Design for Dying (2 page)

There'd be no stopping the tears this time. I dabbed them away and held out Detective Morrow's handkerchief. Instead of taking it, he pressed it against my punctured thumb. “Keep it. You shared a room with Ruby. We're hoping you can tell us about her.”

I nodded several times too many, still struggling to accept what Detective Morrow had told me.

Stay calm, mermaid. Look 'em in the eye and tell 'em what they want to hear. It's the only way to get by in this town.

I shouldn't have been surprised it was Ruby's advice that came back to me. She wouldn't have been jolted by news like this. At the boardinghouse we liked to pretend we were tough. You have to when you're facing the world on your own. But Ruby didn't need to fake it. She'd earned her wisdom the hard way. She was the McCoy.

And now she was gone.

 

2

HOLLYWOOD IS LOUSY
with beauty queens. Ruby taught me that. Every girl convinced she's the next Jean Harlow comes to town with a sash buried in her suitcase proclaiming her Miss Apple Blossom or Harvest Princess.

Ruby's secret sash declared her Miss Johnnycake of Smithville, Ohio. Or maybe it was Indiana. Ruby didn't dwell on specifics. It was a small town without a smidgen of glitter, and she was desperate to escape it. Along with a six-month supply of cornmeal, she won a train ticket to Los Angeles and a screen test.

As for me, I was Miss Astoria Park of 1936, crowned the day the city christened the swimming pool. My bone-dry red velvet bathing suit won me a screen test of my own. I didn't have stars in my eyes, though. What I did have was a love of the movies and an appreciation for the labor it took to make them. Both came courtesy of my uncle Danny, who toiled for years as a set painter at the Paramount Studios in Astoria. He'd bring me to work with him occasionally, telling me to church mouse in a corner. I'd drink in the hubbub behind the scenes then marvel at the transformation that occurred when the cameras rolled. Actors would take their places, and the flats that Uncle Danny and his boisterous pals had erected and painted would become a banker's office or a police station before my eyes. In the soft flicker of light at the Prospect Theater in Flushing, I'd thrill whenever Danny leaned over and whispered,
I did that bit there, pet.
Thanks to Danny, hard work and magic were indistinguishable for me.

Uncle Danny and Aunt Joyce had raised me after my mother died when I was three and my father stepped out for cigarettes and never came back. Danny, front row center the day of my Miss Astoria Park triumph, insisted I take the trip west. The Astoria Studios had closed in 1932 and he'd been painting houses ever since. “You should see where they're going to make movies from now on, love,” he'd said. I boarded the train with the inexpensive grip he'd bought for me. Inside was a loaf of Aunt Joyce's soda bread. I made it last all the way to Omaha.

On my big day I arrived at the Lodestar Pictures casting office and learned it's always someone else's big day, too. Name a type of girl and she was there waiting. Curvy blondes, fiery redheads, sultry brunettes. All of them dressed to the nines, brimming with confidence, and gorgeous.

Unnerved by the competition, I sank into a chair next to a petite blonde with eyebrows so thin they seemed to have been sketched in as placeholders. They loomed over an angular face that could be dismissed as sharp. Huge brown eyes anchored it, though, and the square neckline of her dress set it off beautifully. She knew how to exploit what she had.

“Join the party,” she said as I sat down. “Some crowd, huh? The cream of the crop fresh off the farm.”

“I didn't come from a farm. I came from a swimming pool.”

The blonde offered me a cockeyed grin my comment didn't deserve. “As long as you made it, sweetie. I'm Ruby, by the way. Ruby Carroll.”

“Lillian Frost. Glad to know you.”

“Lillian Frost,” she repeated with a sideways look. “Lucky you. You won't have to change your name. It's your first test, isn't it? Stand up, give us a look at you.”

At five foot eight I towered over her. I was wearing what was supposed to be my lucky suit, a navy blue number with crisp white trim and a matching hat bought specially for the trip.

“You've got a nice shape, mermaid,” Ruby said. “Must be all the swimming.”

I couldn't bring myself to tell her that I wasn't capable of a dead man's float, that I hadn't bought the bathing suit responsible for my trip to Hollywood to get it wet. Instead I blushed and thanked her.

For the next two hours I listened to Ruby hold forth on the subject of crashing the movies. I was so spellbound I almost didn't hear the heavyset woman with a pince-nez and a clipboard calling me to my shot at stardom. Ruby told me to break a leg. I should have taken her literally.

Standing still and smiling for the camera I could manage. I even sashayed back and forth without falling down. The acting was what tripped me up. The scene I had to read was from some misbegotten costume drama. One line—“The chancellor shall hear of your impertinence”—still haunts my sleep. The director, a fellow New York refugee half in his cups, walked me through the speech a few times, but I wasn't very good and we both knew it. I could only hope the film was reduced to ukulele picks in short order. Maybe the descendants of King Kamehameha would have better luck with Madame Renault than I did.

I was in no rush to return to the dicey boardinghouse on Yucca Street where I'd paid a month's room and board, so I waited for Ruby. She wouldn't tell me how her test went. “You've got to put it behind you and think about the next one,” she said, then suggested dinner out to celebrate my maiden Hollywood effort. I wound up with the check and didn't mind.

“At least this test was bona fide,” she said. “One guy I saw had some racket going. I was such a rube, I didn't catch on until I was alone with him in his office. He makes movies for a ‘special market,' he says. Takes the pictures himself. Kept the Brownie in the corner right next to the clothes hanger for my dress. I scrammed pretty quick. Started learning the ropes as his door was closing.”

“How'd you land this test at Lodestar?” I asked.

“You might as well start learning, too, mermaid. In this town, it's who you know. Which is why I'm always glad to know anybody.”

*   *   *

THE SCREEN TEST
didn't pan out. At the end of my allotted month to be discovered, Ruby asked me to share her room at Mrs. Lindros's boardinghouse. By then I'd grown accustomed to navigating Los Angeles by streetcar and bus, as well as to the city's near-constant sunshine. I traded in my return ticket. New York would be waiting when I finally tired of California's weather.

I soon fell in with the other girls, several of whom had already tried rooming with Ruby, and initially had a ball. Casting calls, late-night gab sessions, trips to the beach on the Western Avenue streetcar. Ruby ruled the roost, the queen bee who deigned to share her secrets with us. What sob story to tell Mrs. Lindros when you were late with the rent, how daubing Vaseline on your eyelashes before bed made them grow more lustrous. Once I overheard her consoling a weepy housemate who feared she'd “gotten in trouble” by giving her a doctor's name. “He can take care of it if it comes to that,” she'd said. “I've seen him a time or two myself.” Being around Ruby was exhausting and exhilarating. We sought her approval even as we feared her judgment.

Her romantic entanglements with a procession of men claiming to hold sway at one studio or another were a reliable source of entertainment. “No more swimming for me, mermaid,” she'd say as she dolled herself up before the cracked mirror in our room. “My ship has come in.” She always wound up back in the water soon enough. Ruby would simply reapply her war paint and target her next prospective meal ticket.

A gift-wrapping position at Tremayne's Department Store during the Christmas season led to a permanent job offer. I accepted, with vague plans of someday being promoted to buyer. I didn't weep for my stillborn acting career. You can't give up a dream you never really had.

My newfound sense of responsibility blew a chill into my relationship with Ruby. I couldn't help her anymore, even if only by faring worse than she was. I was merely a warm body taking up the other forty percent of the room.

Ruby had made a science of persevering. She landed a few chorus or background parts thanks mainly to her dancing. Our Miss Johnnycake could cut a mean rug. In the meantime she had the typical stints as waitress, stenographer, switchboard operator. For a few days, she'd give the position her all. Then she'd start slipping out early for auditions or sneaking in late because she'd been gallivanting with her current beau until 2:00
A.M.
Sooner or later, usually sooner, she'd be out of a job.

About two months after I moved in with her, Ruby met Tommy Carpa. Too Much Tommy, we called him, everything about him excessive. His stocky frame, his profusion of black hair forever tumbling into his hooded eyes, his cashmere overcoats and extravagant gestures. He owned a second-rate nightclub called the Midnight Room and kept unsavory company. He never claimed to have pull at any studio. Ruby didn't care. Tommy gave her entrée to swanky Hollywood parties.

I didn't like Tommy, and made the tactical error of telling Ruby so. She called me jealous. Maybe she was right. Maybe I wouldn't have objected to being squired around town by a sharpie in an almost-new Packard. But I still didn't trust the guy.

Tommy was the first substantial rift between us. The next one was personal, portable, and irreparable.

*   *   *

THE BROOCH WAS
a simple piece, nothing special. Two intertwined gold circles set with garnets. Paulette Goddard would have turned up her perfect nose at it.

But for me, it had worth beyond measure.

My uncle Danny presented the brooch to me on my sixteenth birthday. We were sitting at the kitchen table after dinner. I was itching to leave for my friend Peggy's house but Uncle Danny asked me to wait. From his bedroom he retrieved a scuffed jewelry box.

“Before your mother passed, she gave this to me for safekeeping. She said to give it to you when you became a young lady.” His face held its usual smile, but his eyes were fogged with memory. “I think you've become a fine young lady indeed.”

I opened the box, the lid snapping as if new. The brooch felt weighted and warm in my hand, like it had been recently worn. All at once my mother was there with us, a presence in the tiny kitchen that smelled of ham steaks and turnips.

I fetched a pale blue scarf and tied it around my neck. With his thick fingers, Uncle Danny pinned on the brooch. “Very elegant,” he said, and at that moment I didn't feel like a girl anymore. I never made it to Peggy's house that night. I sat drinking milk and eating graham crackers while Uncle Danny told me stories about his spirited sister Maureen. The mother I remembered only as a jolly laugh, a snatch of lullaby, a whiff of lavender.

I never wore the brooch, but after moving to Los Angeles I would take it out and gather my few recollections of my mother. On one of those long, lonely nights I didn't hear Ruby coming down the hall. Staggering tipsily to her bed, she caught an eyeful of the brooch. “Where'd you get that bauble?”

“Just a family heirloom. Not much of one at that.” Feeling silly, I tucked the brooch back in my drawer under some clothes.

A week later I was putting away some freshly washed stockings when I felt ritually for the box and discovered it wasn't there. I tore our room apart searching. I looked in jacket pockets, inside shoes, the unlikeliest places. Then I went through all of Ruby's things. The brooch was gone.

Devastated, I waited up until Ruby tottered home. She bristled at my touching her possessions, said she didn't even remember the brooch, and fell asleep. She stuck to that story over oatmeal the next morning, swearing up and down that she hadn't taken it, hurt that I thought she could have.

I knew she was lying. Ruby had picked up a few tricks in her acting classes, but she couldn't fool me. She'd borrowed the brooch without permission then decided she liked it. Or maybe she dropped it while fumbling with Tommy in the backseat of his car. That was what upset me the most, not the possibility that the only memento from a woman I had never known was lost forever but that it had disappeared in so cavalier a fashion. I wouldn't let the matter rest, finally telling Ruby I'd forgive her if she'd misplaced it as long as she admitted she'd taken it.

“What do you keep going on about it for?” she said, exasperated. “Maybe
you
misplaced it. Maybe somebody else who lives in this dump helped themselves to it. I don't want to hear about it anymore.”

Uncle Danny once told me you couldn't truly hate someone unless you'd liked them first. You had to let them under your skin.

I avoided Ruby as much as possible after that, giving her the silent treatment whenever I couldn't. When I heard about the open apartment nearby I jumped on it, the salary I'd been squirreling away now a godsend. I never said anything to Ruby, but my packing had to be a dead giveaway. On my last morning in the boardinghouse we sat at opposite ends of the breakfast table without a word to each other.

Friendships in Hollywood never last,
Ruby once advised me. Another valuable lesson. At least she'd given me fair warning.

 

3

“SHE SOUNDS LIKE
some piece of work, this Ruby.” Morrow holstered his notebook inside his jacket.

“She wasn't all bad.”

“Coming between a girl and her mother's memory? Did other girls in the house have items go missing?”

“The ones who'd roomed with Ruby before me had the same problem.” I frowned. “A little advance notice would have been appreciated.”

“You're a stout judge of character if you didn't care for Tommy Carpa.”