Murder on High (28 page)

Closing her empty suitcase, she carried it up to the storage room on the fourth floor, which was also where her office was located. After putting the suitcase away, she looked up Harold’s number, and dialed.

A maid answered the phone, and she gave her name.

In a minute, the director was on the line. “How are you, Charlotte?” he asked. His voice was thin and quavery. He was getting very old. A generation of Hollywood history was marching toward the grave.

For a moment, they exchanged greetings. Charlotte saw him fairly often, so they didn’t have a lot of catching up to do. “I have a favor to ask,” she said finally, getting right to the point.

“You know I’m always ready to help, Charlotte,” he said.

She could picture him sitting in his elegant home, wearing white Viyella trousers and a white V-neck tennis sweater. Always impeccably dressed; always impeccably mannered. A gentleman of the old school in a town full of sharks.

“I’m calling about Iris O’Connor. I’m still working on my autobiography, and I’d like to talk with her about the good old days, but I lost touch with her ages ago. Did you ever hear what had happened to her?”

“I ran into Iris a few years ago,” Ames replied. “On the street in front of Polito’s office. She’d been in to see him. I hardly recognized her: her hair had turned snow white. I thought I told you about it at the time.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I meant to. Must have forgotten. Anyway, I asked her what she was doing. She said she’d become a follower of that nature philosopher from Massachusetts. The transcendentalist.”

“Thoreau?” prompted Charlotte.

“That’s right, Thoreau. I have no memory for names anymore. I asked her to lunch, but she was on her way to Massachusetts to deliver a paper about Thoreau and the Maine Indians at the Thoreau Lyceum. That’s all I know.”

“Harold,” she said, “has anybody else asked you about Iris recently? Say, within the last couple of years?”

There was silence on the line while he thought for a moment.

“Any phone calls, for instance?” she prompted.

“There
was
a phone call, now that you mention it. Two years ago, maybe more. It was from one of Linc Crawford’s sons. He also wanted to know what had become of her. I told him roughly the same thing I just told you. He said he was still trying to work out that business at the Chateau Marmont.”

“You mean Linc’s death?”

“Yes,” he said. “The boys were there, remember?”

Charlotte thought back to that horrible day. There was a lot that was a blank—it had been such a tremendous shock—but she did have a vague memory of Linc having been with his sons.

“One of them found the body, as I recall.”

“But what would that have to do with Iris?” she asked.

“Iris had been there too. Just before Linc died.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I didn’t either. The son told me. He didn’t know who she was until that L.A.
Times
article came out about the blacklist, in which it was revealed that she had testified against Linc. He later saw an old photograph of her, and realized that it was she whom he had seen in the room just before Linc died.”

“What was she doing there?”

“Probably dropping off the rewrite of the script for the film I wanted to do with Linc. That was why he was there, to talk about it with me. I wanted to make sure he was committed before I started moving mountains to get studio approval to use a blacklisted actor.”

Charlotte didn’t think she’d ever known why Linc had been at the Marmont that day, but there was a lot about that day that she’d never known, or, if she had known, had buried somewhere in her memory.

Harold continued. “The boys had come along with him. He was seeing them so infrequently at that point—that was after the custody battle—that he was reluctant to get a babysitter. So I told him to bring them along.”

“
Would
the studio have approved?” she asked, curious about the turn Linc’s life might have taken, had he lived.

“I think so. There was already a sense that
Red Rocks
was going to be a blockbuster. If they hadn’t approved then, they certainly would have by the time
Red Rocks
was released. They had nothing to lose; Ireland had already tested the waters for them.”

“But why was Iris doing the script? I thought she’d left town five years before, that she was well out of the business by then.”

“She
was
out of the business. I contacted her through Polito. I wanted the best, and she was the best. I had told her to drop the script by my suite at the Marmont when she got into town. But I never made the connection between the woman who came to the suite and Iris.”

“Where were you during all of this?”

“I only remember that I’d gone out, and was delayed in getting back. I had called the hotel, and asked the desk clerk to see to it that Linc and the boys were let in. Of course, you know what I found when I finally got there.”

Charlotte didn’t want to be reminded.

Harold continued: “Iris delivered the script to me a few days later. She never said anything about having gone to the suite earlier.” He paused for a moment and then continued. “It was a peculiar thing about that script …”

“What was peculiar?”

“It was so crass and heavy-handed. She’d lost that wonderful butterfly touch that she used to have. She was like a concert violinist who wakes up one day and finds she can no longer play cadenzas. I always wondered if her muse had been dependent on her being in Hollywood.”

No, Charlotte thought, it wasn’t that. It was that her creative blood had flowed out through the wound in her conscience. It was time for Charlotte to confess. “I’m afraid I misled you, Harold,” she said. “It’s true that I’m interested in finding out about Iris for my autobiography, but I’m also interested for another reason.”

“What?” he asked.

“She’s dead,” she replied. “Murdered.”

There was a stunned silence on the other end of the line.

“The police didn’t know it was her, at first. She was living in Maine under her married name.” She took a breath, and then said, “One of the suspects is Linc’s son, Brent.” She proceeded to tell him how Iris had died, and about Brent having been seen on the mountain at about the time of her death.

“I see,” Harold said. “I don’t remember the name of the son who called.”

“Did you tell him where Iris was living?”

“I didn’t know where she was living. But I suppose he could have tracked her down through the Thoreau Lyceum. Do you think he thought Iris was responsible in some way for Linc’s death?”

Charlotte thought: a ruined career as a motive for murder—no; but the conviction that Iris had indirectly caused his father’s death? Yes, indeed. Her pulse quickened; she was on the trail again. “I don’t know. Maybe something happened that day to give him that idea.”

“Like what?”

The wheels in Charlotte’s brain were turning. “Maybe Linc had found out somehow that it was Iris who had testified against him, and confronted her about it when she showed up at your suite.”

“An altercation of some sort,” offered Harold.

“Which was witnessed by Brent,” Charlotte added.

“My memory’s hazy,” Harold said. “But I think I remember something about an argument. Wait a minute. I would have the newspaper clippings about Linc’s death in one of Miriam’s scrapbooks.”

“Ah, yes, Miriam’s scrapbooks.” Harold’s wife had kept scrapbooks of references to her husband and his movies for over fifty years. Charlotte had used them several times in researching her autobiography, but she had skipped the volumes that covered her black years.

“What year was that?”

“Nineteen fifty-seven,” she said. “April. April twenty-sixth, to be precise. He was pronounced dead at five fifty-four
P.M.
”

“I’m sure it’s a date you’ll never forget, Charlotte,” he said softly.

Though she knew the date and the time, she knew few of the other details surrounding Linc’s death. People had kept that information from her, and she hadn’t asked. All she could remember was several weeks of stupor induced by the sedatives that had been prescribed by her doctor.

Harold was back in a minute with the scrapbook for that year. “I was right,” he said. He read:

“‘A room service waiter reported hearing an argument between Crawford and an unidentified woman shortly before the body was found by Crawford’s son Brent. The woman had entered the director’s hotel suite about twenty minutes earlier.’”

That’s why Charlotte hadn’t known anything about this.
An unidentified woman:
people would have thought Linc was cheating on her.

“Where was Brent during the argument?” she asked.

She waited while Harold scanned the article. “Here it is: ‘Crawford’s son was unable to identify the woman. He said his father had sent him and his brother into an adjoining bedroom to watch television when the disagreement with the woman broke out.’”

Charlotte wondered whether Linc’s heart attack had come before or after Iris left. If she’d walked out on a dying man, his death would have been that much more on her conscience.

“What do you think?” asked Harold.

“I think the scenario might have gone something like this. Woman enters room, argument breaks out, father sends son out, son returns to find father dead. Son thinks the shock of the argument brought on heart attack. Son tracks the woman down and kills her in revenge.”

“Sounds pretty plausible to me.”

“I’m not sure I’m ready to deal with plausible,” Charlotte said. “The prospect of unveiling Linc’s son as a murderer is not one that’s pleasant to me, even if he thought he was avenging Linc’s death.” She paused, then asked, “Do you think you could make copies for me of those articles?”

“Do you have a fax machine?” he asked.

“As a matter of fact, I do,” she said. It was a recent acquisition with which she had yet to get acquainted. But she did have the number, and she gave it to him. Then she thanked him, and said goodbye.

A moment later, her phone rang to alert her that the fax was coming through. While the machine was spewing out papers, Charlotte went back to the storage room and retrieved her suitcase.

When she got back to her office a few minutes later, the machine had finished printing the copies. Taking them out, she folded them and stuffed them into her pocket. She would read them on the plane.

She had decided to take the next shuttle to Boston.

The evidence against Brent seemed overwhelming, Charlotte thought as she repacked her bag. He was on the mountain at the time of Iris’ death, and he had a strong motive: he may have believed Iris to be indirectly responsible for his father’s death. He had been tracking her for some time; putting ads in the papers, calling her former associates, even parking in front of her house. But she still had major problems with Brent as a suspect. First, if he had been intending to kill her, why put an ad seeking her whereabouts, with a phone number that could be traced to him, in the entertainment press? Why tell Harold about her being in the hotel room just before Linc’s death? These acts would most certainly have linked him with her murder, to say nothing of his name on the park entrance permit. One explanation was that he hadn’t been planning to kill her. His intent may only have been to track her down for the purpose of clarifying the events of that day in his mind, just as he had told Harold. The other explanation was that he had been counting on her death being ruled an accident. Or, if it
was
determined to have been a murder, on the victim being identified as Iris Richards, a wildflower nurserywoman from Old Town, Maine, rather than Iris O’Connor, the Hollywood screenwriter.

In any case, there was still a big gap in the trail of evidence between Brent’s conversation with Harold and the summit of Katahdin. To find out how he had ended up on the Knife Edge, Charlotte had to follow in his footsteps. And the next place his footsteps had taken him was probably the Thoreau Lyceum. Checking in her Thoreau Association file, she turned up a membership card that gave the Lyceum’s hours as nine to five daily. It was now only a little after noon. She would have plenty of time; Concord was only an hour at the most from Logan Airport. Depending on what she found out, she would then either go back to Maine or return to New York. It was a lot of running around, but she was used to that. She even liked it; it reminded her of her old days on the road. As her friend Kitty had said, she was a wanderer. Her suitcase packed, she called the Lyceum to make sure it would be open. The woman who answered said she would be there until seven. Then she wrote a note for her secretary, Vivian, telling her where she was going. That done, she headed out to the street to hail a cab for the airport.

Riding through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, the thought struck her that she probably should have called Tracey. It would be only polite to let him know what she was up to. But she decided instead to call him after her visit to the Lyceum. Maybe then she would have something to report.

The Thoreau Lyceum was located in a small Colonial house on a side street in downtown Concord. She later learned that it was next door to the house in which Thoreau had grown up. She entered a large room filled with display cases containing artifacts from Thoreau’s life. The walls were hung with photographs of Thoreau and the other members of the Concord Authors’ Circle—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne among them—as well as with large wood-block prints illustrating some of America’s most quotable writer’s most quotable quotes, including “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer”; “I have travelled a good deal in Concord”; “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”; and Charlotte’s favorite, “It is a great art to saunter.” A bulletin board on one wall displayed some of the junk mail that Henry David had received in recent months: a notification that he was eligible for a VISA gold card, a promotional brochure for a condominium development in Phoenix named Walden Acres, a notification from the Publisher’s. Clearing House that he was eligible to win the grand prize of two million dollars, and a get-to-know-us invitation from the Bank of Boston.