The Gold Diggers (32 page)

Varda may have preferred it that way. He certainly didn't get his kicks from charity. Rita had begun to think that his dying without a will was no accident—he'd already provided for Frances Dean, after all, and otherwise, he may have thought the State of California deserved to have the rest, since he'd made it off California land. Outside of himself and Frances Dean, he wasn't interested in people, so why would he want to bequeath the feeding of orphans and the curing of cancer? And having filled a treasure room in the crook of two hills with a trove the likes of the Valley of the Kings, he probably didn't care about having a library named in his honor, or an indoor pool at a college, or a new wing of anything. Rita didn't really approve of his attitude, and if she'd known him way back when and could have sat him down like she used to do Peter's grandfather, she might have made some headway in bringing him around. It wasn't as if the money ever got to the poor people's pocketbooks intact, or even to the asphalt trucks pouring out a new freeway interchange. Rita would have explained how it all was eaten up by bureaucracy. Twelve million was hardly enough to buy the red tape to tie up a single bill in the Senate.

But Varda
wasn't
around to have his consciousness raised, and Rita had to make do with the Varda and Frances Dean she'd got. It wasn't just the cavalier way with money, anyway. If Rita could have written it as a script, she would have cured Frances Dean, dried her out, and let them marry. Stop it, she said to herself, think nothing. She looked at her watch. Seven minutes. Then she went to the other window, which still looked onto the parking lot, but from here she could see Highway 10 in the distance—LA one way, Palm Springs the other. Well, she thought, no need to go into it here—suffice it to say Rita's script would never have ended at Desertside. It was just that if Frances Dean had gotten sober, they would have lived like kings.

And the images came through, whether Rita liked them or not, and they had the feel of Harlow in a satin wrapper, eating her chocolates in bed in
Dinner at Eight
. Rita could see the two of them whizzing by this very spot in a Packard, off on a desert lark to a weekend house in Rancho Mirage. They wouldn't stop in West Covina unless they had a flat. And while a man in livery fixed it—the spitting image of Hey—in the parking lot of Desertside, Varda and Frances Dean would have their picnic in the backseat. That is, if they were hungry, because otherwise they'd fuck. West Covina wouldn't even register. Their heads would be too full of grand hotels to make room for it—the Connaught, the Pierre, here and there a Ritz. And what else? Horse races, certainly, and couturiers, topiary gardens and auctions of minor Impressionists. Rita loved to make lists for the two of them to live in. She probably had to today, to counteract the awful room she was waiting in, to her more awful than somebody dead.

She might even have advised Rusty Varda, in the event of a junk-free Frances Dean, to use his secret cave for wine alone. He wouldn't need it for anything else. Rita wondered if it was like telling the Shah not to build the Taj Mahal for a wedding gift, but then right away she saw the difference. The problem lay in the secrecy. It was like mining a mine in reverse, to give it all over to hiding treasure. Like putting the gold back in. Once they'd pulled together and got their health back—Rita had a list of what they ought to eat for breakfast, and a regimen of laps in the pool and sun and steam—then they owed it to themselves to pull all the gold out into the light. Put up a Taj Mahal in LA, or another one, anyway—it was a city where certain neighborhoods had them on every block. Not that one ought to go public for the public's sake, though the wars might all dry up in the fields if the Cézannes and Matisses were hung so everyone could see them. Rather, it was to give them a method for mining the heart that they must dig up and live above ground with their dearest things. If they didn't, then they didn't deserve any of it. Rita's fantasy life had moral laws, all of which tested people in clover as to whether they were worthy. It wasn't all ice cream and cake.

In Frances Dean's prison-gray room, faced with an emptiness that mocked the dreamed-up world in her head, where she figured out the way things should have gone, Rita knew she had to come clean. She wasn't satisfied at all with the Varda and Frances Dean she'd ended up with. She was glad to go this far for them—that is, let out the one of their souls still trapped in Limbo so they could meet, as per Varda's note, in a room where Beauty was held without ransom. But something stuck in Rita's throat whenever she tried to get excited about the reunion of two ghosts. She just didn't buy the idea of afterlife. She was raised a nothing by long-lapsed Catholics, and so she didn't even have a New York Episcopal vision of heaven as an oak-paneled library where the people stare a lot into a crackling fire in a fireplace, while the hansom cabs clop up and down the snow-lit avenue outside. Rita couldn't see it. She'd gone ahead with the killing today so that Varda and Frances Dean would still exist
somewhere
the way they'd always wanted, but the somewhere was—take it or leave it, Varda—only Rita's head. She blew life into them by her rage at what had become of them. In the secret room she didn't want them insubstantial as a dream, but they were.

She looked at her watch. A little less than four minutes left. She wished there was something outside the window she could remember this by, a tree or a couple of little girls with a jump rope, but the parking lot was relentless, the cars in rows, the sun on a hundred windshields. Rita was all that was happening at Desertside, she thought. It didn't have a shred of self to give back in exchange. She turned around again to the little thriller she'd set up. She went behind the respirator, scooped up the plug, and connected it into the wall. Mission accomplished. It wasn't as if the technical part had been all that taxing, but since, like Peter, she was all thumbs except when arranging flowers, she hummed with satisfaction as if she'd just bugged a political caucus or done a brain implant. She gave the room a once-over as she turned to go, but she knew it was clean because she'd brought nothing in and put nothing down. She hovered an instant over the roses, debating one as a souvenir. They wouldn't miss it. But she held back, since the flowers, at least, were what they ought to be, and she figured they had a right to go on as long as they could.

At the door she paused to pat herself on the back, because in a minute it would be still as death, as if she'd never been here at all. And then she gasped. The machine wasn't going. It hadn't started to breathe again when she plugged it back in, and she hadn't even noticed. She'd fallen in love with the silence. And now she started to shake. She suddenly knew how people could write their names all over a crime and, by force of silence alone, not know it. She darted over to the body of the machine, but it wasn't any use. She couldn't, for Christ's sake, fix the picture on a color TV. And while she'd gotten to think in the fifteen minutes that nobody cared enough to burst in on her and catch her red-handed, as if the act itself wasn't worth a followup chain of events, now she was almost choked with panic. The posse was galloping down the hall even as she turned the dials and, when that did nothing, tried to turn them back to where they'd been. It either had a starter she couldn't pin down, or it held its breath when the patient died. Get out, she told herself, because now they're going to know it's you and not a prettily timed coincidence. As if the roof had suddenly been lifted off, she felt the sear of the desert sun. It wasn't LA at all. They lynched their criminals way out here.

Fixing a rapturous look on her face—my dear Aunt Frances and I, we talked old times and the years fell away—Rita slipped out into the hall and hurried off. Luckily for her, it must have been the dead man's ward, because no door moved and no one made rounds. As far as Rita could gather, it was all done with machines now. The last anachronism was the heart-sleeved visitor, she thought with some small shiver of self-respect, even in the midst of the dread at hand. Striding hard, she might have made it all the way out if she'd kept her eyes straight ahead as she passed through the last swinging door to the lobby. But a man came through the adjoining door from the other side, and she stared full at him and froze as they held ajar their respective doors, in the act of propelling through. “Oh, you must be Mr. Webber” was suddenly written all over Rita's face. He smelled as if he'd had a bath in Jack Daniels, and he smiled and tipped his head in a manner exaggeratedly courtly. He would have gone right by without making the connection if Rita hadn't stared. She saw it dawn on him. I must be such a hardened criminal, she thought, that I want to be caught and put away, in a room as dreary as Frances Dean's.

“Miss Varda, isn't it? I was just coming to get you.”

“What for?”

“So we could talk. I'm Alec Webber.” They were both still holding doors on springs, and if Rita had let hers go, they would have had to have their talk in the hall. She pushed on through to the lobby, figuring it would be quicker, and Webber let his door go. “Tell me,” he said, “how you found Frances.”

For an instant, she thought he meant: How did you track her down to West Covina? But, no. He was asking how she thought Frances Dean was doing. Was she looking well? The question, perfunctory though it was, gave Rita the creeps. The use of the first name got her mad.

“Frankly, Mr. Webber, it makes me want to scream.” She knew she'd never pull off the nice-lady act she'd done with the nurse. She was a wreck from the stopped machine, so she had to admit to
something
.

“Don't take it hard,” he purred, putting a hand on her arm a moment, on the very spot the nurse had gripped. Things were standardized at Desertside. “It's just another part of life. Who knows if what we're living is more real than the world she's in?”

“
I
know,” Rita said. But how long, she wondered, would she hold to her convictions if she had to keep coming? Or if it was her own mother lying there tied to machines like a smothered puppet? She didn't want to know. The scream was pressing against the inside of her skull like a migraine. Rita wanted out. “But I had to see for myself,” she continued, stumbling on, casting about for a way to ingratiate so she could end it. “And I know she's getting the best of care, Mr. Webber. That's going to give me a lot of comfort whenever I think of her now.”

“So you're his daughter,” he said, with an oily shift of gears. “I didn't know he'd ever been married.”

“He wasn't,” she said, glad for the chance to go into her story, where she felt safe. “I took his name when I grew up. My adoptive parents finally told me.”

“And the mother?”

“I don't really know,” she said feelingly, “but if you think about it long enough, you start to make an educated guess. You understand?”

“Ah,” he said, and looked away. She had him on the run. She'd told him on the phone she'd never made contact with her father, what with one thing and another, and then he died, and now Frances Dean was all that was left of Varda, so since she was visiting here in LA, couldn't she come and see? It's something I'd like to do for my father, she'd said. She backed Mr. Webber right into a corner. But now she'd doubled it into a two-hanky tearjerker, and it became so poignant and intimate that even a nosy, jaded drunk like Alec Webber had to draw back discreetly. “I didn't have any idea,” he said.

“If it's true,” Rita went on, “then the two of them were even more unlucky than they seemed. They could have used me. I could have taken care of them.”

“Were they so unlucky, do you think? At least they were stars for a while,” he said, so unctuously she could tell it was one of his pet subjects. For a moment she was crushed, since she would have enjoyed a long talk about her orphaned state and her lonely mum and dad. “You know, we have a lot of movie people in Desertside, and generally they're pretty happy. Everyone lives in the past if they live long enough, and the stars have it all over the others.” It sounded as if he still had a tumbler of bonded and branch in his hand.

“You'd think they'd be bitter because it's all gone,” Rita said. To her, the image of a corridor of sleepy, broken refugees from silent films was insupportable. Everyone used to be young, too, but with movie stars there was proof of it on film, yellow and jumpy itself with age, but there they were. The silent ones from Varda's time especially were young as kids, their gestures big and amateur—for a few years yet, not surrendered to studios and salaries and the fall of ancient Rome. If they ended up here together, then Hell was a place like this. To get by, Rita thought, you have to pretend at some level that the old have always been old. But Desertside took away that, too.

Webber said, “They love to talk, and people want to hear it. The others go into themselves, because all they have is pictures of their families and the homes they've given up. I'm not saying some are
better
than others,” he hastened to add, “I just said happy. You have to have a story people have to know.”

“I see your point,” she said with a lot of cool, but in her heart relenting, since she saw what he meant. “But Frances Dean's not happy.”

“Ah,” he said again, and he seemed to relent himself. There was a pause in which Rita measured the distance, ten feet, to the main door. Why was he keeping her? So the day nurse could check on Frances Dean? Then he told her, more or less. “Rusty Varda left you well provided for, did he?”

“I've got more than I know what to do with, Mr. Webber,” she said reassuringly, and knew right away she'd made the right move. She thought: He's scared I'll sue to break the trust. He wants me too rich to care.

“Will we be seeing you again?” he asked, steering her solicitously toward the door.