An Inconvenient Woman

by Dominick Dunne

  “What?” asked Jules, confused by her outpouring.

  “ ‘What,’ he says.” She fastened the earrings onto her ear lobes and pulled her hair back. “This is what.”

  Jules looked at her in a quizzical fashion. He was startled to see the earrings that he had bought for his wife, that his wife would not accept, on his mistress’s ears. Flo’s madly excited reaction to the beautiful jewels was what he had hoped Pauline’s reaction would be when he gave them to her the week before. He did not have the heart to tell Flo that the earrings were not for her, or that he had just told Miss Maple to contact Prince Friedrich of Hesse-Darmstadt, the head of the jewelry department at Boothby’s auction house in London, to inform him that he wanted to sell the earrings.

  “Why are you looking at me in such a funny way?” she asked.

  “I’m not looking at you in a funny way,” said Jules. His voice sounded tired and weary. “I’m just feasting my eyes, that’s all. They look beautiful on you.”

  “Do you think it’s okay to wear the blue sapphire ring and the yellow diamond earrings at the same time?” she asked.

  “I would think it’s proper,” said Jules.

  Nothing put Flo in such a good mood as a beautiful gift. She turned the music up on the radio and slowly slipped out of her dressing gown. She began to dance around the room, wearing nothing but her high-heeled satin slippers. It was a look she knew Jules liked. He lay back on the bed watching her, as her erotic and exotic dance steps slowly began to arouse him again. He was mesmerized by her lovely young body, her beautiful creamy skin, her superb buttocks, her perfect breasts, and her ample red bush, which he could never become sated with, no matter how often he entered it, or kissed it, or breathed it, or rubbed his face in it. As she danced her way from the bedroom to the living room, he followed her. She reached behind her and took hold of his erection and led him to her newly upholstered gray satin sofa. Never losing the beat of the music she was dancing to, she perched on the back of the sofa and then allowed herself to fall backward, spreading her legs at the same time so that only her bush, open and ready to receive him, was visible to him. With one thrust he entered her and began to pump back and forth, without subtlety, a race to a mutual explosion that momentarily obliterated the great disappointment of his day.

  The massive heart attack that followed was concurrent with his ejaculation, and Flo mistook the shudders of his body and the groans of pain from his lips for signs of passion. It was only when his spent penis slid out of her and he fell over backward onto her carpet that she realized what had happened.

  She pulled herself up off the sofa and ran to him. His face had turned gray. Drool was dripping from his mouth. She thought that he was dead.

  The scream that came from Flo’s lips was unlike any scream that she had ever screamed before. The sound traveled upward in the canyon, and people in houses higher up heard it, although they could not tell for sure from which house it was coming. The scream was also heard in the patio of Faye Converse’s house next door.

  All the guests from her barbecue lunch party had finally left, save one. Cyril Rathbone, the gossip columnist for Mulholland, who could not drag himself away from the great star, continued to engage her in poolside conversation, although Faye Converse was sick to death of him and his adoring chatter. He knew the plots of all fifty-seven of her films.

  “How amazing you should remember The Tower, Cyril,” said Faye politely, stifling a yawn at the same time. She could not think of anything she would like to discuss less than the plot of The Tower, one of her great flops, in which she had played Mary, Queen of Scots, against the advice of everyone. She wished she hadn’t sent Glyceria out on an errand, for Glyceria always knew how to get rid of adoring guests who didn’t know when the party was over.

  It was then that Flo March’s scream from the house beyond the tall hedge pierced the canyon air.

  “What in the world is that?” asked Cyril. He jumped up from the lounge chair.

  “Why don’t you go check?” replied Faye, who intended to disappear as soon as Cyril had gone to investigate.

  “Do you think it’s a murder?” asked Cyril. He was wide-eyed with excitement.

  “Oh, no, it didn’t sound to me like a murder kind of scream at all,” said Faye Converse.

  “Who lives next door?” asked Cyril.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” said Faye. “It belongs to Trent Muldoon, but he’s rented it to someone.”

  “Perhaps I should call the police,” said Cyril.

  “You should go over and check first. It could be the television. I’d send Glyceria over—my maid, Glyceria—but she’s out getting some disinfectant for the powder room for me.”

  “Is there an opening through the hedge?” asked Cyril.

  “No, I don’t think so. You have to go ’round, down my driveway, and then up that driveway,” said Faye. Then she stood, expecting him to go. “It’s been lovely having you here, Cyril. When you write up my party, don’t mention that Pepper Belcanto drank too many tequila sours and got sick all over the walls of the powder room. All right? You know how Dom gets. Broken-kneecap time. Good-bye, Cyril.”

  “I’ll come right back and tell you what happened next door,” he said.

  “Oh, no. That’s not necessary.”

  Faye turned and walked into her house. Cyril had not expected to be dismissed in such a fashion, but his curiosity was such that he could not resist going to check on the source of the scream. He went down Faye Converse’s driveway to Azelia Way. From the street the house next door was totally hidden from view by the overgrown shrubbery and trees in front of it. Cyril slowly went up the driveway of that house. Directly in front of the house was a dark blue Bentley, which blocked the garage in which was parked a red Mercedes convertible. From inside the house he could hear the hysterical crying of a woman. The front door was locked. He walked around the side of the house to the swimming pool area. There was no one in sight. Then he went up to the sliding glass doors and put his hands up to cover the sides of his eyes and peered in. There on the floor was an enormous man, totally naked. A beautiful young red-haired woman, also naked, was administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

  Cyril slid open the door. “May I help?” he asked.

  “Call an ambulance,” screamed Flo, between breaths. Without lifting her face, she pointed to a telephone on the bar.

  “What’s the address here?” asked Cyril.

  “Eight forty-four Azelia Way. Tell them it’s next to Faye Converse’s house,” said Flo, between breaths.

  Cyril dialed 911. In the moments before the telephone was answered, Cyril Rathbone noticed the great abundance of Steuben glasses on the bar shelves. His eyes wandered around the room, taking everything in. He noticed the gray satin upholstery on the living room sofas and recognized it as Nellie Potts’s favorite fabric that season, ninety-five dollars a yard. He wondered whose house he was in.

  “Oh, hello? Nine-one-one? Oh, yes, thank God. There is an emergency at number eight forty-four Azelia Way. Halfway up Coldwater Canyon. Turn right on Cherokee. It will be your second or third left, I’m not sure which. It’s the house directly next to Faye Converse’s house. There is a man who has suffered something or other, a stroke or a heart attack. I’m not sure if he’s dead or not.” He turned to Flo. “Is he dead?” asked Cyril.

  Flo, not stopping her breathing, shook her head no.

  “Hurry,” said Cyril into the telephone. “He’s not dead.”

  When he hung up the telephone, he moved closed to the life-and-death drama for a better look.

  “They’re sending an ambulance,” he said.

  The woman continued her resuscitation and nodded her head at the same time. Even in such a moment of crisis, Cyril did not fail to notice that the private parts of the besieged man rivaled Lonny Edge’s in what he privately termed the equipment department. When the beautiful young woman raised her head to gasp for air, he saw for the first time the face of the man on the
floor.

  “Good God,” he whispered, as he realized that the man was Jules Mendelson, the billionaire, the art collector, the designate of the President of the United States to head the American delegation in Brussels during the year of the statehood of Europe, and the husband of the exquisite Pauline Mendelson. Only a little more than a week earlier, at Casper Stieglitz’s ghastly little party, Jules Mendelson and his wife had both snubbed him.

  “Good God,” he whispered again. Within a second, he knew that the naked redhead trying to save Jules Mendelson’s life was the same girl whose picture he had sent to Hector Paradiso from the Paris newspaper, fleeing the fire in the Meurice Hotel, with Jules in the background. Later, he had sent another, anonymously, to Pauline herself. “Good God,” he said for the third time.

  Cyril Rathbone was, after all, a member of the news media, and he knew that he was the first person present, aside from the principals, at what would undoubtedly be a major story, if he acted quickly, before powerful forces moved in to alter the facts of the story, as powerful forces had moved in to alter the facts of Hector Paradiso’s death.

  “Look, miss, I have called the ambulance, and it’s on its way. I have to be off,” said Cyril.

  Flo continued her breathing into Jules’s mouth. She lifted her head long enough to say, “Get me my robe, will you? On my bed. That way.” As she resumed her breathing, she pointed in the direction of the bedroom. “And bring in his pants,” she called.

  When Cyril was in the bedroom, he quickly called the editor of Mulholland and asked for a photographer to be sent immediately to the emergency entrance of Cedars-Sinai Hospital. “Can’t talk,” he hissed into the mouthpiece. “But trust me.”

  For years Cyril Rathbone had dreamed of an opportunity that would catapult him from the gossip column of the magazine to a cover story that would be discussed across the nation. His time was at hand.

  “You did the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, lady?” asked one of the five attendants who had arrived in the ambulance. Another attendant was applying heavy pressure on Jules’s heart by pumping his hands up and down. A third was trying to feel for a pulse.

  “Yes,” said Flo. She did not take her eyes off Jules. “Wasn’t that what I was supposed to do?”

  “You did exactly right. You did a good job. How’d you learn how to do that?” he asked. “Most people don’t know how to do it right.” He had his pad and pencil out and was preparing to ask her some questions, while two other attendants were setting up the dolly onto which the stretcher would be placed.

  “Where I used to work. We had to learn how to do it, in case of a customer getting a heart attack or something. But this was the first time I ever put it to use,” said Flo, distractedly, all the while watching what the other attendants were doing with Jules, lifting him onto the stretcher and strapping him on. She had managed to get his trousers pulled onto him before the ambulance arrived, although she had not had time to pull on his undershorts first, or his shirt afterward. As she heard the ambulance pull into her driveway, with its siren blaring, she had hastily pulled on the clothes she had been wearing when she was watching Faye Converse’s party out the window of her bedroom.

  “This your husband?” the attendant asked.

  “No.”

  “Name?”

  “Mine or his?”

  “His.”

  “Jules Mendelson,” she said.

  He started to write the name. “Like in the Jules Mendelson Family Patient Wing at Cedars-Sinai?” he asked. “Yes.”

  “Holy shit,” he said, looking at her. “Age?”

  “Fifty-six, I think, or, maybe, seven. I’m not sure.”

  “You are not Mrs. Mendelson, you said?”

  “I am not Mrs. Mendelson. That’s correct.”

  “This your house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there a Mrs. Mendelson?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has Mrs. Mendelson been informed?”

  “Only you have been informed,” said Flo. “It only happened twenty minutes ago, thirty minutes ago at most. He just keeled over. Some guy came in here from the party next door and called the ambulance. I didn’t see who it was, because I was giving mouth-to-mouth at the time. Is he going to be okay?”

  “Should I inform Mrs. Mendelson?”

  “She’s on a plane, their private plane, coming back from Northeast Harbor, Maine, due in sometime this evening. I asked you if he was going to be okay.”

  “We’ll get him into the cardiac arrest unit as soon as we get him to Cedars,” said the attendant.

  The other attendants had wheeled Jules out the front door of the house and placed the stretcher in the ambulance. “Okay, Charlie,” one of them called back.

  “Do you want to ride with us in the ambulance? I can finish these questions on the way to the hospital,” said Charlie.

  “Okay,” said Flo.

  Charlie helped her in.

  “What kind of car’s that, Charlie?” asked the driver. “The blue one.”

  “Bentley ’ninety,” said Charlie. “Beautiful, huh? That’ll set you back about a hundred and fifty grand. Do you know who this guy is?”

  “Who?”

  “Jules Mendelson, the billionaire. Like in the Jules Mendelson Family Patient Wing at the hospital,” said Charlie. “So make time, or we’ll all be outta work.”

  “No kidding? That’s Jules Mendelson? No wonder central said there’s photographers at the hospital waiting for the ambulance. This is one narrow driveway, and steep. I can hardly back this around,” said the ambulance driver.

  “Did he say there’s photographers at the hospital?” Flo asked Charlie, in an alarmed voice.

  “That’s what central just told him on the car phone.”

  “Listen, you have to stop and let me out,” said Flo. “Please. It’s very important.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Look, Charlie. Isn’t that your name? Charlie? I’m the girlfriend, not the wife. Do you understand? I better follow in my own car,” said Flo.

  Charlie did not say, “I figured as much,” but Flo could read that look on his face with absolute precision. As always with Flo, people liked her, and Charlie, the attendant, did too. “Hold it up, Pedro,” he called out to the driver. “The lady’s getting out.”

  The ambulance came to a halt at the bottom of Flo’s driveway. Charlie opened the rear door of the ambulance for Flo to get down.

  “Jules, honey,” she said to Jules’s inert body, leaning close to his face. His mouth had been covered with an oxygen mask. “I’m going to take my own car to the hospital. I’ll be there with you in a few minutes. You’re in good hands, Jules. I love you, baby.”

  “Do you know how to get to the emergency entrance of Cedars?” Charlie asked her.

  “Yeah. My mother died at Cedars,” she said.

  In her haste to scramble out the back of the ambulance, she tripped and fell onto the driveway, tearing her skirt and skinning her knee. “Goddamm it,” she cried out.

  “Are you okay?” called Charlie, from the back of the ambulance.

  “I’m okay,” Flo yelled back, waving the ambulance on. The siren started to blare, as the ambulance turned left down Azelia Way. When she tried to stand up on the steep driveway, she heard the sound of Astrid barking. She knew from Glyceria that the dog had been locked up in Faye Converse’s bathroom during the whole of the party, as she had, since Hector Paradiso’s death, developed a reputation for biting people, and Faye did not want to risk having one of her guests bitten.

  The dog came running around from the back of the house. When she saw Flo trying to get up off the driveway, she ran to her and began licking her face, wanting to be picked up.

  “No, no, Astrid, not now. I can’t deal with you now,” said Flo. “Go back home, honey. Go back through your hole in the hedge. You have to go home now, Astrid. You can’t stay here. Go ahead. Glyceria’s waiting for you. Go home!”

  The confused dog, used to
being loved by her, could not understand why Flo did not pick her up, as she always did, or why she spoke to her in such a harsh tone of voice. Flo, limping because of her cut knee, ran back up the driveway to get into her car. Then she realized that Jules’s Bentley was blocking her car in the garage, and she could not get hers out.

  “Oh, God,” she screamed, in frustration. She felt the tears that she had held back for nearly an hour, but she refused to let them come. She ran to Jules’s car and opened the door. “Thank God,” she said when she saw that he had left his keys in the ignition. She jumped into the driver’s seat and turned on the ignition before she closed her door. The radio came on to the news station that Jules always played in his car. Astrid tried to jump into the car after her. “No, no, out,” she screamed, pushing her out of the car. For an instant they looked at each other. “I have to get to the hospital,” she called out to the dog in explanation, as if the dog could understand her. But Astrid could not understand her. Rejected by the person she loved most, she ran forward down the driveway, heading toward Azelia Way.

  Flo had never driven the Bentley before, and she was unprepared for its enormous power. As she applied her foot too hard to the gas pedal, the car shot forward. Halfway down the driveway, before she could apply the brake to slow down, she felt a thud, and heard a thud, and then a scream. The small white furry body of Astrid flew up in the air in front of the grille and landed with another thud on the hood of the car in front of the windshield. Flo screamed. The dog rolled over off the hood onto the driveway. Flo slammed on the brakes, put the car in park, and opened the door.

  “Oh, no,” she moaned, unable to accept the reality of what she had done. “Oh, no.” She picked up the smashed creature from the driveway, and the tears that she had held back for nearly an hour came bursting forth from her eyes. “Oh, Astrid, my little darling Astrid, I love you so much. Don’t die, Astrid, don’t die, Astrid. Please. Please.” She looked down into the dog’s eyes, and the dog looked up at her. Their eyes met. She felt the dog relax, make a quiet sound, and die.

  She held Astrid in her arms. From within the car, she heard the radio. “We interrupt this broadcast. The financier and billionaire Jules Mendelson has been rushed to Cedars-Sinai Hospital by ambulance, following a massive heart attack in the home of a friend in Beverly Hills. Mendelson’s wife, the society figure, Pauline Mendelson, is thought to be en route in the family plane from Maine. Stay tuned.”