The Last Embrace (10 page)

But Jeanne’s room stayed silent as a tomb. Biting her lip, Lily thought about waking Red, then decided to wait until morning, by which time the police would have confiscated the photos and, she hoped taken Taunton into custody as he returned from his fishing trip.

Lily woke up at three-thirty a.m., slick with sweat. She threw back the covers, her limbs rigid from a nightmare. The glow from a faraway streetlight cast the room into unfamiliar shadows. The bed was lumpy, the furniture all wrong. It took a moment to remember she was in Kitty’s room. In the boardinghouse. In Hollywood, California. In her dream Lily had been trapped inside Freddy’s apartment by the manager who held the bowie knife, sharpening it against a whetstone.

In the room’s dimness, she saw the doorknob turn and heard the metal
snick, snick
of her dream. She’d locked the door last night before climbing into bed, unnerved by her close call. But she’d left the key in the lock.

Now she heard the wood strain as someone on the other end put weight against the door, pushing to see if it would give. The metal key rattled in its hole. The noises stopped. Lily shrank back, trying to make herself invisible. She was sure whoever stood in the hallway could hear the blood pounding in her temples. She had to keep perfectly still. The doorknob eased back into its original position, its cut-glass facets catching the dim light.

After an eternity, she heard quiet steps moving away. Lily strained her ears to make out where they went. Perhaps it was one of the girls, plagued with a headache and wanting to borrow an aspirin. Soon she’d hear a knock at another door, a muffled conversation down the hall. But her visitor hadn’t knocked. Was one of her fellow boarders a thief? But then why wouldn’t she just wait until Lily left the house? Lily slid out of bed. Silently, she tiptoed to the vanity and poured some water from a pitcher, her teeth chattering against the glass when she drank. Then she went to the window and stood at one side, careful not to show herself. She pulled the lacy curtains open a crack. The sidewalk was empty. She stood there for a long time, but nothing moved. She wondered if it was possible to conjure up evil by thinking about it too much. Shivering and stiff, Lily moved through the milky gray light and got back into bed.

October 13, 1949

W
alking downstairs for breakfast, Lily heard the exasperated voice of Detective Magruder in the parlor, interrogating Jeanne. The girl was weeping.

“I’m not lying,” she said. “I was sound asleep at twelve-thirty a.m. I haven’t left the house since you were here yesterday. I swear it.”

Lily froze in the hallway.

“The female who called our hotline said it was an emergency. She gave the operator the name and address of Freddy Taunton, the same man you called Detective Pico about last night. She mentioned the existence of pornographic photos involving the deceased. I’d like to know what’s going on.”

“I’ve got no idea,” Jeanne wailed.

Lily stepped into the parlor.

“Good morning, Detective Magruder. Has there been a break?”

Magruder gave her an annoyed look. His eyes were bloodshot and his clothes rumpled, like he hadn’t slept all night. The cologne he’d applied didn’t quite dispel the reek of a brewery.

“You girls and your mass hysteria have us running around like chickens with our heads cut off,” Magruder said.

“Did you find pornographic photos of Kitty Hayden at Freddy Taunton’s apartment?” Lily asked.

“No, we did not,” Magruder roared.

Lily blinked. “You didn’t?”

“We found nothing except a foiled burglary. The manager let some girl into Taunton’s apartment last night after she fed him a sob story. When he got suspicious and checked on her, he caught her going out the back window.”

“What was she trying to steal?” Lily asked shakily.

“Maybe your friend here can enlighten us all,” Magruder said, jabbing a thumb at Jeanne, who buried her face in her hands. “Because of her, I drove back from Palm Springs in the middle of the night and tore apart an apartment with nothing to show for it. Because of her, my partner’s spent five hours down at the harbor, tracking down every passenger manifest for the deep-sea charters. None of them have a Taunton on their lists.”

Lily looked Magruder in the eyes. “Maybe the trip was a red herring. To give Taunton time to get away. Jeanne said he used to tie her and Kitty up, gag them, then watch them try to escape. Maybe he got a little rough with Kitty and things got out of control.” Lily turned to Jeanne. “Did he ever splash red paint on you to make it look like blood?”

“He suggested it once.” Jeanne blushed furiously and stared at the floor. “I told him it made me uncomfortable, so he dropped it.”

Lily raised an eyebrow in Magruder’s direction. “Maybe there are pictures of Kitty too.”

She couldn’t believe the police had missed the photo she’d dropped in the living room, the pulled-up carpet in the bedroom closet, the envelope beneath.

And then it hit her with the force of a thunderclap. The sleazy manager! He would have picked up the first photo, gotten interested, then found the others she’d left half stuffed in the bedroom closet. To a guy like him, those photos were a gold mine. He could sell them to a porno outfit or use them to blackmail his tenant. And if he recognized the girl in the photos as the infamous “Scarlet Sandal,” he might stash them safely away until the heat died down.

If Lily confessed to lying and sneaking into Freddy Taunton’s place, it would be her word against the manager’s, and who would believe her, especially if the photos had disappeared? From the look in Magruder’s eyes, she had little doubt that he’d toss her in jail for breaking the law and interfering with the murder investigation.

No, Lily needed proof before she said anything about the photos.

After Magruder left, Lily plotted her day over coffee and toast. By eight a.m., she was riding the bus on her way to RKO Studios in Culver City to find Max Vranizan. The horizontal city was bathed in golden light, making everything shimmer—glitzy department stores, nightclubs, restaurants, record company headquarters, and swank apartments. Farther off, a beige shroud of smog blanketed the horizon, the legacy of the factories and refineries that had sprung up during the war. Amid the morning traffic Lily saw a new phenomenon: white government coupes that said “air quality control.”

Lily got off a block from the studio, found a taxi, tipped the driver $5, and asked him to take her through the studio gate.

“Tell the guard it’s Miss Kessler, just in from New York, to see Mr. Max Vranizan in Special Effects about the model-making job,” she told the driver.

Lily had grown up on the fringes of the movie industry, which had proved handy once in a newly liberated part of France when they’d captured a little Nazi who’d refused to speak, even after being roughed up by the Maquis. When it was the Americans’ turn, Lily made small talk and learned he greatly admired Charlie Chaplin and hoped to move to Hollywood after the war and become a comedian. Lily explained that she’d gone to school with Chaplin’s daughter. If he cooperated, she’d use her contacts to get him a screen test. Soon he was dictating names and locations—it turned out he was the paymaster for more than a hundred Nazi agents left behind liberated lines. After the man told all he knew, Lily’s bosses handed him back to the French, who promptly shot him.

The RKO guard waved them through gates that rose like castle walls. Inside, the studio resembled a factory more than a fairy tale, a series of nondescript hangars and bungalows. The taxi cruised past a glass and muslin building stenciled with the words
SOUND STAGE
1. Then a western town appeared, complete with Main Street, saloons, hitching posts, and townspeople in homespun cloth. Men bent over movie equipment. A camera on a dolly. Someone yelled, “Action,” and a passel of cowboys on horses came galloping up, scattering pedestrians.

Lily memorized the landmarks so she could retrace her steps. In the rearview mirror, the driver grinned.

“I was a soundman here before the war. But the studios have cut back and I needed a steady job when I got out of the service.” He slapped the dash. “Got a mortgage and a kid on the way.”

They pulled up to a warehouse and the cabbie gestured with his cigarette. “That’s where they do the special effects.”

Lily studied her driver. “Any chance you know this Max Vranizan?”

“Nope, but you won’t have any trouble. They don’t get too many pretty girls on those monster movie sets.”

As her eyes adjusted to the artificial light of the warehouse, she realized the cabbie had brought her to the wrong place. A row of seamstresses sat bent over sewing machines, working pedals. Off to the side, two women sewed appliqué onto high heels.

“Is this Special Effects?”

“You ask over there.” A man with a heavy accent gestured into the next room, where a team of women ironed Renaissance gowns while a supervisor urged them to hurry, everyone on the set was waiting. Steam hissed from the irons, mingling with the acrid smell of perspiration that rose from garments previously worn under hot stage lights.

Lily kept walking.

In the next room, a beautiful woman was being fitted in an evening dress, three ladies kneeling, pins in mouths, hemming her gown. She looked familiar. With a shock, Lily realized it was Ingrid Bergman.

“Excuse me,” she asked again. “Could you please direct me to Special Effects?”

A seamstress rocked back on her knees. “You’re in the wrong building, dearie,” she said. “Step outside, go left one block, turn right and it’s the first building on the left.”

Lily followed her instructions and saw actors hurrying by in costumes from the last two thousand years. Props rolling along on wheeled carts, a man leading a white Lipizzaner stallion. Lily came to a white two-story building with grand columns that reminded her of George Washington’s home in Mount Vernon. This couldn’t be it. Was she lost again? Seeing a group of modest buildings to the right, she walked in to ask, but before she could say anything, a horse-faced woman wearing a severe suit appeared.

“It’s about time.” She threw up her arms, striding toward Lily. “I called the agency at seven a.m. He’s been holed up since yesterday afternoon and we’ve already gone through three—”

“But—”

“And I’ll be gone most of the day.”

The woman clasped Lily’s wrist and tugged her like a determined shepherd dog into a large office with two secretarial desks facing each other.

“No excuses. I’m sure they told you
he
doesn’t like to hear them.”

Lily knew her ruse was about to be discovered. “I think there’s been a—”

“That’s quite enough,” the woman said. “And you’d better not try that with
him.
” She stepped back, appraising Lily. “Now. Where’s your steno pad?”

“Excuse me?”

“Honestly, these agencies today, I don’t know what’s—”

“I’m not a secretary,” Lily said, but at that moment a door opened and a tall husky man in gray flannels stepped out from an inner office. From behind round spectacles beamed a brisk intelligence.

“Here she is, sir, I’m so sorry. I—”

“Thank you, Myra. Come along, then,” the big man said in a hoarse voice, holding the door. “We’ve got a lot to get through.”

Myra shoved a steno pad and two pencils in Lily’s hands and pushed her into the man’s office.

“You can go now,” she told a girl slumped with exhaustion inside, steno pads stacked beside her. The girl left.

The man in the suit exuded an aura of power. Lily hesitated. She could either confess the truth now and get thrown off the lot or try to turn this case of mistaken identity to her advantage. Perhaps she could learn something about Kitty’s murder if she kept her eyes and ears open.

Lily walked to the just-vacated chair and sat down, knees pressed together demurely, steno pad on her lap. From downcast lids, she examined her new boss and saw a brash, ungainly, and yet somehow charismatic man with wavy salt-and-pepper hair. Leaning back in his leather chair, he tapped a pencil against his palm, eyes focused on the far wall, where a framed and signed poster of
Gone With the Wind
hung.

“The first item of correspondence is a letter to LB,” the man announced, propping his feet on the enormous desk stacked high with papers.

Lily waited for the rest of the name, but the man launched into the memo, approving the loan of an actress to MGM for a picture.

He concluded, “Sign it, ‘dictated but not read by David O. Selznick.’”

Lily blinked and looked up. She’d spent the last five years abroad, but even she knew
that
name. She stared at her first Hollywood mogul.

“Ready?” Selznick drummed his fingers on the desk.

“Excuse me, Mr. Selznick.” Lily recovered herself. “I didn’t catch LB’s last name.”

Selznick looked disgruntled. “Mayer. Louis B. My, you are green. But if you caught everything else, you’re everything the agency promised. Now. The next letter is to…”

Lily flipped the page.

“Miss Betty Goldsmith, New York, New York.” Selznick’s eyes twinkled. “Would you like to know who she is?”

“Why, no, Mr. Selznick, I—”

“She’s my foreign rights coordinator. Now, if we might begin…”

“Of course, sir.” Lily bent her head.

Selznick dictated in a brilliant but meandering style that reminded her of a Dickens novel, and he stopped often to take calls. When he began a long phone discussion with someone about Howard Hughes, Lily slipped out to use the powder room.

As she returned, a woman ran into Selznick’s outer office, clutching a steno pad.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” the woman said. “My son threw up blood on the way to the babysitter’s and I had to rush him to the hospital.”

Lily saw the notepad and realized who the woman was. Luckily Selznick was still on the phone, arguing good-naturedly with someone named Leland. She hurried to the young woman and led her back to the lobby.

“Don’t you worry about it, honey,” Lily said, “the studio sent me over on loan from, uh…Special Effects. Why don’t you go back to the hospital and stay with your son? We’re fine for today.”

“Do you really mean it?” the woman cried.

“Here.” Lily slipped her a $20 bill. “Buy him some toys, and tell the agency you worked all day. Same if they call tomorrow. And let’s keep it between us, shall we?”

In any other city, the woman would have wondered what was going on. But this was Hollywood, where people did crazy things to get discovered. The girl thanked Lily and hurried away.

Harry Jack woke up wondering why he was on the couch. Then he saw the kid in the kitchen, cramming a piece of bread into his mouth. He also smelled him.

“It’s shower-time for you, kid—Gadge,” he added, remembering the odd name the kid had given him yesterday. He’d said that was the name pinned to his shirt when the people at the orphanage had found him.

Harry lit a cigarette, took a hit, and exhaled thoughtfully. After his windfall at the
Mirror,
he’d taken the kid to lunch at Taylor’s Steakhouse and then offered to drive him back to the orphanage, but Gadge wouldn’t tell him the name and where it was located. The kid had stuck to him all day and had ended up falling asleep at a craps game, so Harry had no choice but to bring him home. But the kid couldn’t stay here.