“That’s true,” Marcus conceded. “But if you do get fired—if, mind you—burying yourself in your apartment and wringing your hands won’t accomplish diddly.”
“Oh yeah? From where I’m sitting, you got no job and Oliver told you to take a hike. Where has the last year and a half gotten you?”
Marcus backed away—not from Trevor’s red-faced browbeating but because his question had slugged him in the rubber parts. “I just don’t want you to waste as much time as I have.”
“When I want your advice I’ll ask for it.” Trevor scooped up his shoes and pounded them together. “And the next time you want to shove your opinions down someone’s throat, don’t leave them stranded so far from home.”
“I’ll take you back,” Marcus said, turning to the car. “We don’t have to talk—”
“I’ll find my own way, thank you. And fuck you.”
Marcus turned back to the waves. Their steady pulse now seemed empty and monotonous. He dropped his butt and scooped the sand into his hands. It felt almost liquid as he let it slip through his fingers.
“That didn’t go so well, huh?”
Driftwood Guy was standing with his back to the sun, endowed with a golden radiance usually seen in religious paintings.
Marcus gave a weak smile. “Not so much.”
“Mind if I join you?”
“Pull up a sandbank.”
“Reuben.”
“Marcus.”
This was the first time Marcus had seen Driftwood Guy up close. He was well into his fifties, with the tanned face and sun-bleached hair of someone who’d spent a great deal of time outdoors.
Marcus sighed. “What you witnessed was a case of ‘Do What I Do, Not As I Say.’ I only wanted to help, but I guess I won’t try that again.”
“As a matter of fact, I think you’re pretty good at helping people.”
“What makes you say that?”
The guy broke into the sort of smile someone makes when they’re trying hard not to. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
Marcus quickly ran through the carnival of faces belonging to people he’d slept with, but came up blank.
“It was a while ago.” Reuben ran a fistful of sand from one fist to another. “The night they raided that log cabin bar up in Mandeville Canyon.”
That was where Oliver and I had one of our worst fights. “Hermit’s Hideaway.”
“Yes! I must have blocked it. They say we do that with traumatic events. Do you remember the fool who shouted, ‘I didn’t survive the Battle of the Somme, the polio epidemic, and Prohibition to put up with this shit’ and then got thumped with a billy club?”
It had been dark inside that bar, and with vice cops stampeding in, Marcus only had scant memories of what that guy looked like. “For a minute there I thought you were a goner.”
The smile dropped from Reuben’s face. “You were the only one there who showed me kindness. All the others backed off like I had the bubonic plague.”
“Every homo for himself.”
“But you escaped.”
“I had a friend who had a friend who pulled some strings.”
“You got a swell break. They made us wait for hours until the press started sniffing around to see who was in lock-up. By then, they had our names, addresses, and employers typed up and ready for distribution.”
“Did you lose your job?”
Reuben nodded. “But it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.”
That would explain the tranquility that radiates from you like candlelight. “How come?”
“It got me to thinking about what I was doing when I was happiest.” He nodded toward the canyon behind them. “You know what this used to be? We called it Inceville. Thomas Inceville leased this land when he needed more space to make his movies. I was a set builder for him. It was the best time of my life. With my name in the papers, I could no longer work for the studios, so I turned my hand to building furniture. Now I have a store down the road apiece in Santa Monica. We make custom furniture—any size, any style, any wood. You should come by and visit us.”
“Us?”
“My lover is a wood wholesaler. We joke how we should send those cops a thank-you note. We’d never have met if it hadn’t been for them.”
“I love a happy ending.”
“And I never got a chance to thank you for your kindness.”
Marcus leaned back on one elbow. “I see you here all the time.”
Reuben grimaced, revealing two rows of bright movie-star teeth. “A while ago, I saw someone else from that night. I could tell he recognized me, so I approached him, but he ran off. I didn’t want to take the same chance with you, but then I saw you and Trevor Bergin—that was him, wasn’t it?”
“He’s my neighbor.” Marcus started drawing triangles in the sand with his finger. “I don’t know that I did much that night but check you were okay.”
“Under those circumstances, it was a lot. You’re lucky that your life went on as normal.”
“Yeah, until HUAC got its teeth into me.”
“You lost your job, after all?”
“When MGM throws you to the HUAC lions and you tell everyone to go to blazes, it doesn’t leave you with much in the way of career options.”
“And now?”
And now I feel like I’m floating with the current like that driftwood you collect. “Still figuring it out.”
“You a screenwriter?”
“Is . . . was . . . it’s a blurry line.”
“What about television? I have a friend who works on Colgate Theatre. He’s in casting, but I could talk to him for you.”
A television show? Sponsored by a tube of toothpaste? Marcus couldn’t think of anything worse. “Thanks. That’s kind of you, but I don’t think so.”
“If you change your mind, you can find me on Third Street.” Reuben started collecting up his sticks of wood as he got to his feet. “What you did that night was the one bright spot of humanity that got me through a very dark time, so thank you.”
Marcus watched him hike across the sand and dump his driftwood into the back of an old truck speckled with rust. He climbed behind the wheel, roared his engine to life, and steered onto Route 1 without a backward glance.
Marcus stared out to sea. The waves lunged forward and withdrew again, lunged and withdrew. Twenty feet from the shore, a pair of seagulls swooped in for a perfect landing. They bobbed up and down toward the surface of the water for only a minute or two before one of them unleashed a piercing shriek and took off again, leaving his pal to float around on his own.
“Did you hear him?” Marcus asked the bird. “Colgate Theater.” The bird turned his head toward Marcus and stared at him unblinkingly. “I can do better than that, don’t you think?”
The seagull had nothing to contribute.
CHAPTER 27
Kathryn had been to the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel so often she was on a first-name basis with the maître d’. She wasn’t sure where Lukas was from, but he had the eternal tan of an Argentine playboy and the dyed black hair to match.
“Miss Massey! How enchanting you look today!” He welcomed her with his customary continental kiss to both cheeks.
“Is he here yet?” she asked.
He nodded.
“You didn’t put him at my usual table, did you?”
Kathryn typically preferred the one near the center so everyone could see her lunching with Gene Tierney or Betty Grable.
Lukas shook his head. “I sensed some privacy might be required.”
She pressed her cheek to his. “You’re a treasure, and I suspect a little bit psychic.”
He accepted her compliment with an enigmatic smile. “I put him in number seven.”
“Perfect.” Booth seven was tucked away behind a cornucopia of palm fronds. “Oh, and I need you to come over at three o’clock and remind me of the time. I have another appointment in Burbank.”
A table of four lun
cheon ladies followed her through the maze of tables. As she rounded the greenery, she slid her professional smile into place.
Walter Winchell was more handsome than the craggy journalist she expected. In person, his face had a pleasant shape to it, with features in tidy proportion. His hair was graying now, but his firm skin showed no signs of sagging.
When he looked up from his menu, the razor-sharp eyes caught her like headlights. He got to his feet and presented her with a professional smile of his own.
“Right on time,” he said, shaking her hand. “I like that.”
“How nice to finally meet you.” Kathryn ducked under the shady umbrella and into the booth.
“I ordered us martinis, or was that presumptuous?”
Kathryn peeled off her gloves and told him martinis were fine, and trusted that Lukas was clever enough to send her a diluted one.
It took some effort to meet Winchell’s penetrating stare, but she knew if she didn’t, he’d have her at a disadvantage. “What brings you out to the coast?”
“A sizable chunk of my items originate in Hollywood, so I figured it might be wise to stick my nose out here once in a while. You’re only as good as your last broadcast, as I’m sure you’re starting to discover.”
He smiled at her, but it was mechanical.
He’s come to check out the competition.
Kathryn had been on the air for a heady six weeks now. Her disappointment over being lumped with a cop show soon turned to celebration—Dragnet was the runaway hit of the season, pushing her show into the top twenty nationwide. Broadcasting on a Friday meant she had five days to scoop Winchell, whose show aired the previous Sunday.
A waiter arrived with their drinks and departed with their lunch orders. They clinked glasses.
Kathryn said, “I was wondering if perhaps the Battle of the Sunset Strip lured you here.”
Last week, unidentified gunmen had opened fire on Mickey Cohen as he left a restaurant called Sherry’s, not far from Chez Gwendolyn. The press burned through inches of columns, dubbing it the “Battle of the Sunset Strip” as though the Strip was the new OK Corral. Fortunately for Gwennie, the whole scene had played out at four in the morning, so she was nowhere near the place, but it had driven extra traffic into her store.
Winchell was known for his vitriolic anti-mobster/pro-FBI stance, so Kathryn’s question was an educated guess.
“It was the catalyst,” Winchell admitted smoothly.
She took stock of the man opposite her. The last time I felt this intimidated, I was sitting next to Hoover down at Howard’s Spruce Goose flight. Hoover exuded raw power and used it to unnerve people. There was a cold ruthlessness to his speech, the way he gestured, and his ramrod posture. Winchell was like this too, but he masked it with a veneer of worldliness and studied indifference.
He asked about several people they knew in common: radio celebrities he’d worked with, moguls and stars she’d interviewed. By the time lunch arrived—swordfish for him, chef’s salad for her—and a second martini supplanted the first, Kathryn noticed that he’d brought up nothing that he couldn’t have by telephone.
Time ticked by. She had to be out of there by three to wish Bette Davis well on her final day at Warner Bros. Finally, Kathryn disrupted his monologue on The Fountainhead. “Have you asked me here for a reason. A specific one, I mean?”
He drew back, unaccustomed to being interrupted. She relaxed a little when he smiled. “I was planning on bringing it up over dessert.”
“I have somewhere to be at four o’clock.”
He planted his elbows on the table and interlaced his fingers. “I have a hunch. A very strong one. About Leilah O’Roarke.”
Don’t blink. Not in front of him. “What about her?”
“I believe you know the location of her client cards.”
Winchell was the number-one journalist in America, so surely his network of tipsters and informers stretched the entire country. There could be any number of ways he connected the dots from Leilah to Gwendolyn to Kathryn.
“What makes you say that?”
“What I said just now was an outrageous accusation and you didn’t even flinch.” He pushed aside the remnants of his lunch. “If you tell me what you know about Leilah and her cards, I’ll share with you what I know about Ruby Courtland.”
Kathryn tried to keep her poker face intact but it was a losing battle. She brought what was left of her martini to her lips and pondered how Ruby figured in all this. “I hear she comes from serious money.”
“Nouveau-riche money.”
“Out here, everybody’s dough is nouveau riche, so I don’t hold that against her. And besides, it’s not like your money came over on the Mayflower.” She knew a jab like that was a risk, but she’d survived Hoover, the FBI, and William Randolph Hearst, so what the hell.
He glowered at her for a moment, then gave her the first genuine smile she’d seen. “Touché,” he conceded. “But there’s nouveau riche, and then there’s nouveau riche.”
“The difference being . . .?”
“The way you flaunt it.”
“I assume the Courtlands are the flaunting kind?”
“In the worst possible way. Her father, Otis, is a military contractor who spent the war amassing a fortune in New York. Started out as a men’s haberdasher, reasonably successful on a middling scale, but he managed to wrangle major deals with both the army and the navy to manufacture uniforms.”
“Somebody had to.”
He studied her through narrowed eyes. “I was led to believe you were not a fan.”
“I’m not.”
“And yet you’re defending them.”
“I’m trying to figure out the connection between Ruby and Leilah.”
“I didn’t say there was one.”
Kathryn’s glass was now empty. Lukas had made sure her martinis were weak, so she signaled the waiter for a third. “No, you didn’t.”
She caught the four Beverly Hills housewives staring openly at her and gave them a little wave, which sent them diving behind their menus.
“So what do I need to know about Ruby Courtland?” Kathryn asked.
“She was very prominent in the debutant and society pages.”
“Her job with Variety; is it legit?”
“Probably the result of some pulled strings courtesy of father, dear father.”
From the wry look on Winchell’s face, Kathryn had been hoping for something juicier. “He’s hardly the first schmo-made-good to buy his daughter’s way into high society.”
“What’s interesting isn’t that he did, but that he had to.”
“‘Had to’?”
“Darling little Ruby was one of the most notorious victory girls in Manhattan.”
In a city the size of Los Angeles, it was hard to ignore the phenomenon of victory girls: women who offered “comfort” to servicemen heading out to war. During times of peace, girls like that would be written off as tramps, but war blurred judgments. At worst, victory girls were generous; at best, they were patriotic. But this was no longer wartime, and perceptions had a way of shifting. Just as Russia was once seen as an ally but was now the evil face of Communism, victory girls were just floozies looking for an excuse to sleep around.
“How notorious?” Kathryn asked.
“Admirably. Fearlessly. Nightly.”
“So he bought her respectability?”
“Tried. Failed. Hence the move out west.” Winchell lit up a thin cigar and obscured himself in a cloud of white smoke. “I’ll leave you to exploit that information however you see fit.”
Kathryn’s gaze wandered back to the wives. They’d lost interest in the Massey-Winchell meeting and were now enthralled by a story one of them was telling with scandalized eyes and flashing nail polish. Probably about what the maid discovered in her husband’s pockets, or maybe the purchase of a new fur coat at such a good price. For a fuzzy moment, Kathryn envied them. Their lives were a shiny bubble, floating on ocean breez
es, passing the time with lunches and shopping and bridge parties, maybe a charity function to fill their days. They never had to worry about conniving victory girls, or ratings. Or Sing Sing, for that matter.
She heard Winchell clear his throat. “We have a bargain.”
“We do?”
“I traded Ruby Courtland for Leilah O’Roarke.”
“Ah!” Kathryn realized she was slouching and straightened her back. She tried to clear her head by breathing in deeply, but the sweet haze of bougainvillea distracted her.
“Your hunch was right. I know where Leilah’s cards are. Or rather, were. There is someone I know—”
“Gwendolyn Brick?”
You’ve been talking to Leilah O’Roarke. The two of you are in cahoots because . . . because . . .
Kathryn pictured Linc’s hollow book. Gwennie had only shown them the top card before shooing everybody out. Kathryn understood why Gwendolyn had come unglued at the sight of Leilah’s cards, but now she wished she’d convinced Gwennie to pull out the entire stack for them to paw through. If they’d dug as far as the W’s, might they have unearthed Winchell’s name?
“Yes,” she admitted, “they came to Gwendolyn. She wasn’t aware she had them for the longest time.” Kathryn held her hand up to cut Winchell off. “I know that sounds unlikely, but you’ll have to trust me. They were very well hidden, and when she found them, she took a match to them straightaway.”
Kathryn watched Winchell’s shoulders relax slowly, almost indiscernibly.
A sudden movement on her far left caught her attention. It was Lukas pointing to his wristwatch.
She picked up her handbag and gloves. “I imagine that’s better news for you than it is for Leilah.” His eyes darted away. Bull’s-eye! “Thank you for lunch. It’s been . . .” Educational? Frightful? Soul destroying? She went with “memorable” and glided out of the booth.
* * *
Kathryn was halfway up Coldwater Canyon Drive before she realized that it wasn’t the greatest idea to attempt the winding trek over the Hollywood Hills and into the San Fernando Valley with three martinis swirling inside her. Maybe they weren’t as weak as she’d assumed. But a promise was a promise, so she pressed forward.
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