Anita waved her hand dismissively. “Louella is the least of your worries.”
“Who might the most of my worries be?”
“Have you met Nelson Hoyt yet?”
“I don’t think so.”
Anita let loose a snicker. “Between the Rhett Butler accent and that deep cleft in his chin, you’d know if you had.”
“Which studio is he with?”
Anita flashed her a steely look just as a howl of cheers went up. Everybody in the Canteen started applauding.
A handsome army sergeant lingered at the front doors of the Hollywood Canteen, bewildered and startled. Betty Grable, standing out in her sky-blue uniform, hooked her arm through his as Lana Turner and Deanna Durbin looked on. Dietrich grabbed the microphone.
“Ladies and gentlemen, something very exciting just happened!” She consulted a piece of paper in her hand. “The Hollywood Canteen is very proud and excited to welcome First Sergeant Carl Bell with the US Army. He is very special to us because he is our one millionth guest!”
The whole place shook with a bellowing ovation while the Canteen’s photographers captured Betty Grable planting a kiss on Sergeant One Million’s cheek.
It was a while before the crowd subsided to its regular din and the band started playing a peppy version of Glenn Miller’s “I Know Why And So Do You.”
Kathryn turned to pick up her conversation with Anita but the woman had disappeared. She turned to one of the busboys. “Did you see where Miss Wyndham went?”
The busboy turned around and flashed a devilish smile. It was Gene Kelly. “Well, hello again!”
Kathryn had met him only once before, when he was fresh from his Broadway triumph in Pal Joey and relatively unknown in Hollywood. He was now a rising star at MGM.
“Mr. Kelly,” she said. “I didn’t know you were volunteering here.”
“It’s my first time.” He jutted his head toward the lucky sergeant at the center of attention. “Looks like I picked a swell night.” His smile revealed a small scar near his mouth that Kathryn assumed MGM would want fixed. It was arresting to still see it there. “You were asking about Anita Wyndham?”
Kathryn nodded.
“Her shift finished as mine started. I saw her heading out to the parking lot.”
Kathryn convinced Kelly to mind the coffee table for a few minutes, then she dodged the obstacle course of dancing couples, panting soldiers, and footsore sailors and beelined for the back door. The September air was still warm. She spotted Anita opening a white Cadillac and called out her name. “I wanted to finish our conversation.”
“You want my job on the show, don’t you?” It could have been an accusation, but Anita said it with surprising resignation.
“Only if you aren’t happy, or no longer want it. Then yes, I’d like a chance.”
“They were very impressed with you that night. The Kraft people, Bing—everybody.”
“Are you saying you want to give it up?”
Anita’s eyes turned to marble. “It might help if I can present my replacement, already approved and ready to take over.”
“Just say the word.” A spot on Kraft Music Hall? Wilkerson is going to flip!
Anita eyed her carefully. “I’ll let you know.” She closed the door and wound down the window. “You do understand that a job like this raises you to a national profile?”
Kathryn nodded and watched the white Cadillac pull into the Hollywood traffic.
Raise me to a national profile? Isn’t that the whole point?
CHAPTER 25
Alla Nazimova’s Studebaker wasn’t ideal for a long stakeout. There wasn’t much legroom in the back seat, and the overhead light wasn’t quite bright enough for four people to eat by. On the other hand, neither Gwendolyn, Kathryn, nor Marcus owned their own vehicle and Madame was more than happy to lend them hers, providing she could come along. “Which isn’t to say that I approve of what you’re doing,” she added in her dowager voice.
San Ysidro Drive branched off Benedict Canyon just north of the Beverly Hills Hotel and cut an almost straight line up the Hollywood Hills. Every half dozen houses, a streetlight punctuated the dark. At 1137 San Ysidro, Linc’s house sat halfway between Fred Astaire’s and the one shared by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. It was a wide, two-story house with a thick chimney at one end and a deep front garden filled with flowering shrubs and miniature fruit trees.
As Gwendolyn bit into a pickle, Kathryn asked, “How long are we going to give this?” She said “we,” but Gwendolyn knew the question was aimed at her.
Alla suggested midnight.
The lights were ablaze in Linc’s bedroom, living room, and kitchen. His drapes were open, but there was no sign of anybody inside.
“Here’s what I don’t get,” Marcus said, popping open a root beer. “If Linc has a poker game every Wednesday night, why aren’t any cars parked outside his house?”
For as long as Gwendolyn and Linc had been dating, the one unbreakable rule was that Wednesday was poker night and therefore off-limits. She’d scheduled Canteen shifts for Wednesdays and never thought much about it, but now she found herself sitting in Alla’s Studebaker at eleven o’clock at night, peering at Linc’s house and wondering why the only car around was his silver Packard.
“Maybe Linc’s poker buddies are all his neighbors?” Gwendolyn knew how improbable that sounded before the words even left her mouth.
“Or maybe,” Marcus said, “there’s more going on in the life of Lincoln Tattler than he’s shared with you.”
“I still don’t believe it,” Kathryn said.
“But Ritchie—”
“I’m just saying I find it highly improbable that Mister High Society Tattler works the black market.”
Alla leaned forward from the back seat and clapped a hand on Gwendolyn’s left shoulder. “Most people would also find it highly improbable that our lovely Gwendolyn works the black market.” Gwendolyn laid her hand on top of Alla’s, which was taking on a dry, papery feel. Until that moment, Gwendolyn had thought of her as ageless; this was the first time she realized Alla Nazimova was aging like a mere mortal.
“Why would the heir to the Tattler fortune need to deal in the black market?” Kathryn peeled back the aluminum foil from a slice of Marcus’ dense, sticky war cake. It had become standard fare at Garden of Allah gatherings. “It just doesn’t make any sense. Even though I don’t doubt Ritchie’s word, I still don’t think it’s enough to warrant this stakeout you’ve got us on.”
“There’s something I haven’t told you all,” Gwendolyn confessed.
The car went quiet.
“A couple of nights ago, Linc and I got home from a USO benefit at the Beverly Hills Hotel and his telephone was ringing. It was his father. There must have been some sort of crisis with the business because pretty quickly the conversation went from whispering to screaming.” She took a deep breath. “I found out that everything Linc has—the house, the car—none of it is his.”
“Linc owns nothing?” Kathryn asked.
“It’s all in the business’ name. From what I could gather, all bills go to his father, and in return Linc gets an allowance.”
“It must be a heck of an allowance,” Marcus said. “Those dinners and nightclubs? Not to mention those expensive corsages and all that champagne?”
“The point is, Linc feels like his father still treats him like he’s twelve. It was a really awful fight, but that’s not what I’m confessing. The next day when he went out for bagels and lox, I went hunting around for a soft rag to clean my shoes, and I found a stack of nylon stockings. Same as the ones he gave me at the Mocambo. I counted them—there were forty-five pairs, and right next to them was another box: eleven bottles of a perfume called Miramar.”
“Miramar?” Alla exclaimed. “That’s a Spanish perfume. Very expensive.”
Gwendolyn sighed. “So that’s why I insisted we come out tonight and see if anything happens.”
The car fell into
silence until Kathryn started to chuckle. “Look at us! Spying on what could be a big-time war profiteer. What are we, nineteen years old? This feels like the crazy sort of stunt we were pulling when we first moved into the Garden. We tried anything to get our foot in the door.”
“Like when Gwendolyn fell off that dancing billboard?” Marcus asked.
“Or that security guard chased you all over the MGM lot like he was Ben Turpin.”
Gwendolyn fell prey to an attack of the giggles. “What about the time I dressed up as Scarlett O’Hara and presented myself on David Selznick’s doorstep on Christmas Eve? Where did I find the nerve?”
“Yeah, well, we’re in our mid thirties now,” Kathryn said, finishing off her cake. “In a few years we’ll be forty, and that’s middle-aged.”
“Speak for yourself!” Marcus butted in. “I feel like I’m just getting going, so don’t you drag me into the old folks’ home just yet.”
Alla cleared her throat in her best school-marm manner. “Speaking as someone on the north side of sixty, you are all still whippersnappers to me. I don’t consider anyone middle-aged until their knees start aching in winter—oh! Look out!”
A pair of white headlights rounded the bend in the road and a woodie station wagon pulled into Linc’s driveway. All four of them sank down in their seats and watched the driver get out. Instead of approaching Linc’s front door, he walked down the hill and out of sight.
“That was odd,” Marcus whispered. “Shall I go look inside?”
“What if Linc comes out?” Alla asked.
Nobody could come up with a remotely plausible story to explain why Marcus would be standing in Linc’s driveway peering into windows.
A rectangular tile of light caught their attention. They watched Linc close his front door behind him, get into the woodie, and start the engine. He backed out of his driveway and headed up the hillside, in exactly the opposite direction Gwendolyn was expecting.
“I can’t believe I’m going to say this,” Kathryn said, “but Marcus, follow that car.”
Keeping the headlights of Alla’s Studebaker switched off, Marcus kept his distance to the top end of the street, then around a disorienting series of curves and corners until they turned onto Mulholland Drive. From there, Linc led them to Coldwater Canyon, where he headed down into the San Fernando Valley. Eventually they ended up in Burbank.
“Is he going to Warner Brothers?” Marcus asked.
Linc pulled up to a darkened stretch of the high wall that surrounded the studio. Farther down, a billboard featuring Bette Davis in front of a microphone advertised Warners’ all-star wartime propaganda, Thank Your Lucky Stars. The rest of the street was thrown into shadow.
Linc opened the car’s back door and pulled out a large cardboard box. He walked up to the fence and tossed it over the wall.
“He’s done that before,” Kathryn observed.
Linc jumped back into the woodie and drove out of the Valley, past the Hollywood Bowl, and to the eastern border of the Paramount lot, where the same scene was played out again.
“Those boxes don’t look too heavy,” Marcus remarked. “Like they’re filled with something very . . . sheer.”
They followed Linc to a side street adjacent to the Twentieth Century-Fox lot and watched him lob another box over another wall. Then they followed him farther west. With so few cars on the road, they might have been too easy to spot, so Marcus kept the Studebaker at a distance, sometimes too far back, almost losing him.
“He’s going to MGM, isn’t he?” Alla said.
“Yep,” said Marcus.
“Does your pal Hooley still work the gate?” Gwendolyn asked.
“Yep.”
“Will he get us in?”
“Yep.”
Several years back, Marcus made friends with one of MGM’s longest-serving security guards, who was an incurable insomniac and therefore the perfect night watchman. He and Marcus shared a passion for crossword puzzles, so from time to time Marcus would pick up a pair of football-sized hoagies and keep Hooley company for a few hours while they worked on a puzzle together.
Hooley was the stoic type, and didn’t raise an eyebrow when Marcus turned up at one a.m. with three women in tow. Without questioning Marcus’ request to borrow a flashlight, he allowed them through the gate with a sweep of his hand.
Gwendolyn had never been inside a movie studio so late at night. It was eerie, she decided, like an evacuated town, and they were the last four inhabitants left to roam through deserted streets.
They found Linc’s box resting behind the railway station façade where countless romantic scenes had played out, tender goodbyes whispered between glycerin tears.
Gwendolyn knelt beside the box. It was tied with string.
Alla fished in her purse for nail clippers. They were a little on the dull side, so it took Gwendolyn several attempts before the string fell away.
Gwendolyn hesitated.
“Don’t you want to see what’s inside?” Kathryn asked.
“I think we already know,” Marcus said.
Gwendolyn laid her hands on the box but kept them there. “It’s just that,” she started, but didn’t know if she could reconcile the conflicting emotions battling it out inside her head.
“Go on. Open it.” Linc stood a few yards away, his face frozen in the moonlight.
Gwendolyn stood up, unsure if he was angry, or surprised, or even bemused.
“Linc,” she said, but it was all she could manage.
Marcus stepped in. “Did you know we’ve been following you all over town?”
“Let’s just say you wouldn’t make very effective private eyes.” Linc eyed the box between them. “What do you think’s in there?” he asked Gwendolyn.
“Stockings,” she said. “Like the ones you gave me at the Mocambo.”
He took a step closer. “So you’ve guessed my little secret?”
“Judging by the size of the box,” Gwendolyn offered a tentative smile, “I’m guessing your little secret ain’t so little. I don’t know how you’ve been managing to get your hands on them, but if this box is filled with Gorgeous Gams, you’ve got yourself quite an operation.”
He leaned back slightly, his face pulled into a questioning scowl. She decided to go for broke.
“If that box is full, there must be seventy-five to a hundred pairs. Let’s round that off to eighty. If you’re selling them for five bucks a pair, that’s a profit of, what, three or four per? Times eighty pair, that’s something like a three-hundred-dollar profit you’ve got in that box.”
He jammed his fists onto his hips. “Hang me high! You’re her, aren’t you?”
Gwendolyn hoped her face was in shadow, hiding her uncertainty.
“What do you mean?” Alla demanded, suddenly maternal.
He clamped his hands on the top of his head as though to keep it from exploding. “All this time I’ve been hearing about the woman with the stockings. Good product. Discreet. Not greedy. No price gouging. Everywhere I went I heard about her, but nobody could tell me her name. It was always ‘I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a girl who’s heard of the girl with the quality merchandise.’ And all this time she was right under my nose!” He let out a laugh. “Well, if that don’t beat the cotton from the cottonwood tree!” He marched toward her and grabbed her hand. “My biggest competition, glad to meet ya!”
“I’m not your competition anymore,” Gwendolyn admitted. “My source got himself drafted. The field’s all yours.”
“Nuh-uh!” Linc protested. “I’ve got more business than I know what to do with. This studio stuff is just the tip of the iceberg. Why do you think I’ve been trying to track you down?”
Marcus stepped forward. “You want to go into business with her?”
Linc kept his eyes on Gwendolyn. “Nylons are the backbone of the market, but then there’s perfume, scarves, lipstick. They say this war could go on for another year, maybe even two. By then we’ll both have saved enough t
o open our stores: Gwendolyn’s Gowns and Tattler’s Televisions. Maybe we could get them side by side. Wouldn’t that be neat?”
Gwendolyn pouted. “It’s called Chez Gwendolyn.”
She looked at Kathryn and Marcus. It wasn’t like she needed their approval, but if she went into cahoots with Linc, she’d be stepping from the small time into the big time. Or the medium time, at least. Knowing they weren’t completely against the idea meant the difference between telling Linc goodbye and letting him know that she was on deck.
Marcus’ smile was so wide she could tell he didn’t have a problem with this unexpected turn of events, but Kathryn’s face wasn’t readable until she stepped into the moonlight to join Marcus. “I’d kill for a decent lipstick.”
Gwendolyn looked past Marcus and Kathryn to Alla. “And you, Madame? What do you think about all this?”
Alla stayed where she was. “Does it matter what I think?”
Gwendolyn moved into the gloom of the fake railway station. “Of course it does.”
“We are in a time of war.”
“So you don’t think it’s wrong of me to sell these things on the black market?”
“Right, wrong, good, bad, just, unjust. Rules are flexible. Opportunities present themselves. The only thing to avoid is regret.” She reached up and stroked Gwendolyn’s face. “Chez Gwendolyn deserves a chance.”
CHAPTER 26
Marcus and Kathryn strolled out of the Egyptian Theatre and headed up the long forecourt toward Hollywood Boulevard. The night air was cooling now that Thanksgiving was around the corner. They stopped in front of the marquee and watched an usher perched on a ladder removing the letters: Special RKO preview “Higher And Higher” starring Frank Sinatra. The rest of the audience skirted around them as they exited.
Searchlights and Shadows (Hollywood's Garden of Allah novels Book 4) Page 18