Death Was in the Picture (14 page)

“Naw, Kitty. I won’t tell a soul. How did I even know it was you? You were wearing a mask. Could’ve been anyone.”

“Thanks.”

“Really, Kitty, you have to try and be a little less serious. Now c’mon: you’ve been out here working up an appetite long enough. Come back in and get some more fish jelly or some damn thing. Though, maybe in your case, no more champagne.”

I did as he suggested and had some more of the molded fish salad and some other stuff as well. I felt better for it, too. Even though I
did
have more champagne. What more, I reasoned, could happen this night? Why did I need my wits about me? Turns out I had no idea.

THE BALLROOM HAD gotten more crowded in the hour or so I’d been outside. Dex managed to find us a small table anyway. He held it while I got myself another plate of food, then we both sat down to swap notes and figure what came next.

Dex told me that directly under the ballroom there was a sort of basement, partially below ground level. There were a couple of mechanical rooms down there as well as a gaming room, including two billiard tables. All I’d seen of the main floor was the ballroom, but Dex had also scoped his and hers bathrooms, a kitchen equipped to cook for a platoon, a couple of offices meant for the men who ran the club on a day-to-day basis, and a sort of smoking lounge, done up in men’s club style, complete with deep leather chairs, a mahogany bar, and probably one of the best collections of illegal booze in the Southland. This had impressed Dex most of all.

“You stand there, in front of that bar,” he said, a sort of wonder in his voice, “and you don’t think at all about Prohibition. You can’t. You just see all the beautifully arranged bottles and think you’re in Paris. Or Vancouver. And it’s all classy stuff. None of that coffin varnish you get at the speakeasies.” There was a wistfulness about him when he said it. A wonder. It almost made me sad.

Another level had been added to the house since the Masquers purchased the property. Dex said they’d built a deck on the roof where lunch was served every day. I reported on the verandah and the garden while avoiding looking at Dex. We agreed that, from what we’d seen, the place was pretty impressive.

Dex didn’t probe about Baron Sutherland, and I was grateful. I figured I’d fill him in on the little I’d learned later, when the earlier part of the episode didn’t feel quite so raw.

“Now what?” I said when we’d exchanged everything that seemed necessary for the moment and the last of my fish salad was gone.

“Well, more of the same,” Dex said. “Seems to me, we’re doin’ all right. It’s not even eleven o’clock and the party just seems to be getting started.” He looked around. “The booze and the food certainly haven’t eased up any. They’re obviously expecting people will be here for hours.”

“Meet back here in another hour?” I asked.

“Sounds about right. But listen, Kitty, try to keep the evidence gathering to a minimum, okey? We don’t want any love-struck actor type following you home like a lost puppy.” Then he sauntered away. Before, I guess, I could collect my wits enough to talk back or sock him.

This time, it was Dex who headed out to the verandah and the garden, which suited me fine. I decided I wanted a peek at that roof deck. Getting there meant passing through the second floor where I saw that the rooms were smaller: mostly bedrooms and small sitting rooms, with the occasional bathroom thrown in for good measure. The carpets and the walls were a deep, almost lurid crimson—although that adjective might have come from the present context: the use and abandon of a masquerade ball and the sound of giggles and muffled ecstasy that floated out from behind a few of the closed doors. I wondered if there were still masks in place behind some of those doors. I figured perhaps there were.

At the end of the hallway at the back of the house, a second stairway headed up. This one was more austere than the one that led up from the foyer, but then its purpose was different as well.

Like the verandah, the patio had been decked out for a party. I imagined that on a normal day, the tables would be set up at generous intervals, allowing room for either privacy or thick groups of friends. One could almost see them smoking and laughing with the sun on their heads: a perpetual picnic where the food didn’t come in baskets and the booze flowed free.

However, for this party, the tables had been pushed to one side, making room for another orchestra—though this one was smaller than the one in the ballroom: just six pieces playing Rodgers and Hart’s “Dancing on the Ceiling,” which seemed ironic considering where they were. The bar was set up directly opposite. Apparently one could not have masquers without also having a bar. This made sense to me.

A little dance floor had been cleared in front of the orchestra, but just now, no one was dancing. Instead there were thick clusters of masquers in conversations I didn’t feel welcome to intrude upon. Some heads rose as I joined them. I could see them looking me over quickly, cataloging where I fit. A few eyes lingered but no one beckoned me over and I quickly retreated back into the house.

Passing through the corridor of bedrooms and sitting rooms, I saw that one of the doors was open. I stopped and peered inside. A thickset man of about forty wearing an expensive evening suit sat on a nubbled sofa the color of oxblood. The suit was slightly rumpled, his head was in his hands, his mask a bit askew. I could see he’d had too much to drink. More. I hadn’t spent all this time with Dex without learning a thing or two about recognizing signs. The man on the oxblood sofa was looking at his life and he wasn’t much liking what he saw.

At a different time, I might have been afraid of him, sitting there so deeply into his cups. But there was something rumpled and forlorn about him. I was aware of no fear, only simple human concern.

“You all right?” I said from the doorway.

He lifted his head without interest, regarded me dispassionately. To him I might as well not have been there.

“I’m counting my sins,” he said through his drink, though his voice was quite clear and pure. It surprised me.

“And you can’t count that high?” I said gently, making a guess.

Now he looked at me more closely. So closely he narrowed his eyes to slits.

“What do you mean?” he said at length. “What do you know?” I suspected he thought that I was not real. The mirage of a drunken man. A mirage in a beaded dress.

I entered the room cautiously. Here is what I knew: judging from his profile and his girth the well-dressed man on the oxblood sofa wasn’t an actor. That combined with his age and his dress and his location made me guess he was an executive of some sort, therefore someone in a position to know a thing or two. Just the sort of person Dex had suggested it would be good to chat up. But something more basic drew me to him and my response came just as strongly because I understood he was a human in despair. That’s not something I’ve ever been able to walk away from, nor really even tried.

“I don’t know anything,” I said. “I know nothing at all. But men counting sins … well, let’s just say you look like someone who wouldn’t need even a quarter hour to give to despair. Yet here you sit.” Without even knowing I was going to do so, I entered the room and sat on the other end of the sofa, the side closest the door. I was far enough away to make a hasty escape if I needed to. Close enough that he would understand that another human had heard the despair in his heart… and had stopped to listen.

“Bah,” he said, a tiny explosion of sound, accompanied by more air than was strictly necessary. But he made no move either away from me or in my direction so I held my ground.

“That’s the thing about sins,” I said, “they don’t need a lot of room for you to be able to pile them real high.”

He looked at me out of the corner of his eye then. Shot me something like a smile. “What’s your name?” he said.

“Kitty.”

“I’m Joe. You want a drink?” I started to say no, then realized if I’d opted to share a bit of his misery I should also share some of his poison. It felt like part of some unwritten code.

“All right,” I said.

He hauled himself up and moved across the room to a makeshift bar. There were spirits here only, I noticed. Ice in a bucket. A bowl of nuts. And the most basic types of mix. No champagne.

He poured himself a couple fingers of scotch, hesitated, then added a third. Neat.

“What’ll it be?” he said.

“Gin and tonic, please,” I replied then added, with a smile, “heavy on the tonic, though. It’s starting to feel like it’s been a long party.”

“I know what you mean,” he said, mixing my drink. Then, almost as an afterthought, he added another finger of scotch to his own glass before joining me again on the couch. The activity seemed to have jolted him a bit, despite all the new scotch. The activity and, perhaps, my presence seemed to have brought him slightly out of the morose place in which he’d been hanging his head.

“The thing is,” he said when he was seated again, “everything I’ve done, I’ve done for the good of it all, do you know what I mean?” He looked at me earnestly, like my answer mattered. And truly? I did not know what he meant. It was all too oblique.

“I… I guess,” is all I said.

“And we ask ourselves that, don’t we?” I didn’t even start to answer this one. It sounded rhetorical. “We ask ourselves if
it’s more all right when only good was meant. After all, what part do intentions play in all of this? If you
intend
no harm, yet harm comes, is it just as bad? Or do the intentions cancel out the sins themselves?”

I did not answer this. That rhetorical thing again. Or rather, I did not answer out loud. But do intentions matter? Sure they matter. Does one cancel out the other? Maybe. It all depends on the nature of the sin.

“But the industry is in a mess,” he lifted his head once again, met my eyes. What I saw there cut me. It was like a window into a place I did not wish to see. Yet he wanted me to. I could see that, as well. Here I was: anonymous, non-threatening, dubiously connected. And, anyway, he was drunk. He required less of a reason to unburden than a sober man would have done. It’s why people with secrets do better when they stay off the sauce. “I had to do something, didn’t I? I did. And, like the lady said, ‘what’s done … ’”

“… cannot be undone,” I said, picking up the quote and remembering as I did so that the words belonged to Lady Macbeth in the one of Shakespeare’s works that our drama teacher at school had always insisted we refer to as “the Scottish play” for fear of—I wasn’t quite sure what—creating a haggis famine or a run on bagpipes or oatcakes or some such.

“But what… what did you do?” I asked it so softly, at first I thought he didn’t hear. When he hesitated before he said anything, I pressed on. “It’s probably not as bad as you think.”

He looked at me closely again. “Do you recognize me?” he said after a beat.

I shook my head, confident I’d never seen him before.

He lifted his mask. “How about now?” There were glasses under the mask. They magnified his eyes, they were blue shot through with red. His nose was crossed with spider-veins and his lips fit into his face like a pair of German sausages. He was not an attractive man, unmasked. And I did not recognize him.

I shook my head again.

“I’m a very important man,” he said. They were boastful words, but he did not say them boastfully. Rather, he sounded broken as he said them. Sounded as though he was aware of their cost.

“I’m sure you are,” I said softly.

“I work at the Hays Office, directly under Mr. Hays himself.” He watched my face as he said this, waiting for the import of his words to sink in.

I offered no reaction. I didn’t have one. If I’d heard of the Hays Office before, I didn’t remember it now. That seemed entirely possible. After all, I hadn’t remembered Temperance and even Dex had berated me for that.

“You haven’t heard of him or me, have you? I can see that in your face.”

I shook my head. “Sorry. No. I haven’t.”

“Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America?”

“That
sounds familiar,” I said. “So you distribute movies?”

He shook his head. “We’re the governing body of the people that make and distribute the movies.”

“My,” I said, “that
is
impressive.” I wasn’t trying to be patronizing. But I would allow that it may have sounded that way.

“Well, see….” He withdrew a silver monogrammed cigarette case from his breast pocket, offered me one and, when I declined, fumbled one from the case for himself, then expended some mental energy on getting it lit. The process seemed to demand almost more of his motor skills than he currently had available.

“On paper, it
is
impressive,” he said. “Real impressive. But the thing is, the studios put it all together to get people off their backs.”

“What people?” It struck me that there was a thread of something in what he was saying that might be of interest to me.
Special interest. But that’s the thing with thread: if you look at a lot of them altogether, it’s tough to see where one ends and another begins. From a distance, it all just looks like a whole piece of tapestry.

“Oh, you know, govnmint. Churches. That kind of thing.”

“So, wait: who hired you?”

“Will Hays.”

“No, I mean, churches? Or government? Is that what you’re saying?”

“No, no. I’m saying it wrong.” He drew on his smoke and slurped his drink thoughtfully, as though figuring the best way to explain.

“See, at the beginning of the twenties, some people—like I said, govnmint and churches mostly—they got the idea that the movies were showing too much of the wrong kind of things.”

“Oh-kay …” I said doubtfully. He seemed to be digging in to give me a history lesson. And this part of his story I knew already. Everybody kinda did.

“They figured Hollywood was gettin’ out of hand, you know? The movie stars were gettin’ too big for their britches and something oughta be done.”

“And that’s where you came in?”

“Not quite. See, the studio bosses figured it would be better if they could keep being the boss of everything. So they got together and made a kind of club and
that’s
who I work for.”