Girl About Town

by Adam Shankman

  There was no bang, just a little click.

  Vasily, perplexed, looked down at the gun in his hand. “Well, that was terribly anticlimactic.”

  He tried to open the cylinder, but Mugsy barged past Lulu and snatched the gun from his hand. A second later he’d flung Vasily down in a chair and had him covered.

  Mugsy looked down at the gun, frowning. “What the . . . ?” He fiddled with it. “It ain’t even closed right.” He started laughing.

  “Somehow, I don’t think this sap is the one you’re looking for.” He held the gun out for Lulu’s and Freddie’s inspection. Even Lulu, with her limited knowledge of firearms, could tell that the bullets were inserted backward.

  “And they’re not even the right caliber,” Mugsy added. “Even if he loaded them right, he’d get a misfire.”

  “And our suspect knew a lot about ammunition and guns. Or at least, they made it their business to find out.” Lulu sighed with relief. “So it can’t be Vasily.”

  “Then what’s going on here?” Freddie asked sternly.

  Vasily began to weep silent tears, and Lulu decided the best course of interrogation would involve compassion. She gently put her arms around him and let him cry on her shoulder.

  “Vasily, we’re just trying to figure out who put the bullets in the gun. If you didn’t do that, you have nothing to worry about. No one really cares about . . . that other thing.”

  “Maybe not,” Vasily said, “but they will undoubtedly care that I’ve escaped from a mental institution.”

  “We have something in common, then,” Freddie said dryly, but Lulu hushed him as Vasily told his terrible story.

  The great Vasily Anoushkin was born a mere Willie Bednarski in Providence, Rhode Island, to devout Polish parents who lived solely for their faith. The only reason they didn’t steer Willie toward the priesthood, like his brother, was because they needed grandchildren to carry on the family meatpacking business. But Willie had other ideas.

  From an early age he loved to act but was regularly beaten for raiding his mother’s closet for costumes and putting on shows for some unseen but appreciative imaginary audience.

  When he was older, he defied his father and won a role in a community theater production. His father had refused to attend the performance, but he’d showed up to retrieve him afterward and caught Willie in a compromising position with the young manager of the theater company. The manager was jailed, while Willie’s father had him committed.

  “But I escaped,” Vasily said. “I ran as far away as I could, changed my name, and took up my parents’ old-world accent, the one I worked so hard to lose as an actor. For a while I toured with the vaudeville circuit, but eventually I came to Hollywood. Russian acting coaches were all the rage, so that’s what I became. Vasily Anoushkin, the debonair Russian.”

  “But you made a good life for yourself. And you are the best acting coach a girl could ever ask for,” Lulu said earnestly. “You’ve taught me everything, Vasily. You taught me how to find and use feelings inside of me I never knew existed. You taught me how to find goodness and truth in any and every character. I owe you so much.”

  He looked up to Lulu’s eyes with teary gratitude, then shook his head. “Thank you, my angel. You are so very special. So gifted. But it’s over for me. Ruby came to me a few weeks after her ridiculous attempt at seducing me, and she had my identity card from my time in the asylum. I stole it when I fled so they’d have a harder time finding me. It had my photo on it, and I thought if they couldn’t show my picture, I could better slip into obscurity. But she found it in my things and threatened to expose me if I didn’t get her the leading part in Girl About Town. So I tried! Oh, Lulu, I tried. She just wasn’t good enough. But you were. Sassoon ignored my protestations and gave you the lead in Girl About Town, so Ruby was going to expose me.”

  “But you didn’t shoot her?” Freddie asked.

  “I couldn’t even shoot myself.” Vasily gave a mirthless laugh. “I should have tried poison.”

  “No!” Lulu said. “You can’t think such a terrible thing. You are a brilliant acting coach and a splendid man. Whatever happens, you have to fight through it. I’ll help you, however I can.”

  “That’s sweet of you, Lulu. But what hope is there for me in this world? I have had to deny myself my truth and any chance for love that I can be proud of like every other living person. I just don’t think I can carry on anymore. Not if Ruby exposes me. I am an escapee! Even if they don’t drag me back to the institution, my career will be over the minute they all learn I’m a fraud. I only came here tonight to see if she might have hidden the evidence in her dressing room, but I couldn’t find it. I’m doomed.”

  He hung his head. Lulu stood up resolutely.

  “If it is here, we’ll find it. And if it’s not . . . I’ll think of something. Just promise me, Vasily, promise you won’t ever think of hurting yourself. Your students love you very much, you know.”

  He wiped the tears from his eyes and held her close.

  “Where have you looked for the evidence?” Mugsy asked, businesslike. “Tossing rooms is an old hobby of mine.”

  “The drawers, the boxes . . . pretty much everywhere.”

  “Maybe it’s in the broad’s house,” Mugsy suggested. “I can perform a little B and E, and—”

  “No,” Lulu said firmly. “If she was blackmailing you, she would have kept it close. She wouldn’t have left it home.”

  “Then it’s at the hospital with her, and we won’t be able to get it,” Freddie said.

  “No. She was wearing her costume. Remember that dress? There weren’t exactly pockets on that little number. No, she would have had it in her purse.”

  “Which is right on that table,” Freddie said. “I searched it myself.”

  “So did I, first thing,” Vasily said.

  Lulu bit her lip. “Let me see, just in case.”

  She dug through the black alligator purse. It contained only a woman’s standard arsenal: lipstick, compact, handkerchief, a little mad money, and a spare pair of stockings. She looked for hidden compartments and felt for anything concealed in the lining, but found nothing.

  Then she had an inspiration.

  All of those things in Ruby’s purse were essentials, but what among them was the most important to her? She remembered how Ruby was always checking her face in her compact, as if to reassure herself that her beauty was still intact.

  With a feeling of certainty and triumph before she even opened it, Lulu pulled out the compact.

  “Checked it,” Mugsy said.

  “Somehow I don’t think a gentleman of your background will know the ins and outs of a lady’s compact,” she told him. “It might be more complex than you think.” The compact opened in three parts, not the usual two: mirror, a space for the puff, and . . .

  “Bingo!” Lulu said. She dug her fingers into the loose powder in the third compartment and pulled out a dusty folded identification card, worn and yellowed with age, bearing a picture of a much younger but unmistakable Vasily.

  Freddie handed him the matchbook from Bighorn Sporting Goods. “Go on,” he said gently. “Say good-bye to your past. It’s hard, I know, but who needs the past when you’ve got a future?”

  With hope shining in his eyes, Vasily struck a match and burned his old identity to ashes.

  They saw Vasily safely to his home, leaving him in bed with two aspirin on his nightstand. Then they headed to Bighorn Sporting Goods. They met the owner as he unlocked the door. “Do you sell these?” Lulu asked, holding up the bullet.

  “What is it, some kind of club?” he asked. “You’re the second dame to come in looking for one of those. Usually I sell maybe a box a year to some schmo who doesn’t know what he’s doing, but suddenly everyone wants them. What gives?”

  “Who was the first girl?” Freddie asked.

  “A blonde, like you,” he said, almost salivating at the memory. Lulu’s face fell. Ruby was dark-haired. “Real curvy, dressed t
o the nines, which was funny, considering she came in almost as early as you three. Asked me if I was here alone and dragged me to the back room. Started asking all these questions about guns and ammunition, cuddling up to me like I might get lucky.”

  “What kind of questions?” Lulu wanted to know.

  “Funniest thing. She wanted to know what kind of bullets I might have that were least likely to kill someone. I think she was an actress. Asked her why she wanted to know, and she said she was rehearsing for a part. Said it was sure to be the part of her life. I showed her those.” He gestured to the bullet Lulu was holding up. “She seemed tickled pink. Well, I offered to close up shop so she and I could get a little more comfortable, and she grabbed the box of ammunition and hit the road. I didn’t much care, since the whole box wasn’t worth more than two bits. But I was a little sore to be led on.”

  “Sounds like Ruby, except for the hair,” Lulu said.

  “She could have been wearing a wig. Do you remember anything else about her?” Freddie asked the shop owner.

  The owner closed his eyes. Lulu and Freddie exchanged a look, guessing what parts of the girl he might be remembering. “Great gams. Nice big . . . er.” A lascivious little smile drifted across his face, and he opened his eyes. “No, nothing else. Oh, she did have a beauty mark, like a little heart right by the corner of her mouth. I thought it was a muffin crumb and tried to brush it away, and she slapped me and called me fresh. I ask you, isn’t a guy allowed to get a little fresh when a doll like that wiggles into his back room at seven o’clock in the morning?”

  “Well, hello, Ruby,” Lulu whispered under her breath, as Freddie pulled her into an impromptu waltz.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Mugsy, would you please take the new evidence and this charming and ever-so-eloquent shop owner to the police and clear my name?” Lulu was suddenly all bustle and efficiency. “And if it’s not too inconvenient, drop Freddie off at your hotel on the way.”

  “And where, may I ask, are you going to be?” Freddie inquired.

  “Oh, arranging my things for the Far East. Freddie, is it still the Far East if we have to travel west to get there? It’s all awfully confusing.”

  “You mean, you’re still thinking of going with me? What about your career? Now that you’re safe from arrest and from Sal . . .”

  She took his face in her hands. “Let’s put it this way: I’m going to be with you, no matter what. Just . . . well, just wait a while. I have an idea.”

  “What is it?” he asked.

  She put her hands on her hips. “Freddie, let’s get one thing straight right now. I’m not going to be a slave to my man. I might be your girl, but I’m always going to have a life of my own . . . and a little bit of privacy. How dull would I be without an air of mystery?” She mugged a look of glamorous inscrutability. “Just cozy up, dream of me, and I’ll let you know if it all works. If not, we’re off to Macao!”

  She kissed him fleetingly and ran out of Bighorn Sporting Goods, hailing a cab with a street urchin’s whistle.

  It was really far too early to visit anyone in Hollywood. At nine a.m., people were either sleeping off the previous night’s excesses or still enjoying them. But, she rapped insistently on Blake Tanner’s door until he opened it, dressed only in his silk pajama bottoms.

  “I need to ask you a favor,” Lulu said.

  “Here it comes,” he said with a cynical huff. “What do you want, money? I’m in debt up to my ears already. Help getting a part? I might be a star . . .” Lulu raised her eyebrows. What an ego! He was just a notch above her, on the stellar scale. “. . . but I don’t have as much pull as you might think. Go ahead, cough it up. What do I have to do to keep you from spilling the beans about my wife?”

  For a moment Lulu didn’t say anything, only looked at him in quiet disgust until he started to wither. At last she said, very slowly and clearly, “Your secrets are your own, Blake. I’m asking you this as a friend. You can say no and still nothing will happen.”

  Blake furrowed his brow like a confused hound. “I guess you better come inside and have some coffee.” He looked over his shoulder as he led the way, as if she were some sort of alien species, probably benign but perplexing nonetheless. Is it really so hard to believe that a person won’t resort to blackmail, given the opportunity? Lulu wondered.

  Then she remembered what city she was living in.

  Over coffee and brioche from Van de Kamp’s Bakery, Lulu told him about her plan.

  “Do you mean to tell me that vagrant you wrangled to play the bum is one of the richest people in America?” Blake asked. Lulu caught a gleam of avarice in his eyes.

  “He’s poor as a church mouse. He gave it all up.”

  “Sucker.”

  “Blake, none of that. Now, will you help me?”

  “Oh, all right,” he said, and she surmised he still thought she planned to tell the world about his wife if he didn’t. Well, whatever gets the job done, she told herself. It isn’t blackmail unless I mean it to be. “Do you really think it will work?” he asked.

  “I sure hope so,” Lulu said. “Because to tell you the truth, I don’t really know where Macao is.”

  She went to Vasily next. Now that the evidence of his secret past was destroyed, he seemed like his old self again. His gray eyes dancing with excitement, he pulled her into his house and said, quite forgetting his Russian accent, “Are they after you, my dear? You did it after all, didn’t you? What a marvelous actress you are! Do you need a place to hide out from the coppers? How thrilling!”

  “No. That’s all being cleared up, thank goodness.” She told him of her discovery about Ruby and the bullets.

  “How very bizarre, and terribly, terribly sad,” Vasily said.

  “I just can’t see why she would do such a thing,” Lulu confessed.

  “I can, clear as day,” Vasily said, arranging himself on his white leather fainting couch. “She wants fame, my dear, and anyone who wants fame for the mere sake of it is more than a bit insane. Don’t you agree? She desperately needs to be seen, and adored, and desired far beyond rational thinking. Everything she does is in service of that obsession. You saw how she would have ruined me to advance herself. She wants fame as other people want breath. She needs it—and without it, she perishes.”

  “I thought maybe she just wanted to ruin me,” Lulu said.

  “A pleasant side effect, no doubt, but make no mistake. This was all about Ruby. Everything Ruby does is about Ruby. Do you remember that day? How she seemed to move herself in front of the gun? I recall thinking afterward, what dratted bad luck for her, to forget her cues and miss her mark on the floor. She never was good at hitting those little Xs. But in this case I’m sure it was deliberate. She wanted to be shot.”

  Lulu shook her head in wonder. “Because being shot would get her some attention? How . . . how horribly sick!” She felt physically ill at the thought. “What a twisted place this is, Vasily. Why does anyone come here?”

  “Come, now, you feel it too, Lulu. Maybe not as strongly as Ruby, but you crave the spotlight, the camera, the adoring eyes on you.”

  “No, not like that. I want to be good at my job, to . . . to transform people, somehow, to transform myself! Not at all for people to see me, but for them to see people far more interesting than I could ever possibly hope to be. And, if I’m any good at it at all, then to help people escape their lives too. Even if for just a little while. To not have to cope with what’s just too real.”

  Vasily looked at her as if he knew her better than she knew her own self. “I see. Well then, if you say so. That’s very honest, my dear.”

  “There’s something so terribly wrong with poor Ruby,” Lulu said, veering away from that uncomfortable subject. “What if she had died? Didn’t she think of that?”

  “Oh, no doubt she did. Maybe she even hoped to. Her career is stalling. She’s getting older. . . .”

  “She can’t be more than a little bit older than me!”

 
“She’s over twenty-five if she’s a day. Ancient for a starlet. A male star can age, but a starlet only has a couple of years to catch her break. No, Ruby feared she was all but washed up. Her name would have been forgotten as utterly as if she’d never lived. If she’d been killed on set, though—instant Hollywood legend! People would talk about her for decades. Her ghost would haunt Lux, and Louella Parsons would swear she was the brightest young thing of her generation. Death makes angels, darling.”

  Lulu shuddered, then set herself back to her purpose. She had to try to save Freddie from his father. She asked Vasily for a favor.

  “What fun, my dear! I’ve never been a tycoon before.”

  Veronica and David were easy to convince. “I’ll model myself after Anita Loos,” she said. “Do you think spectacles make me look more serious?”

  David looked a little nervous, but luckily, he was just playing an agent, so it wasn’t much of a stretch.

  That afternoon, Lulu placed the call to Jacob van der Waals’s suite at the Ambassador. “Hello, sir. Pardon me for disturbing you, but this is Lulu Kelly. I’m the young lady you saw with your son the other day. I was hoping to . . .”

  “Where is he, you little tramp?” he bellowed.

  Lulu held the receiver away from her ear.

  “I know his whereabouts, and I was hoping to discuss things with you this evening. Can you come to my place, say around seven o’clock?” That would give everyone enough time to go over their parts and settle nicely into their all-important roles in what was to be the most vital scene Lulu had ever tackled.

  “How much money do you plan on extorting from me?” Mr. van der Waals asked bluntly.

  Good Lord, Lulu thought, is that all anyone thinks about?

  “I just want to talk to you, sir. I want to explain something before you take Freddie home with you.”

  “You think you’ve gotten your grubby little meat hooks into him, don’t you? You might have tickled his fancy for a while, but he’ll remember his place soon enough. You’ll be just another one of a hundred sluts he’s left by the wayside. He’s going home and getting married to the right kind of girl, and if you think for one minute that a cheap little gold digger like you can . . .”