The GLAMOROUS DEAD
SUZANNE GATES
KENSINGTON BOOKS
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2017 by Suzanne Gates
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
eISBN-13: 978-1-4967-0813-7
eISBN-10: 1-4967-0813-X
First Kensington Electronic Edition: November 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4967-0812-0
For Jeanette and Joanne
Paramount Pictures
“The Lady Eve” Preston Sturges, Dir
Extras Production Schedule Final Draft October 30 1940
Show up ON TIME. No lipstick provided.
Paychecks issued at Payroll after week’s shooting completed. Do not ask for advance pay. Miles Abbott signs all timesheets. No paychecks issued without his signature.
Are you LOST? Map on reverse.
Questions? Dial Paramount Publicity Department
HOllywood 2411
MA:mb
CHAPTER 1
So you’ve envied those girls out in Hollywood with all the screen heroes to choose from.
—Photoplay, November 1940
Someone buried a girl in the narrow pass behind the Florentine Gardens. Two sailors dug her free and a crowd of us watched, late night, still in fluff costumes from our Hail the Indians dance.
Stany hit my arm. “Might not be her. Rosemary’s across town, think of that. She’s out dancing, and here we’re all worried. Didn’t you say she always comes back?”
“I can’t see. Let me go.”
One sailor lifted a handful of dirt. “I need a flash,” he said, and a flash appeared in his hand. He switched it on, and the light beam made his handful of dirt glow. He shook dirt between his fingers until a chunk remained, and then he yelled and dropped the chunk. It bounced and settled by Stany’s shoe: a thumb.
Funny how long we can stare at one thumb. I knew it so well. Who wore pink polish when red was the thing? Who bit that polish and scraped it with her teeth to a pink oval? And next to the thumb my friend Stany’s open-toed pump, bone leather, toes painted red, little ankle strap leading to her calf, her linen skirt, and around us the feathered colors of Apache Girl, Navajo, Chumash, still costumed for the night’s second show. We heard sirens then, and my eyes stung from mascara and false lash glue.
Stany hugged my shoulders. Stany, who two weeks ago heard Rosemary went missing and said let’s be friends but gave me no reason. Movie stars don’t say to Farm Girls let’s be friends, but she did, and tonight she hugged me, and tonight nobody recognized her. Tonight she was one of us around a dirt pit and a thumb, and Rosemary was the center now because it was her thumb, her pink polish. Stany leaned into me, and my breath wheezed.
“Clear out,” said a cop voice. Girls moved inside the club’s stage door. The two sailors clapped dirty hands over the grave and pointed to what they’d dug so far.
I watched like my real self circled above the alley and all Stany held close was a skin sack. I’m describing it now, and I still don’t want to feel. Stany told me it’s shock, and that’s what shock is. Stany was wrong. I knew about shock. I was circling. I saw streetlamps and cars down Hollywood Boulevard, scrolled front doors of the Florentine Gardens with its neon flashing Nightclub Nightclub, red velvet rope, and line of couples waiting to dance, square building, then its pitted rear walls. The stage door open enough for a long yellow triangle to cut light through the alley by trash cans, between dance hall and dorms. Three cops, two uniforms and one in a suit, and sailor hats I could see the tops of because I circled the air and pretended I couldn’t feel. Stany’s rolled hair.
It’s November in Hollywood, and the Florentine Gardens is the town’s best revue, and nothing I say can make you feel how I felt, sucking air, me in a short feather skirt. I was Cree Girl, and Barbara Stanwyck hugged me, I smelled my best friend in the dirt by my feet, and I thought, Keep that cop away.
CHAPTER 2
Says Joan Bennett: “It’s of great importance to have one’s hands blend with one’s personality.”
—Photoplay, November 1940
The suit cop raised a notebook and smiled. A detective. He made me sit on a bucket he’d turned upside down, he gave me his coat, and Stany tucked it around my shoulders. My headdress wobbled, and Stany unpinned it. She never moved, not when the detective told her to. We stayed outside so the detective could watch us and still see his cops dig up Rosemary.
“My best friend,” I said. “Rosemary Brown.”
“You know without seeing the face?” Burned brown skin and round eyes. A fat Mexican.
“Who needs a face?” Stany talked for me. “Look at the thumb.”
It lay on the dirt, no blood, nail bed white around the pink oval.
“You are—”
“Barbara Stanwyck,” Stany said.
“Like the actress.”
“Just like.”
The detective wrote in his notebook. “Barbara Stanwyck, your friend doesn’t talk?”
“She’s terrorized. She’s asthmatic. She—”
“I talk.” I hardly heard myself. “I live there”—I pointed at the dorms—“with Rosemary.”
“You dance at the club?”
“Not really dance,” Stany said. “She’s in the girl revue. They parade is all. In costumes.”
“I can’t dance,” I said.
One uniformed cop had a shovel now. He dug around Rosemary’s shoulders, and the loose dirt built into a pile between me and the body.
“Why did you bury your best friend?”
“I didn’t bury her. I walked over a little hill, I didn’t know it was her, we all walked over her body for days before the hand got free. Then those sailors dug up her arm.”
“You walked on your best friend.”
Everything said to a d
etective sounds bad. Say a girl walks the hard, flat dirt from backstage to her dorm, and she does this again more times each day, then the next day a hill comes and she walks over that, but she doesn’t have time to think about the hill. She has to get somewhere, a studio or rehearsal, to dinner or bed, and she doesn’t think where she’s walking. Other girls do the same, all day, and we never think it’s a body we’re walking across. We have somewhere to get to. We have to make money.
“I guess so,” I said. “I walked on her. I didn’t know it was her.”
“You didn’t smell her.”
“Nobody smelled her,” Stany said. “Look at the garbage cans. Who can smell a body over that?”
“I smell her now,” I said.
“You parade at this club.”
“She’s an extra at Paramount,” Stany said. “She works on my set.”
“Sure,” he said. “We all work there.”
“So did Rosemary,” I said.
“Sure, all of us. When did you start walking on her?”
“Two weeks? I can’t remember,” I said. “I know Rose went missing on Halloween.” But I’d wished Rosemary gone every day since we’d moved to Hollywood. I didn’t tell the detective that. If not gone from the city, then missing, so each casting call the directors would look at me instead of beautiful her. She was the girl stopped by tourists, the girl handed free drinks, with a small nose and Hedy Lamarr eyes. She was taller than me. She had gold hair that I hated because mine was light blond, boring. She had movie star breasts.
The cop with the shovel stopped digging. “We have a face. Don’t let the ladies see.”
Our detective turned, and his body blocked the view.
Stany nudged me with her elbow. “The cop digging. I know him,” she said. She talked soft, so her voice didn’t reach the detective. “He works security at Paramount. A lot of these guys moonlight. Jim? Joe? Joe. Security. Good news for us.”
“Why good news?”
“Information, Pen. Joe’s our link to the case. I’m having a look.”
She left me and stood by the digging cop, both watching something I couldn’t see. I heard mumbles and some words—“damage,” “chin”—and inside the club, drums beat the beginning of the second show.
Maybe Stany was right. Maybe I was in shock. I couldn’t move from that bucket, and my skirt feathers stuck to my sweaty skin. Under the sweat I felt cold, and the detective’s jacket didn’t help. My legs shook, I think because they understood it was Rose they’d walked across and stomped on and smashed. In my head I got stuck on little things, like, where’s our rent, what’s my schedule tomorrow. I didn’t think about why Stany looked excited instead of scared, how many times did I walk across Rose, or why did Joe the cop stare at me. Those are the questions that come now, as I’m telling you.
I didn’t answer them. I was still on the bucket, and the fat detective shifted so the light from the cop’s flash shined past his body, and I saw in that light Rosemary’s beautiful yellow face with her eyes open and dirt-clogged. The cop was holding her head, and she was staring through me. I heard Stany say, “Why is her neck green?” and I vomited.
“Let’s finish our talk,” the detective said. “Forget what they’re digging up. We don’t see them. Where do you really work during the day?”
I wiped my mouth on my arm. “I’m an extra at Paramount.”
“Sure,” he said.
“I met Stany there. Hank Fonda, too. Rosemary and I got the job on Halloween, with a group from Central Casting. We work the club nights. Rose and me.”
“And I’m her friend,” Stany said.
“Not really,” I said. I looked at the detective’s dark eyes. “She says she’s my friend, but I don’t understand why.”
“You are worth having a friend like me,” Stany said. “Is that guy supposed to move the thumb? I’m sure it’s a clue.”
The detective said, “You work at a dance club where you don’t dance.”
“Right,” I said. “We’ve been Indian Girls since we moved to Hollywood. That was last April. Rose and me.”
“Last April. So that’s, what, seven months you’ve been in town? Seven and a half months? How old are you?”
“She’s twenty-two,” Stany said.
I said, “I am?”
The detective wrote in his notebook and closed it.
“I saw her last at the Palladium,” I said. “We went to the grand opening on Halloween. Can I have some water?”
“If I get you water, will you tell me the truth?”
“Sure,” I said.
He tucked his notebook under one arm and disappeared behind the stage door. I stood and dropped his coat on the bucket. “I’m tired,” I said. I watched Stany watch me. “Early call tomorrow.”
“You’re in shock,” she said.
I stood two feet from Rosemary’s body. A couple feathers drifted from my skirt to her yellow chest. The flash cop brushed dirt from her ribs. I stepped around the cops, the dirt pile, the hill of Rosemary, and I crossed to the dorm.
I must have gone in and climbed the stairs. I remember lying on our mattress in the room we shared with two other girls, but I don’t remember the girls coming home.
I slept, then I woke, and I recalled the night through waxed paper, all smeared except for her body. I thought and thought about Rosemary’s body, and why I should remember it so clear. Then I knew: She didn’t have clothes on. Someone cut off Rose’s thumb and killed her, and buried her nude in a place I’d have to walk over all day.
CHAPTER 3
“Get out and live!” That’s what the old maestros in the opera houses and the theaters used to tell those they were grooming for fame. “And if your heart gets broken, be glad! It’ll make a better actress of you!”
—Photoplay, March 1940
“I’m going to Hollywood,” I told Rosemary. This was last March. We sat under an old Washington navel that waved branches over the Knotts’ farm. Their berry canes stuck through the barbed wire property line. On my family’s side, the orange trees grew in rows for twenty acres and stopped at Grand Avenue. Rose and I sat two acres up and couldn’t see all the people in line down Grand, but we could hear them. Rose stretched her legs in the dirt, and we both breathed in orange blossoms. We lived in Buena Park.
“Hollywood,” she said. “Hollywood! What changed your mind? Oh, who cares, we’re going, who cares. We’ll be stars by next year.” She stood and twirled with her arms out. Her skirt became a bell. “I’m Ann Sheridan, I’m—no, I’m Alice Faye, I’m anyone but Joan Fontaine, who mopes like she’s dead, bless her, I’m Rosemary Brown—”
“Rose.”
“We’ll rent an apartment by MGM. The studio makes the girl. We don’t want anywhere but MGM. I’ll meet a director in three days. No, two.”
“What about Will?”
“We’re not married, Pen. He can visit. It’s not that far. I’ll need new earrings. I’ve just these, and look at them. And a dress.”
I could see her think up her options. She tilted her head, and a gold hair fringe covered her chin. Hair stuck to her lips. She twirled a circle, she danced in her dream Hollywood.
“I’ve saved eight months,” I said. I wore dungarees and red lipstick. “I have to leave here. I’m going. In Hollywood I’ll be somebody else.”
“Eight months? You saved and you didn’t tell me? I need money from somewhere. I’ve made forty dollars at Godding’s and I’ve spent it all. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Rose, are you listening? I want to go on my own. I can’t stay here. These trees, all those people . . .” I meant the line of people I heard beyond the trees, their mutters that reached me as claps and chirps of sound. I breathed and couldn’t quite get the air in.
“You’re selfish,” she said.
“I’m selfish, then.”
“What about Will? Your mom and Daisy?”
“Two minutes ago you said Will could visit. I won’t be far away. Mom doesn’t need my help with Dai
sy any more than she needs your help.”
“Now you’re selfish and mean.” She sat again in the dirt. “Look at me. I belong in Hollywood.”
She did. The sun skipped tree leaves and settled direct on her hair. The wind blew just those parts of her that looked better in motion, her skirt hem and two curls by her cheek. If it rained like it rained two years ago, to a flood, Rose’s wet blouse would drape her waist like a Greek statue. Perfect for film.
“It’s not the trees,” she said. “It’s that date. One date. You go on one date with an old friend and you keep thinking about it. I don’t get you.”
“So I can’t forget.” Across the barbed wire, through canes, in front of his barn, Walter Knott lifted a hand at me. A sort-of wave. He wanted to buy us out. I lifted my hand back.
“It was my idea to go to Hollywood,” Rose said. “For years I’ve dreamed it, and now you’ll go alone.”
“You never dreamed it. I’m sorry. You said you don’t get me, and it’s true. I’m not like I was.”
“Don’t I know,” she said.
“Please. Let me have this. Let it be mine.”
She lifted a twig and made it a wand, tapping her feet and knees. “I need trousers”—tap—“and stockings”—tap—“and another skirt.”
“Rose—”
“I’m going. You’re not the only one with bad luck. So he forced you a little. What do you think a date is?”
I could shift, lean on my side, and see down a tree row to Grand and the line-up waiting for chicken dinner. Through branches and thick trunks and leaves, I saw them: dollhouse families who didn’t care if the wait to be served was three hours. Before the flood, just a few people had stopped at the Knotts’ roadside stand. And now Mr. Knott, in a black town suit, walked with a clipboard from his barn to the back of the restaurant, where Cordelia Knott fried her chicken and served it with stewed rhubarb and goddamn boysenberry pie. He looked at me again and nodded. He knew he’d have our orchard within a year and a half.
The Glamorous Dead Page 1