“It does define his character—a man who is not afraid to let another man die. By the way, did Rosewood Hospital give you that information about Waingrove, or were you just bluffing?” she asked.
“Bluffing. They won’t give information over the phone.”
“Yes, you are definitely the person to chronicle my life.”
“I don’t want to write about you—follow you around like some little puppy dog!”
“There are worse things you could do with your life.”
“Look, I am an independent woman!”
“Please, please, please! When you are in my presence, never put those two words together. You may use them separately, for they are useful words. But when ‘independent’ is used as an adjective to the noun ‘woman,’ all rational and independent thought stops.”
“You are a sexist!”
“An example of what I have just said. Miss Hill, you are the one who just referred to herself as a puppy dog, not me. I see you as a snapping, aggressive, untrainable, full-grown Airedale!”
“Airedale?”
“I need silence. I need to think.” She extended her legs, crossed her arms over her chest, and stared intently at the tips of her shoes.
I looked out the doors. Airedale! Airedales look like strutting old men! What’s wrong with Lassie? Rin Tin Tin? Oh, hell. Get the codicil and get out of Pasadena. Wait a minute…I’ve got the codicil? I can leave!
I turned and looked at Claire. She was totally concentrated, as if she were in a trance. Oh, hell, I’ll find out who killed Valcovich and then I’ll leave.
“Why do you think Waingrove is the blackmailer?” I asked.
She raised her eyes from her shoes to my face. “You started me thinking when you called him a misogynist. This man who does not like women is involved with two very different kinds of woman. Victoria Moor I can understand—her fame puts him in the spotlight. But Judith Kenilworth can do little for Waingrove. And yet he is so very helpful to her and her family…so dedicated about finding the codicil and helping them make a deal with The Smoker. Why? These women have two things in common: they are being blackmailed, and they are involved with Waingrove. I think he is protecting his investments. Did you notice how devastated Judith was when she learned that Waingrove owned Erwin’s house? His ownership made it clear to her that he was the blackmailer. I’m sure of it.”
The doorbell rang.
“But how? Where’s the proof?”
She took her walking stick and pointed at the photograph on the table. “The proof is in here. We just have to decipher it.”
Boulton appeared. “Patricia Kenilworth would like to see you.”
“Just a minute.” Claire took the jewelry box and put it back in my purse; then she slipped the photograph into her pocket. “Send her in.”
We looked at one another as Boulton left and reappeared with Patricia. She rushed into the room. The diamond studs glared coldly against the glazed whiteness of her skin.
“I want it. Now!”
“What do you want now?” Claire asked.
“The photograph you stole from us.”
“Sit down, please.”
“No. I just want the picture.”
“I have some information that will interest you.”
Patricia licked her lips like an alcoholic might at the offer of a drink. “What information?”
“Please sit down.”
She sat on the sofa, and even in her nervous state she remembered to slowly cross her legs, displaying them to their best advantage.
“Will you need me?” Boulton asked Claire.
“I don’t think so.”
“What do you know?” Patricia’s eyes shone with a mixture of curiosity and fear.
“How long have you known Brian Waingrove?”
“Three years, maybe. I told you I went to one of his lectures.”
“How long has he been your daughter’s lover?”
The cat eyes blinked; the lips pressed sideways, forming a smile. “My daughter will have many lovers, but only one mother. He means nothing to her.”
“How long has he meant nothing to her?”
“On and off for the last year.”
Claire reached into my purse and took out the jewelry box. Holding it on her lap, she opened the lid. Patricia stared at the ballerina.
“That’s Rebecca’s! How did you get it? Shut the damn thing off! I’ve always hated that song. Ellis loved it. Turn it off!”
Claire closed the box. “This doesn’t belong to Rebecca. Miss Hill found it in the house Brian Waingrove owns.”
The cat eyes shifted from Claire to me and back. “I don’t understand.”
“The house in back of the Kenilworths’. The house Erwin manages for Waingrove. The house where the patients from Rosewood stay.”
The glazed white skin turned pasty. “He owns…” Her voice trailed off and her hand went to her neck. “What do I care if he owns a house near the Kenilworths’?”
“I think you do. And so does Victoria. That’s why she lied when she said the picture was taken at the beach. I think it was taken in the Kenilworths’ garden. Why do you both care enough to lie?”
Patricia stood. “I shouldn’t have come here.” She reached into her purse and came out with a gun. “Just give me the photograph and I’ll leave.”
She was the fifth person today, including myself, who thought a gun might be necessary.
“Move over by Claire Conrad,” she said to me.
“Do you want me to put my hands in the air?” I asked, moving carefully toward Claire, who was sitting very erect in her chair.
“I don’t think we need to be theatrical.”
“This is very foolish,” Claire said. “My man is in the house.”
“I don’t think you understand me. I would do anything to protect my daughter.”
“Including paying blackmail for the rest of your life?”
“If necessary.”
“How do you feel about your daughter making love to her blackmailer?” I asked.
“I’m not a sentimental woman. Neither is she. Give me the photograph.”
Boulton appeared in the doorway. If I counted him twice, that would make six people with guns in their hands. He moved quietly toward Patricia. The floor creaked. She turned. Claire rose out of her chair, swinging her stick, knocking the gun from Patricia’s hand. Boulton quickly picked it up. Patricia slumped onto the sofa, holding her wrist, crying.
“Why can’t you leave us alone?…Why? We’ve done nothing to you…Please, I’ll pay you anything…just leave us alone.”
Claire took the photo from her pocket and held it in front of Patricia. “Who is the woman in this picture?”
Patricia stared at it. She closed her eyes and began to rock back and forth, sobbing, “Victoria, Victoria, Victoria…my Victoria…”
Tears carved years into her face; she was a sad, terrified old woman. I had trouble looking at her. She had gone through so much to hide her age, I felt as if I were seeing something I shouldn’t. I went to a small side table and poured some brandy from a crystal decanter and handed it to her.
“Where is Victoria?” Claire asked.
“At the studio. Working.” She took the brandy and gulped it.
“We’ll see her now. Did your chauffeur drive you?”
“I drove myself.”
“We’ll follow you to the studio.”
She looked up at us. Ravaged green eyes turned coy. “Will you give me the photograph then?”
“After we talk to your daughter.”
“Yes,” she said softly. “Victoria will have the answers.”
Boulton followed the hunter-green Jag through bumper-to-bumper traffic into Burbank—where Hollywood really exists. Patricia turned down a street lined with pepper trees and ranch-style homes. At the end of the street was the gate to the Valley City Studios. I guess for the people in these houses it was like living next to the mill.
Patricia stopped the Jag
and talked to a security guard standing in a little wooden booth. She drove on. He waved us by. We followed her through a maze of narrow streets and giant cement sound stages that looked as if they were built to house nuclear weapons. We parked and headed for one of these austere buildings. Boulton waited by the car.
Just as the heavy, vault-like door closed behind us, a kind of whistle sounded. A man yelled “Quiet!” in an angry, tired voice. Next to me a red light began to spin. Patricia motioned for us to stay where we were.
All human life, in this dank warehouse of television images, froze in mid-action, like Keats’s lovers on their urn. A hairdresser, brush in hand, stopped inches from the lush, dark hair of an actress. Unmoving, the actress stared at herself in the mirror, lovingly trapped in her own reflection. Grips, resigned to their few moments of inactivity, stared at one another like lumpy statues. A dapper actor sat in a chair, poised forever on the moment of turning a page in Daily Variety.
Only the camera moved. In a brightly lit corner it rolled silently on its tracks, like a giant insect, toward the bare back of Victoria Moor.
“Action!”
Victoria spun around, her blond hair flaring like the opening of a white silk fan.
“You have no right to tell me what to do!” she defied the camera.
“I have every right,” a bored male voice answered from somewhere in the darkness.
Claire moved uneasily, her walking stick tapping the cement floor. She drew a scolding look from a woman dressed as a nurse—or maybe she was a nurse.
Victoria undulated closer to the camera, tilted her head back, and parted her lips as if she were going to kiss the giant eye that burrowed in on her. “You forget I own you.”
“Only forty-eight percent of me,” the voice without a body said.
“As of this morning I own fifty-one percent of you…baby.” She slowly, reluctantly moved away from the camera.
“No. No. No,” the voice droned.
A gunshot rang out. I leaped. The nurse gave me the nasty look. Victoria fell into a chair, her head tilted backwards toward the camera. Blond hair cascaded down. I could see her forehead…the tip of her nose. She looked exactly as she did in the photograph. And I knew Claire was wrong: it was Victoria Moor in that photo.
“Cut! Print!” a harried voice commanded.
The hairdresser began to comb the actress’s hair. The grips started to move and lift. The actor turned to the next page. Victoria, followed by a woman carrying a robe, another holding a comb and can of hair spray, and a man grasping small face brushes as if they were a bouquet, hurried from the cluster of lights toward a large trailer.
“Come with me,” Patricia said, moving toward the trailer.
When Victoria saw us, she stopped. “Wait here,” she commanded her followers, like a general commanding her troops.
We went into the trailer. It was as large as the room my mother had built onto our house, which she loved to refer to as the “Family Room.” Victoria sat in front of her dressing table. The many lights that lined the mirror were dark. In the normal light her makeup looked heavy, tawdry. She peered at herself in the mirror.
“Oh, God! I’ve asked them repeatedly to leave these lights on. Some frugal bastard is trying to make points with the producer.”
She flicked on the lights and was transformed from a hooker into a beauty queen.
“With whom were you acting?” Claire asked.
“The camera. There’s not enough room in television to act with other actors.”
“Did he kill you?” I asked.
“Slightly wounded.” She turned on Patricia, who was sitting nervously in the corner of a sofa. “What is this all about, Mother?”
“They know,” she said.
“Know what?”
“Where the picture was taken.”
“Why don’t you just give us back the photograph and get the hell out of here.”
“Victoria…please…talk to them…” her mother begged.
“Talk to them about what?”
“About…it. Please.”
“I don’t have much time. They’ll be asking for me soon.”
She paused and studied herself in the mirror. It was as if she were sucking in strength from the warm, glowing lights surrounding her reflection.
“All right. The photograph was taken in the garden. I wanted to take Ellis on his own territory—or should I say Eleanor’s territory? Seduce her son—my father—right under her nose. But that strange man-child wandered in. He had a camera—he was just holding it down by his side. He didn’t look as if he were taking pictures, for God’s sake.”
“Why did you lie and say the photo was taken at the beach?” Claire asked.
Victoria didn’t answer.
Patricia leaned forward, her long fingernails digging into the sofa. “They say Brian owns the house where that child came from.”
“How do you know that?” Victoria turned in her chair toward Claire.
“A Mr. Erwin told us. He manages the house for Waingrove.”
“You’re going to believe him?”
“The records are easily checked. I’ll be doing that tomorrow. In the meantime, I have no reason not to believe him. I think Erwin showed Waingrove the photograph. I think Waingrove is blackmailing you.”
“We’re not asking you to rescue us from our blackmailers. Mother and I can handle the situation.”
“Why do you persist in protecting these people? Does it have anything to do with this?” Claire nodded to me, and I took the pink box out of my purse and opened the lid.
“Where did you get that? You stole it from Rebecca!”
“Miss Hill found it in Erwin’s—Waingrove’s house.”
Victoria slammed the lid down.
Claire said, “Ellis gave one to Rebecca and this one to somebody in that house. Who do you think it would be?”
“How the hell do I know? Some poor creature he felt sorry for. He felt sorry for all of us poor creatures. I have to change. I want you to leave.”
Claire and I moved toward the door.
“You said you’d give me the photograph!” Patricia stood.
“That reminds me.” Claire looked at Victoria. “Your daughter doesn’t think this is you in this picture.”
“You showed her that? How dare you! Get out!”
She picked up what looked like a very expensive bottle of perfume and threw it at us. It broke against the wall over our heads and poured down on us. We were drenched in Joy. I’d often sniffed it at the perfume counter at Neiman’s. That’s all I could afford to do there—sniff. Now I knew what it felt like to wear it. We ducked out of the door before she could throw something else.
People stood on the sound stage as if another disembodied voice had yelled for quiet—except this time they were all frozen into silence watching us. Claire and I made our way out of the building, trailing a disgustingly high-class odor behind us.
We drove back to the cottage with all the windows open. Claire had the light on in the car. She never spoke. She only stared at the photograph.
As we headed toward the front door I said, “Did you see Victoria when she got shot and leaned her head back over that chair? She looked exactly as she does in this photograph.”
“Dead?” Claire said, pounding on the front door.
“She was slightly wounded.”
“Well, you’d never know it by her acting.” Claire stopped and looked at me. The dark eyes shone. “That’s it, Miss Hill!”
“What is?”
“I need to think.”
Gerta opened the door. Her face scrunched up when she got a whiff of us.
“I’m taking a bath. I suggest you do the same.” Claire marched off to her room.
I took a bath. But Joy is the best you can buy, and you just can’t wash off the best so easily. In that respect the most expensive perfumes and the cheapest perfumes are the same.
I was sitting on my bed wrapped in my pink kimono when Claire strode in
to the room. She had on a black velvet robe and was looking very judicial—Supreme Court judicial.
“Sit down here,” she demanded, pulling a chair up to the dresser mirror.
I did as I was told.
She laid the photograph on the dresser. “Re-create Ellis’s expression in the mirror.”
“What? I’m no actress!”
“Just do it.”
I studied his face and then tried to get mine to do the same. I half-closed my eyes…opened my mouth in a sort of sexual passion. I tilted my head and moaned sexually.
“Who asked you to make those awful sounds?”
“It looks as if he’s moaning.”
“Do it again, and no improvisation.”
I did exactly what I had done before.
“Scream,” Claire said.
“What?”
“Scream!”
I screamed.
“Keep on screaming!” she demanded.
I kept on screaming, and my expression began to look more and more like his. All the sexual passion I had seen in his face, my face, slowly turned to anguish and despair.
Boulton burst in through the door with his gun drawn. He stared at the two of us.
“Everything all right?”
“Excellent, Boulton. Just excellent,” Claire said triumphantly.
“Right.” He left the room.
“There is more than one kind of passion, Miss Hill. There is the passion of grief…of loss. Ellis Kenilworth is holding a dead woman in his arms. And by the look on his face, he did not kill her!”
I looked at the photograph. There was no way to see it now except as a picture of a man grieving over the woman he held in his arms.
“But they all agreed it was Victoria.”
“We have been played beautifully. Victoria Moor is a very clever woman, and I’m afraid I’ve underestimated her ability as an actress. Tomorrow, Miss Hill, I want you to drive up to Rosewood Hospital and get whatever information you can about that house and Waingrove. And find out how many patients are usually there. You said there were two twin beds in each room. Only three beds were being used. Find out if there was ever a fourth patient. A woman to whom Ellis gave a child’s jewelry box. A woman who is in that photograph. A woman who looks very much like Victoria Moor. A woman he loved—past tense. A woman who has been murdered.”
Mother Shadow Page 22