Gerta hurried out of the room, but not before she beamed another proud smile in my direction.
“Boulton, you will remain,” Claire commanded. “You were listening at the door. Did you hear everything?”
“Yes, madam.”
“Are there any questions you would like to ask Miss Hill?”
“You mean other than what she was doing after eight o’clock last night?”
She tilted her head slightly. He fixed his watchful brown eyes on me and asked, “Why do you think Eleanor Kenilworth took the suicide note?”
“I didn’t say she did.”
“You implied it,” Claire said, tapping the finger with the lapis rock on the head of her stick.
“She was the only one there. She had the opportunity when I went downstairs to talk to the help and order her tea.”
“You said the maid came up behind you in the hall and frightened you.” It was the Englishman named Boulton.
“I was standing at Mrs. Kenilworth’s sitting-room door, which is near the top of the stairs. I thought I would’ve seen the maid come up the stairs, but I didn’t. Of course, I was intent on—”
“Servants’ stairs,” he said. They looked knowingly at one another.
“Servants’ stairs?” I repeated dumbly.
“Most houses such as the Kenilworths’ would have them,” Boulton explained.
The shared secure look of people who have it made irritated me. “I was raised in a house where we made our own tea and had only one set of stairs. They were so narrow we couldn’t pass each other on them. So I’m not familiar—”
“Miss Hill, your story is not going to raise Boulton’s social consciousness. Like you, he is a snob.” She smiled for the first time. “Our intention is not to make a class distinction but to point out that servants’ stairs can be used by the help or by people who do not want to be seen by the rest of the house.” She turned to Boulton. “Any more questions?”
He looked me up and down and shook his head.
“Still checking for weapons?” I asked a little too defensively.
Claire laughed. It was a good, solid, warm laugh. Boulton stiffened into a proper butler, and his watchful brown eyes turned discreet. A slash of red formed on each cheek. I liked that.
Claire leaned back in her chair. “What did Valcovich see from the office window? And this vision, whatever it was—how could it lead him to the codicil in your purse?” Eyes flashed with the excitement of thought. “I find this Patricia Kenilworth interesting. Divorced all those years and suddenly returns worried about what her husband might’ve said before he killed himself. You’re sure it was a photograph?” she asked me.
“As sure as I can be. So what do we do?”
She stood. “Nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing? You could call Valcovich.”
“How do I know you and Valcovich are not in this together?”
“In what together?”
“You could’ve taken the suicide note. You could’ve taken the codicil. You could be involved in extortion along with Valcovich. Until I feel you’ve been honest with me—until you tell me why you never looked in your purse last night—I see no reason to trust you.”
“I came here to tell you that somebody has stolen a four-million-dollar coin collection that is legally yours and you don’t trust me?! Fine! Fine!”
I made my way to the front door. I’d told the truth. If it wasn’t good enough for her, there was nothing else I could do. The door was locked. They moved slowly toward me, the lady and her butler: a Gothic couple. I wanted nothing to do with them. I wanted out.
“Unlock the door, Boulton,” she commanded.
He did as he was told. I stepped outside and started up the steps.
“One final comment, Miss Hill. If you are telling the truth, you could be in danger.”
That stopped me. I turned and looked at her. She stood in the doorway leaning on her walking stick as if she were at Ascot. Boulton stood just behind her. And just behind him was the half-open door with the family crest.
“If you’re telling the truth,” she continued, “then the person or persons who stole these documents know that you know they exist. In the case of the suicide note, they may even think you’ve read it. If they were willing to steal to keep these papers from being discovered, they may be willing to go further.”
The phrase “you could be in danger” was as abstract to me as the phrase “virginity is making a comeback.” I was tired.
“I’ve had it with Pasadena.” I turned and went up the steps. I heard the family crest close behind me. Some family.
I was on the Arroyo Seco Freeway going sixty-five miles an hour away from Pasadena toward Hollywood. If Claire Conrad didn’t believe me, what the hell. I don’t know how telling her I’d gone to bed with my ex-husband was going to make her trust me. I did what I had to do and that was that. I didn’t want to be responsible for the damn codicil anyway. I’d told Kenilworth that. What right did he have forcing it on me, then going upstairs and killing himself? What right? I was through. It was time to get involved in my own life. I headed for the New Woman Employment Agency, formerly the Girl Friday Employment Agency. Times change, but the jobs don’t. And I needed one again.
My radio blasted. A group of male voices screamed at me over their synthesizers, screamed at me to give it to them. Give it to them! It was a love song. Rock ’n’ roll was middle-aged, but it had never grown up. The male voices sounded shrill and desperate. I turned them off. Silence. I was almost middle-aged. I was shrill and desperate. I was in danger. I wondered what form danger would take. A male form, of course. He’d be dressed in black and always have a gun in his hand and a hard-on. Unlike virginity, danger would never have left town. Oh, hell.
I got off the freeway at Highland and drove down to Hollywood Boulevard. The New Woman Agency was near La Brea just before Hollywood Boulevard turns into a street of houses and condos. The agency was in one of those high-rise buildings that look as if they were made out of wraparound sunglasses. Across the street, men, balancing cameras on their shoulders, circled and captured an event for the six o’clock news. Either someone was having his star put in the sidewalk or he had been murdered. I parked the car in the high rise’s parking lot.
The New Woman Agency was on the seventh floor. The agency consisted of three small offices, two hard-working women named Corinne and Phyllis, and a lot of telephones.
I went in. Corinne was sitting at her desk talking to a young Mexican woman. “Do you speak English?” she asked.
“Sí…yes.”
A little boy clung to the woman’s leg. She nervously stroked his shiny-clean hair. Corinne looked up at me. She was dressed in a three-piece green suit. Thick red hair curled in all directions.
“Maggie! Phyllis, it’s Maggie,” she yelled into the next room.
“Out of work again,” I said.
“Be with you in a second. Go in and see Phyllis. She’s got something to show you.” Corinne turned back to the young woman. “Can you type?”
Averting her eyes from Corinne’s, the woman nodded. The boy buried his face in his mother’s lap, pulling her skirt up around his cheeks and exposing her prim cotton slip. Embarrassed, she pulled the fabric from his hands and smoothed her skirt.
“I’m going to have to test you.”
“Test?”
“To see how fast you can type.”
“Oh…” The young woman’s voice trailed off into hopelessness. She stared at the boy. He seemed to sense her fear and patted her hand. That simple meaningful gesture made me feel something I wasn’t prepared for: envy. Mother and child. I could feel the envy in my womb. A swift jab. I looked away and told myself it was just my body clock reminding me of my age. What a lovely term, “body clock.” So mechanical sounding. So impersonal. Like a clock connected to a bomb, ticking, ticking, ticking till it explodes. I looked back at them. That little boy’s gesture wasn’t going to put food on the table. That little boy
’s gesture wasn’t going to help her learn to speak English or to type. What good was that little boy’s gesture? My envy was gone. Now I was feeling the proper emotion: despair. I walked into Phyllis’s office hoping that what she had for me was another job and wishing that minorities would stop having babies. This is America. Don’t they know about the freedom of abortion?
Her hair was dyed raven today. The last time I saw Phyllis she was a redhead. The time before that, a brunette. The time before that…I can’t remember.
She was peering out the narrow band of dark window allotted to her street-side office. “Did you see her?” Phyllis lisped through the retainer she wore on her teeth.
“Who?”
“Victoria Moor!”
I looked out the window. The dark glass made Hollywood appear as if it were in mourning. I watched the huddle on the sidewalk spread apart, revealing a thin bleached blonde kneeling as if in prayer. Venus had her half-shell; Victoria Moor had her star on a dirty sidewalk. She rose from her knees. Her breasts tilted upward toward us, the Hollywood sun, and God. The circling, dipping, jabbing camera shadow-boxed around her every move. She waved and slithered into a long white line of a limousine.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” Phyllis lisped, forming a tiny bubble of saliva on her retainer. It popped. She had straight teeth, but not straight enough for Phyllis.
“She starves herself and has her breasts enlarged and you call it beauty?”
“Oh, Maggie, you don’t like anything. Do you think she killed him?”
“Killed who?” The question startled me. And again I thought of that word “danger.”
“Junior Paddingworth! Oh, God, I hope they don’t send her to prison. Then she has to wear one of those drab gray dresses all the time and we don’t get to see the beautiful clothes.”
She sat at her desk and began going through piles of folders and papers looking for something. Her stubby nails were painted the color of bubble gum. Furry stuffed animals about the size of my fist hung from her desk lamp and balanced on stacks of files. They smiled stupidly at me. A can of some nutrient diet mix teetered on the edge of her desk.
“I hope in all that mess you’re trying to find a job for me,” I said, placing the can so it wouldn’t fall off.
“You have another month to go out in Pasadena.”
She didn’t know. I didn’t feel like telling her. “Finished.”
“Here it is!” Triumphantly, she plucked a bright yellow book from the pile of papers and held it up for me to see. In bold green letters was the title, Cornsilk. Under it, in much smaller print, was my name. A round red price tag declared my book was worth ninety-nine cents.
“And you told Corinne and me it was out of print,” Phyllis chided.
“It is.”
“Autograph it for me.” She thrust the book into my hands as she picked up the ringing telephone.
Phyllis tried to calm an angry temporary employer. I tried objectively to study the photograph of me on the back of the book. I couldn’t. I looked so young. So earnest. So innocent. I felt the same swift jab of envy I had felt when looking at the mother and child, but the pain wasn’t in my womb. It was under my heart, where I always imagined my soul was hidden. I quickly autographed the book and tossed it onto the desk.
Phyllis was now talking to an angry temporary employee. I stared at a stack of telephone books on the floor next to her desk. I wondered what would happen if I showed up at Valcovich’s office. Come on, Maggie, you’ve had it with Pasadena. You weren’t going to think about the Kenilworths. I turned and looked out at the Hollywood Hills. They were cluttered with houses. It was easier to think about the Kenilworths than to think about that young writer on the back of a book. It was easier to think about why somebody would steal a codicil than about why I had never written another book. I lifted the Yellow Pages onto my lap and flipped to the A’s. I took a piece of paper from Phyllis’s desk and wrote down Valcovich’s address.
Corinne stood in the doorway. Her green suit gave her body the curious look of a sturdy stem. The unruly red hair made her head the flower. “She couldn’t type, let alone run a computer. I told her to go to one of the local colleges—a night course to learn some skills and English. I mean, what else could I do for her?”
I wasn’t thinking about the mother and child anymore. I was thinking about Valcovich. “Listen, if you get anything for me, let me know,” I said, heading out of the office. “’Bye, Phyllis.”
“That’s what we get paid for,” Corinne said, following me to the door.
“See you later.”
“Maggie.” She put her hand on my arm, stopping me. “That woman didn’t want to be a maid. What is it you don’t want to be?”
“What are you talking about?”
“What are you doing here, Maggie? Why are you taking jobs you could perform in your sleep? I read your book.”
“I gotta go, Corinne. Call me.”
I was out the door and down the hallway.
“It made me cry,” Corinne yelled after me.
Why do women think it’s a good book if it’s made them cry? Why are tears so important to us?
Valcovich’s office was on Pico Boulevard in a four-story building wedged between one-story shops. The building was designed to always look new, so it always looked cheap. He was on the third floor. The elevator was busy. I took the stairs and came out into a hallway of office doors. The sounds of Muzak collided with the sounds of rock ’n’ roll. The rock music bellowed from an open office. Three young men who looked as if they belonged in the sixties stared at a computer. Antinuclear posters covered the walls. A large sign urged people to pay five dollars and march for peace. It was difficult to get people to spend money for peace when they weren’t sure where war was. Around the corner from the antinukes and on the street side were the law offices of Roger Valcovich. I took a deep breath and breezed in.
The reception desk was empty except for an ashtray filled with butts. In the small waiting room an old couple held shaky hands. A young woman, tears streaming down her face, sat twisting her wedding band. A bearded man pounded his fist on his knee while he read People magazine. A woman of about fifty appeared from behind a row of filing cabinets. I could tell by the burning cigarette in her hand that she was The Smoker.
“Do you have an appointment?”
“Yes.”
“Name?”
“Maggie Hill.”
“I don’t see you on the list.”
“Just tell him my name. He’ll see me.”
She studied me for moment, taking a drag on her cigarette and letting the smoke out through her nose. When she spoke, it was in a whisper: “He’s not in.”
I turned to the group in the waiting room. “Do you know Valcovich isn’t in his office?” I asked them.
The old man glared at The Smoker. “I’ve been here an hour. Waiting! What do you mean, not in?”
The young girl began to sob loudly. The old woman looked bewildered. The guy with the beard continued to read People and pound his fist.
The Smoker moved swiftly toward them. “Don’t worry, Mr. Valcovich will see you.”
“Have to get a lawyer for the lawyer!” the old man yelled at his wife.
“What?!” she yelled back.
The Smoker turned on me. “Wait here.”
She hurried down a narrow hall to a closed door. I smiled at the old man and his wife. I thought about telling these poor people what a creep Valcovich was until it dawned on me that I shouldn’t just be standing there. I ran down the hall and threw open the door. Valcovich was standing behind a large white desk, looking puffy and mean. The Smoker was drawn and nervous.
“Maggie! What a nice surprise,” he said sweetly, settling himself into a white leather chair.
I had the peculiar feeling that somebody had just left the room in a hurry; there was the lingering smell of another person. I saw only one other door. I opened it and peered out into the hallway. Other than the sound of Muzak and the sou
nd of the Grateful Dead, it was empty. Closing the door, I turned back to Valcovich.
His greedy eyes watched me. He placed his hands on his desk just as he had in his television commercial and turned to The Smoker. “Ellen, get the accident forms for Maggie to fill out.”
“You’re a terrible actor,” I said.
He looked hurt.
“I want the codicil, Valcovich.”
He shook his head sadly. “Maggie, Maggie. Why do you keep on about that? You’re beginning to sound a little crazy.”
“How much money did you get out of the Kenilworths?”
“I think we have a nut on our hands. Call the police, Ellen.”
The Smoker picked up the telephone as if she had never seen one before.
“Don’t bother. I’m leaving. I’m not going to let this go, Valcovich.”
I walked out the private entrance into the corridor, slamming the door shut. Then I stood quietly, listening. I heard The Smoker go into a coughing fit. I could hear Valcovich talking; but between The Smoker’s gasps for life, the moans of the Grateful Dead, and the sweet slurpings of Muzak, I couldn’t make out his words.
Oh, hell. I was strapped back in the Honda, curling my way through Laurel Canyon to the Ventura Freeway and home. Moving slowly in rush-hour traffic, I thought about my uneventful visit to Valcovich’s office. What had I expected him to do? Tell me the truth? I found out what I already knew: he was in this up to his fat neck. And so was I.
I unlocked my apartment door to the sounds of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. I shoved the door open with my foot. Frying pan. Sheets. Toaster oven. Clothes. Mattress ripped. Dresser drawers dumped. Dishes scattered. Chair on its side. Cushion split. Pillow feathers everywhere like snow. The smell of day-old pizza. I leaned against the wall, trying to take in the chaos. Television. Phone machine blinking. Computer. Tape deck. Radio—the Montagues and the Capulets marched. All there. So this was danger.
I found the telephone and dialed.
Boulton answered.
“This is Maggie. I want to speak to her.”
She came onto the line. “Yes, Miss Hill?”
“Call me Maggie. We’re going to pretend we’re best friends and I’m going to tell you how I fucked my brains out last night with my ex-husband so I wouldn’t have to think of all the different pieces of Kenilworth’s face. That’s why I never looked in my purse. I made him leave early in the morning because I don’t trust him enough to wake up next to him. He didn’t know about the codicil. He never looked in my purse. When I found it was missing, I called him, because he’s a policeman. A woman answered. I hung up. Any questions?”
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