Duplicitous

by Nicholas James

  Then, as we sat down at the dinner table, Margaret continued to proudly describe other questionable incidents, like the time that Margaret’s husband, Mr. Wilcox, slipped down the stairways in their palatial residence. Margaret was in rare form, proud of her criminal actions and, oddly, bringing them up as the main topic of conversation. But, then, Margaret never minced words. She felt that she had the right to grisly activities, that anything which furthered Margaret’s pleasure and control was something beyond reproach.

  As we were eating the fine French meal that the Wilders provided, Margaret became weirder. In fact, she actually started complaining about Sabrina, bluntly stating that she was the kind of girl who would one day meet with tragedy.

  “And when will you meet with tragedy,” I asked her.

  “Why, never darling, I have the luck of the Irish. What was that your father once said to me, Alex? ‘The Gods endowed me with just the right type of misfortune, a purveyor of tragedy to those around me.”

  At this point, when Margaret was flat out drunk, Billy brought up Sabrina’s poisoning again. He offered to free Margaret from prosecution if she would sell all her belongings, all her paintings, her entire collection of possessions, including her house, and commit herself.

  “You’ll live well there,” Billy said.

  “Do I detect a conspiracy?” Margaret stood up and walked into the sitting room, next to the derringer that she was admiring earlier. “Your DA would have a hard time with the case. People know me, they know that I made this town, that I own most of the police department.”

  “Things have changed, Margaret,” Billy told her. “Attempts on people’s lives are no longer considered fair play among the elite.”

  At this point, both Billy and I saw Margaret placing Billy’s old derringer into her purse.

  “That gun is loaded,” Billy says, “just like you.”

  “You want it back,” Margaret asked.

  “Just watch yourself.”

  “I always watch myself. To do otherwise would scare the hell out of me.”

  Margaret turned to me and asked me to step out on the balcony, to watch the sunset with her. Margaret stepped onto the priceless rug with her slippers.

  We looked at each other on the terrace. Margaret’s smile was hideous, like the smile of a corpse, someone who had nothing more to lose. She pulled out the derringer. Billy moved forward. Margaret smiled sadistically as she placed her finger on the trigger.

  “Time for your hallucinations to turn real.”

  She pulled the trigger but a millisecond before the bullet left the gun, Billy yanked out the rug from underneath Margaret and she went sailing over the edge of the balcony, her gun firing on the way down.

  THE CURTAIN RISES

  Even after such an ignominious fall, the curtain rises. For me, it was rising with Billy. In the morning, after the press had their fun with Margaret’s spectacular death, an autopsy was scheduled and lengthy interviews started with those at the dinner party that night. It was not being called a ‘crime’ yet – and if Billy and I were lucky, it would remain an accidental death.

  Billy and Audrey had joined me in Angler’s office.

  “But the police are a little less corrupt now,” Angler said. “Nowadays, when someone dies accidentally, there is always suspicion of murder.”

  “How would we have killed her? Just pushed her over ourselves.”

  “Her body was found near a gun that had been fired. There was some reason for that. And, so, yes, you could have just pushed her over.

  We already have the evidence that she poisoned her rival.”

  Pause, a long scarlet pause of guilt and dirt gelling in my mind.

  “Was she threatening you, Alexander?”

  “She wanted to kill all of us. She pulled the gun on me so I attacked her and, in the process of our fight, she fell over the balcony.”

  “All right, we’ll go with this story – self defense. We’ll have to wait for the coroner’s report.”

  Then, Angler looked to Billy and Audrey. “I’ve got that other business with Alexander,” he said. They stood up to leave the room.

  John smiled, led his long time clients to the door. Billy and Audrey left the room and John invited me to sit down again.

  “With your half-brother’s death, things aren’t as easy. To resolve this, we’re going to have to find this guy, Hitu, to bring him out in the open.”

  “Have you been in touch with Katsimbalis?”

  John removed the end of his cigar and lit it.

  “He’s already in Tahiti and he’s close to finding him. We may have to go there for you to give your side of the story.”

  “Whenever you need me. We’re getting close to the end of production.”

  IT’S JUST A STORY

  Margaret’s death didn’t hold up production on Sunset at all. The first day we went back to work, we were doing a night shoot. Joe and Betty were working in her office. It was well past midnight, normal people were already in bed, fast asleep. The two writers that were working on their mutual futures were attached, by the hip, to the late night typewriter.

  When they hit a dead spot in the script, when something wouldn’t flow, they took a walk around the studio, from sound stage to sound stage, nighttime witnesses to a fantasy factory that would come to life in all its phoniness within a few hours. On this interrupted night, Joe was getting closer to Betty than his morals would allow. There was Artie Green, her fiancée, and his best friend, out of town and out of the way when these two were writing one story on paper and acting out another in their behaviour. It was easy to fantasize silently when sleeping sets surrounded you and the word “action” was miles away from your thoughts.

  Joe had his brief encounter that night, a kind of play-acting about a pair of lovers who would never broach the abyss that separated them. They were talking about her nose, her fake nose, the one she “fixed” in order to be ready for the Paramount cameras.

  “They loved my nose,” she said, “only they didn’t like my acting.”

  Joe showed scads of sympathy, feeling sorry for another would-be image on the screen. At home, he had Norma to attend to; Out here, he had a real live woman, thirteen years younger, and in Betty Schaefer was everything that Joe’s experienced hunger had always longed for. But he knew it was just another story, that romance found on stalled nights was nothing in the light of day.

  I thought of Katharine and I back at home several years earlier, of our little seven-year-old Mara who remained comfortable because her parents acted out a charade of serenity to each other, how we were living an American dream while so many other Americans were fighting and dying for our fantasy of peace.

  We had our house by the beach, the one that Katharine had purchased and furnished with the income we had made on my smuggled art treasures. Katharine and I were together again and she told me that Michel was in the distant past. But I couldn’t trust her past.

  The sun was upon us when we had to stop for the night (or the day – I stopped being able to tell the difference). After I bid good night or morning to the cast and crew, I walked back to my car a little wobbly, as if I were intoxicated.

  But I had to drive home, to that empty bed that still gave me a comforting chill. When I closed my blackout curtains and slipped between the sheets, I remembered when Katharine was sleeping next to me.

  The ambrosia that was still Katharine’s living spirit glided its way into my sleepy time nostrils and I took in a vague aroma of the past as I cuddled next to a ghost and grabbed the pillow as if it were Katharine.

  Fast asleep, I stared at the full-breasted wonder that lay next to me in my dream. Katharine was no pillow, no ethereal creature, she was sex and blood and pain. She stretched her body in her sleep, tight skin expanded over that body that I so hauntingly still adored. I reached for her as light stole its way through the curtains and placed my hand on her stomach, then moved it down to her mons. Katharine sighed, her moist lips opened and then a loud fogh
orn brought me back to where I really was – alone and sweating in my bed.

  EXPOSURES

  There was no shoot the next day. It had been raining and that wasn’t called for in the script. And they weren’t ready for any new interiors.

  I looked around my room. It was too dark so I opened my blackout curtains. Then I could see my easel and paints. I had to get down what I dreamt the night before. Without even getting dressed or having my coffee, I started in on an abstract of Katharine. I had to paint quickly. I threw my thoughts down on a plastic sheet, then embossed the sheet on the canvas. When I looked at my images, I knew that I caught the right feeling, the panic and chaos that were on the outside while there was a stillness in the center. It described the way I felt tossed, in the sea of dark intentions, like some kind of buoy that refused to sink.

  When the painting dried, maybe as early as the next day, I’d bring it to Potala to hang it and get reactions. I wouldn’t put a price on it. I just wanted interpretations about where my mind was floating at the moment.

  The phone rang again and it scared me. I picked it up on the fifth ring and said nothing into the receiver.

  “Alex? Are you okay?” It was Sabrina, calling me from the gallery.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Tired. Are you free tonight?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then, I’ll come over after I have dinner with Mara.”

  That evening, as I drove through the wet streets to Sabrina’s place, there was a ringing in my ear so loud that it drowned out all other sounds. As I pulled up to her apartment, the sound had a painful thud added to it. There was something inside my brain that wanted to come out. But by the time I got to Sabrina’s door, the ringing and pain had vanished.

  Sabrina and I sat in her home and talked for hours…about the hunt for Hitu and the effort to clear myself. I had no intention of making love to her that night. For long periods, we just sat together, marooned in our own thoughts about the situation. Despite all the darkness that lay before me, I began to feel a release. Strangely, on that night, I began to feel that I actually wanted to be arrested, tried and convicted.

  Fortunately, that masochistic episode didn’t last long and Sabrina and I made gentle love through the night as the raindrops outside her window slowed their pounding and disappeared.

  By the time the sun rose, I was on a new footing. The night with Sabrina had replaced all the other lost nights with Katharine. Sabrina and I went to the gallery. I had received some undeveloped film from Katsimbalis. I took it in to my darkroom.

  Inside, the red safety light was on and I could see the images of the Toomatakuls come into view - the totem pole of animals, the foliage of a different world right on the other side of the resort island where we were shooting “Tabu.”

  Then came the paintings, Michel’s paintings. Katsimbalis must have photographed Michel’s place as well. The lithe arms of Katharine as they rested on Michel’s. Michel’s “Self Portrait with a Lady” was one that Michel never tried to sell. And I can see why – the arms that embraced Katharine gave me a chill.

  The chill grew several moments later when I was handed a telegram from Katsimbalis:

  “THE PAINTINGS AREN’T HIS. HITU PAINTED THEM.”

  Immediately, I got on the phone to Katsimbalis. “What is this?”

  “Michel didn’t do a brush stroke on those paintings,” Katsimbalis told me, “nor it seems on any of his other work that you’d been selling for years.”

  “What?”

  “But that’s only half your problem – A man named Trini, another native, told me that he wanted $100,000 to keep his trap shut.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Trini claims to have seen you leaving the boat after Michel’s death. He’s the one that sent you the painting of the boat.”

  “Jesus,” I said. I put down the receiver. It was horrible to be blackmailed but the thought that Michel’s paintings were Hitu’s made all the sense in the world. Hitu had the motive, the means and the opportunity to kill Michel.

  I had a hard time making my way out of the darkroom. When I finally walked out into the gallery, my shocked look worried Sabrina.

  “It’s nothing,” I said.

  “Let me see those negatives.” Sabrina grabbed them from my unsteady hands. While she was looking at them, I said “These paintings were done by Hitu, not Michel. He was tricking us all these years.”

  WORLD WAR SELF

  I returned to work on Sunset Boulevard. The scenes being shot of Gillis as a man who has something to hide got under my skin. I couldn’t stop thinking about someone making the discovery of my deceptive self, my hiding the fact that I was on that boat when Michel was killed.

  On the set, Gillis is writing at Paramount, late into the night when Betty starts staring at him. It’s not a pretty stare and Gillis begins to imagine that Betty has discovered his double life, that she has sudden contempt for him.

  “What is it,” Gillis asks.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” She gets up and leaves the room. Gillis follows her onto the walkway outside her office.

  “What have you heard? Come on, let’s have it. Is it about me?” She walks away. Gillis follows her. “There’s no use running out on it. Let’s face it whatever it is.” Then she tells him.

  Betty received a telegram from Artie. He wanted her to go to Arizona, where he was on location. He wanted them to get married there. But this happy news puts tears into Betty’s eyes.

  “Stop crying, you’re getting married. That’s what you wanted.”

  “I don’t want it now,” she sniffles.

  “Why not? Don’t you love Artie?”

  “Of course, I love him. I always will. I’m not in love with him anymore, that’s all.”

  “What happened?”

  Betty turned and looked Joe in the eyes. “You did.”

  Gillis is relieved. They kiss passionately, and then Gillis goes back home, stirring with guilt.

  Instead of another night with Sabrina, I went straight home after the shoot and collapsed into a black sleep, which I was shockingly awoken from by an early call from Katsimbalis. Apparently, the well-hidden Toomatakuls had revolted against Hitu and drove him out of their territory. He fled for his life and was last seen heading for the tourist spots of Bora Bora. Katsimbalis said he’s keeping tabs on him as best he could but his main pursuit, that of the extortionist, Trini, wasn’t going as well.

  “It needs to be,” I told him. “We’ve got to get to him before anyone else does.”

  “And what do I do with him if I do catch him, smash his head in?”

  “You act like I’m going to go along with his extortion. You keep him from the police. Meanwhile, I tell the truth about what I witnessed on the boat. It won’t deny that he saw me on the boat but it will give me the first chance to describe what really happened, that Hitu is the man they’ve got to find.”

  “Hitu is very violent, Alex,” he told me.

  “I suppose if he smashed a man’s brains in for showing his paintings, he would be kind of violent.”

  “No, it’s worse than that. He’s mad. He thinks he’s divinely chosen to drive the French out of the island.”

  “Well, forget about his being a revolutionary. Just find him.”

  INCARCERATION

  That morning, I stopped in the gallery before going to the studio. Sabrina ignored me as I went into my office and looked over the mail. Nothing of interest except a letter from Angler, my criminal lawyer. It turned out to be a bill, a retainer he was charging for his services as the Tahitian murder worked its way through the bureaucracy. I put it with the other bills and went to the bathroom. I looked in the mirror and saw a sane self, at least a self that seemed physically healthy. I was grinning at myself like an idiot when I heard my front doors bang open and Sabrina scream.

  I left the bathroom and was face to face with a scene that seemed like something out of film noir. One detective was r
estraining Sabrina from behind while the other one handcuffed me muttering something about the proof they’ve just gotten from Tahiti, proof that I was on the ship when Michel was killed. I was taken from my gallery and hurled into the back seat of an unmarked police car.

  “What’s going on,” I asked, just as I recognized the croissant-faced DeColette turn around from the passenger seat. “We have your papers,” he said.

  “What papers?”

  “Your extradition papers.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Mssr. Lumiere, the American government has been quite co-operative.”

  “Seems like the Vichy government to me,” I said and I asked to see these so-called extradition papers. DeColette held them in front of my face. Unfortunately, they seemed official. Then, the moment I let out with a deep sigh, the police car’s radiophone started ringing. The driver picked it up and was about to argue with the man on the other end. Instead, he became co-operative.

  “Yes, Sir,” he said, placing the phone back onto its receiver.

  “You’re one lucky son-of-a-bitch,” he told me as he turned the car around and started heading in another direction.

  “What is it,” DeColette asked.

  “It’s the state department. Someone monkeyed around with the extradition papers. Seems like we’re supposed to take him to the Santa Monica police station.”

  When we arrived, I recognized Angler’s Cadillac parked a few feet away. Once I was inside the building, my high-priced attorney was proving his worth. He was waiting at the main counter with a self-satisfied look.

  The man from behind the counter held another official paper in his hand. He gave it to DeColette.

  “That’s ridiculous,” he said as he read that the extradition was cancelled. “I have the authority to return my prisoner to Tahiti.”