Dim Sum Dead

by Jerrilyn Farmer

She looked much as I remembered, short-cropped hair, little makeup, and no obvious signs of plastic surgery. Rosalie was dressed in a white oxford shirt with navy slacks and Gucci loafers, conservative as before.

  Eva James looked up at me from the spot where she was seated, next to the fireplace. The fire’s glow softened her tight jawline and lit up her sleek blond bob. In this light, she looked almost exactly as I remembered her in her glory days as queen of the MGM musicals. I suspected she always devised a way to sit near the edge of a lighted fire.

  Helen Howerton and her zebras settled down on one of the three massive sofas that formed a U around the fireplace. Catherine and Rosalie took seats on the opposite sofa, and I decided to face the fire, on a sofa of my own.

  I set the red-leather book down on my lap.

  “Shall we chitchat, dear?” Catherine asked. “Or would you prefer to get down to business?”

  She seemed calm and friendly. I suspected my recent theft of the red book had not pleased her one bit, but her talent to hide her true feelings was a gift, one I had witnessed before, in fact, the previous afternoon. We seemed to understand each other. We had both been deceptive. We had both discovered the other’s deception. We were, therefore, very much alike. No need to make a scene. And besides, I had the red book and was about to return it. They dared not upset me now. Power, while fleeting, feels supremely cool.

  “Could you please tell me what went on between you and Quita McBride?” I asked.

  “All right,” Catherine said, sounding perfectly agreeable. “She called me on Wednesday morning and told me she wanted to trade something valuable. She claimed that an old mah-jongg set had just been found. She reminded me that Dickey kept a diary and that there were many secrets in it that we girls wouldn’t care to have come to the press. She said when the mah-jongg set was returned to her, she’d have the diary as well.”

  “She was attempting to blackmail you,” I said.

  “Filthy girl,” Eva James said.

  “She’s gone now, dear,” Catherine Hill said sweetly to Eva, then resumed her story. “Quita asked me to pay her twenty thousand dollars in cash and also agree to be uncooperative in a lawsuit that was pending. You see, I was going to give an affidavit that Quita did not want me to give. I agreed, of course. We all of us had reasons we wanted to see that diary. Dickey had teased us for years that he had been keeping a journal. Everyone had heard him say he kept it safely hidden in his mah-jongg case.”

  “I see,” I said. “But instead, you sent your gardener to steal it before Quita ever got possession of it. How did he know where to find us so he could steal it?”

  Catherine Hill settled her hands in the folds of silver lamé that covered her lap and continued. “Quita said there was a man who was fixing up Dickey’s old house. This man found Dickey’s old mah-jongg set hidden in the wall. Imagine that. She said this young man had just called her from the house but that he couldn’t meet Quita and give her Dickey’s old case until six that evening. Of course, we had no real interest in the mah-jongg tiles. It was the diary we all wanted. Quita suggested we meet after midnight to exchange the money for the diary.”

  “You agreed?”

  “I said yes. But, of course, I had no intention of waiting until after midnight to get that diary.”

  Eva spoke up. “We couldn’t allow someone else to read Dickey’s diary, you see.”

  “And,” said Rosalie Apple, adjusting her navy slacks as she crossed her legs, “what if this Quita thought it over and decided she could get more money from us? We couldn’t have that.”

  Catherine shook her platinum wig and continued. “I sent my man, Flax, to go fetch it for us. He drove to Dickey’s old house on Wetherbee as quickly as he could—it’s not far—but the man there was just leaving. Flax noticed the man wore a bulky backpack and the house itself was under construction, so Flax followed the man.”

  “That was my partner, Wesley,” I said.

  “Ah,” Helen spoke up.

  I tried to keep my eyes focused on Helen’s wrinkled face, but they kept wandering off to check on all those zebras balancing on her big shirt.

  Helen took up the story. “Flax said your partner, Wesley, was a very nice safe driver and so it was incredibly easy to follow him into Santa Monica. Flax had hoped the young man would leave the mah-jongg set in his parked car. That would have been easy. A quick little bash and bingo, another car theft in Santa Monica, and we’d have our diary. But no. Your partner took his bulky backpack along, so Flax simply had to follow.”

  “Your friend is very tall, Beall,” Rosalie said. “Insanely easy to follow a tall man. Flax had no problem keeping him in sight, even walking around in that crowded outdoor market.”

  So, it was as simple as that. It was almost just after Wes arrived at the Market that we met up and he showed me the mah-jongg set. And soon after, this man Flax ran off with it.

  “But this guy, Flax, he threw the mah-jongg set away,” I said. “Why?”

  “We didn’t care anything about that old set of tiles,” Helen Howerton said. “It was the diary we needed to get hold of. Hell, if Flax had been stopped and he was still holding on to that old wooden case, he’d be arrested. And then where would we be? His family has worked for Catherine forever. They’d track it back to us.”

  Catherine said, “I told Flax, go get the diary and whatever you do, ditch the old case. And he did what I instructed. He always does. Good man.”

  It wasn’t that complicated, I realized. Wes and I had just stumbled into an old storyline that had been set in motion for decades. It seemed straightforward enough. And why, really, shouldn’t these old ladies have their secrets back?

  “You never gave Quita the money?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” Catherine Hill said, her voice for once sounding heated. “We got the diary, hadn’t we? Why should we pay the silly thing a cent? But that wasn’t as important to the girl as my testimony. She had really been quite desperate for me to stay mum.”

  “Yes,” I said, remembering her earlier comment. “What sort of lawsuit was this?”

  “She wanted all of Dickey’s money,” Rosalie said.

  “Of course she did,” Eva James said, giving the fire another poke.

  “But she didn’t deserve it, did she.” Helen added. “The little bitch.”

  I put my hand on the red-leather diary and rested it there. “Tell me about the lawsuit.”

  “Dickey had never really married Quita. Not legally. They had a phony little wedding ceremony on a vacation he took her on a few years back. A friend of hers got her a counterfeit marriage license from the Grand Caymans or some such place, but it was not legit.”

  “Wow,” I said. Not married.

  “I knew he never married Quita,” Catherine said. “Hell, I think Dickey was still legally married to another woman from way back. Quita was fighting the estate, of course, and naturally, she didn’t want me to testify. But then, of course, the attorneys for Dickey’s estate did.”

  “Did you read it, Beall?” asked Rosalie, still giving me a steady look. “The diary?”

  “Did you read what Dickey wrote?” Helen echoed, her voice almost trembling.

  “They were mostly a pack of lies,” Eva added, her voice oozing charm. “I’m sure he made up the most ridiculous nonsense.”

  I thought of the secrets these ladies were living with all these years. The money trouble Rosalie had gotten herself into. Dickey’s accusations of embezzlement might or might not have been true. Many celebrities had little knowledge of their own finances. Who could say what was fact at this late date?

  And with Dickey McBride’s reputation as a lady-killer, it was no wonder so many famous names appeared in the little red book with stars of conquest next to their names. I could imagine Eva James, the dancer, worrying about the affair she had had with Dickey. He had noted it in his diary along with four out of five stars. I hadn’t taken the time to figure out all the dates, but Dickey implied in his diary that Eva was
married at the time to one of McBride’s movie-star friends. Since Eva’s last husband, an old Hollywood hoofer, was now dead twenty years, I wondered why she would care so much about the diary. But shame never died.

  Helen Howerton, who played the teenaged sidekick to Catherine Hill in all those schoolgirl pictures, was another of Dickey’s dates—five stars. I wondered if Dickey had to peel Helen out of her trademark loud prints when they tumbled into bed.

  His book betrayed even Catherine Hill, the woman who claimed to be the one person in Hollywood with whom Dickey had never slept. McBride wrote that he’d been Catherine’s very first lover, back in a dressing room when they were both in their teens, in the days when they played brother and sister in the movie Summer Storms.

  “None of us has read the diary, you see,” Rosalie said. “We couldn’t.”

  “Then we’d see what he wrote about each other. That wouldn’t do at all,” Eva James said, looking eternally young next to the fireplace.

  “Mama took care of it for us,” Catherine Hill explained. “We gave it to Mama to keep nice and safe.”

  “We were going to burn it,” Helen said.

  “Yes, but we planned to do it all together,” Catherine said. “Mama hid it for us, using the same trick that Helen and I used to hide a diary in our old Heavenly Girls movie.” She eyed me. “But yesterday, when we realized you’d actually found our book—”

  “We were shocked, you know,” Helen said, interrupting.

  “And amazed,” added Eva James. “We thought we had been so clever. We were certain we had fooled you.”

  “Yesterday,” Catherine repeated in a louder tone, taking back the stage, “when we realized that you found the book—why I swore up and down—”

  “She did, too,” Helen said.

  “—and for the first time in my life,” Catherine Hill continued, “well, I never thought I’d say this, Madeline, but I wished the Lord had made just one less Catherine Hill fan.”

  I laughed out loud, and so did the others.

  Their secrets were so harmless, I thought. Most of them. But there was one old secret that might still hold some venom. The world at large might not care, but among this close circle of friends, one item from Dickey’s journal could still do damage.

  Dickey confronted Rosalie Apple about her irregular bookkeeping and his missing royalty payments. She denied any wrongdoing, he wrote. In his anger, he fired Rosalie as his personal manager.

  But then McBride accused Rosalie of something that in those old days was considered even more unspeakable. The rejected playboy figured out why he could never get this one woman into his bed. Rosalie Apple was in love with her favorite client, Catherine Hill. When McBride confronted her, Rosalie never denied it. In Dickey’s diary, next to the name “Rosalie Apple” there were no stars. Instead were the words, “old maid.”

  Rosalie was still looking at me intently. “Did you read Dickey’s journal, Beall?”

  “Or did you stop yourself, perhaps?” Helen Howerton asked. “Maybe you had second thoughts?”

  “Well?” asked Catherine Hill.

  “No, ladies. I did not read Dickey’s diary,” I said.

  Would they believe me? I looked at each old face. There were smiles and sighs, and even a tear. It’s what each of them desperately wanted to believe, so indeed, they would. How powerful it must be to want to believe a thing so badly that no matter how farfetched, you do.

  “I am more concerned, really, about finding out why Quita McBride died. Quita had wanted the red book, so I tracked it down. But as soon as I realized its sensitive nature, I thought I had better return it to you.”

  “Bless you,” Catherine Hill said.

  “And you,” I asked, “still have the old mah-jongg set?”

  “Yes, of course. Here it is.” Catherine picked it up from a spot next to the sofa where I hadn’t seen it. “Is there some particular reason you want it back, dear?”

  “Let’s say I’ve gotten attached to it,” I said.

  “Cath?” a small, reedy voice called out. Catherine Hill’s little mama came teetering into the room. She was dressed, as I had now come to expect, head to toe in a duplicate copy of her daughter’s silver lamé housecoat outfit. The marabou feathers came up so high on her neckline that they reached her small chin. There are no words to describe the wig.

  “We’re right in here, minimom!” Catherine called to her.

  By the smile on the lips of the ninety-year-old Hill matriarch, I suspected she had once again forgotten her teeth in a glass.

  “Are we having a party?” Mama Hill asked.

  “Yes, Mama,” Catherine Hill said, her voice sounding positively festive.

  And then she took the red-leather book out of my hand and flung it directly into the center of the fireplace.

  Chapter 26

  I only have one television set in my house. It sits atop a pine dresser in the tiny third upstairs bedroom. My bedroom.

  “How old is your VCR?” Holly asked, scooching over to make more room for Wesley and me. The three of us were crowded on top of my quilted bed, the only comfortable spot in the small room from which to view the set.

  I passed the bowl of freshly popped popcorn. “Hush.”

  On the screen, a young and dashing Dickey McBride was singing about his affection for a beautiful maiden named Lotus Flower. The setting was a Technicolor-bright view of old-fashioned Hong Kong harbor. I had rented Flower of Love on my way home. Something about those days in Hong Kong still worried me. Too many coincidences pointed to Flower of Love.

  “Didn’t anyone mind that Catherine Hill played a Chinese girl?” Holly asked. With one swipe of the bowl, she grabbed a large handful of popcorn.

  “That was the forties for you,” Wes said. “A little slanted eyeliner, a black wig, dark makeup—that’s all it took to turn Catherine Hill into Tip Tang.” He pointed to the screen.

  “Is that even a Chinese name?” Holly wondered.

  “Well…” Wes began, holding up one hand.

  Wes had studied Mandarin. Naturally. I felt a minilecture coming on.

  Holly was currently in control of the remote, so she muted the soundtrack on the movie. On screen, Dickey McBride, in the midst of warbling, “…my Lost Lotus Flow…” went suddenly silent.

  “First off,” Wesley said, “Chinese is not one language, it’s more like a language family. Think of Mandarin, Wu, Min, Kejia, Yue, Huizhou, Xiang and Gan, to give them their Mandarin names. Kejia is also known as Hakka, Min is also called Hokkien, and Yue is commonly known as Cantonese.”

  “Whoa,” she said.

  I peeked around and made eye contact with Holly. “You did ask.”

  “Well, I just thought the name of Catherine Hill’s character sounded too cutesy. Tip Tang, whazzat?”

  Wesley, on a roll, took on that question. “Transcription of Chinese into Latin letters has been a very tricky issue. Chinese languages have sounds that don’t have easy equivalents in European languages. Also, Chinese languages are all tone-based, and how do you write that? Over the years, we’ve written their words using different phonetic spellings, but none of them sound exactly right.”

  “It confuses me,” Holly said. “It seems like all the words have changed, too. Like do we still call it Peking Duck if the city is called Beijing now?”

  Wes grabbed the popcorn bowl and helped himself. “We probably should. Most of the world has adopted a system of transliteration called Hanyu Pinyin, which is the official system of the People’s Republic of China. That’s why we now see words like Beijing, and Daoism and Mao Zedong.”

  “Hey, I want to watch the movie.” I grabbed the remote from Holly when she wasn’t paying strict attention and unmuted Flower of Love.

  “I don’t think I ever saw this one,” Holly said, shifting her focus back to the screen. “It’s pretty funky.”

  “I vaguely remember it,” Wes said, “but I didn’t remember how good old Dickey McBride was. He had a great voice.”

/>   The scene shifted to a palace garden, and we all made comments on the silk costume Catherine Hill wore.

  “I can’t believe how thin Catherine Hill was,” I said. “And pretty.”

  “So,” Holly said, “when they were making this movie, everyone on the set was learning to play mah-jongg and gambling like crazy. I love knowing all that behind-the-scenes stuff. Read another entry from the book.”

  I had, of course, made a photocopy of the pages from the red-leather diary. The copy was on my lap, and I picked it up again. I had been reading out some of the brief entries from the months McBride and Hill were in Hong Kong. We could not make sense out of every entry. Some were cryptic. But some were romantic. There were many notes that referred to McBride’s affair with his beautiful young lover “Jade.” Nothing scandalous by today’s standards. Just notes like: “met Beautiful Jade for the weekend,” and “Beautiful Jade makes me sing to her in bath.” But many of the others referred to names we couldn’t immediately recognize.

  “Here’s one,” I said, reading from the binder. “Millie was fired for cold hands. Trina is much warmer.”

  “What was that about? Sounds kinky.” Holly giggled. “Who was Millie? Who was Trina?”

  “That note was made over fifty years ago,” I said. “We’ll probably never know.”

  Wesley was seized with an idea. He took the remote control from me and fast-forwarded to the credits.

  “Hey, we’re gonna miss the movie, Wes.” I was the only one, apparently, who cared for an orderly narrative.

  “Just wait,” Wes said.

  We watched the movie jerkily speed through its closing scene and then zip past the words The End. Immediately after, the credits began rolling by. The song was a warbling duet between McBride and the woman who sang for the lipsyncing Hill. It was pretty awful. Wes hit the slow-motion button. The crawl of names slowed as they floated up and off the screen. And then, yelling, “Look!” Wesley hit “pause.” Frozen on the screen was the name: Trina Van Hertbruggen.

  “Trina’s hand is much warmer,” Wes quoted from the diary.

  Trina Van Hertbruggen was listed as the makeup artist, and we surmised that she probably replaced the cool-fingered Millie. Such a small item as the chill factor of hands could make or break you in Hollywood. Another mystery solved.