Wages of Sin (15 page)

“What?” He had brought the tumbler up to his lips and now he held it there and looked at her over the rim. He'd made his eyes go wide with surprise, but then he could make his face show you anything. “You're thinking I killed him now? God, that is rich,” he said, and he laughed. An excited, surging laugh that brought a burn of vomit rising up into her throat.

She took a few steps back, out of the swinging reach of his fist, even though he'd actually never struck her in the face before. He found other ways to hurt her, ways that most times didn't even leave bruises.

He was acting so smug, though, like he knew something. Maybe he hadn't been with his latest floozy last night, after all. Maybe he had waited outside until they'd left the house and he'd followed them instead, and if he had followed them then he was smart enough to have most of it all figured out by now. Albert Payne Layton was a very smart man, and practicing cruelty was a pleasure to him, a pleasure and an art. He would enjoy ruining everything just for the practice.

She'd become so lost in her thoughts she hadn't noticed that Bertie had come up to her again, was looming over her. “You're looking quite pensive, my dear,” he said. “Are you doing some mental embroidering on your alibi, going over all the lies you told that cop to see if you might have slipped up, maybe revealed one of those deep dark secrets of yours? Did he ask you, for instance, where you were at two o'clock this morning?”

“Where were you?” she blurted, and was instantly sorry.

But he only smiled and made a tsking sound with his tongue, shaking his head. “Now, now, Flo. Remember the rules. I get to fuck whomever I want, while you stay at home and do your penance.”

A small gasp came from the doorway, and they both jerked around. Their daughter, Della, stood there and she had herself all dressed up like a flapper, with too much makeup around her mouth and eyes and a skirt that was way too short.

“Hey, honey,” Albert said. “You look nice.”

“Thanks, Daddy.”

She gave him a bright smile, and then her gaze went to her mama, and Flo expected her daughter to look almighty pleased with herself because she always could wrap her daddy twice around her little finger. Only on Della's face, as the girl looked at her, was contempt and a strange kind of horrified disgust.

She knows,
Flo thought. She looked at her husband and saw that he was laughing at her, laughing with his eyes.
Dear God in heaven, she knows. He has gone and told her everything.

Chapter Eleven

S
ixteen-year-old Mary Lou Trescher was having the best day of her life.

Before her dazzled eyes was the deck of a pirate ship awash with sea foam. Blood ran through the scuppers, and battle smoke drifted through the broken spars and masts and tangled rigging. The wooden hull groaned with the rocking waves. The air smelled of salt and cordite, and adventure.

The ship looked so real; big as life, even though it was indoors, inside a giant river warehouse that had once stored bananas and coffee off the boat from South America. Bright Lights Studios had taken over the cavernous building and turned it into a place where a ship floated in a huge tank rather than the sea, and the cypress swamp onshore had been painted on a canvas backdrop. A giant screen that looked made out of tinfoil arced over the ship, where the sky should have been.

It was all so amazing she had to pinch herself to believe that it was real. Yet here she was, Mary Lou Trescher, on a movie set, watching a Remy Lelourie picture being made. Reginald Trescher, her second cousin on her daddy's side—who had worked for the electric company until by some miracle he had landed a job working the
Cutlass
set lights—had used his connections to get her a pass into the warehouse this morning, so that she could watch them shoot the sword fight scene.

The other Fantastics were all just going to be
so
jealous when they heard. Mary Lou wanted to rush out right now and tell them what she was seeing and doing, even though nothing much had happened yet. A few men walked about, carrying clipboards and picking their way through the heavy electrical cables that snaked all over the floor. A small orchestra was tuning up their instruments; Reggie had told her they played mood music suited for each scene to inspire the actors. Someone turned on a giant fan and the sails flapped and waves splashed up over the ship's rails, but after a few moments of that the fan was turned off.

Seven cameras on tripods had been placed around the ship, and a bearded man dressed in an open-necked shirt, jodhpurs, and riding boots kept going from one to the other, peering through the viewfinders with a monocled eye and making notes on the scenario he carried rolled up in his hand.

Her cousin Reggie had pointed him out to her as the famous German director Peter Kohl. Reggie had said Mr. Kohl was a man painstaking with details: clothes, makeup, lighting—it all had to be just so, which was why everything was taking so long. “It takes us hours,” Reggie had said, “just to set up and shoot a couple feet of film.”

What Mary Lou most wondered, though, but hadn't dared to ask, was why Mr. Kohl had dressed himself to look like he'd just gotten off a horse when they were making a pirate movie.

So far Mary Lou had only gotten a glimpse of Remy Lelourie herself, when the movie star had stuck her head out the door of her portable dressing room and asked if they were ready for her yet. The dressing room itself was a marvel, for it was on wheels. It made Mary Lou think of the Gypsy wagons she had seen in countless movies.

After several more long minutes when nothing was happening, Mary Lou drifted over for a closer look at one of the cameras. It was smaller than she would have imagined, not much bigger than her school satchel, but with two spools the size of phonograph records fastened onto the top.

“Touch that and you're dead.”

Mary Lou nearly leaped out of her skin, and then she nearly fainted when she turned and got a look at the man who had spoken. She thought for a minute he was wearing costume makeup, or a mask, so hideously scarred was half of his face.

If he was insulted by how she was staring so wild-eyed at him, he didn't show it. It was hard to tell from his expression, for the skin on the scarred side of his face was thick and stiff as leather. “I'm Jeremy Doyle,” he said. “The chief cameraman of this extravagant fantasy. And that's my camera you were about to touch without permission.”

Mary Lou stuttered an apology. She was having a hard time deciding where to look. It seemed an insult to look away, as if she couldn't bear the sight of him, and yet to look at him was to give the impression of staring. It seemed that whatever she did, look or not look, was liable to hurt his feelings and then suddenly it struck her: this Jeremy Doyle had said he was a cameraman. A
cameraman.
Somebody…who was it? Hedda Hopper? Norma Shearer? had been discovered sipping a nectar soda in a drugstore by a Warner Brothers cameraman.

So she made herself look at this cameraman full in his scarred face and held out her hand, palm-side down. “Mary Lou Trescher,” she said, and then she gave him the jaded flapper girl pout that Remy Lelourie had made famous in
Jazz Babies.
“I was only trying to amuse myself while I waited for something to happen. Are movie sets always this dull, Mr. Doyle?”

His mouth screwed into a fearsome grimace, and it took Mary Lou a moment to realize it was his version of a smile. “Listen to yourself. You're not going to tell me you don't find this glamorous.” He waved his hand, encompassing the set, and as if it had been a cue, the banks of incandescent lamps in back of the pirate ship flooded on, bathing the deck in a wash of white light.

Mary Lou's breath left her in a soft sigh, for what had seemed spectacular before was now otherworldly. The open warehouse rafters faded away, and the cables and dollies and folding chairs and arc lamps—they all disappeared and suddenly she was a lady pirate at sail on the high seas.

She felt the cameraman's gaze on her and she blushed, although she was pleased, too, of course, for it must mean he thought her pretty. Of all the girls in the Fantastics, Mary Lou was the one everybody said most looked like Remy Lelourie.

“Oh, Christ,” he said. “Now I suppose you'll be packing your bags and running off to Hollywood.” He reached around her and did something to his camera, snapping a cap off the lens and winding a crank. “Let me give you some advice, baby doll, even though you won't take it and you sure as hell won't like it. The studio lots are already full of girls like you, with your simpering lollipop faces. I can tell right off you haven't got what it takes to make it, so save yourself the price of a train ticket and a broken heart.”

Mary Lou stared at his ravaged face, hurt and stunned breathless, and then something seemed to crack loose inside her and her eyes welled with tears.

“I knew you wouldn't like it,” he said, and he turned on his heel and walked away from her.

Mary Lou took off running in the opposite direction. Tears blurred her eyes so, she nearly ran smack into an open door. She stopped, her chest heaving with pent-up sobs, trying to hold back the tears with her hands and getting mascara all over her white gloves, when she realized that the door she'd almost run into was Remy Lelourie's dressing room. The movie star was not inside, but Alfredo Ramon's dressing room was pulled up next to it and its door was also open, just a crack, but enough for Mary Lou to climb the two steps and take a peek. She almost gasped aloud at what she saw.

Cutlass
's leading man was leaning against a beautiful cherry wood dressing table, one heel braced on a small red and blue Oriental carpet, the other leg sharply bent at the knee. The sleeve of his black pirate's shirt was rolled up, and his bare arm rested against his thigh. His fist was clenched, the sinews rigid. Rubber tubing bit into the muscle of his forearm. He was injecting something into his wrist with a hypodermic needle.

His full lips fluttered with a sigh as he pressed down on the plunger. His head fell back, his eyelids squeezing shut, and his face tightened as if in a rictus of pain. He stayed that way, frozen, except for the shudders rippling over his taut muscles and the harsh shocks of his breathing.

After a while his breathing eased and he straightened slowly. He untied the rubber tubing and pulled the glass syringe out of his arm, dropping it on the dressing table, shaking his hand. He turned his head, and the blurred focus of his eyes brightened with amusement. “Hey, baby, what're you looking at?”

Mary Lou's face burned with embarrassment because she thought he was talking to her, but then she realized it was Remy Lelourie, who must have been standing on the other side of the partly closed door, for he said, “Come on, Remy, don't frown like that. You'll put lines in your beautiful face and it is such a beautiful face, too. More beautiful even than mine, I think…Or maybe not.” He laughed suddenly, wildly. “Whooh. This horse I scored is something else. You sure you don't want some?”

Remy Lelourie came further into the room, enough for Mary Lou to see her now. She was wearing her pirate's costume: black satin shirt, tight black leather pants, and knee-high boots. She had a sword buckled around her waist. A bloodstained bandage was wrapped around her head.

“God, Freddy, we're about to go at each other with swords and you're flying to the moon. Does Peter know you're using again?”

“He doesn't care.” His words were slurred, but an edge was there, cutting through. “You're the box office, baby. 'Long as you behave, everything is copacetic.”

Remy started to turn away from him but he grabbed her arm and jerked her back around to face him. “Are you fucking him yet?”

She tried pulling free of him, but his grip tightened. “Freddy, don't be like this.”

“The last picture we made together, you started out in my bed and ended up in his. I was thinking that maybe this time if you started out in his, you'd end up in mine.”

“Freddy, you are being pathetic. Let go of me.”

He looked down at her with half-open eyes, the flesh beneath his sharp cheekbones quivering with tiny tremors. Then he dropped her arm and took a step back.

Mary Lou barely got down off the stoop and around the corner of the wagon before Remy Lelourie came through the door.

A heavy hand fell on Mary Lou's shoulder and she whirled so fast she almost stumbled. She half expected to see the cameraman with the scarred face, back to torment her some more, but it was her cousin Reggie.

“Hey, why so jumpy, kid?” he said, laughing. “They aren't real pirates, you know. Come on. I'll introduce you to Miss Lelourie.”

“No, Reggie, wait. What are you doing? She's a movie star, for God's sake. We can't just go right up to a movie star like she's just any-old-body.”

Reggie wasn't listening. He was pushing her forward and calling out to Miss Lelourie, and before Mary Lou had time to take a breath she found herself standing in front of an honest-to-goodness movie star, shaking the woman's hand, and mumbling something that sounded incoherent even to her own befuddled ears.

Remy Lelourie seemed smaller than she did on the screen, but her face was almost too beautiful to be real. No, not so much beautiful as something else. Looking into that face reminded Mary Lou of a summer thunderstorm, of that first instant after the lightning strikes and the air is alive with electricity, and you wait with tingling breath-held anticipation for the explosion of thunder that is coming, and the pouring rain.

“I'm so glad Reggie thought to bring you here this mornin', Miss Trescher,” Remy Lelourie was saying in a voice that was husky and surprisingly shy. “Make sure he puts you right up in front of the set, where I can see you. I'm going to need a friendly soul out there cheering me on when they all start to bully me for missing my marks.”

Mary Lou doubted that Remy Lelourie had ever missed a mark in her life. She wanted to say something to that effect, about how much she admired Miss Lelourie's talent and how she'd seen every one of her films at least a half dozen times each, but she couldn't seem to unlock her jaw and get her tongue to move.