Kathryn felt herself falling forward. What should have been “It makes my baking more ambitious!” flew out as a series of shrill wails. A strong hand caught her by the armpits and returned her to upright position.
“’Cause everything turns out so delicious!”
Kathryn ran out of breath before the lyrics ended, so she mimed as best she could, maintaining her smile as the curtain came down.
“That was a close one!” Betty Furness exclaimed. “You okay, hon?”
“Yes,” Kathryn assured her, “thanks to—” she patted the shoulders of the chorus boy with the pale blue eyes “—my quick-thinking knight in shining tap shoes.”
“I thought we were done for when I caught sight of Renee’s gems flying across the stage,” he said.
Kathryn wanted to get back to her dressing room and forget the whole thing. She had bigger worries today. “It would take more than a few unglued diamantes to unglue me. Thanks everyone!”
Kathryn hurried into the wings, up a half-flight of stairs and into her dressing room.
Gwendolyn jumped up. “It’s that cheap glue they made me use!” When Kathryn had suggested to Leo that Gwendolyn design and make the costumes for their extravaganza, he’d agreed but skimped on the budget. “You recovered so quickly, I doubt anybody noticed.”
Kathryn pressed her hands against her chest. What had happened in front of two thousand people wasn’t the only reason her heart was racing. “I don’t suppose—?”
Gwendolyn shook her head.
Kathryn dropped onto the chair in front of her vanity. “This wait is killing me.”
A month ago, when Kathryn had told Winchell about DiMaggio and Sinatra battering down the wrong door, she’d wanted to believe that he would hold up his end of the bargain. Winchell liked to think he had the scruples of Solomon the Wise, but she didn’t delude herself into thinking that he was any more principled than Bugsy Siegel.
She didn’t even give herself fifty-fifty odds that she’d ever see Thomas Danford’s file. “More like ten to one,” she wrote to Marcus. So she had been shocked, impressed, and elated when she arrived home a couple of weeks ago to find a note under her door telling her that Winchell was giving the FBI file to his ghostwriter, Herman Klurfeld, along with instructions to place the file directly into her hands. The note promised this would happen on Friday, December 10th but fell short on specifics.
The whole morning, Kathryn had busied herself with her column: the revenue for television broadcasters had surpassed radio; L.B. Mayer’s long-time secretary, Ida Koverman, had died; and McCarthy had at last been condemned by the Senate.
She didn’t know what Klurfeld looked like; every time someone approached her desk, she steadied herself. Two o’clock came and went. She’d hurried out of the office wondering if Klurfeld knew to find her at the Orpheum, and if he did, she hoped he’d appear before she went on stage. She didn’t want to be preoccupied during a roadshow that now ran ninety minutes and featured half a dozen musical numbers, a chorus of twelve, a magician, a comedian, and four costume changes. The joke around the company was that it was now called “Cecil B. DeMille Presents.”
Now that the show was over, she had to vacate the dressing room by seven to make Romanoff’s by eight. Leo would be swinging by as soon as he had wrapped up in the control booth.
“Come on.” Gwendolyn said. “Let’s get you into your street clothes.”
She was reaching for Kathryn’s zipper when there was a knock on the door.
They froze, staring at each other.
Gwendolyn mouthed, “What are you waiting for?”
Kathryn pulled open the door to find a black woman dressed in a severe suit of gray wool and a plain cream blouse that barely contained the matronly swell of her enormous bosom. “Mrs. Wyatt! What a surprise!”
She steamed into Kathryn’s dressing room like a battleship.
“May I present Gwendolyn Brick?” Kathryn stationed herself by Gwennie’s side. “Cornelia Wyatt is the head of the California chapter of the National Council of Negro Women.”
“Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”
Kathryn checked the clock above her vanity. “How can I help you?”
“You’re a busy woman, Miss Massey, so I’ll come to the point.”
Holy hell! What if Klurfeld is waiting at the Garden?
“Every February we award our highest honor to someone who has done much to elevate the status of Negro women. We wish to present you with our Woman of the Year award.”
Gwendolyn stifled a yip.
“That’s—unexpected,” Kathryn said.
“So you accept?”
“It’s just that, well, shouldn’t your Woman of the Year be a—a—”
“Negro? Normally, yes. But we received that blessed windfall solely because of you, and it made an enormous difference to the lives of more women than you could possibly imagine.”
Behind Mrs. Wyatt came another knock.
“What an honor. Of course I’ll accept,” Kathryn blurted out. “Perhaps you could contact me at my office with the details?” She shook the woman’s hand forcefully. “Thank you so much.”
Turning her around, Kathryn opened the door to someone whose face she was more familiar with than she cared to be. He was holding a large envelope.
Kathryn marshaled Mrs. Wyatt out into the hallway and waved her goodbye. Her smile fell away as she turned to face Felix Miller. He was Winchell’s eyes and ears in LA, and Kathryn didn’t trust a word that came out of his lipless pie hole.
Kathryn prodded him into the room as she scouted the hallway for Leo; he was nowhere in sight. “I was expecting Herman Klurfeld.”
Miller winced. “The poor bastard came down with appendicitis. They raced him to Queen of Angels. Room 303 if you don’t believe me.”
“I’d believe Charles Ponzi before anything you said.”
Gwendolyn picked up the telephone and asked the operator to connect her with Klurfeld’s hospital.
Kathryn nodded at the envelope in Miller’s hands.
“This is it,” he said. “Whatever ‘it’ is.” He showed her the adhesive tape secured across the back.
Gwendolyn hung up. “The third-floor nursing station confirmed that Klurfeld is recovering from an appendectomy.”
Miller ceremoniously lowered his package into Kathryn’s outstretched hands.
“You’ll be okay to see your own way out, I hope.”
They waited until Miller closed the door behind him. Kathryn tore along the top and pulled out the contents.
It was a regular-sized folder that anybody could buy at a stationery store; however, the label on the front looked official.
PROPERTY OF THE
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
CLASSIFIED: TOP SECRET
SUBJECT: THOMAS DANFORD
Kathryn gasped softly. “It’s really his!”
“But honey?” Gwendolyn whispered. “Isn’t it a little thin?”
Kathryn ran her fingernail across what couldn’t have been any more than fifteen memos filled with boring Bureau-speak. “There’s not enough here to exonerate a jaywalker.” Kathryn said. “So the FBI doesn’t have anything on my father?”
“Or,” Gwendolyn replied, “somebody’s lifted the juicy stuff.”
* * *
The next day, Kathryn laid a hand on the door of the Melrose Detective Agency. “If Nelson is in there,” she told Gwendolyn, “we’re keeping everything strictly professional.”
The office smelled of wood polish, as though Nelson had been expecting them and done a thorough spring clean. He’d treated himself to a better haircut, and had pressed his suit. Kathryn’s heart kicked up a notch. Damn you for looking even better than you did last month.
“Hello,” he said mildly, then recognized Gwendolyn. “Well, hello!”
Kathryn held up the FBI folder. “I have it.”
Nelson called Dudley in from the other office and accepted the file from Kathryn. They took seats aroun
d Nelson’s desk as he opened it up.
“A little on the meager side, isn’t it?” Dudley asked.
Kathryn could feel Nelson’s stare, begging her to look at him, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. “I fear we’ve been gypped,” she told Dudley. “Herman Klurfeld took ill; it was Felix Miller who delivered the package.”
“The plot thickens.”
“Who is Felix Miller?” Nelson asked.
She longed to drink him in, if only to tell herself that she’d made the right decision accepting Leo’s marriage proposal. But she was less sure now that she was close enough to hear him breathe. She opened her purse and extracted a cigarette. Nelson flicked his lighter and held it out for her.
She told him, “Miller is Winchell’s man in Hollywood.” His gaze scorched her face. “A real piece of work. Last summer, Confidential had a spread on the Garden of Allah—”
“‘A Rainbow of Colors Dancing in the Garden of Eden’?”
“He took the photos.”
“A real charmer, huh?”
“A peach,” Gwendolyn chimed in.
“So he’s tight with Robert Harrison?”
“That son-of-a-bitch is tight with anyone who’ll pay him enough.”
“Somebody’s made off with the lion’s share of your father’s file,” Dudley said, “and Miller is a likely suspect. Miss Brick, did you get a good look at him?”
When Gwendolyn told him that she’d seen Miller several times, Dudley asked her to accompany him into his office where he kept a folder with dozens of photographs of known tipsters around town. “We might get lucky,” he said, ushering Gwendolyn out of the room.
Nelson asked, “What else can you tell me?”
Kathryn flicked ash into an ashtray with the Ciro’s logo stenciled in black on the bottom. “I can tell you that Ciro’s don’t appreciate having their glassware stolen.”
“Kathryn?” he said. She didn’t respond. “Kat?”
He had to go and say the one word he knew would get a rise out of her: the nickname he used after they’d finished making love and were submerging into blissful slumber.
She summoned the courage to look at him, and wished she hadn’t. Those blue-gray eyes she knew so well churned with emotion.
“Please don’t,” she said. “Let’s stick to business. I can’t—it’s difficult for me to be here—”
“I never stopped thinking of you.” His voice reached barely a hair above a whisper.
“Don’t! It’s too late—”
“Do you know what there is to do in Nome?”
“Not much, I’m guessing.”
“Sweet F.A. I read a heap of books, and I got real good at Solitaire, but mostly I drove myself nuts thinking about you. I even started drawing you. I had to do it from memory because they gave me half an hour to pack and I didn’t have a photo handy. So I sat there sketching you from memory over and over and over.”
“I didn’t know you were artistic.”
He grinned. “I’m not. You wouldn’t have recognized yourself, but it was all I had.” He planted his elbows on the top of his desk and pressed his clasped hands to his mouth.
Kathryn longed to tell him that she thought about him too, usually over the silliest reminders like ugly lampshades and whenever she passed the Radio Room. “I’m engaged now. Let’s leave the past—”
“I’d have thought you’d mention it in your column.”
When Kathryn had accepted Leo’s proposal, she’d reserved the right to make the announcement, telling him, “Timing is as important as the news itself.” The tremor of annoyance in Leo’s eyes had been hard to miss, but he agreed and she changed the subject. Six weeks later, she still hadn’t announced their engagement.
“We’re in no rush,” she told Nelson.
“Maybe you’re not, but I bet he’s wondering what’s going on.” He rounded the desk to her side. Planting himself in Gwendolyn’s chair, he took her hands in his. “You don’t love this Leo guy the way you love me.”
Kathryn tried to tug free of his grip but he had the strength of a gorilla. “You’re not the last word in how I feel.”
Those hands! So warm and firm, but calloused from manual labor. He could build anything with those hands. Cabinets. Picture frames. Doors. Window-box planters. Oh God, how she loved the way he’d run them over her body.
Abruptly, he released her. The chair scuffed the linoleum as he pushed it out from under him and retreated to his side of the desk.
Gwendolyn emerged from Dudley’s office and placed a photograph in front of Kathryn. It was a blurry Felix Miller taken with a zoom lens, but it was him.
“Miller and Winchell go way back,” Dudley said. “So do Miller and Harrison.”
“No surprise there.” Kathryn could still feel the goosebumps tingling her scalp. Leo didn’t raise them like that.
Dudley took a seat. “Miller is also a known associate of Vincent Haynes.”
“Should I know who that is?”
“Haynes was the lead Voss Vanguard member who coordinated Voss’s LA meeting.”
“You think Voss has a hand in the missing pages?”
“Always go with a person’s motive,” Nelson said.
Kathryn glanced at Gwendolyn, who was too preoccupied with studying Nelson’s face to notice. “Last I heard, Winchell and Harrison aren’t buddy-buddy anymore, so you have to wonder where Miller’s loyalties lie.”
Nelson tapped his cigarette lighter against the ink blotter on his desk. “With guys like that, it’s best to assume they lie with their own best interests.”
“In other words, whoever’s willing to pay him the most.”
“Exactly.” Dudley ran his finger along the spine of the FBI file. “My hunch is that Miller believes his best interests now lie with Mister Amnesia.”
Kathryn dropped her face into her hands. “I thought I was done with him.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it.”
Kathryn looked up at Dudley. “Meaning?”
“I called the veterans’ hospital yesterday. He checked himself out a few days ago, and nobody’s heard from him since.”
“So he disappeared around the same time that my father’s drastically abridged FBI file arrived in LA.”
Nelson stopped tapping his lighter. “Personally, I don’t believe in coincidences.”
She met his trenchant stare. I know what you’re doing. “Neither do I.”
“Miss Massey,” Dudley said, “without the full contents of that file, it will be well-nigh impossible to build a case for exoneration. I believe our best chance to recover the missing documents is to find Voss.”
“He’s a slippery one,” Gwendolyn warned.
“This could take some time, so I need your assurance that you’re committed to the chase.”
Dudley looked so much like Fatty Arbuckle that Kathryn wondered how she hadn’t noticed already. “Absolutely,” she assured him. “I want to see this through to the end.” She yearned to look at Nelson, but didn’t dare. “Wherever that may lead us.”
CHAPTER 34
Gwendolyn leaned on the rim of her bathroom basin and took deep breaths to alleviate the persistent ache south of her waistline.
It didn’t work.
She had been feeling lousy for more than a week, but not so bad that she’d taken off time she couldn’t afford to go see a doctor who would tell her that tenderness was the price she paid for an erratic menstrual cycle.
Since she was fourteen, Gwendolyn had dealt with periods that were as unpredictable as earthquakes, and about as much fun. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d left home without a tampon.
But this ache was different. She’d never felt one buried so deeply in her pelvis. At first, it had felt like indigestion. But day by day, the discomfort had swelled into a twinge that became a throb, but not bad enough to call out the National Guard. Over the weekend, the throb had become a sluggish ache, but this morning it was now a conspicuous pain.
Promising h
erself that she’d make an appointment in the morning, she checked her face in the mirror. God almighty, I am pale, aren’t I? She was halfway through brushing on extra rouge when she heard the squeak of aging hinges.
“It’s just me,” Kathryn called from the living room. “How come I don’t see any canapés?”
“I’m a bit behind schedule.”
Kathryn appeared at the bathroom door. “You okay?”
Gwendolyn shooed Kathryn toward the kitchen. After all the finagling she’d done to make tonight happen, she wasn’t going to let a few stomach cramps get in the way. “We’re making do with cheese and crackers. I’ve got pickles and some sort of relish. There’s a green apple in the crisper. If we slice it very finely—” She caught sight of Kathryn’s questioning look. “What?”
“You’re going to have to pick up your culinary game now that you’re dating Clark Gable.”
“I’m not dating him!”
“What are you doing?”
Gwendolyn ripped open the top flap of the Ritz crackers box. “I don’t know if there’s a word for it.”
After they had finished their dressing-room dalliance during Soldier of Fortune’s first lunch break, Gwendolyn and Clark had reassembled their outfits while stagehands banged hammers and connected electrical cords on the other side of the walls. As he zippered Gwendolyn back into her dress, Clark had kissed her neck and whispered, “They’d be jealous if they knew how lucky I got.”
It was a flattering remark, but she’d thought no more about it. Clark had much to prove with his first picture since leaving MGM, and was fully absorbed by the task at hand.
So she’d been mildly surprised when the company broke for the weekend at Saturday lunchtime and he’d invited her into his dressing room. It was the same Caesar salad and cold cuts, but he’d wasted no time getting down to business. And what delicious business it was. Even better the second time around.
Afterwards, he’d said to her, “I’d enjoy myself more if we weren’t—” He circled his hands around each other.
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