An Inconvenient Woman

by Dominick Dunne

  Flo was surrounded by people. Unused to such friendliness, she smiled nervously as she accepted their thanks for her sharing with them. Several people offered to give her their telephone numbers. When she looked up, she was glad to see Philip standing there.

  “Oh, Philip,” she said, breaking away.

  “Hello, Flo,” he said.

  “Are you still mad at me?”

  “Of course, I’m not mad at you.”

  “You were the last time I saw you. I was afraid you’d given up on me.”

  “Never,” he said, smiling at her. “I’m delighted you came back.”

  “I looked for you earlier, but I didn’t see you.”

  “I just got here. I was very late.”

  “Philip, I raised my hand,” she said, proudly. “I actually spoke up at a meeting for the first time.”

  “I heard. I’m sorry I missed you. How do you feel?”

  “Wonderful. Everyone was so nice.”

  “What made you come back today? What made you speak up for the first time?”

  “Something happened,” she said. She looked up at him. Although he could not see her eyes through her dark glasses, he felt that something was wrong.

  “Would you want to go out for a cup of coffee and talk?”

  “Sure,” she said. “But I’d rather you came up to my house for a cup of coffee. I want to show you something.”

  Inside her house, she showed him the note, the gun, and the splintered plate glass window.

  “Good God,” he said. “Did you get a look at the car?”

  “I think it was a Rolls-Royce. I peeked out those curtains at it. It was eerie. Two men sat in the front seat with the motor running and the lights on and just stared at the house. I think the car was gold, or some shade of yellow,” she said.

  “I’ll tell you who has a gold Rolls-Royce,” said Philip.

  “Who?”

  “Arnie Zwillman. I saw it one night at Casper Stieglitz’s house, when Jules and Pauline were there.”

  Flo shivered. “Arnie Zwillman?”

  “Do you know him?”

  “He tried to get Jules to launder money,” she said. “When Jules turned him down, he called the State Department and told them something about Jules that had happened years ago in Chicago that I can’t tell you about, and the State Department told Jules, just an hour before his heart attack here, that he wasn’t going to get the job as head of the American commission to Brussels.”

  “Were you planning to put all that in your book?” asked Philip.

  Flo, embarrassed, nodded. “That’s the kind of stuff my collaborator is interested in.”

  “You’re playing with fire, Flo. You must know that. Arnie Zwillman is not a swell guy.”

  “I’m broke, Philip. I need bucks. My pool man quit. The telephone company is dunning me. That third-rate actor who owns this house wants me out. I don’t have any choice.”

  “And Pauline won’t help?”

  “You must be kidding.”

  “Let me ask you a question, Flo. If you had the money that Jules wanted to leave you, would you still be writing this book?”

  “Of course not,” said Flo.

  “That’s what I wanted to hear you say,” said Philip. “You wouldn’t mind if I interfered a little bit in my own private way, would you?”

  “How?”

  “I can’t tell you that yet. Trust me.”

  As Philip was leaving, Flo followed him to the door. “You wouldn’t want to move in here with me, would you, Philip? No strings attached. Not like it was between us at the Chateau Marmont. You in that room. Me in here.”

  “Somehow I don’t think that would go over very well with Camilla,” said Philip, smiling.

  Flo laughed. “No, I suppose not.”

  “It’s nice to see you laugh, Flo.”

  “Before I used to be afraid because there was no money anymore. Now I’m just afraid.”

  At the same time that Philip was with Flo, Rose Cliveden called Pauline Mendelson, whom she hadn’t spoken to since her outburst over lunch at the Los Angeles Country Club. “My dear, I have the most riveting thing to tell you,” she said. “You won’t believe who spoke at an AA meeting this morning.”

  Late that night, Flo couldn’t sleep. She got up and drove to the Hughes Market on Beverly Boulevard. As she pushed her shopping cart through the aisles, she stopped to stare at the gallon bottles of Soave wine, but she kept moving and bought twelve cans of Diet Coke instead. Ahead of her, standing at the magazine counter, was Lonny Edge. When he looked up from the magazine he was reading and saw her, he grinned his wide grin, the grin that buyers of his pornographic videos found so beguiling.

  “Hi, Flo,” he said.

  “Hi,” she answered.

  “We have to stop meeting like this,” Lonny said.

  Flo smiled.

  Lonny waved the magazine in her direction. “Last time I saw you here, you were on the cover of Mulholland, and now I’m in the magazine. Have you read this about me?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll treat you to a copy. They’re trying to kick me out of my building because of this article.”

  “Really? What’s the article about?”

  “This manuscript I have that turns out to be the lost manuscript of Basil Plant. That famous writer who cooled a couple of years ago?”

  “I always heard you had his manuscript, way back in the Viceroy Coffee Shop days. Curly told me that. Why would they kick you out of your apartment because of that?”

  “The dame who wrote it makes it sound as if I turn tricks there, and the manager of the building has been dying to get rid of me for a long time, and he’s using this magazine for an excuse. Like I’m giving his dump of a building a bad name.”

  “Do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Turn tricks in your apartment?”

  “Hell, no, I don’t. Just a couple of my regulars. Otherwise, I go out. Anyway, I want to get out of that kind of business. I’m over thirty now. Time to get serious about my life.”

  “Well, we’ve all got our problems, Lonny,” said Flo, moving her shopping cart past him.

  “I don’t know where the hell I’m going to move to. I’ve lived in that bungalow ever since I came to this town.”

  Flo stopped and looked back at him. An idea came into her head, which she then rejected. “Good luck in finding a place,” she said.

  Flo’s Tape #24

  “After Jules died, when Cyril Rathbone’s article in Mulholland magazine came out about me, with my picture on the cover—oh God!—Archbishop Cooning started to give these sermons every Sunday from the pulpit of Saint Vibiana’s. Oh, my, the things that he said about him! Poor Jules. He said Jules corrupted my morals. When I was a kid back in parochial school, we used to hear about Archbishop Cooning, only he was just Bishop Cooning then. He was always carrying on about virginity and stuff like that, saving yourself for marriage, ha ha ha. We were all scared of him, but the nuns thought he was great, especially Sister Andretta.

  “Which brings me to Cyril. I always knew he was vile. Jules hated him. And Pauline did too. And yet, I put my fate in his hands. That was a mistake, one of my many mistakes. Any vestige of sympathy I might have received from Pauline over Jules’s estate, I lost when I said that Cyril Rathbone was going to write my book. I mean, just from that article he wrote about me in Mulholland, I should have known. When facts failed, he just embellished his accounts with whatever came into his head.

  “I didn’t tell him everything. Some of it I held back. The part about Kippie Petworth, for instance. For about five minutes I had the upper hand in the situation, with the information about Kippie that I had learned from Lonny, that he was the one who killed Hector Paradiso. But when I met with Pauline, I saw the look of terror in her eyes when I approached the subject of Kippie. I mean, terror. And I backed down. I didn’t press my advantage. Like I felt sorry for Pauline Mendelson, this rich lady who’d had every whim of her wh
ole life attended to.

  “I’d like to have had that out with Jules, about Kippie. That he hid the kid out in my house, and I was there squeezing orange juice for him. I don’t think Jules should have done that to me. But people like that, Jules and Pauline and their whole crowd, they really didn’t think the rules applied to them.”

  25

  The death of Jules Mendelson was a great sorrow to Dudley. He felt that never again would he be able to serve so great or so kind an employer. He had been generously provided for in Jules’s will, and had also received a handwritten letter from Jules, delivered after his death by Sims Lord, asking him to stay on with Mrs. Mendelson at Clouds, for which there would be a substantial added remuneration for each year he remained in her employ. The muffled scandal of Jules Mendelson’s love affair was a thing that Dudley chose to overlook, as if it had not happened. When pejorative remarks about the great man’s behavior came to his ears, and a great many had, he faced his informer with a look of such hauteur that it silenced further discourse on the subject and caused the informer to retreat in shame. It was, he felt, up to him to see that there was no lessening of the established standards of the house.

  When Philip Quennell, a half hour after leaving Flo March’s house, rang the buzzer at the gates of Clouds and asked over the closed circuit television system if Mrs. Mendelson was at home, Dudley was quite put out. Although he knew that Mrs. Mendelson was fond of the young man who had become the boyfriend of Camilla Ebury, he felt that it was an impertinence for him to arrive at the gates of such a house as Clouds and ask to see her, without having called first to make an appointment. Dudley was not unaware that Jules Mendelson had despised Philip Quennell, and he joined his late employer in blaming Philip for causing the crack in the statue of the Degas ballerina.

  “Is Mrs. Mendelson expecting you?” asked Dudley over the closed circuit system.

  “She is not, no,” replied Philip, looking up into the television camera.

  “I really don’t think it is convenient for her to see you, Mr. Quennell,” said Dudley, taking upon himself the task of speaking for the lady of the house. Although he was in no way impolite, he allowed a mild note of annoyance to creep into the tone of his voice. “Perhaps you should telephone Mrs. Mendelson later today and try to make an appointment to see her.”

  Philip was not to be dissuaded so easily. “I realize I have come without calling first, Dudley, but could you please ask Mrs. Mendelson if she could see me for a few moments,” said Philip, in an insistent voice.

  Dudley, annoyed now, made no reply. He turned off the system and called Pauline on the intercom to tell her that Philip Quennell had arrived at the house without an appointment and wished to see her.

  “Heavens,” said Pauline over the intercom.

  Although Dudley could not see Pauline, he imagined that there was a look of surprise on her face. “I’ve asked him to call you later to make an appointment,” said Dudley.

  “No, no, I’ll see him, Dudley,” said Pauline. “It’s just that I have things to do. I have to meet with Jarvis in the greenhouse first, and then I’ll be up. Have Mr. Quennell wait in the library.”

  Dudley, without saying anything welcoming to Philip, pushed the button that opened the gates, and Philip proceeded up the long driveway to the house. When his car pulled into the courtyard, Dudley opened the front door.

  “Mrs. Mendelson has asked that you wait in the library, Mr. Quennell,” said Dudley. He walked in that direction with Philip following him. “Mrs. Mendelson is with Jarvis in the greenhouse and will be up shortly.”

  He opened the door of the library and Philip went inside. As always, when he entered that room, Philip walked over to the fireplace and looked up at the painting of van Gogh’s White Roses.

  “Is there anything you’d like? Tea? Coffee? Drink?” asked Dudley, as he turned away and put into alignment a row of magazines on the fireplace bench.

  “No, thank you. I’m fine,” replied Philip, as if he were unaware of the butler’s lack of civility.

  After ten minutes, Pauline walked into the room through one of the French doors that opened onto the terrace. She was carrying a basket of roses that she had just cut in her garden. “Hello, Philip,” she said.

  Philip hopped to his feet. “Pauline, I know this is inexcusable, to drop in on you without calling first. I think I have upset your butler.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about it,” she said. “I hope you won’t mind if I put these flowers in a vase while we talk.” Without waiting for an answer, she took a blue-and-white Chinese vase and carried it into the lavatory, where she filled it with water. “I’m having a guest for lunch. I’m afraid I can’t ask you to join us.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t dream of staying. It’s extremely kind of you to see me. I’ll only be a few minutes.” He was beginning to feel nervous about his mission.

  Pauline came out of the lavatory and took a pair of clippers from her basket and began to strip the roses and cut off the ends at an angle. “You haven’t fought with Camilla again, have you? That’s what I imagined,” she said.

  Philip smiled. “No.”

  Then she started to arrange the flowers in the vase, with the expertise of a person who had spent a lifetime arranging flowers in rare Chinese vases.

  “It’s not unlike your painting,” said Philip, pointing to her arrangement.

  “Mr. van Gogh’s picture always influences me, but certainly you didn’t come here to talk about flower arrangements,” she said.

  “No.” He shook his head. “I came here to talk about Flo March.”

  Pauline’s body stiffened at the mention of the woman’s name. She put down her clippers for a moment, breathed heavily, and then picked them up again and went on with her arranging.

  “Have you become her spokesperson?” she asked. The expression on her face had changed, as had the tone of her voice. “If so, please contact my lawyer, Sims Lord. I have no wish to hear any message from her.”

  “No, Pauline. I am not her spokesperson. Nor am I bringing you a message from her. Nor am I speaking in her defense. There is something I think you should know. Please listen to me.”

  “Does Camilla know you’ve come here, Philip?”

  “No, she doesn’t.”

  “What do you think she’d say if she knew?”

  “She’d say that it was none of my business.”

  “She’d be right.”

  “She would be right, I know, just as you are right to be annoyed with me because I am interfering, but I anticipate a catastrophe if you don’t listen to some reason, and it is worth your disapproval.”

  Pauline continued with her work. “I’ve always liked you, Philip. You must know that. I’ve been a good friend to you. But I think you have overstepped the bounds, and I would like you to leave my house and not come back.”

  Philip nodded. He walked toward the door of the library. As he opened it to leave, he turned back. “There are things she knows, Pauline.”

  “Please go,” she said.

  He continued to talk as if she had not spoken. “She is a desperate woman, and desperate women do desperate things. She is being manipulated by an unscrupulous man who despises you.”

  “And who is that?”

  “Cyril Rathbone.”

  “Oh, puleeze,” she said, laughing dismissively. “A ridiculous man. An imposter. He holds a grudge against me because I would never invite him to my house.”

  “You must understand that that makes him dangerous. He is writing a book in Flo March’s name, called Jules’s Mistress. Did you know that?”

  Pauline’s silence told that she had not known. “A whore’s trick,” she said, finally.

  “Cyril Rathbone has taped her for forty hours,” said Philip. “She has told him things that could be embarrassing to you.”

  Pauline wanted Philip to go, but she wanted him to stay also. “What sort of things?” she asked. In order not to show the interest she had in what he was saying, she continue
d to arrange the roses in the Chinese vase.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t heard the tapes. I must ask you something, Pauline. And you don’t have to answer me. In fact, don’t answer me, because it is none of my business. But I’m still going to ask you. Does she know something about you? Or Hector? Or something about your son that no one else knows?”

  “Is that what she said?”

  “Alluded to, but didn’t say.”

  Ashen-faced, Pauline turned away from Philip. “The woman is a liar. She would say anything.”

  “You’re wrong, Pauline,” said Philip. “That is just not so. She would prefer not to write this book. I can tell you that for a fact. She has told me that within the hour, but she is desperate. Put yourself in her place.”

  “Once you start paying off a blackmailer, it never ends. Anyone will tell you that,” said Pauline.

  “It’s only what Jules promised her. It’s less than what that ring on your finger is worth.”

  Without looking at her finger, she lifted up her left hand and pulled the ring back and forth with her right. Since Jules’s death, Pauline had begun to wear his ring again, the huge de Lamballe diamond. When people commented on it, as they invariably did, she had taken to looking at it and smiling and then telling the story of how Jules had given it to her in Paris on the week she married him. The story was told with affection for the husband she had been married to for twenty-two years. People remarked later that there was no trace of bitterness in her toward Jules for the humiliation he had caused her. “It’s so typical of Pauline. She’s a lady through and through. After all, she is a McAdoo,” her friends said.

  “Good-bye, Philip,” said Pauline.

  “Good-bye, Pauline.”

  He knew that he had failed in his mission and lost the friendship of Pauline at the same time. Dismissed, he walked down the hallway toward the front hall. At the instant he arrived there, Dudley entered the hall from another of the six doors that opened onto it and went straight to open the front door. But he had not opened it for Philip’s exit from the house, as Philip thought, but for the arrival of another guest who was standing there.