An Inconvenient Woman

by Dominick Dunne

  “How did you know I was awake?” asked Philip.

  “I could see you in the mirror,” she said.

  “Nice back,” he said.

  “Hmmm?”

  “Nice back, I said.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s a good look the way your strap has fallen off your shoulder.”

  “I’m experiencing shyness, if you can believe it.”

  He smiled at her.

  “Do you always sleep with your pearls on?”

  “Always. They belonged to my uncle.”

  “The place card changer, that uncle?”

  She laughed. “Uncle Hector, although I never call him uncle. Hector Paradiso.”

  “As in Paradiso Boulevard, on the way to the airport?”

  “Yes. The Paradisos were a Land Grant family. Hector’s great-grandfather, or great-great, I’m not sure, I never get it straight, was one of the founders of the city, way back when. My mother was his older sister.”

  “Now let me get this straight. On your father’s side, according to Pauline Mendelson, you’re natural gas, and on your mother’s side, you’re from a Land Grant family. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “You’re what’s called well connected, where I come from.”

  “I cover all the bases, at least in Los Angeles.”

  “I know it’s none of my business, but why did Uncle Hector have a pearl necklace?”

  “It belonged to his mother, my grandmother, whom I never knew. When Hector was in the army, he wore it under his uniform. He claimed the pearls brought him luck. After the army, he gave them to my mother, and when Mummy died, they came to me. I almost never take them off, except when I bathe, of course, or go swimming—the chlorine in the pool is terrible for them—or when I wear Mummy’s diamond necklace, which isn’t often, because it’s a bore to get it out of the bank and then back the next morning, because of the insurance.”

  Philip laughed.

  She looked at him, confused. “What did I say that was funny?”

  “Rich people stories always strike me funny,” he said.

  Her hundred strokes finished, she stood up and walked toward the bed and pulled the bedclothes off him. “Time to get up,” she said. Looking down at him, she spoke again. “Oh, heavens!”

  Philip, embarrassed, smiled bashfully.

  “Is that because of me or because it’s morning?” she asked.

  “Both,” replied Philip. He reached up and flicked off the second shoulder strap, and her nightgown slipped down to her waist. “Nice front, too,” he said, quietly.

  She folded her arms in front of her breasts but did not turn away.

  “Don’t do that,” said Philip. He reached up and took down her protective arms and stared at her breasts. With his first finger he lightly touched the tip of her nipple and then moved his finger in a circular motion. “Perfect,” he said. The night before, at the Mendelsons’ party, he had thought she was attractive, but not quite beautiful. Now, seeing her, he revised his opinion.

  “That’s really nice,” he said.

  “What’s really nice?” she asked.

  “Your modesty.”

  “Listen, Philip, I don’t want you to think I’m in the habit of picking up men at parties and bringing them home,” said Camilla. “I’m not.” She wanted to say, “This is the first time since my husband died,” but she didn’t, although it was true, because she knew it would sound like a protestation.

  “That’s not what I think at all,” said Philip gently. For a moment they stared at each other. Then Philip reached out and took her hand and brought her down to the bed beside him.

  “There’s something I meant to tell you last night,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I do think that’s an awfully odd place down there for you to have a tattoo.”

  Later, Camilla went downstairs to make coffee and brought it back up to the room. She could hear Philip in her bathroom, with the water running. He was standing nude with his back to her, intent on shaving. Although she had spent the night with him, making love in endless variations, and repeated the process in the morning, she felt like an intruder on his privacy as she walked in on him in her bathroom.

  “Oh, excuse me,” she said.

  He smiled. “It’s all right.”

  “I need the Floris bath salts.”

  “Come in. It’s your bathroom. I borrowed a razor.”

  “What are you using for shaving cream?”

  “Just soap. It works all right.”

  Passing him, opening the cabinet, her body brushed against the front of him. Philip, always responsive to touch, responded. They both noticed. They both smiled.

  The telephone rang in the bedroom.

  “What? No extension in the bathroom?” joked Philip. “I thought this was the movie capital of the world.”

  “Not the group I’m in,” said Camilla as she walked toward the ringing telephone. “We don’t even speak to the people in the movie capital. It’s probably Bunty. Did I tell you I had a daughter?”

  “No.”

  “Age eight. She’s spending the weekend at her friend Phyllis’s family’s ranch in Solvang. Otherwise, there’d be no way you would ever have spent the night here. Hello? Oh, good morning, Jules. What a marvelous party that was. I had such a good time. I was going to call Pauline to thank her, but I thought it was too early.”

  There was a long silence, and then Philip heard Camilla say, “No!” There was another silence, and again she said, “No! I simply can’t believe it. How could this happen?”

  Again there was a silence, and Camilla said, “Where are you calling from, Jules?”

  Philip wrapped himself in a towel, walked into the bedroom, and stood by Camilla. He perceived at once from Camilla’s face that something serious, possibly calamitous, had occurred.

  “From Hector’s house.” He was able to hear Jules Mendelson’s deep voice.

  “I’ll be right there,” said Camilla.

  “No, no, Camilla, don’t come over,” said Jules. He spoke hastily. “There’s no point in that. It would only upset you terribly. I can handle everything here. What you should do is go up to Pauline’s and stay with her, or I could tell Pauline to come to you, and I’ll meet you in an hour or so.”

  Camilla was dissatisfied with this arrangement, but, as it was Jules Mendelson who was advising her, she capitulated to his wishes.

  “Yes, of course, Jules. Have you told Pauline yet?”

  “Yes, I called her,” said Jules.

  After she hung up, Philip asked, “What is it?”

  “Hector’s dead,” answered Camilla.

  “How?”

  “Shot, apparently.”

  They looked at each other. He put his hand over her hand. “I’m sorry.”

  She nodded. “My father, my mother, my husband, now my uncle. What the hell’s wrong with me?”

  “Get dressed,” said Philip. “I’ll drive you there.”

  “Jules said not to come, that it would only upset me. He said for me to go up to Pauline’s and that he would meet me there and fill me in.”

  “Is Jules Mendelson related to your uncle?”

  “No.”

  “Was he his best friend or something?”

  “No. Hector was Pauline’s friend really. I never thought Jules liked him all that much. Why do you ask?”

  “You are Hector’s only living relation, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How come Jules Mendelson knows your uncle is dead before you know it? Why would the police call him?”

  Camilla looked at Philip. “I don’t know, but it is so like Jules to handle things. Underneath that stern facade, he is an incredibly kind man, who would do anything for his friends. I told you how he helped me when Orin dropped dead in Barcelona.”

  “Yes, I understand all that,” said Philip. “But I still don’t understand why the police called him and not you.”

  “I suppose yo
u’re right,” she said.

  “Don’t you think you should go to your uncle’s house?”

  “Jules said to go up to Pauline’s.”

  “Somehow you don’t strike me as the kind of woman who stays away just because someone tells her to stay away.”

  “I’m not.”

  “C’mon. I’ll take you there.”

  Flo’s Tape #3

  “Once Jules told me he sometimes felt inadequate around Pauline’s family. I couldn’t imagine Jules ever feeling inadequate about anything, but he said he did. Pauline’s father was a great sportsman, and Jules never participated in sports, except to watch football on television. What almost no one knew was that Jules had a little spindly leg, just about this big around. He was very sensitive about it. When he was a child in Chicago, he had one of the last known cases of polio. So he didn’t play golf, or tennis, or any of the things that were important to Pauline’s father.

  “He also felt that Pauline never really lost her Eastern Seaboard background, even though she had become a fixture of the Los Angeles social scene. He said he thought of her as a permanent visitor. When her sisters came to visit her, as they did several times a year, he told me that he felt like an outsider among them, while they giggled and talked about people they had known whom he had never heard of. He said that sometimes they spoke in French together.

  “Once he said that if anything ever happened to him, he was sure that Pauline would be gone from Los Angeles within the year.”

  4

  To have the news of a misadventure before anyone else, even the media, was not an altogether new experience for Pauline Mendelson. In times past, because of the prominence and influence of her husband, she had known of certain minor misadventures involving her son and only child, Kippie Petworth, before anyone, even the police. Kippie’s teenage kleptomania had long since come to a halt, but not without several highly embarrassing situations that had had to be covered for, atoned for, and hushed, all thanks to Jules, who was no more than the boy’s stepfather. But, as everyone they knew knew, Kippie’s real father, Johnny Petworth, was hopeless in any sort of crisis, except in cards and backgammon.

  No amount of familiarity with misadventure, however, could have prepared Pauline for the shock of the early morning telephone call that aroused Jules and sent him flying out of their house at such an ungodly hour.

  “But what is it, Jules?” she asked from their bed, seeing the haste with which he hung up the telephone, after an indecipherable conversation, and leapt from the bed and dressed, without either bathing or shaving. She feared, of course, for her son, who had returned unexpectedly the night before, having abandoned his clinic in France months before the time the doctors had prescribed as necessary for his treatment.

  Standing at the door of their room, ready to go, Jules said to her, “It’s Hector.”

  “Hector!” said Pauline, nearly collapsing with relief. “Oh, thank God. For a moment I thought it was Kippie again.”

  “He’s dead,” said Jules.

  “Hector?” whispered Pauline, aghast. “How? What happened?”

  “I don’t know anything. I’ll call you when I get there.”

  “Was it an automobile accident? What? How?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, Pauline,” he replied again.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To his house.”

  “Oh, Jules, should I do anything about Camilla?”

  “No.”

  “Of course, if they called you, they undoubtedly called her.”

  Jules nodded. “Do you have much on your agenda for today?”

  “Whatever it is, I’ll clear it.”

  “Good. Stand by.”

  Outside, a moment later, she could hear the frenzied barking of the police dogs that patrolled the grounds at night, as they rushed around Jules on his way across the courtyard to the garage. “Hi, boy, hi, boy, down, down,” she could hear Jules say to the dogs. However fierce the dogs were to other people, they responded totally to the commands of Jules Mendelson. “Call them off, will you, Smitty. It’s me.”

  “Anything wrong, Mr. Mendelson?” asked Smitty, the night guard, who had been with the Mendelsons for fifteen years.

  “Apparently,” answered Jules, without elaborating further. “I have to get up to Humming Bird Way. Remind me how to get there. I can’t remember.”

  “Off the Strip, up Doheny, turn right on Oriole, and it turns into Humming Bird,” said Smitty.

  “I’ll know it when I see it. I’ve been there a hundred times,” said Jules.

  “I hope everything’s okay, Mr. M.,” said Smitty.

  Alone, Pauline turned on the All News radio station, but there was nothing on it that pertained to her life, or Hector’s, as far as she knew: rapes, murders, gangs, drug deals gone awry, and a television star’s divorce. Still stunned by the suddenness of the news, and the incompleteness of it, she could not yet cry, although she felt an ache of loneliness for her friend. In days to come, she would say over and over, dozens of times, “He was my first friend here when Jules and I moved to Los Angeles.” She could only remember that Hector had wanted to stay on the night before after the other guests had left, as was their habit, and bring a bottle of champagne into the library to talk over the happenings of the party, especially his latest contretemps with Rose Cliveden, but she had said no. My God, she thought, perhaps if he had stayed, whatever has happened might not have happened. And then she remembered that Rose was sleeping down the hall in one of the guest rooms, having been too drunk to drive to Holmby Hills, let alone down the mountain from Clouds.

  I’ll wake up Rose, thought Pauline.

  On Sunset Boulevard the traffic moved at a snail’s pace and then stopped entirely. Philip Quennell and Camilla Ebury, en route from Camilla’s house in Bel Air to Hector Paradiso’s house in the Hollywood Hills, sat in impatient silence in the car.

  “It’s driving me mad, this sitting here,” said Camilla, tapping her fingers on the dashboard. “The traffic usually moves on Sunset.”

  “There must be an accident, or something, up ahead,” said Philip.

  “More likely, some great event at the Beverly Hills Hotel. That’s the holdup, I’m sure,” said Camilla.

  Philip pressed on the horn several times.

  “Honking is not going to do any good, you know,” she said.

  “I know. I can’t stand people who blow their horns, but I can feel how anxious you are.”

  “Perhaps if you turned left when we get to Roxbury, and got over on Lexington, we could go behind the hotel, and then come out again on Sunset,” suggested Camilla.

  “Did Hector keep great sums of money in his house, do you think?” asked Philip.

  “I know he didn’t. In the first place, he didn’t have very much money.”

  “What do you mean, he didn’t have much money?”

  “I mean, people who don’t have any money will think he had a lot of money, but people with money will say he didn’t have any money.”

  “Money is a relative thing, is that what you’re saying?” asked Philip, amused.

  “Something like that. Jules explained that to me. And in the second place, Hector was extremely tight. Anyone who knew him will tell you that.”

  “Has Hector ever been married?” asked Philip.

  “Engaged a few times, once to an actress, Astrid something, before my time, but he never married,” said Camilla. She looked out the window.

  “Why don’t you cry?” asked Philip.

  “I don’t know you well enough to cry in front of you,” she replied.

  “Yes, you do.”

  “I only met you last night.”

  “We’ve come a long way in a short time, don’t forget.”

  “I want you to know one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m not in the habit of bringing men home from parties.”

  “You already told me that, and it wasn’t necessary to say it the firs
t time. I knew that.”

  She reached over and patted his hand on the steering wheel.

  “Thanks for coming with me,” she said.

  “May I ask you a question?”

  “Of course.”

  “About your marriage?”

  “All right.”

  “Didn’t you love your husband?” asked Philip.

  “Why do you ask that?” replied Camilla, with surprise in her voice.

  “You spoke of him very casually.”

  “How did I speak of him very casually? And when? I don’t remember.”

  “Last night, at the Mendelsons’.”

  “What in the world did I say?”

  “You said, ‘Don’t ever die in a country where you don’t speak the language. It’s a nightmare.’ ”

  “But that’s true.”

  “I’m sure it’s true, but it’s also a very casual way to talk about a husband who dropped dead on the street in Barcelona.”

  “Do you think I sound callous?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m curious.”

  She looked straight ahead, thinking before answering. “Oh, I suppose we would have gotten a divorce in time if Orin hadn’t died. We weren’t really happy, but Bunty adored him, and I wasn’t desperately unhappy, just not terribly happy. Satisfied?”

  “Honest answer.”

  “Now tell me something.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you always remember everything people say?”

  “Yes.”

  “I better be careful about what I say.”

  “Look, the line’s moving,” he answered.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, there’s no one permitted to go in the house,” said the policeman posted outside Hector Paradiso’s house on Humming Bird Way. Already the driveway had been roped off with orange masking tape strung between trees. There were police cars lined up on both sides of the street, and a news van from one of the local television stations was driving up and down the street looking for a place to park. An ambulance, with its rear door open, was parked in the driveway, and the driver leaned against the fender smoking a cigarette. Across the street, neighbors, still in nightclothes, were huddled together, watching the scene.