by Leslie Ford
George Gannon took a step toward her, his hands raised in a gesture of helpless protest. He could as well have tried to stop a rushing mad river of burning gasoline let loose down the side of the canyon we were in.
“I knew you’d planned it that way. Eustace Sype put you up to it. He hated me and he was trying to make you get rid of me. That’s why he got Bill and Sheep to palm off your daughter on me, so when Mrs. Kersey came back there’d be two of them against one of me. But it didn’t work. I wouldn’t take her. Then Eustace told you to come here and send me to Palm Springs—so you’d be alone with her. You lied to me. You said you didn’t know she was here. All the time you were waiting for her to come to you. To—”
“And you came to the hotel too, Lucille?” Colonel Primrose’s voice was quiet as ever, and like iron. “You were the woman on Mr. Gannon’s patio, Wednesday night? And when you saw Mrs. Kersey come in, you couldn’t take it—and you got that cord from the chrysanthemums and tied it at the top of her steps?”
“I was in Palm Springs Wednesday night, Colonel Primrose—where he’d sent me to be out of his way-out of their way.”
“I believe not, Lucille. Your husband is a great gentleman. He’s lied throughout to shield you—even when it’s been apparent you’ve been trying desperately to incriminate him. Even when you’ve killed two people and put on a fake attack on yourself in such a way that all three of them would point to him at once.”
He turned to George Gannon.
“It’s in the record, Mr. Gannon. Why you lie to defend a woman who’s trying to put the noose around your neck I don’t know. You told Captain Crawford at first that you hadn’t seen any woman that night. When you realized Mrs. Kersey was saying there was a woman on your patio, and you heard about that girl wandering around, you changed your story. You said it was the girl who’d come to your patio. That was false. She never came there. The woman who came there was your wife-while Eustace Sype was there, at first, enjoying driving a woman to despair.”
“It’s a lie! It’s a horrible lie! If he told you I was there it’s because he didn’t succeed in killing me last night!”
“He didn’t say you were there, Lucille. You told Mrs. Latham that the business of the string on the steps was out of a picture your husband’s making. You’re trying to accuse him because you failed to kill Mrs. Kersey, which you tried to do when you saw her in your husband’s room. Let me tell you what you thought and did. You thought Mrs. Kersey would tell him Molly was her daughter and his, ask him to divorce you and take up their lives again. You knew Eustace Sype had proposed the divorce. You’ve divorced two husbands already when you thought you’d better yourself. You couldn’t believe the third wouldn’t do the same to you. You were jealous of the girl who was his daughter. You hated her, and you hated the mother more because she had money you thought your husband would sell himself and you and everything for. You didn’t stop to think he might be a gentleman, Lucille. You weren’t worth the despair he felt when he knew finally, last night, that you’d killed Eustace Sype and you were making that too look as if he’d done it, again using a gag technique he’d worked out—and when he realized you were trying to make it look as if he’d attempted your life when it was you who’d faked it—the gas turned on again, after he’d gone leaving his fingerprints there, turned on again just a little, in a room in a hotel crowded with people—”
“That’s all a lie!” Lucille cried. “All a lie! You’re trying to trick me and you can’t do it! I was in Palm Springs Wednesday night—”
“I’m not trying to trick you and you weren’t in Palm Springs. You drove there after you’d put that cord across the steps. You got there early Thursday morning in time to answer that police call and la come back by the plane. You got here, and the first thing you did was tell Mrs. Latham, virtually, that your husband had killed the girl. You knew Gannon knew you were here, and you knew Sype knew it. That’s why you killed Sype—using your husband’s own gag technique again, telling Mrs. Latham you were frantic because you thought Sype might be with the police when nobody answered the phone at his house. And you were frantic—so frantic that you rushed to his house and prepared his death with the bayonet. You didn’t even need any mechanical ingenuity you have, to do it. It was a simple domestic matter, given the framework of a seat, great cushions of puffed down, and the bayonet in the next room. It didn’t take you long, Lucille—but time was of the essence and you couldn’t stop to change your tire when it went flat on your way back to the hotel. With Sype out of the way and your story of coming from your own empty house with your overnight bag you thought you’d be safe. It would just be your husband’s word against yours. But you made a terrible mistake, Lucille—you didn’t realize that you were seen, here in the patio, Wednesday night, by still another person.”
Lucille Gannon’s eyes, slow, hunted, moved dreadfully around the room.
“That’s in the transcript too. Morris Shavin, Wednesday night, was hunting for the girl. In his statement to Captain Crawford he said he almost mistook another woman for her. He would have stopped her, and got into trouble, if she had not gone out the end gate and got into her car just in time. He’d almost lost his job once by stopping a lady star he’d failed to recognize when she was visiting her husband. The job of night watchman, in a hotel like this, would ‘drive the saints crazy.’ That’s why it was easy to overlook, here, one simple thing: Mr. Shavin nowhere said, in his transcript, that he didn’t recognize this woman Wednesday night. The implication is that if he had stopped this woman he would again have got into a lot of trouble—and the reason he knew that he would is that he did recognize her. That is more than an implication, it is a fact. He did not stop her, and he has not yet told the truth, because there could be more than his own job at stake this time. Is that right, Mr. Shavin?”
The little man tried to find words, the sweat standing on his brow. He looked appealingly at Molly, at Rose, at George Gannon.
“His own job was at stake when he stopped the star,” Colonel Primrose said quietly. “This time it was Miss McShane’s job too. Because the woman he saw Wednesday night, going out of the grounds and getting in her car, was the wife of Miss McShane’s producer and director… Is this the truth, Mr. Shavin?”
Morris Shavin found broken words. “She was going way,” he said. “She not see me. She has bad temper, Mrs. Gannon. I would have stop her until I see she is the mister’s wife. It was when I come back from going to his car with Mister Sype.”
Lucille Gannon’s eyes stared unseeingly ahead of her.
“And there is still more,” Colonel Primrose said. “In the transcript again. George Gannon admits a woman was there, and says it was the drunken girl. Mrs. Kersey remarks, ‘I wouldn’t have told a soul, Georgie, dear. I have a clean mind. I assumed it was your wife, darling.’ I think perhaps—”
Viola Kersey brought her hand suddenly up to her mouth. Her face turned pale. She found her voice too.
“I remember. It was his wife. My God, he said it was his wife!”
She looked at George Gannon, standing silent there.
“I remember now. He said it was. I just didn’t believe him. I—I thought he was lying. I thought it was a babe he had there while his wife was away. I thought he was lying because I’d surprised him, going in without waiting for him to open the door.”
Lucille Gannon came to her feet, her eyes blazing— and when she turned savagely on Mrs. Kersey her face was hideous with envy and jealousy and hatred. It was the face of a woman whose heart was a cancerous growth—a woman ready to destroy herself if she could destroy her husband and the woman she thought he wanted to put in her place. Why it should have been this that she broke under I do not know. Colonel Primrose had known it would be. Viola Kersey’s simple assumption, that her husband would naturally have another woman there while she was away, she couldn’t take. It was the spark that set the last straw on fire, it was the root and branch, the flowers and dark fruit of the fear she’d always lived with. Cap
tain Crawford stepped in to her side, and as she moved violently toward Mrs. Kersey he caught her two arms.
“I wish I had killed you! I tried to kill you! And you!”
She jerked around toward George Gannon. “I wish I’d turned the gas full on! They’d have got you then, your fingerprints were there! I’d have been glad to die!”
I closed my eyes as Captain Crawford led her out.
I didn’t want to look at anyone, for the moment, in that room. Anyone, that is, except one person. Mrs. Viola Kersey I didn’t mind looking at. Mrs. Kersey too was an almost invincible devil in her own right. She looked around the room, took a deep breath, and spoke.
“It certainly clears the atmosphere,” Mrs. Kersey said, and she returned briskly to old business. “Now I think we can come to a proper understanding, George. I’m sure we can arrange it so the publicity won’t hurt us, or Molly—”
Colonel Primrose said hastily, “Be quiet, Miss Me-Shane!”
He turned to Mrs. Kersey. She wilted a little under his level gaze before he even spoke.
“You told Mrs. Latham that Molly McShane’s mother was a wicked woman. I want to have the pleasure of adding that she’s a pompous, featherbrained fool. I’m very happy to tell you that you have no moral right to the child you deserted, and you have no legal right to her. You let Mrs. Latham understand you didn’t have a child. You’re right. You have none. You weren’t as much of a fool then as you are now. You wanted to get rid of your baby, and you did it well.”
He took the telegram he’d shown Rose Shavin out of his pocket.
“This is from my associate. He flew down to Galveston last night. It was of course obvious from the beginning that the only hold you could have over the Shavins would be through the one thing they had that meant anything to them. It was obvious that at their time of life it’s unlikely they’d have an only child as young as Miss McShane. Let me read you my associate’s report, Mrs. Kersey. Baby registered Doreen Shavin, daughter Morris and Rose Shavin. Midwife died 1936. Ignore third party claim. There’s no record that that baby ever belonged to you. There isn’t a court in the land that would hand her over to you now against her will. Even if you could establish parentage, there’s no court in the land that would hand this girl over, after seventeen years of desertion, to a woman of bad character.
“Don’t interrupt me. If Captain Crawford chooses to bring it up, you’ll find there are courts that regard an accessory after the fact of murder as a very serious offender. Not to mention the offense of removing evidence from the scene of a crime—not to mention attempting to use it as blackmail against innocent persons.”
Mrs. Kersey’s rosebud mouth had sagged open. It must have been one of the few times in her life when she had nothing to say. Her face was mottled in streaks and blotches, and it was slowly turning greenish gray.
“Sype told Mrs. Latham you planned to become duenna for a promising starlet, now that Hollywood is domesticated and respectable—by taking back a child you’d deserted, whom you didn’t offer to help until you felt her success was assured. It hasn’t worked out, Mrs. Kersey. I should greatly doubt that Mr. Gannon wants to marry you again—”
“Marry that--!” George Gannon was galvanized to instant life, and what he called his former wife, while no doubt true, was not the kind of language he should have used in front of a teen-age daughter.
“And one thing more,” Colonel Primrose said affably.
“I doubt if Mr. Kersey is going to be happy at the idea that you’ve already started divorce proceedings against him. That can also come on the record.”
Mrs. Kersey was not mottled gray-green any longer. Her face was suddenly quite white.
“Let me out of here!” she gasped. “Let me out!”
No one was wanting to stop her, and I heard no regrets expressed when she’d gone, except, oddly enough, from little Miss Molly McShane.
“I feel sort of sorry for her. I guess she’s—”
Her voice trailed off. Pity and compassion were elements I’d thought had been left out of the brew of fire and brimstone, but it seemed they were really there. She turned back to Colonel Primrose.
“Don’t punish her because of me. It doesn’t matter to me. I—I wouldn’t want even to take a chance of being anything like her when I’m her age. I—I’m going to marry Sheep. I’m not going to try to be a star.”
“Not if you’re my daughter you’re not!” The mere mention of motion pictures was apparently enough to hurtle George Gannon out of the domestic maelstrom two of his wives had hurtled him into. “No daughter of mine is doing slave labor in this outdoor Buchenwald. This, I won’t take. This—”
“This, you can skip!” Miss Molly McShane said. “I’m not your daughter. I’m Rose and Morry’s. That, you can take, and that, you can like!”
“Shut up, baby.” Sheep put his arm around her and drew her to him. “I don’t think Rose and Morry want us to be rude to him. He’s still your original producer.” George Gannon jerked his cigar out of his mouth. He grinned a little who’d probably thought he would never grin again. He thrust his hand out to Sheep.
“That, I like,” he said. “Take her. She’s yours. We’re having the biggest wedding in—”
He stopped, looking at Rose and Morris Shavin. I looked at them too. All the years they’d worked to get their girl here—and now she was on her way. They both had tears in their eyes. But a different kind of tears.
Rose Shavin nodded. “It’s best for our girl. She needs a man who can make her behave herself. That Sheep—”
It’s as far as she got. And nobody has to believe this. I don’t believe it myself, who saw it, who was there when it happened. I still don’t believe it, in spite of the fact that last week, in Washington, D.C., Colonel Primrose called me up and told me they were in town, and took me to see them. I’ll never believe it—or I’ll believe, always, anything anybody tells me about Hollywood hereafter.
George Gannon had his cigar poised in mid-air, staring at Rose and Morris Shavin, their faces lighted with pride and tenderness for their little former hellcat. “That Sheep—” Rose said. And George Gannon bounded forward.
“This, I can’t believe!”
He jammed his cigar into his mouth and jerked it out again.
“This is incredible! This is terrific! This— Turn around, Rose. Both of you, turn around! This, I am waiting for! All my life for the last four months, this, I am waiting for!”
He stopped, speechless for an instant with the wonder of it.
“This, I am four months on my knees praying for! Rose, Morry, look! Five hundred a week! Not a cent more!… A thousand a week! It’s a story I am buying and putting on ice for four months because I am never finding two people I am seeing in it. It’s terrific! It’s The Birth of a Nation, it’s The Yearling, it’s Duel in the Sun, it’s great! With you, it is the Academy Award and grosses nine million! Look, Rose. Look, Morry. Molly, I am not wanting. Girls like Molly, with them I am lousy. But character, that I scratch for—that, I will buy. Who’s your agent? Call my secretary!”
It sounds absurd, that I know, but there it was. Molly and Sheep and Bill stood with their mouths and eyes open wide. It seemed impossible that George Gannon, ten minutes before hag-hidden by what the girl from Seattle could have called a couple of screwy dames and been so terribly right, had forgotten all about them. But it’s a thing about Hollywood. It’s the unbelievable single-mindedness of the people who make the movies, the people who do the real work that no one ever hears about. It’s the air they breathe, it’s the blood that keeps their hearts pumping. Their own throats they cut, and anybody else’s, to make a great picture. Whatever they do, whatever they say, they believe it is the most important thing in the universe. That, they believe—that, they work at. It’s a cockeyed priesthood, but it’s a working one.
And George Gannon was working. He was like the dreary lop-eared old horses that become fiery steeds the instant they hear “Camera!”
“Somebody ca
ll my secretary!”
He had them across the hall, a couple of bewildered characters, their new proprietors right behind them. Sheep, and Molly, and my son Bill. He’d forgotten he had a mother present. And she’d forgotten for some time that she had a neighbor, until at that moment Mrs. Ansell’s closet door opened and a paroxysm of coughing came through the wall.
“It’s this damned climate,” Mrs. Ansell said. “I’ll put a stick of wood on the fire. I wish to God I could see Miss Turner so I could go back home. They say next week—maybe.” The closet door closed, a piece of wood rolled down on the floor. My son Bill came whipping back. He’d remembered about me just as he was bringing up the rear at George Gannon’s door.
“Gee, Ma!” You’d have thought he personally had been tapped for the Poor Man’s Clark Gable. He gave me a bear hug and a kiss. He let me go, and turned to Colonel Primrose.
“Gee, Colonel! You were swell! You did a job—I guess I’ve had you wrong! Thanks a million!”
He put his hand out. Colonel Primrose shook it. Colonel Primrose turned to me.
“That, I like,” he said.
THE END
About Leslie Ford
Leslie Ford (1898-1983) was one of the pseudonyms of Zenith Brown (née Jones). The other names this author used are Brenda Conrad and David Frome. Leslie Ford was born in Smith River, California and educated at the University of Washington in Seattle. In 1921 she married Ford K. Brown. Leslie Ford became the Assistant in the Departments of Greek and Philosophy, then the Instructor and teacher of English for the University of Washington between 1921 and 1923. After that she was Assistant to the Editor and Circulation Manager of Dial Magazine in New York City. She became a freelance writer after 1927. Ms. Ford was a correspondent for the United States Air Force both in the Pacific area and in England during the Second World War. Her series characters were Lieutenant Joseph Kelly, Grace Latham and Colonel John Primrose.