank, dearest?” Christine sat up and pushed straight the egret-feathered bandeau that bound the dark cascades of her hair. “Of course, if you’re married to Mary Pickford, I suppose you have to leave early.”

  Brown and Fishbein both glanced inquiringly at Norah.

  “It stands to reason,” she said innocently. “Meeting Mr. Fairbanks was the main attraction for Mr. Pelletier at the party, so of course he wouldn’t have consented to leave if Mr. Fairbanks were still there, would he?”

  “Yes, it was just a few minutes after that when I got the phone call,” Brown said thoughtfully. “In fact,” he expanded, “I was called away from seeing Doug and Mary out the door.”

  “Yes, but you and I were together in the library while the dancing girls were still doing their act,” protested Christine, grinding out her cigarette in a gleaming brass ashtray.

  “That was later,” Brown said firmly.

  “It wasn’t, because you came right in from the foyer and pulled me down off the table just as I was showing that skinny redhead how to—”

  “It was later,” Brown said again. “It was after I got back. And you” he added, turning suddenly. “All of you. Since Charlie’s going to be in Vermont for the indefinite future, I’m moving up the location shooting. Day after tomorrow, Santa Fe station, seven-thirty—”

  “Oh, no!” wailed Christine, sitting up in horror and forgetting all about who had been where when. “Seven-thirty! Isn’t there a train that leaves later than that?”

  “Not if we want to get ourselves out to Red Bluff in time to get set up. If Hearst or the Times can get reporters out there for questions, they’ll be doing better than
I think they can. Is Norah coming with you?”

  “Of course!” Christine shifted her position on the couch to lean across and grasp Norah’s hand protectively. Like all her gestures, the movement combined glowing theatricality with genuine warmth. Everything Christine did was fifty percent sham, but the other fifty percent, Norah reflected, was pure gold.

  “I wouldn’t stick poor Norah here all by herself, and besides,” she added, reaching up to stroke Black Jasmine’s little round head and have her fingers chewed, “I couldn’t be without my celestial cream cakes for ten days, could I, Jazz darling?”

  “Good,” grunted Brown. “We’ll shoot the courtyard and balcony scenes between you and Blake Fallon in Edendale Monday night. We’d do it tomorrow if I could locate Blake, but God knows which of those gold diggers he’s spending the weekend with. So in the meantime, all of you—not a word to anyone.” He glared around with pale eyes. “Reporters are going to be phoning you, so you tell them the police have forbidden you to disclose anything. Did you remember to call the police, Conrad? Just tell them what you know.” He ticked off the points on fingers like Polish sausages. “Charlie was Keith’s mentor in acting, they were friends, Charlie was happy and cheerful earlier that evening—before, of course, he got that terrible news about his mother—”

  “Father,” Fishbein corrected in an undertone.

  “Father, and had to leave town.”

  “Oh, of course.” Christine clasped her hands before her breast. “Such a terrible, terrible tragedy, and then for news of an even greater horror to pursue him...”. Norah could see her rehearsing poses for interview pictures. There were even tears in her eyes.

  “Enough to break your heart,” remarked Mr. Mindelbaum.

  Brown glared at him. “And if I hear one word beyond that,” he added, “you’re going to be back taking pictures of kids on ponies in Lubbock. I’ll see you all in the station at seven.”

  “I can’t believe Mr. Sandringham did such a thing.” Norah settled her back against one of the pillars that supported the roof of the porch, from which a flight of brick steps dropped precipitously to the few feet of grass and ivy that bordered the road. Frank Brown’s car was making its careful way up the drive to Ivarene Street again, rocking a little with the uneven surface; the producer had catechized Christine on the subject of who was in the library with whom when and why she shouldn’t mention her recollections of just when Brown had hauled her away from dance competitions with the girls from the Cocoanut Grove. From the living room behind her Norah could hear that breathless voice: “Murdered, Flindy darling! Absolutely horrible! Frank’s just been up here, and Charlie Sandringham’s left town.”

  She rolled her eyes. Rain still pattered on the eucalyptus trees that grew on the hillside above and below the rough shoulder on which the house was perched, and in the gray afternoon light the tangles of Spanish dagger, stunted oak, and other bizarre growths she could not identify blended into a somber mottling of dark and light greens. Even more amazing than the indoor plumbing—wonderful to Norah after a lifetime of chamber pots and “backhouses” in her parents’ and Mrs. Pendergast’s old-fashioned establishments—were the green grass of the California December, the geraniums and the roses. Another world indeed.

  The pink stucco house, like a miniature Mediterranean castle, was the only visible dwelling in this part of the hills, though Norah knew other lots had been sold. Hollywood—in fact, the entire Los Angeles basin—was a patchwork of real estate developments. A few hills over, some enterprising salesman had erected enormous white letters spelling out HOLLYWOODLAND above a housing development of that name; it was plastered with lightbulbs and could be seen for miles.

  “Is that why you gave them the time Charlie must have left the party?” Mr. Mindelbaum perched himself next to her on the low parapet and plucked a long, narrow leaf from the oleander that grew almost up to the level of their elbows. In spite of the rain, the day was not cold, at least not compared to Manchester. Though the cameraman wore a rather worse for wear brown cardigan over a turtleneck sweater, Norah was completely comfortable in her cotton shirtwaist and long wool skirt.

  “It won’t do any harm. And I think wherever he is, poor Mr. Sandringham needs all the help he can get.”

  She smoothed the dark fabric of her skirt across her knee. After a moment she added, “Thank you, by the way, Mr. Mindelbaum, for... for the moral support, I suppose.” She raised her eyes to his with a fleeting half smile. They’d talked at Enyart’s until almost one, the kind of lazy, gliding talk that she hadn’t engaged in for years, not since those nights she’d lain pillowed on Jim’s shoulder in a London boardinghouse speaking of everything and anything that came to mind. She barely recalled the content of it now: music and technique for developing photographs, Lawrence Pendergast’s worthless friends, and the things one saw on Basin Street in New Orleans late at night. “It really is like being in Oz, you know.”

  He grinned. “Then if we’re in Oz, you don’t need to go on calling me Mr. Mindelbaum,” he said. “Alec will do. And I’m pleased to come to your rescue. But the fact that Charlie was concerned that Chris might be bullying you doesn’t mean he couldn’t have killed Keith, you know.”

  “No, of course not.” She regarded him with slight surprise. “But Mr. Sandringham must be sixty at least, and not in very good shape. Besides, he was almost too drunk to stand when we saw him, and that was before the two bottles of champagne. I don’t think he could have killed a twenty-two-year-old athlete.”

  Alec sighed, twirling the leaf in those soft, deft fingers. “You ever spend a night in a flophouse when one of the alkies goes off his head from Jamaica ginger and decides the guy next to him is a seven-foot warthog who raped his sister?”

  “Hmmn,” said Norah. At length she asked, “What makes you think he did it?”

  He hesitated. “I never said I thought that.”

  He slipped down from the porch wall and straightened the kinks from his shoulders. “But it’s just like Brown to get everybody out of town. Do you mind going to the desert? Red Bluff’s a ghost town three hours drive from Berdoo—some nice rocks near there and one of the best battlefields in the business, but you’ll be shaking scorpions out of your shoes the whole time. They shot the cattle drive scenes of Sawdust Rose there. If you don’t think you can...”

  His voice trailed off as he saw her attention leave him; Norah was staring up Ivarene Street at three white-robed figures that had appeared from the shadows of the trees.

  As they came closer, Norah saw that they were women clothed in diaphanous veils designed for a somewhat more classical climate than even California’s. The veils hung limp with the rain; presumably umbrellas were not known in the Arcadian lands. But even that did not diminish the serene dignity of the tall, graceful woman who led, her dark hair hanging loose about her shoulders and her pale blue, piercing eyes made paler yet by the same heavy mascaro that Christine favored. “We have come to warn you!” cried the tall woman, raising a hand upon which gleamed ancient gold. “The shadow of evil lies upon this house!”

  They picked their way over the rough ground to the brick steps and collected their veils for the climb. The other two women did not wear damp cheesecloth nearly as gracefully as their leader did. One of them was a short, elderly, rather pudgy type who looked as if her name should be Aunt Edna; the other, tall, thin, and flaxen fair, had a restless, hungry gaze.

  They stopped a few steps short of the porch itself, and the dark-haired leader lifted her hand again. “Hail, fellow sojourners in this lifetime! A warning has come to us, a warning of disaster. Your life, and Miss Flamande’s, may be in deadly danger.”

  Alec propped his glasses more firmly onto the bridge of his nose and turned to Norah. “You going to introduce us?”

  FIVE

  MOUNTAIN OVER WATER

  Sign of sacrifice

  I did not seek out the innocent ones; rather,

  it was they who sought me out...

  The first om
en was correct,

  the second and third were incorrect...

  “I AM NADI NEFERU-ATEN, counselor of the Sabsung Institute for the Well-Being of Souls.”

  “So pleased,” murmured Christine, holding out one hand. By the gleam in her dark eyes Norah could tell she was anything but pleased by the incursion into her house of a woman who was not only taller and more elegant than she but clearly had a backstory that beat even being the illegitimate daughter of a French adventurer in the Grand Turk’s harem. “Norah, darling, could you fetch us all some coffee—I’m absolutely dying—and please rip that phone out of the wall!”

  It was ringing again, jaggedly and insistently. Alec went to get it.

  “We of the institute do not drink coffee,” intoned Nadi Neferu-Aten. “Caffeine is a drug, clouding not only the senses in this life but the sight of the inner eye in its quest for the vistas of eternity.” She folded her long hands with their seal rings and cartouches.

  “Well, caffeine may be a drug for you, but for me it’s the stuff of life, right up there with chocolate and gin and that adorable saxophone player at the Grove. Frank really does serve excellent booze at his parties, except for the gin, and God knows what possessed me to drink three glasses of it last night...Cigarette?” She batted eyelashes like enameled wire.

  Nadi Neferu-Aten looked thoroughly affronted. Norah sighed as she slipped through the swinging door to the kitchen. At least the only drugs Christine had proffered so far were tobacco and caffeine.

  When she came back bearing a tray of coffee things, a small teapot for herself, and three glasses of iced mineral water—at a guess, the only thing the Sabsung Institute considered pure enough for the well-being of its attendant souls—Alec was saying into the telephone, “...police have requested that we not discuss it. No. Yes. Yes, I’m familiar with the First Amendment to the Constitution.”