The Devil's Stronghold

by Leslie Ford

  “I think, in that case, you’d like to meet Miss McShane’s parents,” Colonel Primrose said. He went over to the door. I couldn’t see why he was doing it, after all the agony the Shavins had gone to to keep their child’s producer from finding it out. It wasn’t till he’d got to the door and turned back that I had a sinking feeling he was doing it with reason.

  “You’ve seen Eustace Sype’s servants, haven’t you, Mr. Gannon?”

  For an instant George Gannon’s eyes had the painted billiard ball effect, and his mouth dropped open a little. “Sype’s servants?”

  “Rose and Morris Shavin,” Colonel Primrose said. “I believe they used to be your servants, Mr. Gannon! Rose is the night maid at this hotel. Her husband is the night watchman.”

  George Gannon stood there staring at him. It was as strange as anything I’ve seen. For one so wired for both movement and sound as he was it was doubly astonishing. He’d become quite pale again.

  “I thought it might interest you.”

  A slow dark flush came through the pallor of Gannon’s face. Lucille had raised her head from her hands and was looking at him too. I thought it was the first indication I’d had of how really profound her mistrust of him was. She saw me looking at her and turned away, her eyes fixed, staring out of the window.

  “I’ve asked the Shavins to come here—and Mrs. Kersey,” Colonel Primrose said. “I think you’ve been going under a—a set of misapprehensions too long, Mr. Gannon.”

  I had the feeling that I was listening to some curious lot of double talk. The diamond bracelet, I supposed, was in some way what he was talking about. But “misapprehensions” should have included more. It didn’t seem to make any kind of sense. But as Colonel Primrose had said, I had no right to set myself up as a technical expert on a commodity I had so little of.

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Not in the script

  “OH, DARLING!”

  It was Mrs. Kersey who came in first, the Shavins behind her.

  “Darling Lucille—how are you, my dear? I was horrified when I heard—when they told me—”

  “When they told you they’d got me out alive?” Lucille was weak but caustic still.

  “Darling—”

  “That’s enough, Mrs. Kersey,” Colonel Primrose said equably. “We’re all glad Lucille’s alive.” Or are we? I thought he might have added. But he didn’t.

  “Do you drive a car, Mrs. Shavin?”

  Rose did a quick double take then.

  “No. No, sir. I never learned to drive a car.”

  “Who drove you down here yesterday afternoon, when you took the cord off the chrysanthemum stakes on the back terrace here?”

  In the silent room I heard the quick catch of someone’s breath.

  Morris Shavin moistened his lips. “I drove,” he said.

  “You were not at Mr. Sype’s the whole day then.”

  Rose folded her hands in front of her. They were trembling again. “No, sir.”

  Colonel Primrose nodded. “It was foolish of you to say you were. Because while you were away the murderer of Eustace Sype had the opportunity to go up there and carry out the plan Sype and Mr. Gannon had figured up for their murder of a very fat man who loved a cushioned divan to sit in. It couldn’t have been done if you were both in the house with the dogs to give warning that someone else was there.”

  “We were gone only an hour—”

  “Ten minutes was enough,” Colonel Primrose said evenly, “for a mind that had a plan and an urgent need.”

  Then he changed his question abruptly. “What was it your husband burned?”

  Her lips compressed to an obdurate line. “I don’t know. Mr. Sype told us to burn it if anything happened to him.”

  George Gannon had moved over to the window. He stood there watching them.

  Colonel Primrose reached into his pocket and took out the telegram he’d just got. He handed it to Rose.

  “I’d like you to read that. I think you know what was in the papers you burned.”

  Then he turned to Mrs. Kersey. She was in a pink slack suit with pink tourmalines, this morning, instead of her blue slacks with sapphires. “I think you could also tell us, Mrs. Kersey. But I’ll save you the trouble. What was burned was the script you want Mr. Gannon to produce. He’s anxious to know what it’s about. Will you tell us?”

  Mrs. Kersey’s jaw dropped. She looked over at Rose Shavin, blinking. She turned calmly back then to Colonel Primrose.

  “It’s stupid of me but I’ve forgotten entirely,” she said. “It was just a little thing I scribbled on the train coming out. I didn’t even let dear George read it, I was so ashamed of it. Eustace was going to have a writer run over it before we showed it to him.”

  “You wanted Molly McShane to appear in it, I think?”

  “I thought the sweet child was perfection for it. I truly did.”

  Rose was holding the telegram in her hands, her face the most extraordinary and enigmatical study. Her hands were trembling, the yellow blank in them quivering. Morry Shavin had taken her arm protectively, like a white myrtle vine steadying a shaken stone wall. Colonel Primrose took the telegram from her and put it in his pocket.

  And the door burst open. Of course I’d got used to it, to Molly McShane’s entrances. I could be startled, not being a mechanism with an entirely phlegmatic nervous system, but I couldn’t be surprised any more. This time, however, there was a happy difference. It was not me she wanted to claw. Not for me, this time, the sulphur and the brimstone. I was no longer front man in the shooting-gallery. She darted to the side of her mother and turned on us with a blazing glance that took us all in, even her producer, and finished by most particularly searing the rather surprised face of my friend Colonel Primrose, 92nd Engineers. U.S. Army, Retired, and with no Sergeant Buck to step in front of him with granite breast bared and iron-hearted devotion.

  “You! You let my father and mother alone! You haven’t any right here! Let me alone, Mother—don’t believe him. He’s trying to trick you. That’s what Bill says he does. Bill says—”

  Then to my great relief two voices spoke as one from the doorway.

  “Shut up, Molly!”

  I was very glad Bill and Sheep had come on the scene in time. I’d rather Colonel Primrose didn’t hear any more of the things Bill says. A beautiful friendship would have shriveled then and there to dust.

  “Just shut up, baby.”

  She turned on them too then, but they had authority. How they did, I didn’t know, but they had it for their burning dreamboat, while the adults stood around more or less like clods. All, I should say, except one, and that was her producer. George Gannon had brightened up in spite of everything. His peeled eyes were shining. He loved it. It was as though he’d written all this himself, as soon as Molly McShane was on, and was producer and director too, and if he’d shouted “Roll ’em!” it wouldn’t have surprised me in the least. All we needed was a cameraman, and the dust of horses’ hoofs, and a face on the barroom floor, to have a good third-rate melodrama shooting right there in the exclusive precincts of the Casa del Rosal.

  “Just keep quiet, honey,” Sheep said, and the little dreamboat collapsed as if a friendly torpedo had taken a whole side out of her. Pier eyes widened and looked around at us blankly.

  Colonel Primrose smiled a little. “You’re mistaken, Miss McShane. I have a right. I’m representing Captain Crawford, and I’m carrying out his directions.”

  Molly stood there between her parents, with Sheep, quiet and steady, behind her. He was wonderful. He was a balance, keeping his dream on an even keel on a stormy sea. I saw her turn and look up at him. On her intense little face was the kind of faith and trust, lighted with a momentary radiance, that was really profoundly moving from such a hot-headed, willful little wench. He smiled down at her. It was really a faint warming of his lean, determined face rather than a smile, as he nodded at her, reassuring her. She bent toward him, almost imperceptibly, the way a flower bends, as if she were mov
ing toward her own sandy-haired, freckled sun-god. And somehow he looked like one standing there behind her, because her faith and love made him one.

  “There is rather more than one point to clear up here,” Colonel Primrose was saying. “For one, I think Miss McShane will be glad to have Mr. Gannon know neither of her parents is a thief. It’s not vital for him to know—unless he remembers he was given to understand they stole a diamond bracelet from him and his wife-now Mrs. Kersey.”

  I thought the star of the silent screen seemed to have lost, suddenly, a little of her pink-rosebud bloom.

  “I don’t see why we need to go into that, Colonel Primrose,” she said with asperity. “Everyone makes mistakes. I made one, and I made restitution. I paid the insurance company the money they paid for the bracelet.”

  George Gannon took his cigar slowly out of his mouth.

  “And the reason you took the bracelet, Mrs. Kersey?” Colonel Primrose asked politely.

  “I needed the money.” She snapped it out at him.

  “For what?”

  Molly McShane shook off Sheep’s protecting arm and took one step forward in front of Rose and Morris Shavin. “For me,” she said quietly—but I knew it wouldn’t be quietly for long.

  Her chin was out, her blue eyes as steady as her voice.

  “She took it to pay Rose and Morry to take me and say I was their child, not hers, and take care of me so she wouldn’t be bothered and could marry again and not have a baby trailing along with her—so nobody would even know she had a baby. That’s what she took the bracelet for. And she pretended Rose and Morry had stolen it! And then, when they’d done everything in all the world for me, and been so good and kind and beautiful to me, she comes and tries to take me away from them! She never cared about me, never cared whether we starved or were sick or whether we died, until she thought I might be a star. She didn’t come and try to help us until she thought I was on my way, when Sheep and Bill and Mr. Gannon and even poor Eustace Sype had helped me and got me a chance out here. And then she tries to take me back. Not for me, not because she’s sorry, but because she’s a chiseler, and because she thinks it might help her to make a comeback in Hollywood. And she even wrote it all in a story. Only the end was different. Eustace showed it to me. The end she wrote was where the long-lost child rushes into the mother’s arms, now the mother’s a great star again, and because the old servants were cruel and wicked to her!”

  The contempt in her voice, the blasting look she gave the full-blown rose in pink slacks, would have reduced an ordinary ego to strawberry pulp. I saw again that under her flabby exterior Mrs. Viola Kersey was made of determined stuff. She stood her ground, cool and watchful.

  “But that isn’t the way the story ends, Mrs. Kersey! You’re not a star and Rose and Morry are not cruel and wicked! They’re good and kind and wonderful and they’re the only parents I’ve ever had! You can threaten us with the law and everything else!”

  She flashed around to me. “That’s what was in her letter in my bag that I didn’t want you to see. She said she’d been deceived, Rose and Morry had told her I was something dreadful that had better be put away somewhere—and fortunately now she had money to fight for her baby child. And no court, with the kind of lawyers she could afford to hire, would resist a mother’s prayer. A mother’s prayer! And she said she was keeping all the letters I’d written her, when she first started writing to me three months ago, to show the courts how Rose and Morry had poisoned my mind against her.

  “That’s why I went down to her room the night I found out who she was, to find the letters so she could never use them. Rose and Morry never poisoned my mind—they only told me about her at all because they were so humble they thought I wouldn’t have ambition if I thought I was their child. I wish they’d never told me! I’d rather think I was their child than hers!”

  She gave Viola Kersey another searing flash.

  “And then, because they’re simple and—and unworldly, and believe what they read about the courts, and money, she blackmails them with the piece of string that girl fell over. They know they didn’t put it there— she says nobody will believe them, because they were right there. If she can’t have me to make a splash with she’ll ruin them both. So Rose decided it was best for me to go to her. Eustace Sype talked her and Morry into it, frightened them into it, with her help. He promised not to let her use her story if I went. So I was going-long enough to keep her from hurting them. But not any longer. Not a minute longer. Because she’s not my mother! Rose is my mother and Morry’s my father!”

  “Don’t be absurd, dear.”

  Mrs. Viola Van Zant Kersey spoke with all the ease and aplomb in the world. She’d learned more than how to walk with rhythmic grace and where to place her honeyed tones. She even smiled, lightly.

  “Don’t be absurd. Morris is not your father—and I resent that. I never was an unfaithful wife. You may remember that George Gannon was my husband at the time—”

  It was like a destroyer getting a twelve-inch-shell direct hit. George Gannon’s jaw dropped. His cigar hit the floor. He stood gaping, first at his former wife, then at the child who’d been thrust full-grown into his paralyzed arms. The child was just as stunned.

  Mrs. Kersey was as bland as Colonel Primrose himself.

  “I take it Rose and Morris never bothered to defend my good name. I take it they never told you about the birds and the bees. It so happens that nobody ever told Mr. Kersey either. He preferred to think I was young and unspoiled. I certainly couldn’t afford at the time to disillusion him. Men’s illusions have to be fostered or women would have a hard time getting along with them… And you’ll remember a star couldn’t have babies, in Hollywood in my day, though now if they don’t they have to adopt them by the dozen. And of course if I had told George he was about to be a father he would have made a terrible fuss about it, and if he wanted a child it would be quite simple for him to marry again and have one. It was just very inconvenient for me, at the moment, and Rose said she’d take you.”

  Molly McShane and George Gannon were still gaping open-mouthed and open-eyed at each other, and Rose and Morry Shavin were making silent keening motions, and my son and Sheep had miraculously found themselves something very funny in the situation and were holding themselves in with a good deal of effort. And somewhere in all this, the first conversation I’d had with Lucille Gannon was being very vividly acted again off Stage in the wings of my memory. This was what she’d sent me to Eustace Sype to find out—not that Molly was Rose and Morry’s daughter but that she was Viola Kersey’s and George Gannon’s daughter. That was the reason for all the violence and heat, and the sudden switch when she thought she’d said too much. This was why she’d been down on Molly from the beginning, and why she’d sent for me to come from Washington, and why, again, she’d tried to maneuver Sheep and Molly into marrying—to get a young and lovely stepdaughter out of her way. She’d said Eustace told her, hoping she’d tell her husband, and that Gee Gee would no doubt rush out and buy another diamond bracelet to atone for the parents’ sins. As I saw it now, she’d stopped herself each time she realized her anger and jealous torment was leading her down a path that she couldn’t afford to travel.

  “So now you see, dear,” Mrs. Kersey said—and this was the beginning, I can see it now, of the end that would have been so incredible in the pedestrian world most of us live in—“it all works out beautifully. Life is Beautiful, if we look at it the Right Way. Dear Eustace Sype saw it all so clearly. He said what we should do, darling, now that you’ve inherited my ability as an actress, is for me to come back, for me and George to marry again and give you the sort of thing you need. With my money to allow George really to put you over, it’s Ideal. I’ll be glad to buy Rose and Morris a little farm somewhere. We’ll need smarter-looking servants in the house. I’ve already seen a lawyer about Mr. Kersey. And I’m sure dear George wouldn’t want you to have a stepmother, charming as Lucille is…”

  Chapter Twenty-S
even: “I wish I had killed you!”

  I THINK THAT WAS THE FIRST TIME any of them had thought about Lucille. It was certainly the first time I’d dared to look at her. And then, when I did, I saw that Colonel Primrose’s steady gaze, grave and somber and intent, was already fixed on her, and I had the sudden feeling that he had been watching her for some time. After all, she was too sick a woman to take this. I realized that this was Hollywood. But having a stepdaughter you were already violently jealous of suddenly rung in on you was bad enough anywhere, without also having her mother decide quite pleasantly to push you into the marital garbage can without a please, madam, or a by your leave. If there was something just incredibly absurd about the whole thing, Lucille had never had any sense of humor to speak of.

  She certainly had none now. As I followed Colonel Primrose’s level glance I saw she was sitting bolt-upright, the lines on her face not only etched but dug with chisel. To make everything worse, if possible, the solid figure of Captain Crawford was in the patio door. When he’d arrived, I had no idea. He too was looking at Lucille as she sat gripping the cushion of the bamboo chair. Her scarlet-tipped fingers seemed to have drawn live blood out of her tortured insides, and the expression on her face chilled my heart.

  “Don’t look at me—what are you all looking at me for?” she said hoarsely. “Let her marry him. I don’t care if she marries him. Let her take him. I don’t want him Let him get her money the way she’s got Mr. Kersey’s, and she’ll see. She’s a fool. I knew they were trying to do this. But he’ll get rid of her—the way he tried to get rid of me last night.”