by K. K. Beck
Melanie lowered her voice conspiratorially. “And what about that other thing? What have you found out about Lila?” Because Melanie felt that Lila was a menace, both financially and as far as the script went, she’d asked Tom Thorndyke to do a background check on her. The last straw had been a few days ago, when Nadia had suggested Lila move into the guest cottage because “she’s really crucial at this stage, creatively speaking.” The last denizen of the guest cottage, a nasty piece of Eurotrash named Guido, who had staked out a claim as Nadia’s fencing coach when she was considering a lady pirate script, had managed to live rent free for more than a year.
“It’s done,” said Tom. “I’ll fax it over to you.”
“Is she Valerian Ricardo’s widow for sure? I mean we only have her word for it. She could be anybody.”
“I haven’t come across any record of a marriage, but it’s clear she’s who she says she is. They lived together as man and wife. Professor Pendergast told me she knows all about Valerian Ricardo and he has no reason to doubt she’s genuine.”
Melanie was disappointed, but read Tom’s report carefully when it came through on the fax machine a few minutes later. Maybe there was something in here she could use to discredit Lila in Nadia’s eyes.
Lila Ricardo a.k.a. Lila Lamb a.k.a. Ethel Mae Lasenby. Lila Lamb is a stage name. Born in Rumford, Maine, circa 1915, where her parents ran a dry goods store.
LR apparently arrived in Hollywood in 1937. Member of Screen Extras Guild, and later Screen Actors Guild. SAG records indicate that Lila Lamb had two credited parts in B movies: hatcheck girl in The Lady Cracks Wise Twentieth Century Fox, 1939, and a jitterbugging switchboard operator in Victory Canteen RKO, 1942.
According to Dr. Glen Pendergast of Montana’s Badlands State College, and the author of a book about Valerian Ricardo, LR says she met VR in 1942 when he was a writer at RKO and they married. They moved into the penthouse of the Scheherazade Apartments in 1944.
VR’s career fell flat after the war and the couple had financial and legal problems. In 1948, he was arrested in a raid on a printing company that was publishing pornographic novels. He was apparently there to pick up a check for a work entitled Naughty Spanking Nuns Confidential, but beat the rap when he offered to testify for the prosecution against his editor. He was also charged, very briefly in 1952, with statutory rape in a case involving a teenage girl living in his building, but the victim recanted and the charges were dropped. The Ricardos had tax problems in the sixties, which dragged on for years, and Lila set herself up as an elocution teacher.
Economically pressed, they moved from the penthouse into a series of smaller units lower down in the building, ending up in the caretaker’s apartment in the basement.
In 1972, VR was found dead of a heart attack in the boiler room of the Scheherazade. There were a few small obituary notices, noting the fact that VR was once a bestselling author, and alluding to mysterious mechanical equipment of unknown purpose, in which Ricardo’s partially nude body was found entangled.
Because tenants at the Scheherazade had complained about juvenile drug use in the boiler room, there was a brief police investigation into the case. According to the detective in charge, now retired and living in Oregon, Valerian’s body had been found by a tenant who had come to complain about the malfunctioning heating in the building.
Ricardo was tied up to some sort of bondage apparatus of his own design and manufacture. Lila told the police her husband regularly insisted she tie him onto this framework, make small adjustments with a series of cranks and read passages of his works to him, although occasionally he simply asked her to come back in half an hour or so and release him.
Recently, she said, he’s been hanging out with a bunch of hippies who’d been providing him with hashish, opium, and cocaine, drugs he had used previously during the years right after World War One. Lila wanted these youths to be held accountable for his death, and produced some hashish they had left behind.
It was the detective’s opinion that the heart attack could well have been brought on by a coke binge, but it would have been difficult to make a case against Ricardo’s juvenile associates.
“I told her to forget about it,” he said. “She was a respectable woman in her late fifties or early sixties, and she’d suffered enough with that husband of hers. He got what was coming to him, many years too late, in my opinion, and there wasn’t any point in exposing the poor old gal to a lot of ugly publicity.”
Lila moved to West Hollywood soon after Valerian’s death, and found work as a manicurist at a department store hair salon. She appears to be living on social security and a small pension.
According to Glen Pendergast, she has litigious tendencies and in 1992 made many attempts to extort money from him on the basis that she owned rights to VR’s works. She threatened him with legal action and demanded the right to edit his book. Pendergast expressed concern about her sanity, telling the interviewer, “That crazy woman is one of the scariest people I know.”
CHAPTER X
THE VISION OF KALI-RA
The last line gave Melanie an idea. Maybe the professor’s presence around here could undercut Lila’s influence. She’d pitch it to Nadia that the guy was a great intellectual with terrific insight into the work of Valerian Ricardo, and suggest they hire him as a consultant. Maybe he could stop Lila from ruining Duncan’s script.
Nadia would probably buy it, and Dr. Pendergast would too, if his gushy inscription was any indication. She took his book down from the shelf and read a passage at random.
Even stylized phallic symbols such as the Sacred Dagger and the Pillar of Pain can thus be reappropriated (“re-gendered”) by Eternal Woman defined, unlike Goethe’s Ewig-Weibliche, not despite but through her sex(d)uality. In Kali-Ra, the vagina dentata becomes a textual black hole creating a parallel “she-male” universe in which pain/pleasure, power/humiliation, good/evil are fused in post-Manichaean bliss (cf. Lacan, op. cit.).
It was, Melanie thought, pretentious bullshit, but a lot classier than the stuff Lila was dishing out. She would definitely try to get the professor on board. It shouldn’t be too difficult. Judging by his agitated prose, Dr. Pendergast hadn’t had a date in some time.
* * *
Out by the pool, Duncan Blaine clutched his lemon-papaya spritzer, feeling badly in need of something more stimulating. The old girl was banging on about Kali-Ra’s moonlight soliloquy to the bound and gagged Raymond Vernon, which she felt needed beefing up. “In short, I’m sorry to say that you don’t seem to grasp the depths behind all this,” she said.
He suppressed the urge to say depths couldn’t be grasped, and weren’t behind anything, while she fished around in what looked like a knitting bag and came up with some sheets of lined notebook paper covered with crabbed, penciled writing. “I’ve put together a few of my own thoughts, with more emphasis on the metaphysics. This is where we can deliver Valerian’s insights from the Enlightened Ones to the common people. But it takes time. It’s not something you want to rush through.”
He put down his glass and scanned the pages, pretending to skim, although he couldn’t have deciphered her scrawls even if he had chosen to. The lines seemed to run into each other at odd angles.
“Hmm,” he said with fake reluctance. “I don’t know. This looks pretty long. We can’t stop the action for five minutes while Kali-Ra gives us some kind of occult sermon.”
Nadia chimed in. “Maybe it could be really dramatic. Get in closer and closer on me until you see just my eyes. And then they can change color, like a mood-ring thing.”
“Yes, yes,” said Lila enthusiastically. “Nadia, darling, a moving soliloquy with the wisdom of the Enlightened Ones as its subject! It’s your chance to show the world what a powerful actress you are.”
“Well, we’re still running pretty long,” said Duncan. It had been his idea to cut this scene by half through the simple expedient of literally gagging Raymond Vernon, and tying him up too, of course, then reduc
ing his lines to a few muffled groans. But then Nadia had wanted to shoehorn in about a million temple rituals in which her followers lay prostrate before her in dumpy robes her while she pranced around modeling kinky goddess gear.
“I’ve been thinking about running-time issues,” said Nadia. “I think we should cut the virgin handmaidens.”
“Cut the priestesses of Kali-Ra?” said Lila, aghast. “That’s like making a movie about Jesus without the apostles.”
“I kind of like what we’ve got going with the handmaidens,” said Duncan. “A little postmodern referential thing that goes back to the Goldwyn Girls.” He appealed to Nadia. “The critics will realize how sophisticated and witty it is.” Duncan also thought the virgin handmaidens cavorting around their living quarters at the temple together, handled properly, could work on another level. The way he’d written it, it was pretty saucy stuff. His take had been to interpret the label “virgin” only in its heterosexual sense.
“This project is not about exploiting female sexuality,” said Nadia with a pout. “A bunch of bimbos’ tits take away from the central focus.”
Yeah, thought Duncan. Which is your tits. He cleared his throat and decided it was time to try to get back out to the glove box-cum-drinks cabinet. “Listen, you ladies have given me a lot to mull over. What I want to do now is get back to the hotel and have a really good drink. Er, think.” He flapped the notebook pages. “And of course go over Lila’s notes.”
“They’re not notes,” said Lila huffily. “I’ve written the whole scene. Or actually, Valerian did. He guided my hand while I was in a trance state.”
“Wow,” said Nadia her eyes widening. “Maybe we should give him a writer’s credit.”
“What?” Duncan felt himself losing it. “You want me to share credit with a dead man?”
“Dead is a relative term,” said Lila.
“Not to the Writers Guild,” snapped Duncan.
Lila’s eyes took on a glassy opacity. “Valerian is speaking to me now, Duncan,” she said in a husky voice. “You’re not a very evolved entity. And he’s worried about your spiritual emanations. You may be blocked.”
“We can’t have anything like that,” said Nadia. “We’re shooting next month, for God’s sake. Duncan, you better move in here and we’ll put in twenty-hour days or whatever it takes until we get it right.”
“All right,” said Duncan, making a mental note to clear out the minibar, stash all those little bottles in his luggage and bill it to the picture before he checked out, and then stop by the liquor store as well to make sure he was adequately supplied. He rose to go but Nadia stopped him. “Stay right here. I’ll have Melanie or someone drive down there and get your stuff.”
CHAPTER XI
A SECRET PAST
“Margaret? Is that really you? God, I’m so glad you took my call.”
Quentin Smith lay on his hotel room bed, stared at the sprinkler heads on the ceiling, and reveled in the sound of her voice.
“Morbid curiosity, I guess,” she said bitterly.
“I’m really glad you did.”
“I think I wanted a chance to tell you just what a jerk you are.”
“I know I’m a jerk,” he said.
She sighed. “I wrote you a bunch of letters telling you in precise terms just what a jerk you are, but I never sent them.”
“I wish you had. Any letter from you, no matter how abusive, would have comforted me in my horrible exile.” This would have been easier in person. He could have showed contrition through body language and with a spaniel-eyed look.
She continued with her narrative. Quentin had the feeling she might have rehearsed it. “At first I didn’t send those letters because I thought they made me sound hysterical and unattractive,” she said.
“Oh, Margaret,” he said tenderly.
“Later I didn’t send them because I didn’t care what you thought anyway,” she snapped.
He produced a doglike whimper.
“So,” she said briskly, changing key, “just what brings you to town?” Apparently, the personal part of the conversation was over.
“Um, a little research. About a Nadia Wentworth project. Your firm did some business with her a while back, didn’t they?” he asked.
“That’s right. I wasn’t involved, but Lou was. Remember him? He handled it and he started doing painkillers and had to go into rehab and his marriage broke up. Nadia Wentworth has an ego the size of an aircraft carrier and she’s about as maneuverable.”
This didn’t sound good.
“She’s also very stupid,” Margaret added thoughtfully.
“Really?” This sounded better.
“The word is, ever since some disastrous experiences early in her career, Nadia Wentworth has displayed a reckless disregard for the advice of her attorneys and her business manager. She wants to handle everything herself.”
“I see.”
“So far, it seems to have worked. A few years ago, she hired a young personal assistant, Melanie Oakley, who seemed to have arrived in town off the bus from college. Rumor is her last job was pulling lattes at a Starbucks somewhere, but now she handles Nadia’s entire career and her production company, and she seems to be doing a fantastic job.”
“Interesting.”
“Well,” Margaret said curtly. “We’ve talked business. Is that why you wanted to see me? To pick my brain?”
This wasn’t going well. In a huge spasm of helplessness, Quentin decided to blurt out the whole truth. If she wasn’t moved, at least she’d be disarmed. “Margaret, I wanted to see you because you’re the only woman I have ever loved and could ever love. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Go ahead. Laugh.”
After a little pause, she did laugh, then said calmly, “You should have written that on the postcard you sent me, instead of that glib invitation for me to throw away my chance at a partnership, give away the cat, sell my condo and come join you on some Club Med–type island.”
“It was a very confusing time,” he said.
“You got that right,” she said, sounding hard and cold and proud of herself because of it. “So how are things in your tropical paradise?”
“I hate islands,” he replied with a shudder. “I feel like a prisoner.”
“I take it you’re still working for that scumbag who makes Sammy Glick look like Mahatma Gandhi.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“I’m sure you’re learning a lot.”
“I’m learning my lesson,” he said. “I’m learning how much I had to lose. I’m learning what it feels like to turn into someone you don’t like very much, doing things that you wouldn’t want your mother to know about.”
“Quentin, for God’s sake. You talk as if you have no choice! Quit. Come home.”
“I can’t,” he said.
“You didn’t seem to have much trouble quitting your old job, packing your bags, and leaving town six months ago.”
“I might have had more trouble if I’d stayed,” he said.
“What? What kind of trouble?” She sounded concerned now.
“Legal trouble.”
“Quentin! Is it the McCorkindale matter?” He winced. How he wished he’d never heard the name McCorkindale. “I always wondered if you were in that deeper than you let on!” She sounded shocked.
“I filed this document with the Securities and Exchange Commission that—” he began.
“Stop! Don’t tell me!” she said.
“But I want to tell you! Oh, Margaret, marry me. If you marry me, you can’t testify against me.”
“Ha! Now that’s a real winning proposal.”
“I know I sound crazy,” he said urgently.
“I’ve got to go,” she said.
“What? Can’t we at least have dinner?”
“No. Anyway, I have a date. That’s why I have to go.”
“Who is this guy?” Quentin felt helpless and angry. “Someone from your firm?”
“No. He’s a lawyer, but
not an entertainment lawyer. I’ve sworn off sleazebags. Actually, he’s a federal prosecutor.”
Quentin’s head started pounding and he put a trembling hand on his forehead.
“Don’t worry,” she said sweetly. “I won’t mention the McCorkindale matter.”
“When can I call you again?” he asked plaintively.
“As soon as the statute of limitations runs out,” she said, hanging up on him.
He replaced the receiver, consulted the room service menu, and was about to pick up the phone to order a French dip sandwich and fries, when the phone rang again. It was Maurice’s secretary, asking him in her clipped tone to stay on the line for Mr. Fender.
Quentin went over the details in his mind. He’d learned all about the project and reported back to Maurice a few days ago. It wasn’t anything Maurice couldn’t have learned from the trades. The Revenge of Kali-Ra was ready to start shooting in a month. They had a pretty decent director who was in Costa Rica right now, along with the production staff, nailing down some final locations, and a writer, who although washed up at the moment, had written a screenplay about disaffected young people in Thatcher’s Britain that had won a Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival a decade ago.
Quentin had also learned that the studio was frantic because Nadia Wentworth was still in town screwing around with the script. Her screenwriter had green card problems, and couldn’t risk leaving the country now, so he couldn’t be in Costa Rica doing the rewrites. They were powerless, however, because her deal had a creative-control clause that was about as good as what Orson Welles had had on Citizen Kane. Quentin had told Maurice that now was as good a time as any to produce proof of copyright and screw a million or so out of the producers of The Revenge of Kali-Ra, who would be glad to pay up in order to avoid the costly holdups that would result from litigation. Maurice had finally agreed, and Quentin had duly filed with the Copyright Office and mailed a letter to Nadia’s production company, Apple Blossom Productions, pointing out that the works were no longer in the public domain and that Maurice’s company owned the rights.