Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

by Donna Andrews

  “There’s always DNA.”

  “You said the old lady turned you down flat on that.”

  “She wouldn’t have to take part. If we found a cousin or something of Lombard’s — a ‘shirttail blood relative,’ as she put it — exhumed the body from Forest Lawn, and compared samples, we could either settle the question or make her claim credible.”

  “Even if you could do that, say you proved the corpse is Lombard’s, which of course would be the result. She might destroy the other three reels of A Perfect Crime out of spite.”

  “Not if she relinquishes possession first. We could stall for time, go ahead with the publicity arrangements as promised. No one could expect us to follow through with them once she’s exposed as a pretender.”

  Broadhead put away the pipe. “Where’d you tell me you were from originally?”

  “A little town called Fox Forage, Indiana. I saw my first movie there in a stuffy little box made of concrete.”

  “I think you should go back there for a vacation. You’ve been out here so long you’re beginning to think like a grifter.”

  Valentino sat back, deflated. “I didn’t like it when I heard myself saying it.”

  “Don’t feel bad. I said, ‘Even if you could’ get Lombard’s body exhumed. You can’t. You’d need that theoretical cousin’s permission or a court order, which you won’t get because there’s no probable cause for a search, and then you’d have to pay for it. Digging corpses out of mausoleums is ten times more expensive than putting them in. Then you have to pay to put them back. UCLA won’t foot the bill; we’re lucky it keeps us in paper clips. How’s your cash?”

  “Ask my contractor. He’s seen it more recently.”

  “Well, there it is. You’ve got one reel of a film you can’t exploit and a crazy old bat who thinks she’s the Queen Mother of Hollywood.”

  “I liked her, though. If she isn’t who she says she is, she oughta be.”

  Valentino was having a familiar dream. In it, he was standing on a thousand-foot cliff overlooking the ocean, arranging lemmings into an orderly herd to drive inland to safety. Suddenly a storm broke out. Thunder and lightning and lashing winds panicked the lemmings, who stampeded between his feet, dodging his grasping hands, and plunged over the edge of the cliff and down into the pitching waves, which swept them out to sea and out of sight.

  He was grateful when the telephone woke him. The lemmings were a unique breed, black and glistening as the bits of film he gathered from both hemispheres to assemble and save from obscurity. Too often he failed just when success seemed at hand.

  “I’m not getting any younger,” said a cigarette-hoarse voice. “None of us is, but I’m moving faster than most. Do we have a deal or what?”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Peters.”

  “I’m sorry, too, if ‘Miss Peters’ means what I think it means.”

  “It’s just too risky without proof you’re Carole Lombard. My reputation’s one thing, but the preservation program’s is another. A lot of important work has been destroyed in the past because someone failed to check his facts, deliberately or by accident.”

  “In other words, I’m a damn liar.”

  “There’s just nothing to show the world you’re telling the truth.”

  “What’s A Perfect Crime, chopped liver?”

  “The argument could be made that you don’t have to have been in it to acquire a print. You said yourself the studios were careless in those days. You know a lot about Lombard, but she’s been written about a lot. I’m sorry.”

  Silence crackled for what seemed a long time. “Well, people have been called phonies less politely. You know, you could have had what you wanted just by blowing smoke up my skirt until I kicked the bucket.”

  “I admit the idea was discussed, but I couldn’t live with it. I’d have gotten a bad case of hives every time Nothing Sacred played on TCM.”

  “Bill Wellman directed that one at the top of his lungs. I waited until we wrapped, then got the crew to tie him up in a straitjacket.” She exhaled, probably blowing smoke. “Toodle-oo, kiddo. Drop reel three by anytime.” The line clicked and the dial tone came on.

  Gloria Voss answered the door. She looked as trim and elegant as ever, but her eyes were red. “Jane passed early this morning, in her sleep.”

  “I’m sorry.” He truly was, somewhat to his surprise. He gripped the film can he was holding so hard his fingers went numb.

  The nurse excused herself and went into the bedroom. She came out carrying the rest of A Perfect Crime in a stack. “She asked me — told me — to give you these in case she missed you. ‘Tell him to go to hell, and no hard feelings,’ those were her words. It was the last thing she said before she went to sleep.”

  “But that wasn’t the deal.”

  “I know. We had no secrets. She liked to come on as a tough old broad, but she had a heart as big as L.A. She ordered me not to see her films because they might corrupt me. Once, she said, she altered a contract with her agent so he owed her ten percent of everything he made instead of the other way around. He signed it without reading. She had him over a barrel, but she laughed and tore up the contract and had him draw up another.”

  “I’ve heard that story.”

  “I think she was testing you. Congratulations. You passed.” She held out the stack of cans.

  His cell phone rang. He apologized and answered. It was Kyle Broadhead. “Listen, my whiz kid found a great-grandniece of Lombard’s in Fort Wayne, that’s where Lombard was born. She’s agreed to provide DNA samples.”

  “Kyle—”

  “I’m not finished. I talked to Ted Turner’s people. He’ll finance an exhumation in return for distribution rights to A Perfect Crime. We’ve got the niece’s permission, and Turner already owns everything Lombard did for MGM. He wants to put together a box set with her debut film included.”

  Valentino explained the situation.

  “Doesn’t change a thing,” Broadhead said after a pause. “You can’t buy publicity like this, but thank God Ted Turner can. People love a clever fake. The attention will bring in donations to the program like — like—”

  “Lemmings,” Valentino finished. “Tell Turner no deal.”

  “I heard some of that,” Gloria Voss said, when he flipped shut the instrument. “It means you don’t believe her, but it was a wonderful thing to do.”

  “I don’t know what to believe. Whichever way it went, it would have spoiled a beautiful story.”

  “Grandma would say, ‘Thanks, buster.’ ”

  He reacted after a beat. “Grandma?”

  “She’s the one who talked me into becoming a nurse. She had a soft spot for them.”

  “So you’re the granddaughter of—”

  “Jane Peters and the owner of Buffalo Shipping. That’s what it says on Mom’s birth certificate.” She thrust the cans into his arms, smiling with Carole Lombard’s cheekbones and Clark Gable’s mouth.

  Limpopo

  by Sheila Kohler

  © 2007 by Sheila Kohler

  O. Henry Award-winner Sheila Kohler makes her EQMM debut this month in a painfully suspenseful tale set in her native South Africa. Her seven novels and three collections of short stories have brought her worldwide recognition and translation into many languages. Her most recent book is Bluebird, or the Invention of Happiness (Other Press, 2007).

  ❖

  Amy stares at the marks of the tires in the red dirt and the shiny bumper of the blue car, which glints in the light as it goes down the long driveway under the trees. It rained the night before and the earth is wet. She can hear the sound of the river running through the bottom of the garden in the distance. Always, there is the sound of the river running, even in her dreams. She likes to say the funny name over and over again: “Limpopo, Limpopo, Limpopo,” she says. She wonders what the name means.

  Her mother has told her she is just going up to the farmers’ co-op for a minute, she’ll be as quick as she can, and Amy is to be a
good girl now and mind the baby, who is sleeping like an angel, and the dogs, who are lying under the tree. From the swing, Amy watches the pale blue car go down the muddy driveway and out the gate. She swings back and forth through the blue air, going higher and higher. She stares at the tracks the way she does when her father takes her walking with him in the bush and they are looking for animal spoor. Her father is very good at spotting leopard tracks. There are still a few leopards in the hills, her father says, and he doesn’t want them coming down and stealing his game.

  Sometimes her father lets her walk with him, if she walks very quietly at his side and is careful to look for ticks in her socks on their return, when he goes out with the dogs looking for game to cull. Amy’s father, Mark, runs a game farm on the border which he inherited from her grandparents before Independence. Amy is not quite sure what Independence is. All Amy knows is, her father gets up very early in the morning and leaves the house before anyone else is awake, and when he comes home at night, she is sometimes already asleep.

  Amy swings through the air, throwing her head back and forth, and stretching out her legs. They look longer, and she feels taller, more grown up, watching the back of her mother’s car disappear and the big garden that stretches away toward the river, which she can see glinting invitingly in the distance like a chocolate brown ribbon. Her mother has never left her alone with her baby brother before, though the co-op is not far from their house. In fact, she has never left her alone, even for a minute, even to go to fetch the eggs in the henhouse, which is right near the house.

  But Amy is eight years old now, what her father calls the age of reason, the age when they shipped him off all on his own to boarding school, he says, and it is her father’s birthday today. Her mother is making him his favourite cake, with granadillas and granadilla icing, and she has forgotten something she must have. Amy is old enough to remain with her brother for half an hour, surely, with the dogs to guard them, the two big ridgeback dogs they keep, called Dale and Tony, who are now asleep as the baby is, lying in the shade just outside the house under the seringa tree.

  Gladys, the old nanny who works for them and helps her mother in the house, the one who brought her mother up, is too sick today to come in to work. She is lying in her small, smoky room, which is some way from the house. Amy’s mother doesn’t trust anyone else, these days, she says.

  Her mother was in a hurry, and the baby was sleeping so soundly, which is such a rare thing; her brother is a colicky baby, her mother says, and anything wakes his lordship. He still wakes up in the night again and again and screams for her mother to come and pick him up and breast-feed him, which wakes Amy, too, sometimes, and makes her mother sleepy and cross during the day. Her mother stumbles around the house in her funny bra, her stained blouse half open, half-asleep. Her mother says she feels like a “zombie” half the time.

  Today her mother had forgotten something she really needed for the special cake. Amy heard her say, “Oh dammit!” in the kitchen and slam a cupboard door shut and then step outside and look down at the sleeping baby. Then she looked up at Amy, who was swinging back and forth through the air in her light-blue sundress with the little sleeves like wings, her hair tied back from her face in a ponytail with her favourite blue bow. Such a good girl, my good girl, my angel, her mother often calls her.

  Her mother told her to be an angel and hold the fort. She said if the baby should wake up, she could jiggle the pram a bit and he would probably go right back to sleep, she had just fed him, after all, or if that didn’t work she could push the pram back and forth, but she was not to try to pick him up on her own. Amy is not allowed to hold her baby brother except when she sits with him on the sofa and rocks him very carefully in her arms with her mother beside her. Amy thinks this is stupid, as she is sure she can easily hold her little brother without dropping him to the floor, after all.

  Amy likes having the whole house, the big garden with all its bright orange, yellow, and purple flowers, with the bees hovering over them, the two dogs, but above all her baby brother, all to herself. She pretends she is the mommy, now, of the new baby boy, and she is the owner of all this vast space. She feels she is the one who has brought it all forth: the baby, the big English pram with the mosquito netting falling down around her baby’s face, and the big blond dogs, and even the river running in the distance. She has invented it all.

  She gets down from the swing and struts around the garden in her Clark’s sandals, pretending to be Mommy. She deadheads a few flowers the way Mommy does and pulls out a weed. She thinks it’s probably a weed. She likes the way the cicadas scream again and again, like someone telling the same story over and over again. She likes the way the sun makes everything so very quiet and still at this hour of the morning before it gets too hot.

  Amy’s mother, too, likes the silence in the sunlit garden, the warmth of the early-morning air on her face, as she drives fast down the driveway in the car. She has not left the house on her own since the birth of the baby, six weeks ago. In fact, she has not had a moment on her own since the birth of her baby. The baby has been constantly, or so it seems to her, on her breast, sucking at her flesh. Insatiable, a big insatiable boy, who seems never to have enough milk and wakes up almost as soon as she puts him down. Since the birth of the baby, Amy, too, follows her wherever she goes, thumb in her mouth, watching her with her dark brown acquisitive eyes. She even follows her into the bathroom and keeps asking her every five minutes if she loves her. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?

  Amy was conceived so easily. Too easily, Stella thinks as she shifts gears. She remembers the awkward fumbling in the back of Mark’s car in the dark. It was the first time they had made love; the first time she had made love, if that is what it could be called. When she realized she was pregnant, she couldn’t believe it.

  When she gave Mark the news, he said, “No problem, we’ll get married. My parents will be only too happy to let us take over the farm.” Neither of them was twenty years old yet. Stella left the university in Cape Town, where she was studying French, and they moved up north to Mark’s parents’ farm, near the border between Zimbabwe and South Africa. Stella finds the place very beautiful, and she likes to garden, but she sometimes suffers from the heat in the small house with its corrugated iron roof, and she misses her friends and family in Cape Town. Sometimes, when Mark comes back late at night, she finds the days long and lonely. After Amy’s birth, she had moments of depression when she kept miscarrying repeatedly, and her mother came and stayed with them for a while. A psychiatrist prescribed pills. Finally, this beautiful new baby was conceived. And now, for Mark’s birthday, the baby seems to be finally sleeping sweetly, soundly, replete.

  Now she puts her sandaled foot on the accelerator, flying fast down the strip road, her tight skirt slipping up her thighs. She likes this comfortable elastic skirt which clings to her body, and which she wears with a blouse in the house. Unlike other women she knows, she was careful not to put on extra weight during her pregnancy. She is proud of her slim body, her long, lithe legs. She has got her figure back fast. She remembers being on holiday in Italy as a girl and someone calling out to her in the street: “Che belle gambe!”

  With the window open, she feels the strong morning sun on her face, her legs. She turns on the radio and sings along with the old Beatles song that is playing: “Here Comes the Sun.” She feels buoyant, light-headed, young. Her body no longer aches. She’s a lucky young woman, she thinks, with her beautiful new baby boy — she had so wanted a boy, she is not sure why, but she did. She has a handsome, young, six-foot-two-tall husband who loves her and watches her as she moves around the kitchen in the morning and says, “You have the most beautiful legs in the world!”; and they have a huge game farm all to themselves. She has a bottle of Champagne in the refrigerator, and she decides that tonight, after they have eaten the cake, they will make love for the first time since the baby was born. Since the baby was born, Mark lies in the bed beside her and gro
ans and keeps telling her he feels like a rocket about to take off.

  She speeds fast going toward the co-op, which is not more than ten or a maximum of fifteen minutes away. She calculates: ten minutes there, five minutes to buy the baking powder, and ten minutes back to the house, not more than thirty minutes in all. What can possibly happen in thirty minutes? She knows Mark would die if he knew she had left Amy alone in the house, but she is certain Amy is perfectly safe with the two big dogs at her side. The good dogs would never allow anyone harmful near her children, she knows. They always set up a terrible racket if a stranger approaches, and the local people are frightened of the big dogs.

  It is still quite early, not even ten o’clock yet. Amy knows how to tell the time on the big watch with the Mickey Mouse that her grandmother gave her for her birthday.

  She gets down from the swing and walks over and peers at her baby brother in his pram, which was her pram when she was a baby, a long time ago. He is, everyone tells Amy, such a beautiful big baby boy. There is something about the way everyone says boy that Amy dislikes. Her mother says he’s the most beautiful baby boy ever, though he wakes her up again and again at night. Even her daddy says he’s the most beautiful baby boy ever. When her father says that, Amy has an urge to give the baby boy a little pinch on his pink arm.

  Once, when her mother left the room for a moment, she did give him a little pinch, only a tiny little one, on his leg, but it made him scream very loudly, which surprised Amy. Amy had never heard such a loud scream. Her mother came running back into the room and picked him up. She thought he must have been bitten by an insect because there was a red mark on his skin. “Could it have been a spider?” her mother said and looked at Amy inquiringly.

  Certainly he is pink and has her father’s dark hair. “A chip off the old block,” her mother says, looking at her baby and then at Amy’s father and laughing. Her mother looks very lovely when she laughs. The baby reminds Amy a little bit of the kittens, with his eyes shut so tightly like theirs. They had to drown the kittens, as there were too many of them. Thomas, who works in the garden three times a week, put them in a sack and dropped them into the river which runs at the bottom of their garden. Amy wonders how many babies are considered too many before they, too, are put in a sack and drowned in the river. If anyone had asked her opinion, she would have told them she preferred being the only one, but no one did.