No Sale

by Patrick Conrad

  “And in conclusion I would like to quote Hitchcock’s favourite scene to prove my thesis. In his conversations with François Truffaut he declared that this was a sequence from Rich and Strange, his 1932 film, better known in the United States as East of Shanghai, with Henry Kendall and Joan Barry as Fred and Emily Hill. While they are swimming, Emily taunts him: ‘I bet you can’t swim between my legs under water.’ She is standing in the middle of the swimming pool, with her legs apart. He dives down, but unexpectedly she snaps her knees together. His head is clamped between her thighs and you can see bubbles of air escaping from his mouth. After a moment she lets him go and he appears on the surface out of breath, panting: ‘This time you nearly murdered me!’ And she replies: ‘And wouldn’t that have been a lovely death?’

  “In Hitchcock every murder is sexual. In fact, in Shadow of a Doubt, from 1943, he cites a quotation of Oscar Wilde’s, which in my opinion harbours a profound truth: ‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves.’

  “Thank you for your attention.”

  Cox was not displeased with his efforts given the unusual circumstances in which he had been working on the text. He slipped the twenty-five pages into a grey folder, on which he wrote LECTURE 8TH JUNE 2002 – HIGH NOON FILM CLUB in block letters with a thick felt-tip pen. Then he looked at the photos on the desk of his two women: one of Shelley in her brief but irresistible Betty Grable period in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont and the other of Starr, in which she looks at him over her bare shoulder against a dark background, and that strangely was starting to fade.

  His original plan that evening had been to go to the Ki-nepolis to see Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, which had just won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. But when he read that, following the showing of BUtterfield 8, Arte was broadcasting a documentary about the true events on which O’ Hara’s novel was based, he decided to stay at home. Because since the previous night he had not been able to shake off the story of Gloria Wandrous, who drowned in the Hudson River and had the same handwriting as Starr.

  For his novel, O’Hara had been inspired by a lurid news item that attracted enormous attention in the press at the time, according to the documentary. On Monday, 8th June 1931, at around six o’clock in the morning, a beachcomber called Daniel Moriarty finds the body of a young woman on Long Beach, New York, half-buried in the soft sand. Her drenched summer dress is clinging to her voluptuous body. She is wearing silk stockings but no underwear. Her nails have been painted bright red. Her expression is serene, as if she is asleep. The sight is both innocent and obscene. At half past nine Inspector Harold King and two detectives from Nassau County examine the body, but do not find any personal papers or jewellery that could reveal her identity. The only clue is an embroidered label in the collar of her dress: Lord & Taylor, an expensive fashion store on Fifth Avenue. King has the remains transferred to the mortuary in Mineola for an initial cursory autopsy. The coroner’s findings can be summed up simply: death by drowning.

  In the late afternoon a lanky man in a three-piece suit appears at the Mineola coroner’s office. This man, Stanley Faithfull, claims to have read in the paper that the body of a young woman has been washed up on Long Beach. His stepdaughter has been missing since the previous Friday. Starr Faithfull, twenty-five years old.

  Cox gasps when he hears this and reaches for the whisky bottle without taking his eyes off the screen. The model for Gloria Wandrous, who has the same handwriting as Starr, also has the same name. Spelt in the same unusual way. His last image of Starr Mortenson is of an innocent young girl walking into the sea. The sea that on 8th June 1931, exactly seventy-one years ago to the day, had cast up the body of Starr Faithfull on Long Beach. This is no longer fiction but solid reality. It’s an absurd thought but perhaps the death of one Starr can explain the disappearance of the other.

  Stanley Faithfull identifies his stepdaughter’s dress. Inspector King asks the famous forensic surgeon, Otto Schultze, to conduct a second, more thorough, autopsy. The doctor counts more than one hundred wounds over her entire body. Her lungs are full of sand. So she must have drowned in shallow water, more than forty-eight hours ago. In her stomach he finds the remains of a sumptuous dinner. The theory of an accident is abandoned.

  On Tuesday evening Inspector King makes his way to 12, St Luke’s Place, in Greenwich Village, where the Faithfull family occupy an apartment in a nineteenth-century building. He questions Starr’s mother and younger sister Tucker, as well as her stepfather. When he leaves the apartment around midnight, he declares that he knows the identities of the murderers, adding that one of them is an eminent politician. That same night he takes the train to Boston.

  Starr’s real surname was Wyman. She was born in Boston on 27th January 1906. When her father left his family in 1918 to go and work in Paris, her mother found some comfort in her friendship with Martha, the wife of the mayor of Boston, Andrew J. Peters. From the start Peters displayed a rather unhealthy interest in the twelve-year-old Starr, whom he called Bambi. But everyone kept quiet, especially because Peters supported the Wyman family with a monthly allowance. When her parents divorced in 1924, Starr spent her holidays on the mayor’s private island or on his three-master, the Malabar VII. Her mother married Stanley Faithfull in 1925 and the family moved to West Orange, New Jersey.

  Had Starr Mortenson been living with a similar secret and was that the reason she was so different to the other students? Was that the reason too that she wore such striking make-up? She had often told him that her father called her Bambi when she was little. The father that he had never met, as if the man dared not come out into the open. The father who perhaps did not even exist.

  On the screen appeared a blurred, yellowing photo of Starr Faithfull, playing as a child in the surf with her dog Congo. Starr Mortenson’s dog had the same name! She was able to swim well from an early age, the narrator says, and proved to be an excellent swimmer later on. Just like my little Clara Bow, thinks Cox, drinking straight from the whisky bottle.

  While passing through New York, on 26th June 1926, Peters invites Starr out to a Broadway theatre show and then spends the night with her at the Hotel Astor.

  The last time that Cox saw Starr alive was at the Hotel Astoria. Astor/Astoria. It cannot be coincidence. Did Starr also have a double life, just like Shelley and Faithfull? A dark side that she had never dared own up to and that she had taken with her as an unspeakable secret? Why had all three women come to their ends in the water? Was Starr really called Mortenson or was she the reincarnation of that lost creature washed up on Long Beach like a piece of driftwood, and was that why she had walked into the sea again?

  When Starr Faithfull, confused and befuddled, comes home the next morning, she tells her mother of the eight years of sexual abuse she has suffered. To prevent a scandal, Peters promises extra financial support for Starr’s psychological care. In August 1927 he pays the sum of $25,000 into the Faithfulls’ bank account. The family moves to Greenwich Village and Starr travels to Paris, London, the Antilles and the Mediterranean. She discovers Cunard’s pleasure cruises, whose fleet of liners docks not far from St Luke’s Place. By the spring of 1931 the money has run out, but Starr continues to attend the parties that the shipping company throws before its passengers embark on the luxury liners. She was often seen tottering around the quayside, looking for another party on a Cunard cruiser. Everyone knew her at the docks.

  Just as everyone knew Drunk Dixie in the bars around the Bonaparte Dock, thinks Cox, slumping down from the sofa. The bottle of J&B rolls over the floor. He tries to concentrate but everything is starting to spin inside his head. Starr Faithfull’s murder has never been solved. Just like the disappearance of Starr Mortenson. She claimed to have spent the week before their last meeting in Sweden. She had called Cox regularly, apparently from Stockholm, but there was no proof she had ever left the country. Even her account of the Deborah Kerr retrospective was not convincing. Perhaps, while he was waiting for her in his hotel room, she had be
en spending the days with strange men in the bars of Ostend or on the Dover – Ostend ferry. And, the night that he had encountered young Fellini on the beach, perhaps she was murdered by one of her last lovers. Maybe by the mysterious man that she called Grandpa Mortenson. And perhaps that man had come to collect her clothes and other things from the room while he was listening to Lejeune in the Bogart Bar.

  The Faithfull family did not let go of Andrew Peters. Their silence cost the politician more and more money, a comfortable and above all regular source of income. But Starr started to behave increasingly strangely. Once she was found almost dead in a hotel room close to Central Park, then the police found her again in a suite at the Montclair Hotel, dead drunk and beaten up. She was repeatedly taken by ambulance to Bellevue Hospital where she needed treatment for injuries and beatings. In London she was even detained one night for wandering naked through Kensington.

  Someone rings the bell, and Cox limps, swearing, on his bare feet to the front door. Two uniformed policemen are standing there, the older looking no more than seventeen.

  “Mr Cox?”

  “What are you accusing me of now!”

  “Nothing, we… We have a package for you.”

  “A package?”

  “From Superintendent Luyckx.”

  Blushing, the young policeman hands him a see-through plastic bag in which someone has stuck a folded pair of knickers, and says: “I don’t know what it is.”

  “Starr Faithfull’s underwear, young man,” mumbles Cox, “which Inspector King has been looking for for days. He’ll be pleased. Give Luyckx my best wishes.”

  “Is everything all right, Mr Cox?”

  He shuts the door, runs back into the living room, drops on the ground in front of the television and wipes the sweat from his forehead with Starr’s knickers.

  Ten days after the death of Starr the police are still fumbling in the dark. Only a meticulous analysis of how she spent her time in the days leading up to the murder may yield some clues. But even that seems insurmountably difficult.

  Had she somehow contrived to smuggle herself on board one of the Cunard liners in order to throw herself overboard and commit suicide once the ship had left harbour? That too was impossible. Her body had been in the water for ten hours at most and it was simple to ascertain that at the time of her death every Cunard ship was on the open seas. The fact that no traces of alcohol had been found in her blood also contradicted the statements of various witnesses. Nor was there any explanation for the numerous wounds and bruises on her body. Or for the spotless state of her clothes. Or for the sand in her lungs and the half-digested food in her stomach. In December 1931 the file on her case was closed.

  Starr Faithfull had taken the mystery surrounding her death with her. Some beachcombers claim to this day to see her now and then at daybreak emerging from the mist, wandering over the beach in her blue-and-white summer dress and then stepping back into the sea as the foghorns of passenger ships resound in the distance, to vanish in the waves until her next appearance.

  Cox turns off the television and stares at the cashmere pattern on the Persian rug. The same pattern as on the dress clinging to the shapely form of Starr Faithfull. He slumps to his knees, tumbles over in slow motion and falls asleep with his face pressed against her belly full of seaweed and gin and veronal.

  24

  John Agar

  “In Hitchcock, every murder carries a sexual charge. Indeed, in connection with Shadow of a Doubt from the year 1943, the Master quoted a line of Oscar Wilde’s which, in my opinion, contains much truth: ‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves’. Thank you for your attention.”

  The hall echoes with applause. Cox bows politely, shuts his grey folder, switches off the reading lamp and steps down from the podium. Vincent van Lierde, president of the High Noon Film Club, is in raptures and hurries over to congratulate him.

  “Brilliant, Professor! That was eloquence in the service of erudition. I don’t know how else to describe it.”

  “I feel greatly flattered.”

  “No, I really mean it! My spine is still tingling when I think of your remarks on Grace Kelly and Cary Grant’s kiss in To Catch a Thief. And you heard the applause yourself: the High Nooners must have enjoyed it as much as I did.”

  “How long did I speak for?”

  “One hour and twenty minutes. Perfect timing.”

  “As long as that?”

  Cox looks at his watch. It is half past ten.

  “I do hope you can stay for the reception. I’m sure our members have lots of questions for you.”

  “Unfortunately I have another important meeting and…”

  “You don’t say! We did agree…”

  “I know, Mr van Lierde, but I have to be in Koksijde by midnight. An unexpected family problem.”

  “What about the club photo?”

  “Another time. I’m really sorry.”

  Cox disengages his hand and leaves the hall by a back door. A quarter of an hour later he is speeding down the Antwerp – Ostend motorway.

  He had woken in the living room with cramp in his shoulders at three that morning. Then he lay in bed with a splitting headache, agonizing about what he had seen. Now that he knew all the details of the Faithfull case he was convinced that Starr – his Starr – had not dumped him for the hell of it and that a terrible story lay behind her disappearance, a story of which he had not had the remotest inkling. At about six o’clock he began to comb through the house, looking for her diary. She had once told him that since primary school she had written down her life in a secret code every day in grey clothbound notebooks and that whoever found them later would be stunned by their contents. He knew the diaries existed because he had often seen her, sitting in a corner of the bedroom when she thought she was alone, writing things down incredibly fast. Even he was not allowed to read them; it was an intimate diary and perhaps she would burn it one day. Sometimes it’s better not to leave any traces behind, she said.

  But he found nothing. Obviously the diary was not in his flat. He quickly drank a cup of coffee and set off for Starr’s old address.

  The shutters were open and the windows adorned with flower pots. He even thought the Mortensons had returned, until he read the name ‘Lievens’ on the doorbell. He rang. An elderly man in slippers opened the door. Cox was lost for words. He could not think exactly why he had come.

  “What can I do for you?” asked the man. His clothes smelt of pipe tobacco.

  “My name is Victor Cox and I used to give classes to the daughter of the previous tenants. I assume they no longer live here?”

  “That’s right. We rented our flat for a time to the Mortenson family. And they did have two daughters.”

  “Did you say two?”

  “Yes. They had odd names. Their father was of Swedish descent.”

  “Starr and Tucker?”

  “Correct. Starr was the older.”

  Starr had never told him that she had a sister. A sister who, what’s more, had the same name as Starr Faithfull’s sister.

  “And when did they move out?”

  “On the 14th of October last year, to be exact. The rental contract was still running. I think it was because Mr Mortenson was unexpectedly given a foreign posting.”

  “Did they leave a forwarding address?”

  “No. My wife and I had almost no contact with them. But they were decent people who always paid their bills.”

  The old man’s story seemed too neat, too simple. Why would Starr not have informed him that her father had been posted to a new embassy and that she had to leave the country with her family? For fear that he would follow her? Nonsense. Cox did not dare suggest they should let him in to look for the diary. It would appear at the very least rather suspicious. Anyway, he had the feeling that he would not find the answer to the riddle in Antwerp. If he could uncover where she had spent the week before she disappeared perhaps he would understand what had forced her to plunge, alone, into the ice-co
ld waves that evening. And for that he had to get back to Koksijde.

  It is almost midnight when, exhausted after two sleepless nights, he parks his car on the promenade outside the Meteor Cinema, which tonight is showing John Gilling’s The Reptile as part of a week of science-fiction films. The performance has just finished, and a couple of dazed spectators with bloodshot eyes are leaving the cinema as the floodlights on the roof are extinguished, one by one.

  Cox avoids the Astoria Hotel and slips down from the promenade. To his left, in the orange glow of the street lamps, he can see the row of bathing cabins where Riccardo and Federico had been waiting for their father. The tide is out and the beach looks like that beach of silver pools which he had seen Starr dance and skip over through his binoculars on 14th October last year, casting her bathing robe and towels aside. He still remembers the exact spot where she entered the water and with a radiant smile turned to wave at him one last time before disappearing into the foaming waves. It was not even a hundred yards to the left of the breakwater. Behind him, in the distance, he can hear the noise of the funfair. And from the Astoria Hotel loud dance music can be heard as if a party is going on. The air smells of fried food and sunburn. The tourist season has begun.