An Inconvenient Woman

by Dominick Dunne

  “I think it’s highly unlikely that I would have suggested taking Officer Whitbeck back to the house on Azelia Way if it had been I who crashed in her head,” Philip said to the captain.

  “Get yourself a lawyer and tell him your story,” said Captain Nelson.

  On the television news, a detective from homicide determined the cause of Flo March’s death as multiple skull fractures and intercerebral hemorrhage due to blunt force trauma. He said it was not simply a blow that had killed Miss March, but blows, many blows. He estimated nine. Pauline Mendelson watched on the television set in her library. The detective described the blows as gaping blunt lacerations of the scalp. More than one of the blows, possibly as many as four, would have been sufficient to kill, although it was believed that the fatal blow was one to the left side of the head, over the ear. The face of the young woman was, by contrast, relatively unmarked. Robbery was immediately ruled out as a motive, as a yellow diamond earring, thought to be of considerable value, remained in one ear lobe, and a sapphire ring, smashed by the murder weapon, remained on the victim’s ring finger. There were multiple lacerations on both hands, as well as fractures of the fingers of both hands.

  “They have arrested Philip Quennell,” said Sims Lord, later.

  “Philip Quennell! No, that couldn’t be true,” said Pauline, in disbelief.

  “It’s true. They found him running down Coldwater Canyon away from the house.”

  “That doesn’t mean he killed her.”

  “People do not speak well of him.”

  “What sort of people?”

  “Casper Stieglitz, the producer, for one. Marty Lesky, the head of Colossus Pictures, for another. And Jules, you must know, despised him.”

  “That doesn’t mean he killed her,” repeated Pauline. “I don’t believe it.” She rose and walked around the library. “Oh, my God. How could this happen? Do you know something, Sims? If I had paid Flo March the lousy million dollars she wanted, none of this would have happened.” She went to the telephone.

  “Who are you calling?”

  “Camilla Ebury.”

  In the weeks of his residence there, Lonny Edge had never felt comfortable in Beverly Hills. Even in the privacy of the secluded house on Azelia Way, people in such lowly capacities as the man who cleaned the swimming pool had looked askance at him when he paraded nude by the pool, and Trent Muldoon, the television star, had given him the same kind of disapproving look when he answered the door with only a towel wrapped around his middle. Lonny Edge was not used to indifference when he showed his disrobed body. He felt slighted when he did not observe desire in the eye of his beholder.

  “They’re a big bunch of snobs in Beverly Hills,” he complained during that time to his friends at the Viceroy Coffee Shop. “Even the cops in Beverly Hills have attitude.”

  When the cops from Beverly Hills knocked on the door and identified themselves at 7204¼ Cahuenga Boulevard, accompanied by their fellow officers from the station house on La Brea, Lonny Edge was nervous at first, thinking that his immoral past had caught up with him.

  “Just a moment,” he yelled out, tearing down from the wall the poster from his best-known video, Hard, Harder, Hardest, in which his jeans were revealingly dropped to his pubic hair.

  “Yes?” he said, when he opened the door.

  “May we come in?” asked Captain Nelson.

  “Yeah. What’s the matter?”

  “We wanted to ask you some questions.”

  “About what?”

  “Flo March.”

  His relief knew no bounds. “Oh, Flo. Sure, I know Flo. She’s my roommate. Not exactly roommate, per se. Housemate is a better word for it. Why?”

  “When did you see her last?”

  “Last night I saw her. Why? I’ve been living there in her house on Azelia Way. But we were moving out today. I better get over there. The movers were coming by ten. She was supposed to be here last night. I don’t know why she didn’t come, and the phone is out of order, or disconnected, or something, I don’t know what. I didn’t want her to stay alone there last night, because she was depressed and all. What’s this all about? You know who Flo March is, don’t you?” He said her name as if it were the name of a movie star that they should recognize. “She’s been in all the papers. She was the mistress of Jules Mendelson. You know, the billionaire? With all the art? A close personal friend of a lot of the Presidents. Lived up on top of the mountain, at the estate called Clouds? You know of Pauline Mendelson? The socialite?”

  The police officers stared at Lonny. Finally, Captain Nelson spoke. “Would you come with us, please, Mr. Edge?”

  “Where?”

  “To the Beverly Hills police station.”

  “Hey, what the fuck is this, man?”

  “Just routine questioning,” said Officer Whitbeck.

  “You can’t routine question here? What are my neighbors going to say, me going out of here with a whole posse of cops?”

  As the two policemen approached him, Lonny made a dash for the front door. One of the two leapt after Lonny in a pantherlike motion and made a lunge for him, grasping him around the chest from behind.

  “What’s going on here?” screamed Lonny, fighting off the assault.

  When he was subdued, the officers jerked his hands behind his back and clamped handcuffs on his wrists. Another knelt on the floor and clamped shackles on his feet.

  “How come you killed your girlfriend, Lonny?” asked Officer Whitbeck.

  “Flo? Flo’s dead? Oh, no. Oh, Flo. Oh, no. You’re not going to pin this on me. No way. I know too much about all these people. Pauline Mendelson’s son killed Hector Paradiso. Kippie Petworth, that’s his name,” he screamed. With one officer on each side of him, they pulled him out the door and across the courtyard to the stairs that went down to Cahuenga Boulevard. “I saw him. I was there. Kippie Petworth, Pauline Mendelson’s son, shot Hector five times, and Jules Mendelson covered it up and told the world it was a suicide. That’s why they killed Flo March. She knew. She knew too much.”

  “The guy’s nuts,” said Officer Whitbeck to Captain Nelson.

  When Glyceria, Flo’s friend, who had helped her pack to move, showed up for work at Faye Converse’s house, she was immediately made aware of the dire happenings in the house next door. By that time Flo’s body had been removed to the morgue, and the news of her death was in every newspaper and newscast. Two men in two separate jails had been booked for the murder. The driveway in front of Flo’s house was filled with reporters, some of whom peeked in the windows.

  Avoiding them, Glyceria made her way to the back of the house, to the swimming pool area where she used to sit with Flo in the early days of their friendship, when little Astrid brought them together. It surprised her that the sliding glass door with the smashed window was ajar. She wondered why there was not a police guard on duty, or why a house where a murder had taken place was not sealed.

  For a six-hour period, two men in two separate jails were booked for the same murder. When finally Philip Quennell was released from the Beverly Hills jail, with abject apologies for having been wrongfully booked, he emerged into a glare of television lights and strobe cameras. His money and credit cards and watch and cuff links were still in the sealed manila envelope that the arresting officer had handed back to him as he was discharged. His tie had been lost. He felt soiled and looked weary as the reporters crowded around him.

  “Flo March was my friend,” he said. “I am heartbroken that her life has ended in this terrible way.”

  “Are you bitter that you were falsely arrested?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going to sue?”

  “No.”

  “What was it like to discover her body?” asked a reporter.

  Philip sheltered his eyes from the bright lights of the television camera. As he looked past the crowd of media people surrounding him, he saw Camilla sitting quietly on a bench watching him.

  “Excuse me,” said Philip a
s he pushed through the reporters and made his way to where Camilla was. “Am I glad to see you.”

  “Oh, Philip. Are you all right?”

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  “They towed your car, but I was able to get your bags.”

  On the steps outside, he said, “I’m really glad you were there. I can’t tell you how much it means to me. I want to hug you and kiss you, but I don’t want to have them take our picture at the same time. Do you know what I feel like?”

  “Crying?”

  “That’s right. How’d you know that?”

  “Because I love you. Come on. My car’s in the lot,” said Camilla.

  He took hold of her hand and they headed for the parking lot. “There’s something I must ask you,” he said.

  “What?”

  “When you heard I had been arrested.”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you think it was true? That I killed her?”

  “No. Not for an instant.”

  Flo’s Tape #29

  “Lonny’s expecting me over at his little bungalow on Cahuenga, but I really want to spend my last night here in this house. God, how I love this house. What memories, including the lousy ones, but that’s what makes a house a home. I wanted to think about Jules in private, because after tomorrow, when the moving men come, everything’s going to be different for me. Sure, he had a lot of faults, but he was good to me. If I had it all to do over again, knowing what I know now, would I still have gone with Jules? I think about that a lot, and I’ve finally come to an answer. Yeah, I would.”

  30

  Not a single soul, except for Philip Quennell, who made the arrangements, knew that Camilla Ebury paid for the cost of Flo March’s cremation and burial in the Westwood cemetery.

  Ina Rae attended every day of Lonny Edge’s three-week trial. She was distressed that he was so pale and thin and listless, but she reported to Darlene that he was as handsome as ever and always seemed pleased to see her in the courtroom. Throughout the trial, Archbishop Cooning, who was militant on morality, preached from the pulpit of Saint Vibiana’s on the tragic life of Flo March. The archbishop did not blame her alleged killer, Lonny Edge. The archbishop laid the blame directly on the late billionaire who had corrupted the young woman and led her into a life of luxury and entrapment. Poor Jules, his friends said in private. It was a good thing he was dead, so he didn’t have to hear what the archbishop had to say. He always hated to have his name in the newspapers.

  It was as if Lonny Edge’s life mattered less because he had been involved in what was considered an unacceptable style of existence. He now resides in San Quentin, and will remain there, in all probability, for the rest of his life, which is not expected to be a long time. There have been rumors that he has a fatal disease. It has been reported that he looks more than twice his age and weighs but a fraction of what he weighed when he appeared in his pornographic videos, and that lesions cover his once-handsome face.

  Nothing has gone right for Lonny. The lawyers for the publisher of Basil Plant’s lost manuscript of Candles at Lunch argued successfully in court that the manuscript had been stolen before Basil Plant’s death, and that Lonny was due no payment whatever. This was particularly distressing to Marv Pink, the lawyer who agreed to represent him on the condition that 50 percent of the proceeds from the sale of the manuscript be turned over to him. The book will finally be published in the spring. There is great interest in it from both the book clubs and the movies.

  Philip Quennell has visited Lonny in San Quentin several times. Philip is one of many who do not believe that Lonny killed Flo March, but that he merely left the door to her house open that night in order to allow unnamed people to enter and search for her tapes, believing that she would be in his apartment on Cahuenga Boulevard at the time.

  “Lonny’s fingerprints were not on the murder weapon,” he said over and over to no avail. It was not a point that was stressed in the courtroom. He could never understand why so little was made of the fact that the drawers and packing cases in Flo’s house had been ransacked. Lonny Edge had lived in the house, and wouldn’t have needed to ransack anything. One of the many things Philip could not figure out was why one of the cushions of Flo March’s gray satin sofa was missing. The tapes, if they existed, and Philip Quennell believes they did exist, have never been found.

  Kippie Petworth has not come to the bad end that Arnie Zwillman and the headmasters at several fashionable schools predicted he would. At least, as yet. He has become the young lover of Mrs. Reza Bulbenkian, who dotes on him completely and keeps him in very smart style in an apartment on Beekman Place in New York. Yvonne pays a publicist to keep her name in the papers, praising her parties and her clothes, and to keep Kippie’s name out. Her husband, Reza, of course, is totally unaware of the arrangement.

  Kippie’s mother, Pauline Mendelson, became Lady St. Vincent, and lives at Kilmartin Abbey in Wiltshire. There is no contact between mother and son. She brought with her very few reminders of her past life, other than the vast Mendelson fortune, which was now hers, and two artworks that she did not sell. She tried to hang van Gogh’s White Roses in several locations of her new home, but it seemed inappropriate among the Canalettos in the drawing room, and out of place among the Raphael drawings that lined the walls of the library. The insurance company disallowed it to be hung in any of the hallways, for security reasons, or in any of the rooms that the public was allowed to wander through on visiting days. Finally, Lord St. Vincent suggested to Pauline that she hang it on the wall of her morning room, where she attended to her correspondence, menus, and invitations each day, but she found the picture too overpowering for the small room, as her attention was constantly drawn to it for the memories it evoked of the twenty-two years it had hung over the fireplace in the library at Clouds. She did not wish to sell it, because of the attention it would cause on the international art market, and donating it to one of the many museums that had craved its possession would also have attracted the kind of media coverage that would resurrect the history of her previous marriage and the brutal death of Flo March. Finally, she had it wrapped in blankets and tied with twine. It has been placed in one of the storage rooms of the abbey, along with the great silver pieces that have not been brought out since the wedding of Lord St. Vincent’s daughter nine years ago.

  The last time Philip Quennell saw Pauline St. Vincent, she was seated in the backseat of a Daimler in Beauchamp Place in London, staring straight ahead. He was sure that she saw him, but she gave no sign.

  Clouds was sold to a Japanese who had lately become involved in the motion picture industry, having purchased Marty Lesky’s Colossus Pictures. Mr. Ishiguro’s plans for the beautiful house were more grandiose by far than anything the Mendelsons had ever dreamed. An indoor ice skating rink and a bowling alley were but two of the planned additions. In time Mr. Ishiguro came to feel that it would be less expensive to tear down the house and build again on the same site. The house has now been leveled, although the kennels and the greenhouses remain. Construction on the new house is expected to be completed in three years.

  For Griffin and Carey Dunne with love

  By Dominick Dunne

  Fiction

  ANOTHER CITY, NOT MY OWN*

  AN INCONVENIENT WOMAN*

  PEOPLE LIKE US*

  A SEASON IN PURGATORY*

  THE TWO MRS. GRENVILLES*

  THE WINNERS

  Nonfiction

  FATAL CHARMS*

  THE MANSIONS OF LIMBO*

  *Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  Look for the latest New York Times bestseller by

  DOMINICK DUNNE

  ANOTHER CITY, NOT MY OWN

  Gus Bailey, journalist to high society, knows the sordid secrets of the very rich. Now he turns his penetrating gaze to a courtroom in Los Angeles, witnessing the trial of the century unfold before his startled eyes. As the infamous case and characters begin to take shape and a range of celebr
ities from Frank Sinatra to Heidi Fleiss share their own theories of the crime, Bailey bears witness to the ultimate perversion of principle and the most amazing gossip machine in Hollywood—all wrapped in a marvelously addictive true-to-life tale of love, rage, and ruins.…

  “THOROUGHLY ABSORBING.”

  —Time

  “MISCHIEVOUSLY GOSSIPY.”

  —The New York Times

  “ALLURING … YOU CAN’T PUT IT DOWN.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “DELICIOUSLY WICKED.”

  —Vogue

  Available in bookstores everywhere.

  Published by Ballantine Books.

  The Ballantine Publishing Group

  www.randomhouse.com/BB/

  Also by

  DOMINICK DUNNE:

  The classic story of scandal, money, and murder in a high-society Manhattan family …

  THE TWO MRS. GRENVILLES

  When navy ensign Billy Grenville, heir to a vast New York fortune, sees showgirl Ann Arden on the dance floor, it is love at first sight. And much to the horror of Alice Grenville—the indomitable family matriarch—he marries her. Ann wants desperately to be accepted by high society and become the well-bred woman of her fantasies. But a gunshot one rainy night propels Ann into a notorious spotlight—as the two Mrs. Grenvilles enter into a conspiracy of silence that will bind them together for as long as they live.…

  “STEAMY.”

  —Newsday

  “COMPELLING.”

  —LIZ SMITH