The Four of Hearts (11 page)

CHAPTER 9

THE CLUB NINE

On Wednesday the twentieth the only completely peaceful persons in the City of Los Angeles and environs were John Royle and Blythe Stuart: they were dead.

It had been a mad three days. Reporters; cameramen, of the journalistic, artistic, and candid varieties; ageing ladies of the motion picture press; State police and men of Inspector Glücke's Homicide Detail; stars; producers; directors looking for inspiration; embalmers; preachers; debtors; mortuary salesmen; lawyers; radio announcers; real estate men; thousands of glamour-struck worshippers at the shrine of the dead pair – all milled and shouted and shoved and popped in and out and made the waking hours – there were few sleeping ones – of Bonnie and Ty an animated nightmare.

‘Might as well have planned services for the Bowl,' cried Ty, dishevelled, unshaven, purple-eyed from lack of rest. ‘For God's sake, somebody, can't I even send the old man out decently?'

‘He was a public figure in life, Ty,' said Ellery soothingly. ‘You couldn't expect the public to ignore him in death.'

‘That kind of death.'

‘Any kind of death.'

‘They're vultures!'

‘Murder brings out the worst in people. Think of what poor Bonnie's going through in Glendale.'

‘Yes,' scowled Ty. ‘I guess … it's pretty tough on a woman.' Then he said: ‘Queen, I've got to talk to her.'

‘Yes, Ty?' Ellery tried not to show surprise.

‘It's terribly important.'

‘It's going to be hard, arranging a quiet meeting now.'

‘I've got to.'

They met at three o'clock in the morning at an undistinguished little café tucked away in a blind alley off Melrose Street, miraculously unpursued – Ty wearing dark blue glasses and Bonnie a heavy nose-veil that revealed little more than her pale lips and chin.

Ellery and the Boy Wonder stood guard outside the booth in which they sat.

‘Sorry, Bonnie,' said Ty abruptly, ‘to bring you out at a time like this. But there's something we've got to discuss.'

‘Yes?' Bonnie's voice startled him; it was flat, brassy, devoid of life or feeling.

‘Bonnie, you're ill.'

‘I'm all right.'

‘Queen – Butch – somebody should have told me.'

‘I'm all right. It's just the thought of … Wednesday.' He saw her lips quiver beneath the veil.

Ty played with a glass of Scotch. ‘Bonnie … I've never asked a favour of you, have I?'

‘You?'

‘I'm … I suppose you'll think I'm a fool, getting sentimental this way.'

‘You sentimental?' Bonnie's lips curved this time.

‘What I want you to do …' Ty put the glass down. ‘It's not for me. It isn't even for my dad exclusively. It's as much for your mother as for dad.'

Her hands crept off the table and disappeared. ‘Come to the point, please.'

He blurted: ‘I think they ought to have a double funeral.'

She was silent.

‘I tell you it's not for dad. It's for both of them. I've been thinking things over since Sunday. Bonnie, they were in love. Before … I didn't think so. I thought there was something else behind it – I don't know what. But now … They died together. Don't you see?'

She was silent.

‘They were kept apart so many years,' said Ty. ‘And then to be knocked off just before … I know I'm an idiot to be talking this way. But I can't get over the feeling that dad – yes, and your mother – would have wanted to be buried together, too.'

She was silent for so long that Ty thought something had happened to her. But just as he was about to touch her in alarm, she moved. Her hands appeared and pushed the veil back from her face. And she looked and looked at him out of her dark-shadowed eyes, not speaking, not changing her expression; just looking.

Then she said simply: ‘All right, Ty,' and rose.

‘Thanks!'

‘It's mother I'm thinking of.'

Neither said another word. They went home by different routes – Ty in Ellery's coupé to Beverly Hills, Bonnie in the Boy Wonder's limousine to Glendale.

Then the coroner released the bodies, and John Royle and Blythe Stuart were embalmed, and for several hours on Wednesday morning their magnificent mahogany caskets, sheathed in purest Anaconda copper, with eighteen-carat gold handles and $50-a-yard hand-loomed Japanese silk lining stuffed with the down of black swans, were on public display in the magnificent mortuary on Sunset Boulevard which Sam Vix, who was surreptitiously superintending the production on a two-per-cent-commission basis, persuaded Jacques Butcher to persuade Ty Royle to beg the favour of Bonnie Stuart to select, which they did, and she did; and four women were trampled, one seriously, and sixteen women fainted, and the police had to ride into the crowd on their magnificent horses, which were all curried and glossed for the occasion; and one poorly dressed man who was obviously a Communist tried to bite the stirrup of the mounted policeman who had just run over him and was properly whacked over the head with a billy and dragged off to jail; and inside the mortuary all the glittering elect, tricked out in their most gorgeous mourning clothes – Mme Flo's and Magnin's and L'Heureuse's had had to hire mobs of seamstresses to get the special orders out in time for the funeral – remarked how beautiful Blythe looked: ‘Just as if she were asleep, the darling; if she weren't under glass you'd swear she was going to
move
!'

‘And yet she's embalmed; it's wonderful what they can do.'

‘Yes, and to think she's got practically
nothing
left inside. I read that they performed an autopsy, and you know what they do in autopsies.'

‘Don't be gruesome! How should I know?'

‘Well, but wasn't your first husband –'

‘– and didn't Bonnie show a too, too precious taste in dressing Blythe up in that
gorgeous
white satin evening gown with that perfectly
clever
tight bodice –'

‘She had a beautiful bust, my dear. Do you know she once told me she never wore a
girdle
? And I know for a fact that she didn't have to wear a cup-form brassière!'

‘– with the shirring at the waist and those
thousands
of accordion pleats –'

‘If she could only stand up, darling, you'd see what a cunning fan effect those pleats give!'

‘– and that one dainty orchid corsage and those
exquisite
diamond clips at the shoulder-straps – ‘I mean they look exquisite. Are they real, do you think, dear?'

‘And how handsome poor old Jack looked, in his starched bosom and tails, with that cynical half-smile on his face.'

‘Wouldn't you swear he was going to get right out of that casket and put his arms around you?'

‘Who put that gold statuette that Jack won in thirty-three in there with him?'

‘I'm sure I don't know; it does seem a little like bragging, doesn't it?'

‘Well, there's the Academy committee and they looked simply devastatingly pleased!'

‘He
was
a handsome devil, though, wasn't he? My second husband knocked him down once.'

‘Don't you think that's a little indiscreet, darling? – I mean with all these detectives around? After all, Jack was
murdered.
'

‘Don't be funny, Nanette! You know Llewelyn ran off to Africa or some place with that snippy extra-girl with the g-string and hips two years ago.'

‘Well, my dear, the things I could tell you about Jack Royle – not that I'm speaking ill of the dead, but in a way Blythe's better off. She'd never have been happy with him, the way he chased every chippy in town.'

‘Oh, my darling! I'd forgotten that you knew him well, didn't you?'

And over in Glendale, in the big seething house, Bonnie stood cold and tearless and almost as devoid of life as her mother down in Hollywood being admired by thousands; while Clotilde, whose plump cheeks and Gallic nose seemed permanently puffed out from weeping, dressed her – unresisted – in soft and striking black, even though Bonnie had often said she detested public displays of grief and typical Hollywood funerals; dressed Bonnie without assistance from Bonnie, as if in truth she were dressing a corpse.

And in Beverly Hills Ty was cursing Louderback between gulps of brandy and refusing to shave and wanting to wear slacks and a blazer, just to show the damned vultures, and Alan Clark and a hastily recruited squad of husky friends finally held him down while Louderback plied the electric razor and a doctor took the decanter away and forced Ty to swallow some luminal instead.

And then Ty and Bonnie met over the magnificent twin coffins at the mortuary, framed and bowered in gigantic banks of fresh-cut flowers until they and the corpses and the mortician's assistants and the Bishop looked like figures on a float at the annual flower festival; and neither said a single word; and the Bishop read a magnificent service against the heady-sweet background, bristling with ‘dear Lords' and ‘dear departeds', and Inspector Glücke almost wore his eyes out scanning the crowd on the fundamental theory that a murderer cannot resist visiting the funeral of his victims, and saw nothing, even though he stared very hard at Joe DiSangri Alessandro, who was present looking like a solemn little Italian banker in his morning coat and striped trousers; and Jeannine Carrel, the beautiful star with the operatic voice than whom no soprano in or out of the Metropolitan sang
Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life
more thrillingly, tearfully sang
Nearer, My God, to Thee
accompanied by the entire male chorus of Magna Studio's forthcoming super-musical production,
Swing That Thing
; and Lew Bascom did not even stagger under his share of the weight of Blythe's coffin, which was a testimonial to his stamina and capacity, since he had consumed five quarts of Scotch since Sunday night and his breath would have sent a buzzard reeling in dismay.

And among the other pallbearers present were Louis X. Selvin, executive president of Magna; an ex-Mayor; an ex-Governor; three outstanding stars (selected by Sam Vix on the basis of the latest popularity poll conducted by Paula Paris for the newspaper syndicate for which she worked); the president of the Motion Picture Academy; a Broadway producer in Hollywood making comical short subjects; Randy Round, the famous Broadway columnist, to whom no set in filmland was forbidden ground; an important official of the Hays office; and a special delegate from the Friars' Club. There was a good deal of crowding.

And somehow, aeons later, the motored processional, rich with Isotta-Fraschinis, Rolls-Royces, Cords, Lincolns, and special-bodied Duesenbergs managed to reach and penetrate the memorial park – Hollywoodese for ‘cemetery' – where a veritable ocean of mourners surged in eye-bursting waves, mourning, to await the interment ceremonies; and the Bishop, who seemed indefatigable, read another magnificent service while a choir of freshly scrubbed angel-faced boys in cute surplices sang magnificently, and thirty-one more women fainted, and ambulances came unobtrusively and plaintively to the scene, and one headstone was knocked over and two angels lost their left arms, and Jack and Blythe were lowered side by side into magnificent blue spruce-trimmed graves edged in giant fern and topped off with plaits of giant lilies; and Bonnie, disdaining the Boy Wonder's arm, stood cold, lifeless, straight of back, and watched her mother make the last slow descent, magnificently dramatic, into the earth; and Ty stood alone in his own empty dimension, with incurving shoulders and a wonderfully bitter smile, watching his father's clay make the same slow descent; and finally it was practically – not quite – over, and the only part of her costume Bonnie surrendered to posterity was her dry black lawn handkerchief, snatched from her hand by a sabled fat woman with maniacal eyes as Butcher led Bonnie back to his limousine; and Ty, observing, lost the last shred of his temper and shook his fist in the fat woman's face, to be dragged off by Lew, Ellery, and Alan Clark; and stars and stars and stars wept and wept, and the sun shone blithely over Hollywood, and everybody had a lovely time, and Sam Vix said with emotion, wiping the dampness from under his black patch, that it had all been simply – there was no other word for it – magnificent.

But once safely away from the Argus-eyed mob, Bonnie gave vent to a wild sobbing in the Boy Wonder's arms as the limousine dodged through traffic trying to escape the pursuing cars of the insatiable press.

‘Oh, Butch, it was so awful. People are such pigs. It was like the Rose Bowl p-parade. It's a wonder they didn't ask me to sing over the r-radio!'

‘It's over now, darling. Forget it. It's all over.'

‘And grandfather didn't come. Oh, I hate him! I phoned him myself this morning. He begged off. He said he was ill. He said he couldn't stand funerals, and would I try to understand. His own daughter! Oh, Butch, I'm so
miserable.
'

‘Forget the old buzzard, Bonnie. He's not worth your misery.'

‘I hope I never see him again!'

And when they got to the Glendale house Bonnie begged off and sent Butcher away and instructed Clotilde to bang the door in the face of anyone, friend or foe, who so much as tapped on it. And she shut herself up in her bedroom, sniffling, and tried paradoxically to find comfort in the bulky bundles of mail Clotilde had left for her.

Ty, who had to traverse the width of Hollywood to get home to Beverly Hills, changed from open rebellion to a sulky, shut-in silence; and his escort wisely left him to Louderback's stiff ministrations and departed. He had scarcely finished his third brandy when the telephone rang.

‘I'm not in,' he snarled to Louderback. ‘To anyone, d'ye hear? I'm through with this town. I'm through with everyone in it. It's a phony. It's mad. It's vicious. Everybody here is phony and mad and vicious. Tell whoever it is to go to hell.'