In the wall farthest from the street there was a gate that was no doubt intended to allow residents the easiest possible stroll to the surf. I could see the gate was locked. For one awful moment, I thought that was it, I’d have to turn around and shuffle back through the sand to the car. At the last minute, though, I noticed that the gate was not locked at all, but had merely been made to look that way. I just had to reach through and unlatch the bolt from the inside.
Then I was inside the wall in a garden that seemed, at first, like a fantasy or something from a film. The swimming pool I’d gotten a glimpse of through the house dominated the space and was surrounded by beautiful tile work. A Moorish bath of Roman design, that was the feeling one got.
Inside the walled garden, you could not see the ocean, though you could catch a sliver of the view by way of the wrought iron door through which I had come. You did not have the feeling of being at the beach, virtually on the strand. Until you listened. That was an odd sensation, strangely soothing. Not seeing the view, but hearing it. It was like being on another plane in a different world. It was a lovely garden. I could have spent a long time there.
Then I saw her where at first I had not. She was reclining on a chaise at the far side of the pool, under the shade of a huge orange umbrella that cast a reddish glow over her skin. Though I’d never seen her before in person, I didn’t need anyone to confirm that this, finally, was Rhoda Darrow.
She was thin. I could see this through her swim costume. Almost bizarrely so, with pointy little elbows and bony little knees. She looked as though she might break. Thin as she was, she had the pallor most of us gain only in illness or even in death. It was something beyond the pink alabaster so admired in maidens, a ghostly glow that increased when she caught sight of me.
Rhoda Darrow brought herself to a standing position in a single movement that managed to appear both lithe and painful. “What do you want?” she said in a voice that was surprisingly smooth and well-modulated. I had expected something else from an actress who had never “talked.”
Her question was itself telling. She didn’t ask who I was or what I was doing there. With her question, she assumed a desire. That meant something. She was scared.
It was actually a good question. I’d spent so much time tracking her down, now that I had her, I didn’t know exactly what to do.
“I work for Dex Theroux,” I told her. I saw a flicker of something, but not full recognition. She remembered the name, her look told me, but not the context. “He’s a private investigator,” I told her. “His office is downtown.”
“What’s a shamus want with me?” she said, but I thought I could see full recognition now.
I tried again. “You were his … date the night Fleur MacKenzie … died.”
“At the party,” she said quietly.
“That’s right. It is my … my understanding that you were told to have him see certain things.”
A spot of color to those pale cheeks. But no denial. “How did you get in here, anyway? I should call someone.” She started to move toward the house but I stopped her easily with my hand on one frail arm. I could feel her little bird bones moving beneath the skin. I held fast. Mustard was right: if it came to it, I could take ‘er easy. My heart clenched at the thought.
“You’re not going to call anyone,” I said quietly and, fortunately, she wasn’t putting up much of a fight. Then something emboldened me. I gave her a little push and she fell back into her chair. I controlled the rush of excitement that flooded through me and found I couldn’t quite. As a result, I felt a flush of embarrassment stain my cheeks. That together with the glitter the excitement this no doubt put in my eyes, combined with the slight shake of my hands—pure nervousness—probably combined to make me appear more dangerous than I ever had before. I could see that danger reflected in her eyes.
“What do you want?” she said tremulously. I tried to feel pity for her but I just couldn’t muster any. Instead I started grilling her, while keeping on eye on the door that led into the house. It wouldn’t do to have a servant come out here while I was browbeating her mistress. I could imagine police being called, paddy wagons arriving and me in handcuffs being marched off to join Wyndham at Number 11.
“Someone hired you.”
“Someone always hires me,” she said, with some of the waspishness back in her voice. Maybe she thought I was as harmless as I looked? She was right, but there was no sense in letting her know that. I moved toward her threateningly, relieved when I saw the fear flood back to her eyes.
“Someone hired you to incriminate Laird Wyndham.” There. I’d said it straight out. The thing I hadn’t even been sure was the case.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, but I thought I heard the catch in her voice.
“I know who it is anyway,” I lied. “I just want to hear it from you. How did Fleur fit into this?”
“You know so much,” she said, “you tell me.”
“Don’t play with me, girlie.” Even while I said it, I thought the words sounded straight out of a bad movie. In a way that made sense. I was working on pure instinct now. Instinct fueled by a lot of films. The little I knew about tightening the screws, I’d learned from watching in the dark. I pressed on. “You don’t tell me what I need to know, I’m going to hurt you good.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” she said, but the fear was back in her eyes.
I dropped my voice down to a dangerous place. “Oh, but I would. Now I’ll ask you one more time: how were you and Fleur connected?”
“We … we were both under contract for a while. At MGM.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“What always happens? Our moments passed somehow, I guess. We fell out of fashion. It happens,” she added defensively.
It did happen. I knew that. I realized at the same time that her looks—and in a way the late Fleur’ s, as well—were similar to Lorena Duvall’s. That thin delicacy, the pale locks and skin, the swan necks and flat chests. The three of them could have been sisters, in a way. Then I realized that the three of them were sisters: discarded for the fuller, richer, lustier models that movie-goers wanted today.
“So you were friends,” I said.
“Friends,” she said the word with something like contempt. “Yeah, sure. We were ‘friends.’ Then when we were down on our luck, we helped each other when we could. I thought I could help her that night.”
“How?”
Her face closed up at the question. She turned her head away.
“How?” I repeated. More forcefully this time. Even to my own ears my voice sounded harsh. Like the shot of a gun. I shook her again when I said it and I saw the fear rise in her eyes, while I could have sworn I felt her bones rattle.
It was a strange thing, to see that fear. Fear of me, someone who has a tough time deboning a chicken. I must have been convincing, though. Her fear was the desired effect, but I was still surprised. Nor did I quell the thrill of excitement that came with recognition of that fact. I’d deal with that emotion later.
“Please … please don’t hurt me. I’ll tell you, I swear I will. But you mustn’t tell—please promise you won’t tell? He told me he’d kill me if I did.”
“A lot of people might be standing in line to kill you, Rhoda. What do you make of that?” Honestly, it was like I was reading a film script. The words? It does not seem possible that I was thinking of them by myself.
“He … he asked me to get a girl to come. To the party. Someone young and pretty, he said,” she dropped her voice. “A hophead. He said that was important.”
“What?” I said, wanting clarification. I’d barely been able to hear her.
“The girl,” she said, her voice only slightly stronger. “He wanted her to be a hophead.”
“And so you arranged for Fleur to come?”
She nodded.
“But I didn’t know what he had in mind. Honestly, I never did.” I believed her. She was an actress, but she wasn’t this good.
“How did she die, Rhoda?” My voice was soft now. Comforting. I knew I didn’t need to coerce her anymore. The words were tumbling out of her like they craved escape.
“But I don’t know that, don’t you see? I wasn’t there. She was alive when I left her….” Her voice trailed off and I understood something.
“You weren’t surprised though, were you, by her death?”
“Oh, but I was. I was,” she insisted. “I never thought she’d die. I thought it was just, you know, sex.”
“You sold your friend as a prostitute?”
“Sure,” she said coldly now. “Why the hell not? We used men, Fleur and I, every chance we got. And why the hell not?” she said again. “It’s not like they wouldn’t use us if they had half the chance.”
The venom in her drained all the mad out of me. What would it be, I wondered, to be this injured? To be this mad? And to hate people so much you put your own life and that of others on the line to perpetuate that anger?
“You made the arrangements,” I accused, my voice softer now. Quieter. The mad might have drained out of me, but a cold, hard anger remained. “You might as well have killed her with your own hand.”
“No, no,” and now she met my eyes. Twin pools of blue, threatening to overflow, or so it seemed until she’d looked at me for moment and realized that tearful tactics were unlikely to work. “It… it wasn’t like that. I never thought it was a game.”
“You talked to Laird Wyndham. At the party.”
“I was to tell him that someone wanted to see him,” she choked back a sob. “In the bedroom. Someone wanted a word.”
“And that someone was Fleur?”
“She’d been told to wait for him. That he would come in and that all she had to do to get fixed was seduce him.”
I played this back in my mind. Ran it against what Dex had initially told me. It fit. It also painted a lurid portrait. Wyndham, who didn’t want to be there in the first place, is told someone wanted to meet him; perhaps even needs to meet him.
He enters the bedroom and the girl is naked and desperate. “Hungry” was how Wyndham had put it. She wants her fix and she thinks she knows how to get it. Wyndham is repulsed. How could he not be? He, who could have had any woman he wanted, accosted by a junkie. And then … then I ran out of scenario. A few pieces were missing, even if I now felt closer than I had.
“So you killed her?”
“No,” she sobbed. Sank back onto the chaise. Dropped her head into her arms. “No.”
“Someone did. And there’s good money riding on it being a woman.” Then I added softly, “You.”
She shook her head violently in denial. Again I feared the slender neck would give under the strain. “No, no. Not me. Not. Me.”
I let it go for the moment. “So you were upset when they found her. I know you checked her pulse. And then what?”
“Then nothing,” she said sadly. “It was over. She was dead.”
“Rhoda, who hired you?”
“That I won’t tell you. You know I won’t. I can’t. He told me he’d kill me if I did.”
“Rhoda, you must tell me. Don’t you see? The way things sit now—based on what you’ve told me—it’s you who are responsible for Fleur’s death.” She shook her head, but did not interrupt me. “And make no mistake about it: I will tell people what I know. And then you could be the one in jail, not Laird Wyndham.”
She started to cry then, quiet sobs that began somewhere deep inside. “It doesn’t matter. You can say whatever you like, do whatever you like when it comes down to it. He told me he would kill me if I didn’t do everything he said. I believed him. I believe him still.”
“But Rhoda,” I sat on the chaise lounge next to her, stroked the back of her arm, “if you help us, he won’t be able to hurt you. If you help us, he’ll be the one going away.”
“How can I be sure?” she asked, but I could tell she was wavering.
“We’ll take care of you. And we … we can hide you until all of this is over.” No one had said anything about this, but I knew I could make it true. Dex had given me fifty dollars—fifty dollars—in order to buy the right outfit to work this case. Surely we could hide one desperate actress until the matter was dealt with?
She raised her head to me then, looked at me with something like hope in her eyes. It didn’t look effortless there. It looked as though hope was something she hadn’t worn in a while.
“Do you really think you could keep me safe?”
“I do,” I said. “I’m sure of it. Now tell me: who was it that hired you? Tell me his name?”
“You told me you knew who it was,” she said.
I shook my head. “I lied.”
She sighed and I could almost hear her thoughts. Here she was, at the point of no return. There really was no going back. And then acceptance. She’d come this far, after all.
“I never knew his name,” she said. “When he … when he called me, he just said to call him Slim.”
“Was that a nickname?”
“I don’t think so. I think it was more of a joke. See he isn’t skinny. Not by a long shot.”
But a light had dawned. Of course. I wasn’t even sure why I was surprised. “No, he’s not skinny at all, is he?” I said with confidence. “He looks more like a baby grand in a good suit.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THERE WAS NO question of me leaving Rhoda Darrow alone in the walled house by the sea. She was going to cooperate. I had no doubt about it at all. But I knew she was frightened. And she was weak. That could be a deadly combination, so I asked her to dismiss the staff at the house and tell them she was going to Chicago, without even wondering about my choice of false destination. She packed an overnight bag and I took her with me in the Marmon.
“Where are we going?” she asked as we drove. “Not Chicago, right? That was just something you wanted me to say.”
“No. Not Chicago,” I said. But, beyond that, I didn’t know what to tell her because I wasn’t sure myself. In the end, I took her to the office in the hope that Dex and Mustard would be back, maybe three sheets to the wind but still affable and full of ideas.
I was disappointed to find the office empty, though I had the feeling the guys might not be far off. Wreaths of smoke still lingered in the heavy air and though Dex’s glass was drained—of course—what must have been Mustard’s glass still held a finger of bourbon and the end of a couple of rocks. They had probably gone for dinner. At least, that was what I hoped. That they’d gone out to get a bite or some fresh booze or both and they’d return in short order so that I could get Rhoda to tell them her story and we could figure out what it all meant and what to do.
“What a dump,” Rhoda said as she looked around the office, wrinkling her nose slightly.
“Nicer than a jail cell though, don’t you think?” That shut her up.
Rhoda seemed interested in snooping around Dex’s office, and I didn’t stop her. I had a collection of Agatha Christie short stories that Mustard had brought me called The Mysterious Mr. Quin and I had a dog-eared copy of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury that had made me weep when I’d read it the month before. I figured Motion Picture or Photoplay would have been more her style but they weren’t the kind of thing I kept around the office.
In lieu of anything real to keep her busy, poking around would at least give her something to do. For a while. After all, there wasn’t that much to look at. Snooping through it might be interesting for a couple of minutes, but I could foresee limited entertainment possibilities in that area.
I kept my eye on her as she moved around the room. She inspected the motley collection of pictures on the wall—a washed out ocean scene on one. A poorly executed still life on another. She tested the furniture, ran her fingers down the spines of the books on Dex’s shelf and generally had a good look around. I kept an eye on her, but I didn’t stop her. I didn’t know what I’d do with her when she ran out of things to keep her entertained.
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br /> “Mind if I nibble one?” she asked, eyeing the heel of the bottle of bourbon.
“Sure,” I said. “That’s fine.”
I got her a clean glass from the stash in Dex’s desk. She plunked herself down behind the big desk, and I sat at my usual place in front of it. It wasn’t that I felt like having a big chin wag with her—we weren’t going to be girlfriends, I could tell that straight off. I just didn’t know what else to do—either with her or with myself. With all our business talk out of the way, it wasn’t like she and I had a lot to say to each other or a lot in common.
When I heard the outer office door open, I tried not to let Rhoda see my relief. “I’m in here Dex,” I called out, not bothering to get up. It had been a long day and, anyway, I wanted to be in a position to see his face when he got a load of Rhoda Darrow, not just in our office, but in his chair.
It was the voice that alerted me. I could feel the welcoming smile die on my face.
“Well, well. Well. What do we got here?”
Then the business end of the biggest gun I’d ever seen. And it was pointed at my head.
“Slim!” Rhoda’s voice. “I can explain. It ain’t… it ain’t what it looks.”
It took me a moment to process everything that was going on and once I did, I realized how the most natural thing for me to do—bring Rhoda back to the office—had also been the most dangerous. Why couldn’t I have left a note for Dex and just taken her home? Yet that hadn’t even occurred to me. It was only with a gun in my face that I realized how shortsighted my actions had been.
I couldn’t even begin to imagine how he’d known where to find her. Then I remembered that I’d introduced myself to the woman who had opened the door at Rhoda’s house. Perhaps she had told him that I had taken the mistress away and Xander had done the math and followed us here. I realized, though, that the how didn’t so much matter. Xander Dean was here and he was larger than life.
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