by Leslie Ford
“Nobody knows, exactly, Lucille,” I said. “A girl was tight, and she fell or tripped—nobody seems absolutely sure—down the stone steps out here. She was killed instantly, they think.”
“Oh, dear, isn’t that a shame. Who was it? Somebody in the hotel?”
“Not a guest. I don’t know whether she even dined here or not.”
“Well!” Lucille said lightly. “All I hope is, it wasn’t a string tied across the steps that she tripped over.”
I looked at her, startled. “Why?”
“Oh, because then they’d try to pin it on Gee Gee. He’s doing a wonderful picture where the heavy murders an old sweetheart of his. It’s marvelous. Of course, they use a woman acrobat and the steps are padded and just painted to look like stone. It was an original idea of Gee Gee’s, he got it out of a story of Agatha Christie’s. He wanted to have a perfectly simple murder that anybody could do, not all complicated and psychological.”
“In that case, I’d keep it to myself,” I said. “The police have an idea that’s exactly what happened.”
She looked at me blankly. “You mean—”
“I mean the police think the girl tripped over a cord that was tied across the stone steps. Only these steps were real stone and the girl wasn’t an acrobat. They seem to think it wasn’t meant for her but for a woman named Kersey. Viola Van Zant, she used to be. Her room’s at the bottom of the steps and she was out at the time.” Lucille sat motionless—for the first time, I imagined, in all her life. She needed that heavy sun-tan pancake make-up.
“You mean Viola Van Zant—the—the old silent—”
I nodded.
“But Gee Gee—he hasn’t seen her for years! He’s working—he wouldn’t know whether she was in the hotel or not. He never leaves his room. Anyway, he’s always up on the top terrace where it’s quiet.”
She tried to brush it all aside. “Anyway, that’s absurd. Gee Gee—”
She stopped, as there was a tap on the door and Sheep came in with her coffee. It was on a large tray that had another breakfast on it. There were two eggs and a dish of something that looked like grated carrots and was grated carrots. There was a thermos jug and a glass but no cup and saucer except the one Sheep took off for Lucille and put with the coffeepot on the table.
Lucille’s shoulders stiffened almost as if an electric shock had gone through them. “Is—is that boiled milk, Sheep?” She asked the question abruptly and lifted the top of the jug before he had a chance to answer her. “Who’s it for?”
“It’s for a Mr. Smith.”
“What room is Mr. Smith in?”
“One hundred and one, just across the hall.” Sheep glanced at me and gave his head a barely perceptible shake. Lucille didn’t even see the check he was holding out to her. I took it and signed it. He’d no sooner closed the door than she was across the room. She put her head against the door, listening, and came back. After a moment she got up again, went to the French window opening on the patio and stood there, like a cat intent on the patter of little mouse feet. And apparently Gee Gee liked his morning carrots in the fresh air. Subdued voices came over the fuchsia-showered white brick wall. When she came back and sat down she was subdued too, so subdued that she’d forgotten about her coffee. I poured a cup for her.
“You’d better drink this.”
“Listen to me,” she said abruptly. “Don’t get any silly notions in your head. Gee Gee wouldn’t try to kill Viola Van Zant. I wouldn’t tell anybody else this, but the truth is, he’s never got over being in love with her. It’s the absolute truth. You know she was his second wife.” I hadn’t known it. I don’t seem to manage to keep au courant in this shifting world.
“They were divorced, but that was because he wasn’t making any money and she was washed up in pictures. He thought it was only fair to let her marry someone with a lot of money while she had the chance.”
“Modern chivalry,” I remarked. I didn’t entirely mean to, but it seemed a quaint conception of marital responsibility.
“Oh, out here money’s awfully important. It really is, Grace. I know a writer who says people ought to have their salary printed on a tag to wear in their lapel so you don’t make a mistake and speak to the wrong person. Anyway, Gee Gee’s never been as much in love with anybody else. It’s just one of those things that happen to people. So you see, he wouldn’t do her any harm. You see that, don’t you, Grace? It would be horrible. No matter how much she’d hurt him, he’d never want to hurt her. And even if we knew she was going to be in Hollywood, he wouldn’t know she was in this hotel.”
“Did you know?” I asked.
She nodded. “We’d heard she was coming. I knew before Gee Gee did. Eustace told me. He said she had a lot of dough she wanted to throw away, and I couldn’t have been more pleased.”
She picked up her coffee cup.
“Anyway, Grace, Viola Van Zant isn’t dead, is she? So if she isn’t dead, Gee Gee can’t be accused of killing her, very well, can he?”
It seemed to settle everything beautifully, in Lucille’s mind. She relaxed back into her chair.
“I think you’re right about that,” I said. “There is the small matter of the girl who was killed.”
“But, darling, don’t be absurd! That doesn’t concern Gee Gee. That’s ridiculous. Quite frankly, Grace, I don’t see what on earth we’re getting all so upset about, either one of us. I should think the best thing to do is say nothing about it. And I think I’d better go home.”
She picked up her bag, went over to the door, and stopped to draw on her gloves. “Have you met Molly McShane yet?” she inquired casually, without looking at me.
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve met her several times.”
“She’s one of Gee Gee’s finds.”
She was still being elaborately casual about it.
“I believe you called her a trollop, in your letter to me about Bill,” I said. “All kinds of a trollop, as I remember.”
“Oh, well. You know me.” She shrugged lightly, smoothing the back of her glove with more interest than it deserved. “I get burned up about things and get over it the next day. Bill and Sheep had the cockeyed idea I’d like to act as some kind of legal guardian for my husband’s coming star. They must take me for a damned fool. I’d wreck my marriage for a bright idea of theirs! Not much I wouldn’t… If it was their idea—which I doubt. I suspect it was that rat Eustace Sype’s, the whole thing from beginning to end—including the juke-box joint where they’re supposed to have picked her up. It’s a good publicity gag, or they’re two of the world’s outstanding suckers.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Do you know anything about Molly McShane?” she demanded. She’d dropped any pretense of being casual and disinterested.
I shook my head. “Only what the boys have told me.”
“Then you’d better get busy, that’s all I can tell you. I don’t want to suggest that anybody’s paying your son to be a gigolo, but it wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened. You know Eustace Sype as well as I do. And of course it’s none of my business, but if Bill was my son, I’d darn well want to know a lot more about the girl he and Sheep take turns dragging to all the hot spots, than anybody here pretends he knows.”
“I take it you don’t like Molly McShane, Lucille,” I said.
“You take it quite right, darling. I don’t like her. I don’t like anything about her. I don’t like the way she lands on my doorstep and takes Gee Gee in, so he goes all out and almost loses his top star because he pushes Molly right into the camera as it she was his leading lady. No, I don’t like her. And, you watch. The first chance she gets, she’ll ditch Bill and Sheep, and if it is their own money they’re spending on her—”
She shrugged again. “They’ll have their memories. That girl is the spit of her mother.”
“Do you know her mother?”
“No. How would I know her mother? I don’t move in those circles.”
Then, as if rea
lizing it was unbecoming to engender quite so much heat over somebody who shouldn’t matter quite that much, she did a nice job of thermic control.
“But I know something about her. Eustace Sype told me. For instance—I know she stole a diamond bracelet that belonged to Viola Van Zant. Or half of it did. The other half belonged to Gee Gee, under community property rights. And you needn’t tell Bill and Sheep I told you—nor Gee Gee.”
I looked at her. “You mean he doesn’t know? You haven’t told him? If it’s true, or important, I should think—”
She stopped me with a brief, ironic glance. “I’m not a fool, darling. Men don’t believe things about the other woman—not when their wife tells them. If I told Gee Gee, he’d probably go out and buy her a diamond bracelet himself to atone for her parents’ sin, and insist I take over her guardianship. It’s a chance I’m not taking, angel—because knowing Eustace, I haven’t the slightest doubt exactly what he had in mind. He thought I’d run straight to Gee Gee.”
And again as if she thought I might take a dim view of her intensity about it, she laughed lightly.
“I expect Eustace thought I couldn’t take anybody’s getting away with my half of a diamond bracelet. But I’m smarter than he thinks. Anyway, you just ask him. There’s no dirt that’s been spilled here for twenty years that Eustace doesn’t know all about. He’s a magnet that attracts it and a squirrel that stores it. And if he doesn’t want to talk, you just bring out your club and let him have it.”
“My club?” I asked.
“His book, darling. Remember The Coming of Age of E.P.S.? It’s the one thing he’s really ashamed of. He’s psychotic about it. Nobody here knows he ever wrote a book—and they’d laugh their heads off. It would absolutely ruin Stinky, and he knows it. I’ve got six copies of it, in a safe. It’s the only way I get along with him. He’s scared to death of me. So go see him, dear. He’ll talk.”
“He doesn’t get up till four o’clock,” I said.
“Rot. He gets up in plenty of time to gouge the studios with the moth-eaten talent he handles. But don’t get me started on Stinky Sype. He certainly got himself a fine package deal when he got the little McShane. Sheep and Bill to tote her around, Gee Gee to give her a part and put her across, and—well, I’d better shut up. You just go and see him, Grace. Unless you’re a lot dumber than I think you are you ought to be able to put a few things together.”
She put her hand on the doorknob.
“I hate this place, Grace. I wish to God I’d never come here.”
I started to tell her to be careful going out. The girl from Seattle had said much the same thing, though without such intense bitterness. And she wasn’t angry, and Lucille was.
“As a matter of fact, I love it,” she said more quietly. “That’s the hell of it. Everybody that says he hates it is really crazy about it. It gets in your blood and you can’t stay away from it. It’s when you’re not a success in it that you pretend you hate it.”
“Aren’t you a success, dear?”
I meant it to sound lighter than it did, or than she took it, anyway. The sharp lines around her mouth looked suddenly as if they’d been cut with a knife in fresh sun-tan plaster.
“Nobody’s ever decided what success is, out here,” she said after a moment’s silence. “If you’re a woman, it’s age twenty-two. If you could figure something to keep you always twenty-two—that would be success. And no woman’s ever achieved it… But I’m going. If you should see Gee Gee— No, don’t bother. I’ll tell his secretary to tell him I’m home. I wish I’d stayed in Palm Springs.”
She opened the door, and pushed it quickly shut.
“The police are out there, Grace—and Gee Gee’s door is open. Oh, this is horrible! The reporters—the papers will—”
She looked around desperately, and pointed to the French window.
“Does that— Where does that go to? Can I—?”
“You can try it,” I said. I didn’t tell her her husband had found it a way out in the early hours of the morning and that the dead girl had found it a way in before that.
She dropped a kiss on the top of my head as she hurried past me.
“I know I sound horrible, Grace—but wait till you’ve been here as long as I have.”
I did wait about ten minutes, half expecting her to reappear, but as she didn’t I took a shower and got dressed. So far there had been no summons from Captain Crawford, and I saw no reason for barging out until I had to. And I was concerned about Lucille. On her flying sorties into Washington, she was a blithe spirit, her life in Hollywood rainbow-hued and full of such excitement and glamour that it made life on the Potomac seem like a crust of moldy bread.
It’s proverbial, of course, that an angry woman is not a reliable reporter either of event or of character. Still, Lucille’s attitude toward her Gee Gee and Viola Kersey appeared so rational and adult, compared to the intensity of her bitterness toward little Molly McShane, that I decided I’d take her advice and see what was behind it all. If Eustace Sype or anybody else was playing Bill and Sheep for a couple of suckers, as she’d put it, the quicker I knew it the better. Not that I’d be able to stop it, I supposed, or convince them of it, but I’d at least have the satisfaction of knowing what the score was.
And I got it at Eustace Sype’s house in Bel Air that afternoon. There was no satisfaction in it, and it wasn’t the whole score. The blood-drenched figures were not all in, at that point. But I did get two exceedingly important digits of the score. I also got why Sheep Clarke said it was too late to do anything about guardianship for Molly McShane. He and Bill were very wise when they decided it was better just to lie low. The question was, how low could they lie—how long could they lie there.
Chapter Twelve: malice, plain and fancy
AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK Captain Crawford sent for me. Viola Kersey, George Gannon, and I were the only ones present in the assistant manager’s office. What seemed to me a quaint local custom was in effect. Nat, the bellboy, wasn’t there because it was his day off and he was spending it in jail as his third weekly contribution to a ten-day sentence he was working out for reckless driving. Molly McShane wasn’t there because she was working, and Bill because he had classes. I’d never heard of the police fitting themselves to anybody else’s occupational convenience before, but it seemed like a sound idea. Rose and Morry Shavin weren’t there because they worked nights and slept in the morning. It didn’t seem to matter a great deal, however. They had not yet found out who the dead girl was. Until she was reported missing or someone recognized her picture in the papers and came forward, all they knew was that she was about twenty-five years old, had a job of some kind, came from Seattle, Washington, and had met her death while under the influence of alcohol by tripping over a piece of hemp cord on the stone steps of the Casa del Rosal. If Captain Crawford knew any more, he was keeping it to himself.
Viola Kersey was sticking calmly to her story about the vine. It must have taken a good deal of will power to resist the natural temptation to improve it, now she’d had a long time to think it over. Or perhaps it was her training in reading lines the way they were written. If the night watches had not changed the lines of her story, however, they had very much changed the lines of her face. Its pliant, cooing softness had settled into a solid and watchful determination. Whatever it was Mrs. Kersey wanted, it was clear she had got it, and all she had to do was keep it. Her self-confidence was superb. She would never have appeared in a pair of powder-blue gabardine slacks if it hadn’t been. Her mink coat and sun glasses were merely finishing touches, as was the glittering load of sapphires she bore, distributed at various strategic positions on her person. Beside her milk-and corn-fed opulence, Gee Gee Gannon looked like a man raddled with ulcers and despair.
“You now say you did talk to her,” Captain Crawford remarked. “Last night—”
“I know what I said last night,” George Gannon retorted irritably. “I said I hadn’t seen her and hadn’t talked to her. And you
’d do the same in my place. I never see the girl before she turns up on my patio. She says she’s hunting somebody who has her bag. I see she’s tight. That doesn’t make any difference to me. It can be a stall, just like the bag. In this business women are so much poison ivy. There’s nothing they won’t do, and we get the fireworks. I have trouble enough without getting saddled with any I’m not looking for.”
“Anyway, I’d just come, hadn’t I, George?” Viola Kersey said sweetly. The implication was sour enough. It also explained why she’d had to rap on his door more than once to be let in. “You see, Captain, Mr. Gannon and I are old friends. We were married for several years, at one time. Three, wasn’t it, George? I’ve forgotten. And I was so surprised, and so pleased, when I found out he was here—alone.”
I couldn’t tell about the surprise part of it, but if George G. Gannon shared the pleasure angle he concealed it to a noteworthy degree. The impression I got was that he’d like to boil Mrs. Viola Kersey in rancid oil, thereafter dumping her into the nethermost of the nethermost reaches, to continue burning through all eternity and beyond. That was the way he looked, certainly. I’d thought he was heavy-set, seeing him briefly when he was out in the hall demanding where the hell his vegetables were, the evening before. Now I saw it was just the paunchiness of the sedentary worker. Though Mr. Gannon could not properly be called sedentary. He was in and out of his chair now, across the narrow room and back, up and down and around twenty times in five minutes. He was shaved, and he had a bright checked coat on over his black open-collared sport shirt. Whether it was the same cigar or a new one I didn’t know, but he had a fascinating technique of gnashing it from one corner of his mouth to the other, as if his teeth were equipped with trolley tracks, and suddenly grabbing it out and gesticulating with it before he jammed it back. He was like an animated cartoon in a bad temper with St. Vitus dance. How he stood the strain he put on himself seemed miraculous to me, unless grated carrots are good for more than night blindness and curly hair. His hair, however, was mostly gone, I had no doubt because he’d torn it out by the roots with his own bare hands.