“You think Cora killed Warren and Sam to keep them from saying anything to June?” Hector asked.
“Maybe. Or maybe she and McMillan did it together. Since McMillan apparently has witnesses that he wasn’t in the balcony when Sam was pushed, maybe Cora murdered Sam. But McMillan could still have murdered Warren.”
“That’s a lot of maybes,” Hector said, pulling into the garage of a modern glass-fronted house on a block of tall Victorians.
“We’re here already?” We hadn’t been in the car five minutes. “You’re living in the neighborhood?”
“It’s a great neighborhood,” he said. “I hear all good things about the demographics and zoning and so on.”
I recognized the buzzwords I’d used on McMillan. “You’re hilarious.” I told Hector.
“I am many things.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
The house was amazing. Four floors of gleaming surfaces and tasteful neutral furnishings topped by a roof deck with literal million-dollar views. There was an elevator, just in case the modern glass stairs were too much. There was a kitchen that would have made grown chefs weep with envy. And there was Cousin Gabriela, in her chair at a table-height section of the vast kitchen island, wielding a knife like a pro.
“Nora, I’m so glad you could make it.” Her smile provided the warmth that the ultramodern kitchen lacked.
“I’m so glad you invited me.” I bent to give her a hug, staying clear of the knife. “Something smells incredible.”
“It’s our grandmother’s recipe,” she said. “But that’s for later. First, a glass of wine and some of this gorgeous cheese I got from that shop down the street.”
Hector was already opening a bottle of red, and the island was laden with platters of cheeses, crackers, grilled vegetables, and fruit.
“Nobody ever goes hungry around the Acostas,” I said.
Hector grinned. “We should adopt that as our new family motto.”
“What was your old one?”
“Something grim about revenge,” Gabriela said.
Which really shouldn’t have surprised me.
“I’ve never eaten that much in my life,” I said later, pushing back from the table. “Or that well.”
Gabriela waved a dismissive hand. “You should see us at the holidays.”
“I don’t know if I could take it.”
The conversation had been as good as Gabriela’s cooking. She’d told me more about her work, developing technology to make the world more accessible to people with all sorts of disabilities. She spoke passionately about bridging the gap between humans and computers, of using tech to enable all sorts of things that weren’t possible just a few years before.
Listening to her, I had a crazy thought about using technology to help Trixie. If Gabriela’s research could help a veteran who’d lost his arm to “feel” his robotic hand, was there something she could do for someone without an entire body?
Hector noticed that my mind had wandered. “I fear we’re keeping you up too late,” he said.
“You should take advantage of the theater being closed to catch up on your rest,” Gabriela advised. “Hopefully it will only be for a few more days.”
“The inspection is Friday,” I told her. “Fingers crossed that the inspector doesn’t ask me about the giant gaping hole in the stage.”
“What are you going to do about that?” Hector asked.
“For the balcony inspection, my strategy will be to lower the screen and not mention it,” I confessed. “But long term I’m calling in a carpenter to take out both of the old trapdoors and repair the stage.”
“That seems safest,” Gabriela said.
“Meanwhile, we’ve got those orange traffic cones around both traps, and the public isn’t allowed onto the stage, so there shouldn’t be any danger.” Famous last words, I didn’t add.
“Well, I can’t wait until you’re open again.” Gabriela folded her napkin and placed it neatly over her dessert plate. (Did I not mention the dessert? Rice pudding. Amazing spices.) “I’ve been looking forward to your Eleanor Powell movies this weekend. You know how I feel about musicals.”
“I sincerely hope we don’t disappoint.”
I’d managed to put the troubles at the Palace out of my mind for a while, but now they all came rushing back. Hector must have read my thoughts.
“Gabby,” he said casually. “Nora has a theory about the people who might be behind all this. I don’t suppose you could do something magical on your computer and see if there’s any connection between our two main suspects?”
Her eyes flashed. “I thought you’d never ask.”
“Cora used to work with McMillan?” I repeated.
Gabriela was looking at her laptop screen. Hector and I had cleared the table while she’d tapped away at the keyboard. By the time we got back from the kitchen she had our connection.
“Until six years ago she was the office manager for a real estate firm in Noe Valley where he was the top salesman,” she now told us. “They both left at about the same time. He opened his own firm in the Financial District, and she…I don’t know what she did until she showed up working for June.”
“When was that?” I asked.
Gabriela tapped again. “Three years ago.”
“I can’t believe you found all that out so fast,” I marveled. “You’re a genius.”
“I’m really not,” she grinned. “Everything I told you is right there on LinkedIn.” She didn’t say “any fool could have found it,” but she didn’t have to.
“Still,” I said. “Thank you. I hereby grant you free passes to the Palace for life.”
She laughed. “For free passes let me keep digging. I’m sure I’ll be able to come up with something more.”
“A secret video of McMillan killing someone would be useful,” Hector said.
“Don’t get too ambitious,” I said, then, in my best Bette Davis voice: “Don’t let’s ask for the moon, we have the stars.”
Blank looks from both of them. They didn’t recognize the line from Now, Voyager (1942, Bette Davis and Paul Henreid).
“Sorry,” I said. “I tend to channel Bette Davis after a few glasses of wine.”
Hector was looking at me with something in his eye. “Perhaps we should call it a night.”
Hector walked me to the door of Robbie’s guest house and waited until I was inside with the bolt in place before calling “Goodnight, Nora” and walking away.
There was no goodnight kiss. Hector had never tried to kiss me. He hadn’t even so much as paused and lingered and looked at me like Paul Henreid lighting that cigarette for Bette Davis. Sure, Hector smoldered now and then, usually from a safe distance, with a table or a desk between us, but that was as far as it had gone. And to be fair, he probably couldn’t help but smolder. It seemed like his natural state.
But no, there had been no moves. And that was a tremendous relief.
I liked him. A lot. And I was attracted to him. Any woman would be. Any woman with a pulse. And at least one without. But no amount of attraction made up for the fact that I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready to let another man into my life. Not after Ted’s series of brutal betrayals. No, I wasn’t ready to start thinking about a life with someone else. Not until I’d established a life just for me.
I could only see about five minutes into my future, and that’s no state of mind to be in if you’re thinking about mixing your life up with someone else’s. And something told me that if anything did start with Hector, it wouldn’t be casual. It would be very mixed up.
So, to sum up for the jury…I. Was. Not. Ready.
But I kind of hoped I would be soon.
Now, Voyager
1942
This is one of those movies that I’ve seen a dozen times and never realized it was all abou
t sex until I tried to write about it. Yes, it’s about finding your identity and learning to stand up for yourself. It’s about what it means to be a grown woman with choices, and it’s even about the redemptive power of proper eyebrow grooming. But at its core, this is totally a movie about sex.
Bette Davis plays Charlotte Vale, and she’s a mess. When we first meet her it’s because her sister-in-law Lisa (Ilka Chase) has arranged for a psychiatrist (played with quiet warmth by usually-a-villain Claude Rains) to come to the family mansion in Boston for what amounts to an intervention.
Charlotte is middle-aged and beyond dumpy. She wears glasses because her mother thinks she should. She carries extra weight because her mother doesn’t believe in slimming. She wears baggy dresses and sensible shoes—you can guess why. Her mother (Gladys Cooper) is a domineering tyrant, who refers to Charlotte as “My ugly duckling.” And that’s when she’s being nice. Charlotte, we learn, is having a nervous breakdown. Who wouldn’t? The only thing that gives me hope for her is that she smokes in secret. Rebellion! Yes! (I mean, smoking itself, no, but rebellion, absolutely.)
The horrible mother agrees for Charlotte to go for a cure at the doctor’s Vermont sanitorium because she fears the shame that news of Charlotte’s crackup might bring to the sacred family name. Also because Claude Rains calls her out. “My dear Mrs. Vale, if you had deliberately and maliciously planned to destroy your daughter’s life you couldn’t have done it more completely.” Go, Claude.
It’s during a conversation with the doctor that we find out Charlotte wasn’t always a scared, sexless rabbit. Quite the contrary. When she was twenty, she had a shipboard romance while on a cruise with her mother. He was a dishy sailor and all the girls were after him, but he chose Charlotte because “I was so responsive.” Really. Do tell…Of course the couple is found out—found in mid-make-out session, in what Charlotte calls “the proudest moment of my life.” Interesting.
Mother, as you can imagine, brings down the hammer. And the result is the sad old spinster still hiding those cigarettes. Until…self-esteem happens. No, they didn’t call it that in 1942, but you know what good therapy and a healthy lifestyle can do for a woman. In a movie, at least. After months of healing Charlotte is ready to leave Vermont. But she isn’t going home. No, no, no! She’s going on another cruise! This one to South America, and notably without Mother.
This is where we have The Shot, people. The iconic shot of Charlotte stepping off the ship and into her new life. And you better believe she takes that step wearing heels! She’s so chic it’s insane. The glasses are gone, the eyebrows are perfect, and the lipstick totally on point. The dress is fitted to show off her new slim waist, and this shot is the best argument there will ever be for bringing back hats. Please, can we bring back hats?
There is, inevitably, A Man on the ship (Paul Henreid). He and Charlotte are thrown together and it’s awkward at first because she doesn’t know how to act around a normal, but then it isn’t awkward anymore because it’s perfect. They’re perfect for each other. We know they’re perfect for each other because of the way Max Steiner’s theme music swells every time they’re together. (“Wrong, would it be wrong to kiss? Seeing I feel like this…” Trust me, it’s dreamy.)
The only thing that mars all the perfection is the fact that the man—Jerry—is married. Yup. Unhappily married, as we learn from the wife of a friend, but he’s too much of a saint to leave the wife and abandon his emotionally fragile daughter. (Okay, okay, but maybe that wasn’t quite as cliché in 1942? Just go with it.)
They’re perfect for each other but they can’t be together. And it’s that longing, that just-out-of-reach love that they can see but they know they can’t have that keeps me (and thousands of gay men) coming back to this movie. I’ve never smoked, but when Jerry lights two cigarettes and takes one from his lips to put it on Charlotte’s, it’s a classic movie moment that’s still shockingly swoon-worthy. It’s almost a kiss. Almost.
You know how I just said they can’t be together? Ha! Not so! Because of a truck accident and a missed ship they get five glorious days in Rio. And Charlotte gets to be all kinds of “responsive” again. They are together, if only for a moment, but in the world of this movie adults know that sometimes that’s all you get. Sometimes you can only have “that little strip of territory that’s ours.” Sigh.
And then the trip is over, and Charlotte goes back to Boston, where her new backbone is very much in evidence. Mother is not a fan. But Charlotte, let’s not forget, is played by Bette Davis. Do you think she’ll crumble again? Not with Max Steiner’s music playing, she won’t! Not with her memories of being loved to give her strength. She may still be single, but Charlotte Vale is no old maid anymore.
There’s more, involving a new boyfriend and a chance meeting with Jerry’s daughter (!!) but I won’t tell you the rest. Because the last line of this movie is one of the best, most tear-jerking lines in all of movies, and I want you to earn it. Bette did.
Beauty thoughts:
Okay, so this movie has a disturbing inclination to equate being pretty with being lovable. How many of us have internalized that message from how many movies? Or, for that matter, from how many makeover shows? Cut it out, Hollywood! On the other hand, Charlotte’s pre-Vermont eyebrows were tragic.
Voyaging thoughts:
There has never been a more romantic place to say goodbye than a train station. Fact.
Movies My Friends Should Watch
Sally Lee
Chapter 33
A brief article appeared in the Entertainment section of the online Los Angeles Times the next morning.
San Francisco’s Palace Theater Gets A Second Act
We’re spoiled here in the City of Angels. Our collection of landmark movie theaters is second to none. So in this as in many things we might feel a little superior to our chilly Bay Area neighbors. But now one of LA’s own is taking a piece of cinema history and giving San Francisco’s Palace Theater a second act.
Okay, I should have known that the writer would lead with a little regional snark. And, by the way, I wasn’t one of “LA’s own.” I’d been born in Dayton, Ohio. But that was beside the point.
Nora Bishop—yes that Nora Bishop, one-time screenwriter and soon-to-be-ex of A-lister Ted Bishop—has a new project. She’s taken over the Palace and is turning it into a glittering reminder of what Hollywood’s Golden Age was all about. Cue Busby Berkeley’s chorus girls, because Miss Nora Paige (she’s already ditched her husband’s famous name) is showing nothing but classics at the Palace. Turns out the almost-ex is writing a second act for herself as well. We asked the classic film buff, why the Palace?
“It was made for these films,” she told us. “The theater has been retrofitted and brought totally up to date with the latest in comfort and technology, but it’s still true to its original design. So the experience is as close to stepping back in time as you can get—but with more comfortable seats. You may think you’ve seen your favorite film when you’ve seen it on TV, but just wait until you see it on the big screen. There’s truly nothing like it.”
But don’t expect her to be showing any of her husband’s films any time soon. “We’ll have to give them fifty years or so,” she said, smiling cheerfully. “To see if they stand the test of time.”
We also asked the movie maven about the ghost rumored to be haunting the Palace. Her response was typically upbeat: “I can only quote Gene Tierney, in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir: ‘Haunted! How perfectly fascinating!’”
Fascinating indeed. A classic film repertoire in a haunted movie palace? Sign me up.
This is the kind of piece that a team of public relations specialists could plant with forty-eight hours and one quick Skype call. I would have preferred if they hadn’t mentioned Ted and had concentrated on how incredibly safe and structurally sound the theater was—which is mainly what I’d told them about—but I’d take what I could
get. I could only hope the line about it being retrofitted and up to date would help to combat the rumors about the balcony being “faulty.” Because passing the inspection was only half of the job. The other half was getting customers back in the theater.
By the time I got to the Palace that morning the piece had been picked up by our local news site, SFGate, and the PR squad had zapped links to it all over social media. Someone sent it to Callie before she’d even had her breakfast.
“I mean, yay,” she told me when I found her in the lobby. “Did you give them that picture?”
“Albert had it,” I told her. “I just sent it to them yesterday.” Accompanying the article was a photo in glorious black and white of the Palace marquee taken on a summer night at a time when the customers lined up around the block and every person in line wore a hat.
“Albert called a while ago,” Callie said. “He said to tell you he’s staying home today.”
“Good.” I moved around the candy counter, drawn to the steaming pot of coffee. “I wouldn’t want him out in this rain.”
The drizzle had finally turned into something a little stronger. I’d fought with my umbrella all the way from Robbie’s guest house.
I was pouring coffee when I heard the blaring trumpets of the 20th Century Fox overture, announcing Marty’s arrival. I jumped and spilled hot liquid all over Albert’s freshly-polished glass counter.
I looked up at Marty as he shook himself dry by the lobby doors. His resemblance to an aging Saint Bernard had never been stronger.
Murder in the Balcony Page 22