A Death in California

by Barthel, Joan;

  “Okay then,” Taylor said mildly. He didn’t seem to want to talk about guns, anyway. He seemed to want to talk about the children, about their schools, their sports, their friends, the ordinary things married people talk about. He seemed relaxed and happy, whistling as he wandered around the house, the man of the house.

  All day Monday he came and went. Once, when he was gone and the phone rang, it was Taylor. “Well, I see a lot of girls are coming to your luncheon,” he said lightly. “You’d better order more hors d’oeuvres.” Hope was sure, then, that her phone was tapped. Whenever Taylor was gone for an hour or two, he would call her a few times during that period, and when he came back, he would give her a detailed account of Tom Masters’s movements. He said that Tom had had lunch at Scandia; he said that Tom had a new girlfriend. He suggested, again, that he might kill Tom, and what Hope might do then. He suggested that she get the children together, take them to her mother, then go to Europe with him and eventually settle in Rhodesia where, he said, there was no extradition law.

  “If only I could trust you,” he said over and over, and Hope assured him, over and over, that he could.

  When Keith came home from school, Taylor seemed delighted to see him and wrestled again with him on the floor. Watching them, Hope thought again of how Taylor was playing husband and father, and doing it well, she had to admit. Around dinner time, when she protested that she couldn’t eat a thing, Taylor took Keith down to the House of Pies. They were gone longer than Hope had expected, and when they returned, Keith showed his mother the new jacket Taylor had bought for him.

  “Now can I call my mother and tell her we’re coming?” Hope asked.

  “Not yet,” Taylor said. “Not tonight.” Late in the afternoon he had brought in a telescopic rifle that he had set up at the sliding glass door in the living room, overlooking the street and far into the distance. “I can see anything through here,” he assured her. “I can watch and make sure if anybody’s coming; I can really do a good job of protecting you with this. I can take someone down across a football field with this.” He kept saying he wanted to show her how to use it, but Hope kept refusing, telling him it was too heavy, that she didn’t want to touch it because she was afraid of guns. Finally she went across the room and looked through the eyepiece, but she didn’t put her hands on it.

  He had brought in at least one other gun, too, a .38-caliber revolver that Hope found in a bottom drawer of the bathroom chest when she opened the chest looking for something. She marched back out into the living room and asked him to come into the bathroom. “How dare you leave a gun where the children can get at it?” she demanded. “Don’t you realize how dangerous that is?”

  Taylor looked sheepish. “Yes, you’re right, I’m sorry,” he said. He took the gun and said he would put it in a high place, where the children wouldn’t find it.

  Hope put the children to bed again in her big bed and came back into the living room to try to reason with Taylor. She sat in the big chair by the fireplace; Taylor sat on the floor at her feet, looking at the fire.

  “Taylor, this can’t go on,” Hope said. “Time is passing—my God, Taylor, we have to call the police sometime. Someone will find the body.”

  “I would like to sit here by the fire with you forever,” Taylor said in a gentle, almost dreamy voice. “I would be your protector and take care of you and the children forever. Put the kids to bed and sit by the fire with you.”

  He stood up. “But now I have to leave for a while, because I need a change of identification.” He gave her the usual instructions again and left quickly. Hope wanted desperately to go to bed, so she stretched out on the floor, by the fire, and closed her eyes.

  She was awakened by Taylor returning, dragging several large suitcases into the living room. One big, black suitcase had a piece of red yarn taped on it. Taylor explained that the way it was done in the organization was to leave a piece of luggage at a bus stop with a piece of red yarn or some similar marking, so that whoever was searching I.D.’s would know which suitcase to pick up. When he opened the black suitcase, he frowned, as he held up pieces of clothing. “Tacky, cheap, and the wrong size,” he declared. He began going through the other bags, and Hope yawned. “Taylor, I’m going to bed,” she said. He frowned at her. “No, I want you to stay up and keep me company,” he said sternly. “I have been sitting up here protecting you and your children, and the least you can do now is to sit up with me a while. I am very tired, and I have a backache.”

  “Well, let me give you a backrub,” Hope offered. She was glad when he smiled at her. He took off his shirt and lay on the rug, in front of the fire, stretching both arms over his head. Hope knelt beside him and rubbed his back, kneading his shoulders, then pressing down along the sides of his back with firm strokes. “Mmmm, nice,” he murmured. Hope was glad he was pleased; she thought it would keep him happy and she knew she gave good backrubs. She was still rubbing Taylor’s back when Martha Padilla came back, after her days off. Martha walked through the kitchen and into the living room, but when she saw Hope on the floor with a man with no shirt on, rubbing his back, she went back through the kitchen into her own room and went to bed.

  “Better?” Hope asked Taylor.

  “Oh, much better.” He sighed. He sat up, put his shirt back on, and poured two glasses of wine. Hope put a record on the stereo, and a wistful song began. Hope sat in the big chair by the fire and sipped her wine. Taylor set his wine on the coffee table and walked around to the back of the small sofa, facing her. He leaned across the sofa, resting his arms on it. “Can you ever forgive me?” he asked quietly.

  “Yes, I forgive you,” Hope replied. “I understand that this was all a horrible mistake, and I forgive you.”

  “Will you marry me?” Taylor asked.

  Hope shook her head. “Oh, Taylor, I don’t think I could ever get it out of my mind enough to marry you.”

  “I can stop doing this, you know,” he went on. “I can go straight, starting right now, starting tomorrow. I can go out tomorrow and get a job as an attorney and never harm another person.”

  “But you told me you’re so involved with the organization,” Hope reminded him. “You said you could never get out.”

  “Well, I have thought of a way,” he said, and he related his plan: he would claim to have heart trouble and get out of the organization on disability.

  “If I stay out of trouble for five years and become an attorney, then will you marry me?”

  “Well, I think it would be fine if you became a lawyer,” Hope said, “but I honestly don’t know how I’d feel in five years. I just don’t know.” She set her glass down and stood up. “Taylor, I really have to go to bed now.”

  The children were sound asleep, sprawled all across Hope’s wide bed, so she closed that door softly and went across the hall into Keith’s room. She crawled under the blankets in one of the twin beds; Taylor got into the other bed. “Come over into my bed,” he said. “I want you to cuddle with me.”

  Hope did not dare to argue with him about anything. She got out of her bed and got into bed with him. Taylor took her in his arms. “Just let me hold you,” he murmured. He kissed her softly all over her neck, into her hair, with a lover’s gentle caresses. Hope fell asleep in his arms, as he was telling her over and over, “I love you.”

  PART II

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Honey was the ideal nickname for Hope’s mother. She was not deeply tanned—women in her position avoided bronzing. She had a beige, tawny look, with blond hair carefully and smoothly waved back from her face. Like her daughter, she was petite, though she usually wore very high-heeled shoes, either alligator or a soft, buttery leather, so that she seemed taller than Hope. Her clothes were elegant, conservative, expensive-looking—Chanel suits, rose-colored silks—and she wore them in an elegant, conservative, expensive-looking way. Everything about Honey was tasteful: her looks; her clothes; her heavy, cream-colored stationery; her living room, with its expanses of pale
carpeting, its lemon-velvet sofas, its bowls of perfectly fresh flowers perfectly arranged.

  The relationship between Honey and Hope was never very difficult to discern. A man who knew them both and who had observed them together often called it “sibling rivalry.” Like siblings, they were jealous and competitive. Like siblings, they bickered and quarreled and depended on each other in an intense and perpetual emotional bonding. Honey said Hope was a difficult child; Hope said Honey was trying to run her life. Both women were right.

  Honey was born in Canada, but her parents moved to southern California when she was a young girl, so she always felt she belonged. Her father was a successful businessman, in wholesale lighting, and Honey liked to recall “the tremendous stability” of her childhood. “When I grew up in Beverly Hills,” she reminisced, “it was a darling little village. All the shopowners knew the families. It was a very traditional way of life, very conservative. My family was known and respected in the community, and I was never exposed to the kind of mishmash that comes to California.”

  Honey disliked talking about her first marriage, to Hope’s father; Hope liked to bring it up. “How about Jimmy and all his crazy pals?” Hope asked, when her mother commented on the “mishmash.”

  “Yes, yes, that’s true,” Honey said in an edgy, controlled voice. “I was exposed, in my first marriage, to the Hollywood side of life and I hated it. I hated everything about it. Not that I hated having all the great people in music come to our home. It was wonderful to have George Szell playing the piano in our living room, accompanying Jimmy on the French horn, or to have José Iturbi play ‘The Fire Dance’ just for you when you were little. Or to have John Barbirolli pretend he was a great brown bear and ride you around on his back.”

  “What about Frank Sinatra?” Hope persisted. “You liked him. You liked Nancy.”

  “Yes,” Honey said reluctantly, “I met him when he first came to Hollywood and had a radio show. Sinatra was very pleasant.”

  After her divorce, Honey left Hope with her own parents in Holmby Hills, secure in the knowledge that “Hope was sheltered and protected” and would be “brought up like a little princess.” Hope, she maintained, was “a very joyous child.” Honey enjoyed the social life that her beauty and wealth made possible—world travel, extravagant parties—until she married Van and settled into a sedate upper-class life.

  Van’s family was known and respected in the community, like Honey’s, only more so. He had been sent east to school, and when he returned from Yale Law School, he joined an old-line, conservative law firm and married one of the richest women in the United States, with oil money behind her and an oil scandal behind that. After three generations, the scandal had pretty much petered out, except for entries in American history books, but the money never did. Besides, Van had family money of his own. His father had discovered a copper mine and had promptly retired to play golf—at the age of thirty-five. Van had had children with his first wife, so when he married Honey, Hope acquired two older stepbrothers and a stepsister her own age, Cynthia. Even though Cynthia visited only on occasional weekends, Hope felt her mother had decorated Hope’s bedroom to suit Cynthia, so Hope dressed a little sloppier, ran around a little more, and acted up in various other ways. Hope was fifteen when her mother remarried; although Van legally adopted her, the two of them got on badly from the beginning. Hope said he reminded her of the American eagle: stiff, unbending, conservative; Van said she was ungrateful. Hope felt that much of the problem was due to her mother, who complained constantly about Hope to Van, who then berated Hope for making her mother unhappy. When Honey had a period of fainting spells, Van sent her to the Scripps Clinic for a complete checkup. “My daughter is making my life miserable,” Honey told the doctors, who told Van, who told Hope. Hope always felt like a third wheel in the house, unwanted and ignored; she was particularly annoyed by Van’s habit of walking into the den where she was watching television and changing channels without asking her.

  Even after she got out of the house by eloping with the boy next door, Hope found her life still entwined with Honey’s and Van’s. Besides his father’s money, Van had inherited his father’s love of golf, and he and Hope’s husband played together often. The four of them played bridge often, at the games that sometimes reduced Hope to tears. Honey and Van had arranged to buy the first house Hope lived in, after Keith was born, the place in Benedict Canyon that Honey described as “a little dollhouse, just adorable” and that she had decorated in black and white and gray. By the time Hope was divorced and remarried, with a third child coming, the house was far too small, and Honey had arranged to buy the house on the Drive, which had less charm but more bedrooms. All along, Honey reminded Hope, she and Van had “provided for the basic essentials. We saw to it that the medical bills were paid, that your home was paid for, and, of course, we bought all the furniture. We paid for the birth of your children, all three of them: the doctors’ bills, the hospital bills, the nurses. And then we set up a little income for you.”

  Honey disapproved of almost all the men Hope had relationships with after Hope had separated from her second husband. She liked Bill Ashlock, however. She had met him only once, about a week before he and Hope went to the ranch, when they came by her house to pick up Keith, who had been visiting his grandmother. Bill was driving Hope’s station wagon, with his two girls and K.C. and Hope Elizabeth piled inside. Bill told Honey they’d all been spending the Washington’s Birthday weekend at Hope’s, and now he was on the way to the market to pick up things for a barbecue. “With all five children!” Honey had exclaimed, and Bill had laughed. “The more the merrier,” he’d said. Honey and Van and Bill had chatted a little about the trip to the ranch the next weekend. At that time, Bill and Hope still planned to take the children, and Honey told Bill’s girls what fun they would have riding Bonnie, the gentlest of the ranch horses. “We’ll have a wonderful time,” Bill had agreed. “We’re all just one big happy family now.”

  When Bill and the children had gone, Honey and Van had discussed Hope’s future. Honey said it didn’t seem right that Bill would have to support Hope’s three children, along with his own two, and that since Hope was getting so little from her first husband, Honey and Van would need to help out with Keith and Hope Elizabeth, at least. Honey had disapproved of Bill living with Hope, but she was glad Hope planned to be married. Although Bill was in advertising, Honey didn’t consider him “the typical Hollywood character” at all.

  Hope said her mother helped her as she did because she felt guilty about having neglected Hope as a child, and perhaps about having married so much money, while Hope hadn’t; Hope pointed out that her mother’s personal allowance from Van was three thousand dollars a month, which didn’t have to cover maintenance on her Lincoln Continental or lunches at the Los Angeles Country Club. Honey didn’t understand why, when she wanted to buy Hope a mink, Hope refused it, though she obviously expected financial help from her mother. Sometimes Honey thought she had arranged Hope’s upbringing in the wrong way. “My parents brought her up like a little princess,” she once told Van. “Perhaps that was wrong, because she never had to do anything for herself. She never had to think for herself; everything was done for her. Then the harsh realities of being married, having to budget—she was totally unequipped for these things. And I feel I made a terrible mistake in that respect. On the other hand, you want to do what you can, and, of course, that was the way I was brought up, in a social setting. Hope was brought up in that setting, and so she has rebelled against this, somewhere along the way—to the point where it’s hard for me to understand.”

  Hope’s rebellion, however, was not unremitting. Her friend Michael Abbott had noticed Hope’s pride in her breeding. He considered her a dual personality. She had an earthy streak, but she also thought herself a patrician, and acted that way. And indeed, at times the similarities between Hope and Honey were far more apparent than their differences. Both women were petite, blond, beautiful. Both smoked a lot. Ho
pe nursed sick cats, sheltered runaway children, and made certain attempts to reach out beyond the given perceptions of Beverly Hills; while Honey was anything but earthy, there were occasional signs that her inner yearnings were not totally unlike her daughter’s. Honey kept a book of religious poems on the edge of her bathtub, and she had clipped a maxim and taped it on her refrigerator door:

  I SEARCH, THEREFORE I AM.

  Monday was one of Honey’s usual busy, well-organized days. She and Van had come back, just two weeks before, from a trip to Guatemala, and Honey had notes to write, people to make luncheon dates with, the Chips meeting at her house to prepare for, maids to instruct: besides her regular day maid, a middle-aged black woman named Gertrude, Honey had a Japanese student, a young woman named Kazue Tomita, working at her house part time. Late Monday afternoon Honey drove to her stepson’s house and picked up two of his children, whom she and Van later took to dinner. They drove them home and got back to their house around eight o’clock.

  Honey phoned Hope then. She thought her daughter still sounded strange, and Honey said she was coming up to see her. Hope put a man on the phone, who spoke calmly and reassuringly. He said his name was Taylor, that he was a friend of Bill’s and that Hope and the children were fine, but something had come up about her divorce that had upset Hope. “In these divorce situations, there are always legal unpleasantries,” Taylor told Honey, assuring her that Hope would come by to see her Tuesday and explain everything.

  Hope telephoned Honey around eleven o’clock Tuesday morning. “Lock all the doors and turn on the alarm and don’t let anyone in the house,” Hope told her mother. “I’m coming down with Keith and K.C. because our lives have been threatened.”

  Hope had awakened Tuesday morning to find Taylor already showered and dressed, cheerful as ever, again cooking breakfast for the children, getting Hope Elizabeth ready for school. Hope begged Taylor to let her daughter stay home. “I’m taking her to school, and that’s that,” Taylor said firmly. He and the child left together. When he returned, he told Hope that Hope Elizabeth was safely in school and that all day the child would be watched by his people.