Dream of Fair Woman

by Charlotte Armstrong

  ‘Well, sure. What do you mean?’

  ‘Who is her dentist?’

  ‘Her what!’

  ‘Her dentist.’

  ‘Jeepers,’ said Bobbie, stricken stupid. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know the name of your daughter’s dentist?’

  ‘Listen, I thought you meant did she live in L.A. I don’t say she lived right here, with me. Why, when we first came here, lemme see … right after she got out of … uh … high school that was … Well, Alison was eighteen about, and she took an apartment with some kids from the studios. Over in North Hollywood, that was. But they busted up and she had a place by herself, but then the Freeway came through and she hadda move. She … uh … well … moved around, see? I forget. Anyway, then she got this chance to go to Spain. So when she gets back, natch, she’s got no place. And that was when she came to me. About two weeks ago.’

  ‘How long had she been in Spain?’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Bobbie, calling on the Deity quite unnecessarily, ‘it was a year and a half. Well, see, that turned out not to be so great because she kinda lost track of her contacts around this town. I mean, boy, they can forget you ever lived in about six weeks, around this town. And she was real, real tired, see? She had to get some rest. So she just hung around the house, sleeping.…’

  The woman paused and her face became a little bleak.

  ‘Of course, she’s my baby,’ she said, putting on another voice, another aspect. ‘And my home is her home, if she needs it.’

  Matt said, ‘Has she a California driver’s licence?’

  ‘What do you mean? Why?’

  Betty said, with some asperity, ‘Because it might have her thumbprint on it.’

  ‘Oh. I never thought … Yah, but the thing is, Alison don’t drive.’

  ‘Doesn’t drive!’ said Betty, astonished. ‘How old is she?’

  ‘She’s twenty-three. Well, see, she kinda never bothered.’ The woman’s remark fell very flat.

  ‘Mrs Hopkins,’ said Matt sternly, ‘don’t you realise that we have to find some proof of this girl’s identity? That you are going to have to give us the right answers?’

  ‘Listen … the truth is … She don’t like this to get around. Her eyes aren’t too good.’ The woman looked up blindly. ‘Mine, either. But some people can’t stand contact lenses. Sensitive, you know?’

  ‘So she couldn’t pass the test? Is that it? She couldn’t get a licence?’

  ‘That’s right. Listen, I don’t want that in the papers.’ The woman reached quickly for her drink. ‘People are funny,’ she announced.

  Matt was discovering that he didn’t believe a word she said. Betty said, out of the blue, ‘Does Alison wear lace on her slips?’

  The woman goggled. ‘For God’s sake! Certainly. Alison likes nice things.’

  ‘You haven’t looked at the clothing our girl was wearing, have you?’

  ‘No,’ said Bobbie. ‘No. Why should I? Listen, I got problems I never even used yet.’

  ‘What was Alison wearing when you last saw her?’

  ‘She didn’t show me what slip she had on.’ The woman was sulking.

  ‘A black dress?’

  ‘No, no. Her green lightweight wool with the jacket.’ Bobbie was staring at Betty.

  ‘When was this?’ said Matt, impatient with details of clothing.

  ‘Well, that was last Tuesday night, around seven-thirty, eight o’clock. She came in around five, I guess it was. She didn’t say much. She went in her room. I was going out to eat. I mean, there wasn’t any reason why I should call her or anything …’

  ‘You mean,’ said Matt, ‘you weren’t going to serve any dinner.’ He surprised himself. He seemed to know exactly what she was feeling guilty about.

  ‘Oh, Alison liked to snack around,’ said Bobbie. ‘Well, then, here she comes all of a sudden with her suitcase.’

  ‘A grey suitcase?’ asked Betty.

  ‘No, no. It’s blue. One of them wardrobes.’

  ‘And?’ Matt brought her back sternly.

  ‘Well, natch, I want to know what’s with her? She says she’s found a place to stay and she’s taking off. She says maybe she has a job. She don’t know yet. So I say, “Well, look, baby, I haven’t got any money, you know that.” But she says not to worry about it. She’s moving in with a friend, she says.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘She didn’t say.’

  ‘Who was the friend?’

  ‘Well, she didn’t say.’

  ‘Male or female?’ snapped Matt. ‘Did she say? Or didn’t you ask?’ He couldn’t imagine what was the matter with him. He was sounding like an elder of the church.

  ‘I didn’t ask,’ said Bobbie sulkily. ‘Listen, a girl today, she’s got her life. I got mine. Such as it is,’ she added bitterly.

  ‘Did the friend call for her?’

  ‘She walked,’ said Bobbie. ‘There’s a bus. I don’t know.’

  Matt said firmly, ‘Has your daughter Alison any scar from some old injury? Or,’ he added, uncontrollably angry, ‘don’t you know that, either?’

  The woman drained her glass. ‘You got the nerve of an elephant, you know that?’ she said calmly. ‘But you also got an idea there. All right. I didn’t look when I went down to see her. I didn’t think to look. Why would I? So—I should have looked. O.K., Mr Smarty. Alison got some quack to take off a mole she had on her … uh … left breast. And I dunno, he kinda butchered the job. So she’s got a shiny spot there. It don’t tan, see? Alison takes sunbaths in the altogether. She can’t afford strap marks—not in her business. But that spot don’t tan.’

  ‘What is the doctor’s name?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Bobbie. ‘Should I know?’

  ‘But she has such a mark? You’ve seen it?’

  ‘Of course I’ve seen it.’

  ‘Well then,’ said Matt coldly, ‘I’ll have to tell you that the girl in the hospital is not your daughter Alison.’

  (And so be it, and alas.)

  ‘What are you talk …’ She let her red-smeared mouth hang open.

  ‘She can’t be.’ Matt stood up.

  ‘Now wait a minute …’

  ‘Have the police been here?’ Matt said suddenly.

  ‘What?’ The woman was looking terrified.

  ‘Could you answer the question? Have the police been here?’

  ‘No. Why should they be? What’s going on? Listen, I don’t have to sit still for this. And how do you know,’ she howled, ‘she hasn’t got a mark on her left breast, you dirty—’

  Matt had to take her by the wrist. Bobbie now began to cry hysterically.

  Betty said, ‘Mrs Hopkins, don’t carry on. Just try to calm down, please. After all, if she isn’t your daughter, why then you shouldn’t cry.’

  ‘Oh God, I do the best I can,’ the woman wailed. ‘I try to do the best I can. Listen, my’—she gulped in air—‘the father,’ she said, ‘ran out on me a hundred years ago. What am I supposed to do?’

  ‘Did your daughter model for Megan Royce at one time?’ asked Matt.

  ‘For who? Listen, I guess she did some modelling. She had to eat. Don’t worry. She didn’t do nothing dirty. And what have some of those kids got that she hasn’t got?’ Now Bobbie was fierce. ‘She should be on top. She just needs a break. She photographs … Look how she photographs. That stupid director she had in Spain … Oh, I’m telling you, it’s rough. It’s rough!’ The woman seemed to be drunk now. ‘I coulda done all right myself if I’d have had a coupla breaks. So now look? So now what? What? Eh?’

  Matt signalled and Betty turned to go.

  ‘Look,’ said Bobbie, seeming to become suddenly sober, ‘maybe I made a mistake. But maybe not. Right? Listen, she’s been away, Alison has. Listen, maybe the rain in Spain …? What? Who can say? Maybe that spot don’t show anymore. Maybe it was just going to take time. Couldn’t that be, huh? Could that be?’

  ‘Didn’t you know,’ said Betty gently,
‘that she was a double for Dorothy Daw?’

  ‘How should I know anything?’ cried Bobbie Hopkins. ‘Nobody tells me anything. And I got a distinct feeling I might as well be drunk as the way I am.’ She went, like a bee to honey, for her bottle.

  Matt opened the door for Betty. There didn’t seem to be anything more that they could say.

  When they had gone, Bobbie put the bottle down. ‘After dark,’ she muttered. ‘So what do I know? Damn kids!’

  In the car Matt said, ‘Frustrated mama, using the child? “She’ll get where I never got”? Classic. Do you think so? Maybe Alison was running away from that. I wouldn’t blame her.’

  But Betty said, ‘Alison got away, a long time ago. And our girl can’t be Alison, can she?’

  ‘You should have heard Bobbie, howling that she’s a mother.’ Matt sputtered in a moment. ‘Doesn’t know the simplest facts about her own child …’

  ‘Why blame Bobbie exclusively?’ said Betty. ‘Maybe Alison doesn’t let her know.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Betts. That godawful woman.’

  ‘She isn’t much like your mother.’

  Matt said stiffly, ‘Shall we stick to the point? Does Bobbie Hopkins know whether Alison’s scar still shows? Or does she not? And if not, how can we know?’

  ‘You want our girl to be Alison, don’t you, Matt?’

  ‘Now that,’ he said, ‘is idiotic! What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Probably I’m using my feminine intuition.’

  But he fell silent. He wouldn’t quarrel.

  Betty held her tongue, but she thought, For just a minute there, he knew I was alive. Oh damn … damn … damn.…

  Peg said that Tony Severson had called and left a number. So Matt called it.

  ‘Hey! Hey!’ said Tony. ‘What do you know?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Well, the lieutenant ain’t talking. Tate, that is. But something’s up and I’ll tell you what I bet it is. Don’t upset your mama. But he’s got a body.’

  Matt looked into the living-room where his mother sat. ‘Who has?’

  ‘Lieutenant Clarence Tate of none other than Homicide. So what’s he mixing in for, if he hasn’t got a body? So one of those two chicks is dead. That’s the way I figure. But I’ll tell you this. If he has got a body, he hasn’t got it here. Not in the morgue. That’s for sure. I looked.’

  ‘You’re not making a lot of sense, Tony.’

  ‘But then I got an idea,’ said Tony softly. ‘I got this brilliant idea. I looked in the newspapers. Hold on to your hat, now. Last Tuesday morning, a certain truck driver—name of Bailly, Sam—he pulls up in Fresno to unload, and lo and behold if there ain’t the dead body of a nekkid blonde in the back of his rig. How do you like that? And what’s more, the statistics tally pretty good. About twenty-two to twenty-five years of age. Five feet four. Around a hundred and ten. Blonde. Hoo! Hoo!’

  ‘Fresno?’

  ‘So what?’ said Tony. ‘This here very same damn truck left the L.A. area around midnight, Monday.’

  ‘Monday!’

  ‘Right. So now you know, don’t you? You got Dorothy Daw in your hospital. Because how can she have lunch with Uncle Leon, Tuesday, if she’s dead in Fresno at the very same time. So this poor kid, this starlet, this Alison, she must have fallen among evil companions. And there you are. As for friend Tate, so he saw our girl’s pitcher in the paper and he’s no fool. Fact, he’s kinda brass—which he’d better be, if he’s going to pussyfoot around the Daw involvement. He was quietly checking that out. Don’t worry. He’ll be checking out the other one. He’ll probably get around to you.’

  ‘I see,’ said Matt, somewhat dazed. ‘Well, thanks.’

  ‘Don’t thank me. Thank your daily newspaper, buddy. I should thank you. If I hadn’t tailed you guys, I wouldn’t have got on to Tate’s nose in the pie. Say … uh … I’d be just as pleased if you didn’t spread this around too much. Hey? I’m exclusive, as of now. Got to double-check it. You see that.’

  ‘There’s only one thing.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Mrs Hopkins says Alison left her house, lively enough to be carrying a suitcase, on Tuesday evening.’

  ‘Well, that’s impossible,’ said Tony cheerfully. ‘I’m saying the old biddy made a mistake. She’s the type that would.’

  ‘Is that a scientific fact?’ said Matt caustically, and hung up.

  He called the hospital. Atwood had gone home. He called the Atwood house. Atwood was out for dinner and the evening. He called Dr Jon Prentiss. Dr Prentiss was on a call and his return was unpredictable. He called the L.A. Police Department, and after long waiting and several voices he was told that Lt Clarence Tate was unavailable until morning.

  So Matt gave up and Peg called them to supper.

  At first, Peg Cuneen resisted the whole idea of a body, and what must be a murdered body, having anything to do with the case. Tony, she surmised, was off on some wild tangent and only trying to beef up his precious story.

  Matt, who couldn’t suppose that a police officer was trying to beef up anything, kept silent.

  ‘There isn’t any trail for Alison,’ said Betty. ‘She walked out of her mother’s house, whatever night of the week it was, carrying a blue suitcase and wearing green. How can we follow her?’

  Matt shook his head.

  ‘But because of that scar or mark that won’t tan (and after all, how could her mother have invented such a thing!) … can’t we say that our girl isn’t Alison?’ Peg struggled to be logical.

  ‘We ought to check with whatever “quack” made the mark,’ said Matt.

  ‘How can we?’ Betty said. ‘Maybe the police can.’

  ‘It seems to me,’ said Peg, abandoning logic, ‘that our girl must be Dorothy Daw. You did say Mrs Hopkins was very upset when you told her we don’t have Alison. Perhaps she wanted Alison as safe as that, at least.’ Peg winced.

  ‘She,’ said Matt fiercely, ‘has a brain the size of a peanut and she operates in such a raggle-taggle alcoholic confusion, I don’t believe …’

  He was showing too much fury. He stopped, wary, for some reason, of Betty Prentiss.

  But she said quietly in a moment, ‘We don’t know, that’s all. What are we going to do, now?’

  ‘I’m going over to the hospital and see whether any halfway decent people have come to identify her,’ he said, too furiously, and went off. What’s the matter with me? he wondered.

  When he had gone, Peg looked at Betty.

  Betty said, ‘I don’t know, Peg.’ She got up and went to the kitchen window. It wasn’t quite dark yet. She could see, between houses, the end of the park and she saw Matt, walking with his head down, taking the path.

  ‘It’s a funny thing about identity,’ she said. ‘That girl just lies there, sleeping. She hasn’t any.’

  ‘It’s mysterious, I suppose,’ said Peg lightly, answering the unspoken question. (Why should that be so attractive?)

  Betty’s eyes began to fill with tears. She told herself to cease and desist such nonsense, and stood waiting for the tears to dry.

  Peg got up and began to make a cheerful clinking of the dishes. She was thinking, I don’t expect myself to be reasonable all the time, but Matt does expect that of himself. He always has, he thinks, been reasonable. He thinks we could all live by our reason, if we only tried. But he isn’t being reasonable—he’s involved—he’s hooked on some dream that he doesn’t understand, and he can’t admit. And it’s making Betty cry.

  But there was nothing his mother, of all people, could do about it.

  There were no new claimants at the hospital. There had been some phone calls from shy people salving their consciences. A stewardess with whom Dorothy Daw had flown, who did not feel she could help, really, unless the hospital insisted. She’d be back in four days. A fellow starlet to Alison, who hadn’t seen Alison for a year and a half and really hadn’t known her very well, but who would be glad to do what she ought, although at the moment s
he had a miserable flu bug.

  Matt put the messages in his pocket and forgot them.

  The girl lay sleeping.

  In the hush, the somehow holy hush, of the little room, Mrs Marsh said to Matt, ‘You know, I thought a while ago that she had her eyes open and was just staring. It wasn’t so, of course, but it scared the life out of me, for just a minute.’

  Matt said, ‘Well, take it easy.’

  He wished he could.

  CHAPTER NINE

  When it was dark, Bobbie Hopkins left her house. She backed her ‘transportation’ out of the shed and turned down the winding roads. She kept watching her rearview mirror. She took some extra windings, once she reached more level ground. She didn’t think she was being followed but she intended to make sure.

  Finally, she steered a direct course for her destination and came into one of the lost streets of Los Angeles, a piece only a block long that had been cut off by the Golden State Freeway so that it could only be reached from one side and was hard to find. The houses were small and shabby and forlorn. Bobbie stopped her car in front of one of them and scurried down a walk beside it, heading for the even smaller house at the back of the lot. This was a so-called ‘rear house,’ a rental property. Every time Bobbie came here, the loneliness made her shiver. Talk about being hidden away, she thought.

  The tiny house, only one room, bath, and kitchenette, stood square, with two small window eyes over which the lids were down. But there was a light.

  Bobbie sighed and knocked. Nothing stirred.

  ‘It’s only Bobbie,’ she said into the wood. ‘Look, honey … let me in, huh? It’s only Mama.’

  In a moment, the door cracked and Bobbie made herself as narrow as she could, slipped in, and the girl closed the door.

  ‘Alison?’ said Bobbie, reproachfully.

  ‘Oh, Mom, listen … why did you have to come here? Listen, if anybody saw you …’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Bobbie grimly, ‘I took care of that. Where’s Lilianne?’

  The room was barely furnished. There was a day-bed, a table, one straight wooden chair, one that was partially upholstered, a rag rug on the vinyl floor. A closet door stood open; there were only a few garments hanging there. The door to the tiny bathroom stood open. The kitchen was only an alcove. Nobody else was in the place. Bobbie said again, ‘Where’s Lilianne?’