The hookers thought I was funny, how I pushed myself into the corner and pulled up my knees. I tried not to cry in front of them. They got bored with me and ignored me, but never slept three at one time. On Sunday morning they left the cell, and the guard stood in the doorway and winked at me. He asked me, “What did you learn from the Mex whores?”
I knew what he meant. His wink told me.
* * *
“Your turn,” the guard said and switched on the hall light. The hookers had been gone all day. In the hall I saw shadows, shadows all over, shadows of bars that crossed the hall floor and hit my cell at an angle. The guard unlocked my cell. The hallway clock read five thirty p.m.—between sandwich and stew time—and the guard pushed me in front so I walked the hall before him, then down a flight of stairs to another hall. He knocked on a door, and when it opened he hit my shoulder with his hand. I went in.
After the dark cell, the light made me squeeze my sore eyes and look through my eyelashes. A small room. Stany was there, and Detective Conejos, and Marty with one swinging lock of hair that had missed his morning Brylcreem. They sat around a long table, smoking. I didn’t see Will until the guard shut the door. He sat in a chair behind me. He wore a blue jacket that didn’t match his work pants. He didn’t look at me straight on. Instead, he picked his fingernails and leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
“Why are you here? Mom’s all right? Will?”
He wouldn’t talk or look at me.
“What is this? Why do you have my brother?”
“I’ve met your whole family,” Conejos said. “Sit down, please. You look like you slept on the floor. How’s your breathing? We’ve got your vaporizer. Need it?”
My breathing was fine. I sat on the only empty chair, beside Will.
“Okay, then. Your brother has told us a story. It’s a good story. Not the best I’ve heard, but he doesn’t have the practice you do. Brother, you want to tell your story again?”
Will shook his head.
“I understand.” Conejos tapped his cigarette on the table corner and turned pages in his notebook. “I’ll tell it for you. The story starts last April. A young man in need of money. How’m I doing, Missy? I want the right touch of drama.”
“Shut up and talk,” Stany said. She lit a cigarette with the butt of her last one. Through the layers of smoke, her hair was dull, like shelled walnuts. She’d tucked her curls into a snood.
“April. Your brother and Rosemary Brown cook up an idea between them. She moves to Hollywood and lets her beauty open doors. Ciro’s, Earl Carroll’s—you ever been to Ciro’s?”
“No,” I said.
“Me neither. Did you know Rosemary Brown had?”
“She didn’t tell me.”
“Hmm. Good story. But you’ve got practice. Anyways. You live here a while, it doesn’t take long to figure out the social agenda. Go to a few nightspots, read the columns, pretty soon you know where people are going to be. A party at Ciro’s, you show up. Say MGM needs girls to fill a room, you show up there, too. Rosemary Brown knew how to do this. Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you know?”
I shook my head. This wasn’t my story.
“Rosemary was smart. She discovered that she could be seen, get a free meal, just for showing up to these places. Meet studio guys, get noticed. And she discovered something else: If certain people were out at the clubs, that meant they weren’t at home. All those beautiful homes. Right, Missy? Bel-Air, Beverly Hills—empty. Oh, maybe a maid or two, but that’s all.
“Now, your brother says he came up with the burglary idea. His idea. But say that’s true. I still believe it was Rosemary who figured out who to target, and when. She’d go to a fancy party or she’d read a gossip column that gave the invite list for that fancy party, and she’d call up your brother here. Brother drives to town, brings a ladder in his pickup—yes, he showed me his pickup—and we’ve got ourselves Bonnie and Clyde.”
“Cut it out,” Stany said. “Penny’s brother is not Clyde. Look at him. He’s crying, for crap’s sake. Cut your goddamn drama and keep to the story.”
“The story,” Conejos said. “We don’t know all the story. According to Clyde here, that’s the end of it. Rosemary Brown used the ladder to get into houses, then opened a door for Clyde. He’d drive away with the goods. Did I get it all? That right, Clyde?”
Will hadn’t raised his head. His shoulders shook from crying. The tears fell from his face to his lap.
“What about the kidnapping?” I asked. “What about Rosemary following me up a ladder?”
“That was a good story. I liked that story,” Conejos said. “But Clyde here told us a better one, and he showed us a few items from a long list. Then I found a few more items in your bedroom at the dorms. Maybe you’re Bonnie, hmm?”
“Conejos,” Stany said, like a warning.
“What I can’t figure is, where’s all the other stuff on my list?” He shook an envelope from his notebook and opened it, then slid out some pages. “Inventory. Fur coats, cash, jewelry, little statues and artistic shit people set on their mantels, some clothes. But we already know about the clothes, don’t we?”
The hem of Rosemary’s dress waved to me from under the table. I could see it if I leaned my head back and looked down. It wasn’t Rosemary’s dress, though. I didn’t know whose it was. I could be wearing Dottie Lamour’s lavender tea gown, or a cocktail number sewed for Claudette Colbert by Irene. Movie stars have designers so famous they don’t need last names. I could be wearing Irene’s design, and I’d slept in it on a cell floor and been kicked twice by a hooker whose hands shook.
It didn’t matter. The kicks and the dress, they didn’t matter. Will had turned himself in, and I knew he did it so I could go free. I wanted to cry since he was crying. I wanted to hug him and make him stand up, not hear him sniffing and swallowing beside me. I loved my brother right then. I wanted to hit him for telling the truth, but I loved him.
But I couldn’t decide about Marty. I didn’t know why he sat at the table. Thief or lawyer? Which was he today? I couldn’t ask him, and when he looked my way he did just that—looked my way but not at me.
“The stuff,” Conejos said. “Where is it? Your brother gives me a couple of ashtrays and says he sold the rest but won’t tell me where or how. Don’t watch him, Penny. I’m the one telling the story.”
“That’s enough,” Marty said. He sounded like a lawyer now. “You’ve got your burglar. Let Penny go.”
“Nothing of mine was stolen,” Stany said. “I’ve got a question for Pen.” She raised her eyebrows and pointed her cigarette at me. “You didn’t break into my house to steal my kid?”
“No.” My voice shook. “I didn’t break into your house at all. I fell into your house. I tried to stop Rosemary.”
“Irrelevant,” Conejos said.
Stany pushed back her chair. “My ass. You bet it’s relevant. Your story stinks, Detective. I’ve seen better scripts thrown out the window. What happened to Rosemary Brown? Where’d she go? Who met her and killed her? Penny says she didn’t kidnap my kid, I believe her. Marty, we’re leaving. And Penny’s coming with us. You”—to Conejos—“lock up Clyde if you want, or throw him back.”
I can’t really explain; you’d have to watch her. When Stany’s mad, the whole room is full of her, and the walls nearly crack. She talks fast, and each word is solid and spit out. The madder she gets, the faster she talks and the more she wants to say. Even Will had to raise his head.
“It wasn’t just Will and Rosemary,” I said.
“What do you mean? Pen, what are you saying?”
“Yes, it was,” Will said. “Just me and Rosie. Nobody else. Pen, shut up.”
“But it wasn’t,” I said. Marty had been there, and probably Teddy, too.
“That’s enough,” Marty said. “Penny, shut up.”
“Just me and Rosie,” Will said. “Pen didn’t know anything. Get me out of here.
Lock me up. The only other one guilty is Rose, and she’s dead.”
* * *
“You’ll tell it all to me,” Stany said. She sat in her personal chair—Stany stenciled on the canvas back—at Stage 10, Paramount. I sat, too, on a fake staircase. Stany had clicked on one table lamp. Marty wandered the set, picking stuff up like he was in Woolworth’s and he’d find a price on the bottom.
Stany felt cozy here. She said it was more home than her own. Any set, any movie, any studio—Stany could live in it. She could pick up her chair and walk next door to RKO, she could unfold her chair and move in. That’s why she drove us here, at night, and made security unlock the gate.
“Everything,” she said. “Tell me every tiny thing.”
My back was sore from the concrete. I wanted to sleep. My brother had just confessed and I felt relieved but dull inside, empty. I told her my story. I started with the Palladium, fifty klieg lights down Sunset, and how beautiful Rose had looked. I told her about Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra, the crowd, and how at nine p.m. Dottie Lamour had walked onstage and together she and Dorsey cut a ribbon. The Palladium, officially opened. Dottie’s hair, parted and rolled on each side. I told Stany I wanted the steaks couples ate in the gallery, but I couldn’t afford to eat. I drank, though. Rosemary bought me drinks.
Stany frowned when I told her I’d seen Franchot Tone. He shared steak with a girl a lot younger than me. Claude Rains, Ida Lupino—I saw them, and George Burns, and Mary Astor sitting on some guy’s lap. Like MGM, I said. More stars than in the sky. Then Rosemary on the dance floor, whispering: I’ve got a secret.
The cab ride, the hike into Holmby Hills, lanterns on Faring. Glass breaking. I told Stany and it happened again for me, like I was crouched on gravel and the glass exploded a ways off, about where Marty tapped keys on Preston’s piano. Panic in my chest and shoulders. It was only Marty in the dark sound stage, not glass, but the telling and the dark made it real.
“So the glass broke,” Stany said. She was a good director.
“Broke, right. So I ran. Not away from the sound, like I should have. I ran to the glass.” Marty stopped tapping the piano. He waited for me to tell Stany I’d seen him, and seen Will, running out of the yard. I told Stany, but not everything. I didn’t tell her about two men who ran past me.
“How bad was she cut?”
I held my scarred palm out, so Stany could see. “The glass cut my palm, but that’s nothing. Rose’s cut made me want to throw up.”
“Who brought her to the hospital? Do we know him?”
We do. “Some guy,” I said. From across the sound stage, tap-tap on the piano keys. Tink-tink.
“But you don’t know who it is? Did anyone recognize this guy?”
“Described him to me, but no—the nurse didn’t recognize him.”
“Not at all? How old was the nurse?”
“Why?”
“Just—how old?”
“An average age,” I said. “Not too old.”
She nodded. Her chin circled around. “Not too old. So she’d probably know who she saw. She’d recognize somebody famous.”
We weren’t talking about Marty anymore. We weren’t talking about Rose, either. I didn’t know what we were talking about.
“Stany, who’s famous?”
“Just a minute. Marty, stop playing that goddamn piano!”
“Stany, don’t cry.”
“Let her,” Marty said. His dress shoes clicked on the cement floor. He pulled a handkerchief from his jacket and handed it to Stany. “If she needs to cry, then it’s best she do it with us, and not in front of him.”
“Him?”
Stany blew her nose.
“Him—her husband? Him—Robert Taylor?”
“It’s stupid,” she said. “He didn’t do it, I know he didn’t, but I couldn’t stop thinking, and my mind kept playing the scene over. What if he did, what if . . .”
I had that rock in my stomach—the one that gets thrown when I finally understand a thing—that big rock—and I said, “You thought your husband killed Rosemary.”
“I knew he couldn’t have, but I kept thinking.”
“Your husband is Robert Taylor.”
“He wasn’t even in town,” Stany said. “He was off playing vaquero in Palm Springs. He was on a horse. He was gone five days with loads of other men—Jackie Cooper, for God’s sake—all riding horses. He couldn’t have killed her. God, I hate it. I hate that I love him this much. I’d kill him myself if I could.”
Marty stood behind her and rubbed her shoulders.
I said, “How can you think your husband’s a killer? He didn’t know Rosemary, did he?”
“Shut up,” she said.
“He knew Rosemary,” I said.
“Shut up,” she repeated.
“Didn’t you hear her? Shut up,” Marty said.
“Are you really that jealous of a dead girl? Why would he know Rosemary? They never met.”
“They did,” she said. “I was there. I didn’t know who she was, but you don’t forget someone who looks like that. Christ. We see beautiful girls all the time, they crawl off every bus that comes through. But her. I know Bob, and I know anyone who looks like that whore Lana Turner is trouble for me. Fucking Sweater Girl, my ass. We went to the Troc a couple months back and there she was, Rosemary Brown, just like Conejos said. Cadging drinks from some guys. Only I didn’t know her name. Bob followed her all fucking night. Like a fucking sniffing, drooling dog.
“Then Halloween I show up for work, and there she is again. She’s one of the new extras on set. I got sick. I wanted to kill her.”
“Marty, did you know any of this?”
“No,” Marty said to me. “But I know Bob and Missy, and I could fill a truck with all the pain this town brings.”
The man sounded good. I was convinced. He’d helped Rose, and he coddled Stany. I could hardly remember that he also would have taken whatever Rose stole from Stany and hocked it for cash.
Stany rolled her head so Marty could dig into her neck. “I had this idea. I’d get to know Rosemary, or at least get close enough to warn her off. Something like that. It wasn’t a full idea yet. I don’t know what I would have done. It doesn’t matter, because that night Rosemary went missing.” She laughed. “I was sure Bob ran off with her.”
“He was on a horse,” I said.
“I know! A horse, and he called me at night that whole trip, and it’s all wonderful except I was sure he’d snuck back to town, picked up Rosemary, and then holed up with her somewhere.”
“Relax,” Marty said.
“Shut up, Marty. Goddamn vulture.” She hit his arms away from her neck. “What if he came back to town? What if he wasn’t on a horse? He came back to meet her and then something bad happened. He wouldn’t kill her on purpose, would he?”
“He didn’t kill her,” Marty said.
“I knew you had a reason for being my friend,” I said. “All the girls hate me because of you.”
“I’m sorry. No, I’m not sorry. I’d do it again. I needed to know about the case, who Conejos suspected—”
“You got me out of jail.”
“Well, come on. You didn’t kill Rosemary. She didn’t take your man like she tried to take mine. Am I irrational? I’m feeling crazy inside.”
“Bob didn’t drop Rosemary at the hospital.”
“No?”
“No,” I said. “The doctor described a man who wasn’t nearly as handsome as Bob.”
Marty winked at me. Goddamn vulture.
“Think about it,” I said. “If Bob had a date with Rose, she’d stay away from your house. I mean, yes, she’d go after Bob Taylor. Who wouldn’t? Excuse me, Stany, but that’s the truth. Bob Taylor, there’s nobody like him. So say Rose and Bob have a date. No, I’m saying what if. Marty, keep rubbing her neck. Just if. I was with Rose on Halloween, and I know what she did. No Bob. So if they had a date, they’d have to meet later. Except that later she was breaking into your house. I
f she’d arranged to meet Bob later than that, she’d call off the robbery. She wouldn’t risk breaking into the house where Bob lived. Bob could be anywhere: at home, at a club—”
“I was at the Cocoanut Grove, and he wasn’t with me.”
Marty chop-chopped on her neck. “That’s because he sat around a campfire singing trail songs. He played vaquero. Missy, you’ve got to trust that if Hedda Hopper says thirty men are riding circles in the desert for a week, then that’s what’s happening.”
I got tired convincing her. Marty didn’t look tired, but he did this a lot. Stars paid him to do this. I said, “If, just if, Rose knew she’d see Bob on Halloween night, she wouldn’t have broken into your house. She wouldn’t risk it.”
Stany believed me. She stared up at the catwalks. Finally: “Then who killed Rosemary?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“No idea,” Marty said. “Why don’t you ask another question: Why bury her at the Florentine Gardens?”
“For me,” I said. “So I looked guilty.”
“Do you know that for sure?” Marty asked.
“Who cares, if it wasn’t Bob?” Stany brushed her hands on her trouser legs and stood. She’d had her moment and her ideas, and she was done.
“What about me?”
“You?” Stany looked at me like she’d just noticed a grease stain.
“I need my job. Am I still on the set? I can’t be fired, Stany. I need to work.”
“Well, how do I know? I can tell you, Preston’s fed up and Miles Abbott’s furious. He said—what did he say? He said if you showed up at the back lot he’d arrest you himself. Does that mean you’re fired? I’ve never been fired. I wouldn’t know.”
“You’re the one who had me arrested in the back lot,” I said.
“You’re the one who left blood in my house. Did I mention that we had to strip the floor? All right, all right. I’ll talk to Miles. I’ll tell him your brother’s the thief. That’ll make him happy. Can we get out of here now?”
The wondering, trying to see why I was given her friendship—I could stop thinking about it now. I can’t compare it to much, but imagine a movie star visits you, takes you to autopsies, lunch, digs you out of jail, and pays for a lawyer. She saves your job at the studio. She loans you a gown. Wouldn’t you wonder? Wouldn’t you walk around all day thinking, Why? What does she want? How am I special?
The Glamorous Dead Page 14