Citizen Hollywood (Hollywood's Garden of Allah novels Book 3)

by Martin Turnbull

  CHAPTER 16

  Gwendolyn heard Kathryn let out a little snort as their taxi started to climb into the Hollywood Hills. “I can’t believe you were going to go to this party on your own!” Kathryn’s voice sounded a little ragged.

  “I still don’t understand what you’re so worked up about,” Gwendolyn replied. “You’ve been to Countess Dorothy’s parties before.”

  “I have,” Kathryn said, “but not since she took up with—” She paused to adjust her straw sun hat and eye the cab driver. “—a certain someone. And the company she keeps nowadays is a matter of some concern.”

  “Come on, now,” Gwendolyn said. “Dorothy di Frasso is one of the biggest socialites in Los Angeles. She’s hardly likely to go around inviting people to a—you-know-what party. It wasn’t her fault I fainted out front of the Trocadero and upstaged the Talmadge sisters, but she felt partially responsible because she got me the job, and she wanted to make up for it. That’s all this is.”

  They said nothing more until the cab driver rounded a corner and revealed a castle-like mansion on the left-hand side of the steep road. It was painted white and had somebody’s idea of ye olde worlde stonework around the base. A turret with a witch’s-hat roof—the sort of thing Rapunzel would lean out of—topped the house.

  They got out of the cab and paid the driver.

  “Classy enough for you?” Gwendolyn asked.

  “Ask me again in half an hour.”

  Nobody answered the thick, stained-oak front door, so they tried the handle and found it wasn’t locked. It swung open on black arrowhead-shaped wrought iron hinges and they stepped into an octagonal foyer, then followed the brassy sounds of a jazz band up a short flight of brick stairs. Deeper inside the house, they heard laughter and the clinking of champagne flutes. Through another doorway, dozens of people were dotted around a spacious, light-filled living room that opened out onto a large back patio. A platinum blonde in a super-tight white dress told them, “The bar’s out back near the pool.”

  They stepped onto the patio and looked out across the canyon, past a grove of Italian cypress, and up to the Hollywoodland sign. Farther out in the opposite direction, the view across Los Angeles was so clear that Gwendolyn could even make out the blue Pacific. A smattering of homes, most of them large like this one, were starting to dot the hillsides, but Gwendolyn felt like she was a million miles from the hubbub of Sunset Boulevard.

  They walked over to the bar at the rear of the patio, where a bartender in a red jacket was scooping ice into a metal bucket. He spun around to ask them what they’d like and Gwendolyn hooted with delight.

  “Ritchie!”

  Ritchie was Gwendolyn’s favorite waiter from the Vine Street Brown Derby. He’d been her waiter the evening she launched her ill-fated GWENDOLYN WAS HERE campaign. He’d helped Kathryn out once, too, when she started hacking at Louella Parsons’ throne. Gwendolyn knew it was ages since she’d last seen him, but he didn’t look any different. He still had his big round baby face, still looked paler than a bucket of milk, and was still so thin it looked like he hadn’t had a decent meal since before they invented the talkies.

  “How lovely to see you,” Kathryn exclaimed.

  But Ritchie’s face was bunched up in horror. “What are you two doing here?!”

  “We got invited,” Gwendolyn told him.

  Ritchie looked at Gwendolyn like she’d just slapped his mother. “You—you’re friends of the boss?”

  “Depends on who the boss is,” Kathryn said.

  On the far side of the pool, someone let out a whooping laugh. Gwendolyn turned to see who it belonged to and immediately wished she hadn’t. It was George Raft, one of Warner Bros.’ major stars. He was standing with a couple of big-busted chorine types and a guy with jet-black hair that was carefully pomaded into place.

  Kathryn turned to Ritchie and leaned in to whisper, “The guy George Raft is with, please tell me that’s not the boss. Please tell me you work for Dorothy di Frasso.”

  Ritchie pressed his upper teeth onto his lower lip until it drained of color. “It was the countess who invited you?” Gwendolyn nodded. “She and the boss had a huge fight last night. I was still cleaning up spilled booze and busted vases a half hour before the first guests arrived today. I think they called it quits last night.”

  Kathryn pulled her mouth into a tense line. “Oh, Gwennie.” Gwendolyn stared at her roommate but was afraid to ask who the chap with the black hair was. Kathryn gripped her arm. “It’s Ben Siegel.”

  Gwendolyn felt like she was trapped in that horrible corset again. She tried to catch her breath but couldn’t seem to fill her lungs. I’ve dragged my best friend into a mob party.

  “You really shouldn’t be here.” Ritchie maintained his professional waiter smile without moving his lips.

  “But you should be?” Gwendolyn asked.

  She dared not look at anyone except Ritchie as he made his way around to their side of the bar and told the girls to follow him. They trailed him along the perimeter of the patio and were almost inside the house when Bugsy shouted out, “Gwendolyn! Baby! Where you going?”

  Gwendolyn froze. Siegel and Raft strode toward them; when Siegel waved, the chunky diamond in his ring caught the sun and flicked spitting bullets of light at them. It was only then that Gwendolyn got a good look at LA’s most infamous gangster. She was shocked to see it was the handsome guy who’d revived her on the sidewalk the night of the Wind party. He’d been so kind and gentle to her, giving her room to breathe, getting her water, helping her off the sidewalk and finding some woman—a cleaning lady who only spoke Spanish—to help her out of the suffocating corset. But now she could see him in the sober light of day, with his meticulous suit and molasses-black hair, his china-blue eyes and deliberately smooth voice tempered with the inflection of a New York streetwise punk. I’m such a chump, she told herself. How could I ever think this guy was the maître d’?

  “Where you off to?” Siegel asked.

  “I was showing them to the powder room,” Ritchie said.

  Siegel didn’t seem to hear him. “Ladies, I want you to meet George Raft. George, this is Gwendolyn Brick. Miss Brick here was my Scarlett O’Hara the other night.”

  Raft wasn’t nearly as tall as Gwendolyn had expected, but he did have a threatening presence. It was no wonder he played bad guys in the movies.

  “Must have been a hell of a night,” Raft said with a leer.

  “The poor girl fainted, didn’t you, honey?” Siegel said. “Damned corset. But you’re A-okay now, huh?”

  Gwendolyn nodded. She didn’t need to look at Kathryn to see her Get us out of here face. She felt faint. This could be disastrous to Kathryn’s career, especially if Louella or Hedda caught wind of it, and it’d all be her fault.

  “No harm done, by the looks of things,” Raft said, not bothering to hide the fact that he was raking her with his eyes like she was some two-bit hooker from the east end of Hollywood Boulevard.

  “I’m going to have to be terribly rude,” Gwendolyn said with her best Southern-belle smile, “but champagne goes straight through a girl, if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh, sure, sure,” Bugsy said. “Let’s chat some more when you’re back.”

  Ritchie led them inside, down a half-flight of steps, and through a long corridor until they were under the turret. “You need to scram.”

  “But what are you doing here?” Gwendolyn asked. “Mixed up with this crowd?”

  “I have a—what you might call a gambling problem. The horses. Santa Anita.”

  “Oh, Ritchie, no.”

  “My parents had a rough trot of it during the Dustbowl and they needed dough. I’ve got a knack for picking winners, but I had a bad streak a while back. Real bad. I tried to bet my way out of it, but like a donkey’s ass, I just got myself in deeper. So here I am working it off. It’ll take a while, but he pays me well, and . . .” He swayed his head some more.

  “. . . and once you’ve paid him bac
k, you think he’ll just let you walk away?” Kathryn asked. “Oh, Ritchie, come on. These guys don’t play nice.”

  “It ain’t the whole story.”

  Gwendolyn could see a film of sweat gloss Ritchie’s forehead, but before he could say another word, the blonde in the super-tight white dress reappeared.

  “Say!” she said, elbowing Kathryn, “I just figured out who you are. You’re Kathryn Massey, aren’t you? From the Hollywood Reporter.”

  Kathryn regarded the blonde unblinkingly. “You’re right,” she admitted, “I am.”

  “We’ve never met, in case you’re wondering,” the blonde said. Gwendolyn could see Kathryn relax her shoulders an almost imperceptible notch. “I was in that Bob Hope picture, The Cat and the Canary, you reviewed a few months ago. You mentioned me in your review. I can’t imagine you even remember, but it sure meant a lot to me. It was my first mention in the press and I promised myself that if I ever met you, I’d be sure to thank you. It meant so much.”

  “Of course I remember,” Kathryn said, although from the way she was fingering the button on her jacket, Gwendolyn could tell she didn’t at all.

  “I can’t wait to tell my girlfriends I met you!” the blonde gushed, making a grab for Kathryn’s arm. Kathryn pulled it away. “They’ll be so impressed. We all read you every day.”

  “How nice of you to say,” Kathryn replied, then turned to Gwendolyn with a beseeching look.

  “I’m so sorry,” Gwendolyn told the girl, “but we were just on our way out.”

  “Oh, sure, sure,” she said. “I just wanted to keep a promise I made to myself.”

  Ritchie shepherded them into an alcove where a pointy window looked out onto the street.

  “Ritchie,” Gwendolyn said, “what do you mean it ain’t the whole story?”

  He whispered so quietly she could barely hear him. “The FBI approached me a while back to report everything I see.”

  “You’re spying on the mob? For the FBI? Ritchie!”

  “It was going to take me eleven years to work off my debts to Siegel. The FBI promised to give me enough to pay him off in two.”

  Oh, Ritchie no, Gwendolyn thought. You’re such a nice, regular kind of fella. “You don’t deserve this,” she said.

  “I got myself in deep, and this was my only way out.”

  “If you don’t get shot first.”

  “It was the lesser of two evils. Look, you really should get out of here.”

  Gwendolyn grabbed Kathryn’s arm and headed toward the front door.

  “No, no!” Ritchie insisted. “The FBI has this party staked out.”

  “Are you telling me the FBI saw me walk into a mob party?” Kathryn’s face was red as she started pawing her handbag like she was about to throw it at Gwendolyn.

  “You can assume they did.” Ritchie pointed to a door behind him. “This leads to a path that takes you down the far end of the garden. There’s a fence, but it’s not too high. Four feet, maybe five.”

  Gwendolyn clenched her jaw and cringed. She knew what Kathryn was thinking: And we’re going to have to climb a fence?

  “There are some old moonshine barrels lined up along it. Use them to get yourselves over.”

  “And then?”

  “Steer clear of the road until you’re down the hill. As long as you can’t be seen from the patio, you should be okay.” He pushed the door open. “Go!”

  * * *

  “Kathryn, I’m so, so, so sorry for all this.”

  “You weren’t to know,” Kathryn replied curtly. She was gauging the height of the wall with the weathered barrels lined up against it. She grabbed both sides of the seam along her right thigh and with a grunt, yanked the two panels apart. The stitching separated like a cheap zipper nearly all the way to her waist. “You owe me a new dress for this.”

  Even with the barrels, climbing the brick wall wasn’t any picnic, but they managed to scrape and scramble over. They fought their way through thorny Manzanita bushes and hairy clumps of crabgrass, and lurched and wobbled down the steep canyon slope until they were more than four hundred yards away.

  Just as Gwendolyn became aware of the sound of a car rounding the corner farther down the hill, Kathryn yanked her off her feet. They dove headlong into a cassava bush as a gleaming yellow Packard convertible rolled past.

  They peered through the bush as the Packard pulled up outside Siegel’s place, then Kathryn rasped, “That was Roy!”

  “Who was?”

  “The driver.” Kathryn paused, then gasped. “He’s going in.”

  CHAPTER 17

  The long-term residents at the Garden of Allah liked to tell their guests that the pool was shaped like the Black Sea, because Alla Nazimova was from Yalta and it reminded her of home. But Marcus had a problem with that story for several reasons.

  Although the pool vaguely took the shape of the Black Sea, it also resembled a grand piano, the continent of Africa, and the island of Sicily. Also, Madame didn’t have the happiest of childhoods and it seemed unlikely to Marcus that she’d want to build anything that reminded her of the place she’d escaped as soon as she was able. He asked her about it several times, but she never gave him a straight reply, which made him wonder if she rather liked the legend.

  Whatever the reason, it did provide the Constantinople side of the pool with an area that always caught the sun, and that’s where Marcus was when he realized Taggert might be right about Hugo after all.

  Marcus, Kathryn, Gwendolyn, and Gwendolyn’s friend Alice were sitting around a wooden table on the pool deck one cool Sunday afternoon in February, talking about whether or not Marcus should go to the premiere of Strange Cargo. The picture had turned into a bit of a white elephant after it received a Condemned rating from the Catholic Legion of Decency for “irreverent use of Scripture” and “lustful complications,” which left the studio scrambling to make changes.

  “I think you should go,” Gwendolyn said as she mended Kathryn’s dress. Things had been a bit cool between the two of them since the mob party, but recently Kathryn had cracked a joke about squatting among the Manzanita bushes like a pygmy on the lam, which Marcus took to mean they were inching their way back to being chums.

  “Sounds like that picture’s turning into a dog,” Alice told him, flicking through Vogue Paris, looking at clothes she’d never be able to afford. “If you ask me, you dodged a bullet.” She and Gwendolyn were equally ambitious aspiring actresses, and resembled one another, too. But Marcus thought Alice’s homemade peroxide job and her bargain-basement jewelry made her come off looking like Gwendolyn’s cousin from the five and dime. “But I’d still go. Don’t give those front office wiseasses the goddamn satisfaction. Those guys are such louses.”

  You should know, Marcus thought, glancing up from his crossword. You’ve slept with enough of them; not that it’s gotten you anywhere.

  “I agree with Alice.” Kathryn looked at Marcus as if to say, I can’t believe I just said that. Kathryn was flipping through a copy of Picturegoer, a British movie magazine someone had left behind. “No matter how it’s turned out, you should be proud of your work, even if you’re the only one in the audience who knows you wrote it.”

  “I think I’ll just end up resenting the whole movie on principle alone,” Marcus said, “so I figure why waste my time?”

  Kathryn laid her magazine down. “Your family will see your name up on the screen,” she said. “And what better movie than something like William Tell?”

  Alice sat up. “You’re doing William Tell?” she asked. “You maybe got a part in it for me? Like the romantic lead, for instance?”

  Marcus pictured Alice with her chipped nail polish and her chewing gum, decked out in fourteenth-century garb. He wasn’t sure what women wore back then, but he couldn’t imagine it’d show off her curves, which were her best asset. Pretty much her only asset.

  “Don’t hold your breath, Alice,” he said. “It probably won’t have one. It’s all about William, his son,
the villain Gessler, and the rebellion that led to the independence of the Swiss Confederacy. Apparently there was no time for smooching a comely Fräulein along the way.” Taggert had just rejected Marcus’ latest effort to shoehorn a romance into the story.

  “No love interest?” Alice flicked over a page without even looking at it. “That’s just nuts.”

  “You talking about William Tell?”

  Everyone looked up to see Hugo dressed smartly in black pants, white shirt, crimson red tie with a bold fleur-de-lys pattern, and a dark blue jacket.

  Marcus nodded. “I’ve been trying to squeeze some sort of romance into the story, but it all comes out so contrived.” He looked at Kathryn, whose eyes were fixed on Hugo’s jacket.

  “Of course it’s contrived,” Hugo said. “Ninety-five percent of what we do is contrived. Don’t worry, you’ll get there. Just keep at it.”

  “Get a load of you, all dressed up, jazzy-snazzy,” Gwendolyn said.

  “Yeah,” Hugo said. “My pal Preston is an animator over at Disney. He worked on their new feature, Pinocchio. It takes an army of artists to make one of those cartoons, too many to invite to the premiere, so he hasn’t seen it yet.”

  “I hear it’s impressive.” Kathryn looked at Marcus, shot her eyes back to the jacket then back at Marcus, and raised her eyebrows ever so slightly.

  Marcus took a closer look, then forced his eyes back onto the LA Times puzzle. The shade of Hugo’s Peruvian-wool jacket was called Scandinavian Midnight Blue. The unusual white-and-blue striped buttons were made of enameled Bakelite mounted on sterling silver. It was available exclusively at a menswear store a few blocks down from the Garden of Allah called Silverwoods, and it cost $24.95. Marcus knew all this because he bought the exact same jacket a week ago and was planning to wear it that night.

  Marcus lifted his elbows onto the patio table, bunched his hands together as if in prayer, and pressed the knuckles of his thumbs against his lips. Slowly, he pulled in air through his nostrils and looked over at Kathryn. Her thoughts couldn’t have been clearer if she’d scrawled them across her forehead in India ink.