The Twenty-Year Death

by Ariel S. Winter

  “He hasn’t come back,” he said, and tried his million-dollar smile, but his face looked pinched, and his eyes were afraid. He set the script down. “You will find him, won’t you?”

  “I charge twenty-five dollars a day plus expenses and I get one hundred dollars up front as a retainer.”

  His face lost any pretense now. He was very troubled. “That won’t be a problem. That doesn’t matter. He doesn’t even need to come back. I just want to know that he’s all right.”

  “You said he’s done this before when you’ve fought. Where did he go?”

  “He never gave me specifics. That was part of our unspoken arrangement. He could go on an occasional bender but we would act as though it hadn’t happened. I know that he would get high, shoot up.”

  “H?”

  “Morphine, I think. Maybe it was heroin. His eyes were always glassy. Sometimes he’d end up with bruises on the insides of his arms. He’s very delicate.”

  “Any friends, family he might have gone to?”

  “I don’t think so. Definitely no family. Greg isn’t from San Angelo. Maybe friends, but I never met any. I know he would go to the Blacklight, Choices, all those Market clubs. If he was feeling lucky, maybe the Tip. He knew people who went there.”

  “Who?”

  “Well, me, for one.”

  The Tip was Gilplaine’s club. Of course it had to be the Tip. I didn’t know the other places, but I wasn’t the type who would know them. “Clubs close. He would have had to sleep somewhere.”

  “I told you. We never spoke about details.”

  “Do you have a photo of him?”

  “No.”

  There was a sound at the door and I turned to find Vera Merton standing there in a bright red blouse with an oriental pattern and a muted red skirt that stopped just before the tops of her brown calfskin high-heeled boots.

  “I step out for a moment, and I miss everything.”

  She touched my shoulder as she went past me and I caught the scent of cinnamon and cloves. She went around Stark’s chair and settled herself in the one beside him, putting her boots up on the wicker ottoman.

  “This is Mr. Foster,” Stark said. “He’s here about Greg.”

  She smiled, and her smile had no concern dampening it at all. “I think maybe we saw one another yesterday. Is that right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She bit her lower lip and then said, “This has been a horrible horrible day.” It sounded like the sort of thing she might say on a day when it rained too much.

  Stark said, “I know that I’m not giving you very much information, but it’s all I’ve got. I met Greg when he was nearly just off the bus and since then he’s been living here. He didn’t have much of a life outside of the house.”

  “And you never went out in public with him,” I said.

  He stiffened and said, “Not never. But rarely. I’m sure you’ll understand, and you’ll understand why this matter has to be kept private. If the studio hired you, I know you can be trusted.”

  “The studio doesn’t feel that way this morning. I was the one who found Mandy Ehrhardt.”

  Miss Merton winced, almost as though she were remembering the ghastly scene herself.

  Stark said, “I didn’t know.”

  “Why would you have?” I said.

  “Was it awful?” Miss Merton said, and now her face was pale and her voice unsteady.

  “It always is,” I said.

  “Hey, Johnny,” a man called from inside, and then appeared at the entrance to the porch. He was tall with dark hair, wearing dress pants and shirtsleeves, very neat, but the back of his shirt wasn’t tucked in all of the way. He stopped short when he saw me, and ran his hand through his hair. I’d seen him yesterday, too.

  “Tommy, this is Mr. Foster,” Miss Merton said. “He’s a private eye. Daddy hired him to look after Chloë.”

  “Oh?” Tommy said.

  “But now I’m working for Mr. Stark,” I said.

  “John,” Stark said, almost on reflex. “Please.”

  “Smashing,” Tommy said. Up close, his breath carried a hint of gin on it as he exhaled. “I hope it all works out.” He darted glances at each of us in turn. “Well, everybody...I need to see a man about a horse.” And he gave a little bow with his head. As he walked, he faced backwards, pointing at Stark. “Don’t you go anywhere, Johnny. We need to talk.” Then he slipped inside the house.

  “Is he always like that this early in the morning?” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Miss Merton said.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Excuse me,” Stark said. We both looked at him. “Can’t we please get back to Greg? I’m concerned that he might have done something to hurt himself. With drugs or...” He shook his head and made a distasteful face. “I just want to make sure he’s safe.”

  “And to get him to come back.”

  “If he wants to,” Stark said. “But finding him is what matters. At least you’ve seen Greg, which is a place to start from.”

  “If you’ll allow me to be blunt, John, that’s nothing to start from. And if you’ll allow me to be even blunter, all you’ve given me is that he’s a queer dope user. Well, I guess that narrows it down a little.”

  “There’s no need to be nasty,” Stark said, and he seemed genuinely hurt.

  “I’m not being nasty, I’m just making sure I’ve got the facts since it seems some of them have only been implied and I don’t want to work from the wrong implication.”

  Stark nodded. “You have the facts right.”

  I said nothing.

  Miss Merton said, “So where will you start?” The color had come back into her face.

  “I’ll start with the crime blotters to make sure he wasn’t picked up on a charge or thrown in the drunk tank or any other reason that the police might have gotten involved.”

  “I should have thought of that,” Stark said.

  “You wouldn’t have gotten anywhere and might have caused yourself some embarrassment. I can call people I know and can keep your name out of it. If those calls are a washout, well, I suppose I can try Hub Gilplaine. He and I are old friends these days.”

  Stark nodded. He looked satisfied. “Potts can give you a check on the way out.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I know you’re good for it.”

  There was an awkward silence in which Stark looked out at his lawn, Miss Merton looked at her feet, and I watched the two of them.

  “You’re sure there’s nothing more you can give me?” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “I’ll call you when I’ve got something to report. It might not be today.”

  Stark looked up, shocked. “What if he’s on the street?”

  “It’s warm out,” I said. “You do understand, you’ve given me basically nothing to go on.”

  He returned his gaze to the horizon. “Of course,” he said.

  Miss Merton said, “We’re all just so shaken by Mandy Ehrhardt’s death.”

  Maybe she was and maybe she wasn’t. Stark was shaken all right, and probably had cried all morning, but not over Mandy Ehrhardt.

  I left them to commiserate, and let myself back into the house. The butler met me before I got out of the music room.

  “Is there anything you require?” he said.

  I didn’t stop, and he fell in beside me. “Is Mr. Stark good friends with Miss Merton and her brother?” He didn’t answer at first and I could see him try to think of a way to reply. I turned to him. We were in the main entrance. There were blinding patches of white on the marble floor in line with the windows. “Mr. Stark just hired me to find Greg Taylor. I think that he would want his staff to be cooperative, so that I can conduct my investigation.”

  The butler still hesitated, but said, “Yes, Mr. and Miss Merton are regular guests here. Their father, too. Many people from the studio are.”

  “They would all have known Mr. Taylor?”

  “Yes
.”

  “How about you? How well did you know Mr. Taylor?”

  A disdainful expression came over his face. “We were hardly fraternal,” the butler said.

  “Of course,” I said, and walked away from him, my shoes echoing in the hall.

  THIRTEEN

  I was just getting into my car when the front door opened again. “Mr. Foster!” Vera Merton ran on her tiptoes like a ballerina. “Wait.”

  I waited and she stopped short on the other side of the car. If she had been upset inside, she didn’t show it now.

  “Mr. Foster,” she said, and then decided that she didn’t like having the Packard between us. She came around to my side, the better to show me her legs. They were lovely legs. She could have been in pictures. Nobody would have complained about paying to look at her. She pulled at her lip and put her eyes in their corners so they weren’t on me. Indecision didn’t look natural on her.

  “Am I supposed to guess what you want or are you going to tell me?”

  “I just can’t stop thinking about Mandy Ehrhardt,” she said. “Do you have any ideas? About who did it?”

  “I haven’t been asked to have any. In fact, quite the opposite.”

  “How’d you come to find the—her?” Her eyes darted to my face and then went back to their corners.

  “About the same way I found you and your brother yesterday. I just happened along at the wrong moment.”

  This time her eyes went right to mine. She tried to cover her nervousness with a smile. “So you weren’t supposed to be, I don’t know, following Mandy, or something?”

  “Didn’t you just get finished listening to Mr. Stark talk about how respectful I am of people’s privacy?”

  “Yes, but Daddy would want you to tell me. It’s all right.”

  “If that’s how he feels about it, he can tell me.”

  “Well, what were you doing at the studio yesterday?” she tried.

  “I knew then, but I don’t know now.”

  She pouted. “You’re making this very difficult.”

  I gave her a knowing grin. “Sorry.”

  “I know that Daddy hired you yesterday and I know that you found Mandy’s body. I’m just trying to understand.” She paused for a second and decided she needed to add something to that. “It’s all so horrible.”

  “Look, Miss Merton. I was hired by Al Knox, the head of security at the studio. If you want to take this up with Al, go ahead, but I’ve got work to do.” To make it convincing, I should have gotten in my car, but I didn’t.

  She took a step closer and reached out to play with my tie. “You don’t like me, is that it?”

  We both watched her hand toy with the silk.

  “You think my family are awful people.”

  “Miss Merton, I don’t think of your family at all.”

  “Not even now?” She had found more inches to eliminate between us. Her perfume made me think of homemade cookies, which soured both her and the cookies.

  “I’m trying harder to forget your family every minute.”

  “I just worry about Tommy. And Daddy,” she said. “They need a woman around but all they’ve got is me, which isn’t much of anything.”

  “You’re definitely a woman.”

  She raised her head the right angle. “I knew you could say nice things.”

  “I can say all kinds of things.”

  “Why did Daddy hire you? Was it about Tommy? You can tell me.”

  “I told you before, your father didn’t hire me, Al Knox did. If you think your father was behind it, you’d better go ask him. Whatever you and your brother do is no concern of mine. Though from what I’ve seen, your brother does altogether too much of whatever it is he does.”

  She stepped back then, all of her charm withdrawn. “How come you found Mandy?”

  “It was an accident. It had nothing to do with anything.”

  “That’s the best you can do?”

  “I could do better, but you wouldn’t like it.”

  She screwed herself up to say something more, but thought better of it and walked back to the house instead. She was a girl too used to getting what she wanted. Knox had warned me about her and her brother the day before, and now I could appreciate better what he’d meant. Poor Daddy. Running a movie studio wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. You might give people orders, but that didn’t mean your kids wouldn’t run all over town getting into trouble. In fact, it probably ensured it.

  I got into my car and rolled down the hill again. This missing person job seemed like only slightly more of a case than protecting Chloë Rose. It must have been my advertising: give me your money, no satisfaction guaranteed.

  FOURTEEN

  I was too close to the Rosenkrantz house to resist a visit. The way I figured it, I was owed the audience with Chloë Rose that I had been denied the night before. Knox may have thought that he could just throw me off of this thing, but the police wouldn’t let me go that easily. With my name already in, it was for my own good that I meet the other person at the center of the storm. Anyway, Chloë Rose and Stark were co-stars, perhaps she knew Taylor, too.

  Soso in mid-morning was a collection of geysers and waterfalls sprinkling the various lawns. It was the Rosenkrantzes’ front lawn and flowerbeds that got the treatment this morning, requiring me to run a gauntlet to the front door. I timed it so I got the minimum shower. A faint shimmering rainbow appeared on the outer edge of the fan of water. It held a beautiful mystique, but collapsed before it could be properly admired, and then threatened to damage my suit a moment later.

  I glanced back. There was a car parked out front. It was unmarked, but it said police anyway. It didn’t fit with the neighborhood.

  The door again opened before I could ring the bell. This time it was Detective Samuels and another plainclothes cop. Miguel was visible beyond them, wringing his hands like an old maid.

  “Don’t you sleep, Foster?” Samuels said.

  “No, I’m a vampire, didn’t I tell you.”

  “Vampires can’t go out during the day,” the other cop said.

  “Go on, you know all about it,” I said.

  The other cop looked away, embarrassed.

  “I know you’re not here about that murder,” Samuels said. “Right?”

  “You know, I heard a funny story about that,” I said. “It had something to do with Chloë Rose being a suspect in your investigation. It was so ridiculous it made me laugh.” I showed him how it made me laugh.

  He was unimpressed. “This is a police investigation. You played it straight with me this morning, and I’m grateful for that. But I don’t want any private dicks chasing my tail.”

  “And I’ll do whatever I need to, to protect my client.” If I could get her to be my client.

  “Except provide her with an alibi. You still claim it wasn’t a divorce job?”

  “I don’t do divorce.”

  Samuels cocked his head to his partner. “Come on, McEvoy. We’ve got work.”

  They waited for the sprinkler to finish its cycle, and then hurried down the wet path to their car.

  Miguel came forward to stand in the doorframe. He greeted me like a long-lost cousin, stopping just short of giving me a hug. “That was the police,” he said.

  “I hadn’t noticed. Were any others here?”

  He shook his head. “No, just those two.”

  “When did they get here?”

  “Maybe an hour ago. Maybe a little more. They talked to both Mr. Rosenkrantz and Miss Rose.”

  “About what?” I said.

  He averted his eyes. “I wouldn’t know. They were private conversations.”

  “You can skip that bit. What did they say?”

  He bobbed his head to show his reluctance, but then opened up as though he couldn’t wait to tell somebody. “About a murder. Another actress in Miss Rose’s movie was killed. They asked Mr. Rosenkrantz about his relationship with this actress, when he had seen her last, did she have any enemie
s, was she afraid of anything.”

  “Sure, I know the drill. And Miss Rose?”

  He shook his head. “They kept asking her where she was last night. They would talk about something else, and then they would ask her again if she was sure she had been here the whole time, and had she made any phone calls, and had nobody seen her? She got very upset. She had to lie down. What about you, Mr. Foster? Where were you last night?”

  “Out gambling. Where can I find Miss Rose?”

  He waited. I started around him. He thought about trying to stop me, but it was only a thought. Instead he led the way. We took the squared arch to the right, entering a dining room with a heavy wooden baroque dining set. We went through a door on the opposite side into a poorly lit antechamber in which hung a portrait daguerreotype of a cat. This opened into the library, which was arranged like a sitting room with Louis XV loveseats facing each other over a delicate Chippendale table. The fireplace was large enough to stand in, but it didn’t look like it had been used anytime during the current administration. The built-in shelves housed richly bound volumes in matching sets. Everything in the room looked like it belonged in a museum.

  Chloë Rose was on the loveseat facing the entryway when I came in. If Vera Merton was one kind of woman, then this was the other. She had the kind of beauty that made you nervous you were going to do something that would break it. She wore no makeup, and her eyes were red from crying. She had on a simple navy ankle-length skirt and a white-on-white patterned blouse.

  I took off my hat, and gave her a moment to collect herself.

  “Your colleagues were just here,” she said. Her accent was faint but it was there.

  “I’m not the police, Miss Rose. I’m the private investigator that was hired to protect you yesterday.” I got out one of my cards. She made no motion to take it, so I left it for her on the corner of the table.