Текст книги "Night Night, Sleep Tight"

Автор книги: Hallie Ephron

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

Chapter 30

It’s only a movie. It’s only a movie. That was what Deirdre used to whisper to herself as she tried to drown out the sound of her parents arguing. She’d repeated those same words to get her through round after round of torturous physical therapy.

It’s only a movie, she told herself now, as she made phone call after phone call, working her way through a list of Arthur’s friends and associates, telling everyone that Arthur’s memorial service had been scheduled for Wednesday, day after tomorrow. I hope you’ll be able to make it. We’ll have sandwiches at the house after if you can drop by. She tried not to think about when the police and insurance investigators would descend next.

Henry worked the other phone line while Gloria cleaned the house. After about an hour, Gloria put out a platter of tuna fish sandwiches and the three of them took a break to eat. Deirdre tossed her leftover crusts to the dogs and then went back to making calls.

Meanwhile, Sy went out for a case of Arthur’s favorite scotch and bags of ice. When he came back, he stood beside Deirdre and leaned close. “I noticed,” he said under his breath. “You did not seem worried about what the police might find out in the alley when they come back.” It smelled as if he’d helped himself to a nip of the liquor he’d purchased.

Deirdre had forgotten her lie, so it took her a moment to realize that he was talking about the knife. Flustered, she started to dig herself in deeper. “I took it up the alley and buried it in a bag of grass clippings.”

“Grass clippings? You’re sure about that?” When she mustered a weak response, he held up his hands. “No. It’s better that I am ignorant. But try not to forget, I am much better at sussing out lies than you are at telling them.”

Deirdre’s face grew hot. Henry, who was standing in the doorway, must have overheard that because he guffawed.

“Henry,” Sy said, “that goes for you, too.”

The smirk wiped itself off Henry’s face. Abruptly, he turned and walked away.

Sy turned back to Deirdre. “And you really do need to find that person who helped you with the exhibit Friday night in the gallery. If she verifies your account, the police will back off. If you do not . . .”

Sy’s tone shook Deirdre into action. She called Stefan at the gallery. “Did you talk to Avram?”

“I’ve tried, believe me. But . . .”

“But?”

“When I call the number he gave us, I get a recorded message that isn’t in English. At first I thought it was just a problem with international connections, but—”

“There has to be a way to reach him. Stefan, this is serious. His assistant is the only person who can vouch for where I was that night.”

“I get that. But listen, I think we have a problem. I tried calling some other galleries, thinking maybe one of the other dealers might know how to reach him. Not one of them has ever heard of Avram Sigismund.”

Deirdre felt like a stone sank in the pit of her stomach. “I thought you checked him out.”

“I did. His portfolio seemed solid. His sales records in Europe looked good. But it was all a sham. On top of everything else, the last check he wrote us bounced.”

“I don’t understand. Why—?”

“And you know what else? Turns out I could have stayed at the gallery that night and worked on the exhibit with you after all. That journalist I was supposed to meet? She stood me up.”

“Stood you up?” Deirdre felt numb.

“Didn’t even call to apologize. Can you believe it? I drove all the way down to Coronado, waited at the bar at the golf course for over an hour.”

It didn’t require much paranoia to wonder if someone had gone to a lot of trouble to ensure that no one could vouch for Deirdre’s whereabouts that night. Then she herself had sealed the deal by picking up that shovel from the driveway and leaving her fingerprints on the shaft.

By the time Deirdre hung up the phone, her hands were sweaty. When Detective Martinez returned, she’d have to explain to him that she had no idea how to reach the person who was in the gallery with her until late Friday night. That the artist whose show Deirdre had been preparing to open could not be reached and might not, in fact, exist. That she and Stefan had been conned by cartons of smelly old shoes and the promise of payment up front.

Chapter 31

That night, Deirdre had dinner with her mother and Henry at Hamburger Hamlet. Then they drove to Hollywood Boulevard for sundaes at C.C. Brown’s, where the booths were like church pews and they served mammoth scoops of ice cream in chilled tin cups with thick hot fudge and crispy whole almonds, a pitcher of extra fudge sauce on the side. Deirdre would have preferred the small, elegant sundaes served with a single amaretto cookie at Wil Wright’s, but Brown’s had been her father’s favorite and Wil Wright’s had closed.

Later, when Deirdre got in bed, she thought about how readily Sy had seen through her lies. Knew full well that she hadn’t gotten rid of the knife. She wondered if he knew that Arthur had been working on a memoir. It seemed so unlikely that Arthur would have kept that from his oldest friend and closest confidant.

Deirdre pulled the manuscript out of the drawer in her bedside table. One Damned Thing After Another—not only was it the perfect title for Arthur’s memoir, but it also described precisely what her life had turned into since the moment she’d agreed to help him get his house ready to go on the market. She paged through the beginning, skimming past what she’d already read. In the next section, Arthur wrote about arriving in Hollywood and rapidly blowing through his savings. Broke, he’d holed up on a friend’s couch. Crashed some cocktail parties. Made connections and bullshitted his way into some low-level jobs, working with other talented newcomers. Met and fallen in love with a chorus girl. Born Gertrude Wolkind, she’d changed her name to Gloria Walker. The truth was, she was a whole lot smarter than she was sprightly, and soon she’d quit dancing and started to work with Arthur. Helping him write was how Arthur saw it.

From the moment Arthur started collaborating with Gloria, his luck changed. Deirdre had intended to skim the pages—after all, she’d heard most of the stories many times over. But she found herself caught up in her father’s storytelling.

In one chapter he told how he and Gloria talked their way into getting assigned their first movie script. Gloria stole a copy of the Academy Award–winning screenplay for Casablanca from the studio library and they cribbed shamelessly from it for story structure and formatting. When their script passed muster, they had their first movie credit and their career took off.

From there on, Arthur’s memoir read like a movie with Hollywood’s greats in supporting roles and a bit player holding the camera. In one scene Spyros Skouras, the head of Fox, rose from his breakfast in a rage, jowls quivering, spewing incomprehensible English and crumbs of half-chewed toast at Arthur. A few chapters later, Arthur was in the dressing room with a half-dressed Marilyn Monroe, resisting her advances while coaxing her into costume and out onto the soundstage to deliver a knockout performance of “Heatwave.” He claimed to have held Marilyn’s hand and offered this advice:

Keep trying. Hold on, baby. And always, always, always believe in yourself, because if you don’t, who will? Head up, chin high. Most of all keep smiling, because life’s a beautiful thing and there’s so much to smile about.

Could that have been Arthur? Sensitive, supportive? It sounded more like lines he’d written. Or was Deirdre’s view of her father tainted, warped by the angry adolescent girl she still had snarking away inside her?

As she read on, what came across was how much her father adored everything about the movie business. And despite the prism through which Arthur saw the past—selective memory colored by an oversized ego—it was clear that he and Gloria were much in demand in those heady early years when they churned out hit after hit.

Every so often, Arthur would mention Deirdre or Henry, and when he did it was with blind affection and pure delight. In the bitterness that had built up over the last twenty-plus years, Deirdre had forgotten how unabashedly gaga he’d been about his kids. Forgotten the many times he’d taken her to the studio to show her around but also to show her off. First they’d have lunch, sitting at a corner table in the cavernous studio commissary, surrounded by actors and actresses in full makeup and extraordinary getups. Then they’d walk over to one of the vast soundstages where invariably a movie was being shot. Deirdre had to be careful not to trip on the cables that crisscrossed the floor, and she got goose bumps remembering how absolutely still and silent she had to be the moment a voice boomed, “Quiet on set!” The painted backdrops that looked so phony in person were somehow rendered utterly believable through the magic of filming.

She was near the end of the manuscript, tired and ready to turn out the light when she read these words: There are parties and there are parties, but the shindigs at Elenor Nichol’s house were legendary. Why did it have to be that night of all nights that our attorney finagled an invite there for us to mingle with the crème de la crème of Hollywood’s most glamorous?

A chill passed through Deirdre as she read on.

The setting was out of a movie script. Liveried attendants valet-parked the Jaguars and Mercedes that pulled up at the end of the driveway. Gloria and I got out of my six-year-old Austin-Healey feeling like pikers. We waited for a golf cart to ferry us up to the house.

Tuxedoed waiters, most of them out-of-work actors, glided about with silver trays bearing champagne flutes of Dom Pérignon and shots of Chivas and Glenlivet. The crowd included stars and studio executives, a heady mix of staggering beauty—men and women both—and arrogant power. The men swaggered about, bravado masquerading as brains. Oscar Levant seemed permanently ensconced at the piano, completely brilliant and completely soused, per usual. Needless to say, writers like Gloria and me, a dime a dozen in Hollywood, were in short supply. Most of the folks there were under the illusion that actors and directors made up lines as they went along, so who needed writers, anyway?

Bunny, as Elenor Nichol was known, though there was nothing remotely soft or cuddly about her, reigned over all. Queen of wanton amorous fire, that night she wore a crimson dress with a plunging neckline and ropes of pearls that couldn’t hold a candle to the luminescence of her skin. With her swelling bosom and round bottom, her sultry voice somewhere between a purr and a snarl, she had every man in that house salivating, including yours truly. But no one dared to make a pass at her—not with Tito Acevedo watching her every move like a dyspeptic guard dog.

Thug. Bully. Gigolo. Goon. Those were just a few of the labels hung on Tito—never to his face, of course. Supposedly he used to be errand boy for Mafia boss “Sam the Cigar” Giancana in Vegas before shifting his base of operations to Hollywood. Here, rumor had it, he threatened to castrate the director of Bunny’s last film when he got what Tito deemed a bit too chummy. On top of that, he fancied himself a player and took meetings, reading scripts and throwing around wads of cash. A crass charmer, he’d have made a great character in a B-movie. In real life, he was a black hole of pure nastiness. Everyone gave him a wide berth.

That night, Tito glowered silently from the shadows beside a massive potted palm in the corner of Bunny’s palatial living room. He was doing a second-rate Humphrey Bogart imitation, his eyes half-closed, pinching the end of his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger behind a cupped hand.

Like the cigarette he was smoking, it turned out Tito Acevedo was on a slow burn.

Deirdre paged ahead, looking for but failing to find any mention of her or Joelen at the party. Like Oscar Levant, Arthur would have been plenty “soused” himself with all that high-class booze floating around, more than a few rungs up from his usual Dewar’s. Finally she found her own name.

Gloria and I had long ago bailed and were home sleeping it off when the phone rang. I was thinking, Christ almighty, who calls at two in the morning? I almost didn’t pick up. But then I did.

“Arthur? It’s Bunny.” Her voice didn’t sound soft or sultry—more midway between outraged and petrified. “Get Deirdre.”

Get Deirdre? For a crazy moment I was thinking: great title. Then I realized my daughter was sleeping over at Bunny’s house. I’d seen her at the party, she and Bunny’s daughter all dressed up and parading around like grown-ups.

I sat bolt upright, wide awake. “What’s wrong?”

“Something’s happened,” she said.

“To Deirdre? Is she all right?”

“She’s fine. But you’ve got to get her away from here before they come.” Before I could ask who “they” were, she hung up. Talk about your cliffhanger ending.

I slapped some water on my face, threw on some clothes, and drove over there as fast as I could. Up Bunny’s long driveway to the big white house that had been lit up like a stage set hours earlier but now had just a single light on in an upstairs window.

Before I could knock, Bunny pulled open the front door. It was dark, but I could see she looked pale, her face puffy and teary-eyed. She had a nasty bruise under one eye and her lip was split. She wore a flowing peignoir that, it only occurred to me later, looked like a leftover costume from her movie Black Lace.

I followed her up the stairs into what I realized right away was her daughter’s bedroom. Pink walls. Twin beds. One of the beds was empty. Lying facedown on the other was Tito Acevedo.

I could smell the blood that had soaked into the quilt under Tito. The soundtrack, high-pitched squeals, turned out to be a pair of thoroughly spooked guinea pigs. Bunny’s daughter, Joelen, was huddled in a corner by their cage. She was hugging a pillow and leaning against the wall. Her eyes were shut tight. At first I thought she was asleep.

I looked around for Deirdre. Thank God she wasn’t there.

When I reached for Tito’s wrist to feel for a pulse, Bunny stopped me. “He’s dead, for Chrissake. Can’t you see that? Help me move him.” Imperious as ever.

Deirdre read on. Her father had helped Bunny wrap Tito in the quilt. They’d pulled him off the bed and dragged him down the hall to the master bedroom, where they’d rolled him over onto the floor. That must have been where the news photographers later snapped pictures of what was supposedly the crime scene. Deirdre clearly remembered a shot of a cop sitting at the edge of Bunny’s satin-covered bed, staring down at the dead man.

What happened? Who killed him? When I asked Bunny Nichol, she showed me a knife. “Recognize this?” she wanted to know.

Of course I recognized it. The last time I’d seen it was in a drawer in the buffet in my own dining room. It had been a wedding present. So what was it doing here?

I was desperate to take the knife from her. At the same time, I was afraid to touch it. The thought of how it had been used made me sick to my stomach. I know I’ve seen too many cop shows, but I was worried about leaving my fingerprints on top of those of the killer. At the same time, I realized it was too late to worry about fine points like that. The arms of my jacket and my trousers were already stained with Tito’s blood.

Bunny said not to worry. She’d get rid of the quilt from her daughter’s bedroom that we’d just dragged Tito in on. And she’d “take care” of the knife. Then she showed me a dress she said my daughter had worn to the party earlier that night. It was covered in blood too. I stared at it, too stunned and frankly afraid to ask the obvious question. Bunny promised me she’d take care of the dress, too. That the police would never know.

Know what? I wanted to ask.

If I didn’t tell, she said, she wouldn’t tell, and she’d keep these items somewhere safe. She called them her “little insurance policy.”

I asked her what in God’s name she meant by that. She blew up. What happened was my fault as much as it was hers. If I’d been a better father, and so on and so on. I had no idea what she was going on about.

Finally she calmed down and said, “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll forget we had this little talk.”

Even at the time it sounded like a line of dialogue from one of her movies. But then, the whole situation felt like it was out of a movie. Everything except for Tito Acevedo, who was not pretending to be dead. And my daughter, who was somewhere in the house, needing me to get her out of there.

I asked Bunny where Deirdre was. Her answer stunned me to my core: “Shouldn’t you be asking, where’s Henry?”

Deirdre felt her jaw drop. What on earth had Henry had to do with what happened that night?

Apparently Arthur had had the same reaction.

I was about to ask what my son had to do with any of this when I heard a car outside on the gravel. I looked out the window. Headlights. Taillights. Then I realized I was looking at my own car driving away.

Bunny was beside me, looking out, too. “If you want to protect our children,” she said, coming down hard on our, “you’ll go home and never breathe a word of this to anyone.”

I thought about that as I walked home, hoping the police wouldn’t stop me for loitering even though I was moving as fast as I could. I was praying that when I got back to the house I’d find Deirdre safe and sound, asleep in bed.

Fortunately, it was not very far. Unfortunately, my daughter was not there. Neither was Henry.

That was the end, the very last typed line. Below it were handwritten notes, scrawled at the bottom of the manuscript’s final text and on the back of the page.

Gloria New Age. Deirdre knew what that would be about.

Talk That Talk. Deirdre recognized the title of the movie that had been her father’s one and only attempt at directing.

Baby boy. She had no idea what that referred to.

Sy trust. That was underlined twice.

Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Harrison Ford, Maximilian Schell.

The list made Deirdre smile. Arthur was considering A-list actors to play himself.

Deirdre gathered up the manuscript pages and was about to slide them back into the folder when she realized something was stuck in one of its pockets. A small envelope. She slipped from it a greeting card. The front was printed with a ring of flowers circling a baby-carrying stork. Inside was a handwritten message:

Congratulations! It’s a baby.

That’s all. No name. No date. No six pounds eleven ounces. No return address on the envelope. Just a postmark: Beverly Hills, May 11, 1964. Six months after Deirdre’s accident. Six months after Antonio Acevedo was killed.

TUESDAY,

May 27, 1985

Chapter 32

At four thirty in the morning, Deirdre lay awake in the dark, mulling over what her father had written. There was some comfort in knowing that she had not, after all, been at the wheel of her father’s car when it crashed. But her father hadn’t been driving either. It was Henry who’d led her from the house. Henry who’d driven her up to Mulholland and crashed the car into the guardrail. For some reason he’d been at the Nichols’ house, too, the night Tito was killed.

And what about the dress and the knife? What kind of “insurance” was Bunny buying for herself by holding on to them, and how did her father end up getting them back?

Deirdre got out of bed, pulled out the torn plastic bag she’d stashed in the closet, and took out the dress. Unwrapped the knife. Examined the flourishy initial engraved in the silver cap at the end of the bone handle. Was it n for Nichol? Or—she rotated the knife 180 degrees—u for Unger?

And what about the dress? As she smoothed it out on the floor, brittle bits of netting broke away. Were the brownish stains on it blood? They could as easily be cocktail sauce or red wine. She and Joelen had gorged on both after the party, then thrown up.

Deirdre sniffed at the stains, but after all these years the only smell was of dust and decay. There was no telling what had made them. Or was there? Would Tyler, with his chemistry lab, be able to identify the stains? He’d offered to help. Urged her to call on him “anytime.” Did that mean it was okay to call at five in the morning? Would he write her off as a crazy nut job? She hoped not.

She crept into the kitchen, where she’d left her bag by the back door. In it was the report of her accident on which Tyler had written his phone numbers. She dialed the one marked “Home” and held her breath.

“Corrigan,” Tyler said, picking up on the third ring. His voice was thick.

“Tyler? I’m sorry, it’s—”

Before she could give her name, he said, “Deirdre! Hang on.” She heard muffled sounds on the other end, then he came back on the line. “Are you okay? Is everything all right?”

It didn’t sound as if he was writing her off. “I’m sorry to call at this ridiculous time, but you did say that if I needed anything it was okay to call anytime.”

He yawned. “Said it and meant it.”

“The thing is, I’m not sure this is something you’re allowed to do. I found a very old dress and was hoping that you might examine it and tell me whether the stains on it are blood. Off the record, of course. Just as a favor.”

“So you think the stains could be blood?” He said it in what sounded like a cop voice: Just the facts, ma’am.

Had she been right to trust him? After all, she hadn’t seen him in more than twenty years and they’d hardly had what you’d call a relationship. Why was he so eager to help her, anyway? And why was she so ready to trust a virtual stranger when she couldn’t trust her own mother, whose prayer beads she’d found in her father’s office? Or her brother, who’d never admitted that he was responsible for the accident that crippled her and who seemed to have a vested interest in burying her father’s secrets? Even Sy made her feel apprehensive, though she couldn’t put her finger on why.

Any of them could have purchased a shovel and used it to bash her father in the head during his midnight swim. Even if Arthur had seen one of them in the yard, he’d never have expected to be attacked. Any of them could have arranged for a mythical Israeli artist and a no-show news reporter to ensure that Deirdre didn’t have an alibi.

“Sorry, Deirdre,” Tyler said, “but I have to ask. Does this have anything to do with the fire?” It was a fair question, and he sounded like a real person asking it. She relaxed a notch.

“The stain is old. Really old. From twenty years ago. So I can’t imagine how it could be connected to the fire,” she said with a twinge of guilt. Because it was just possible that the fire had been set in order to destroy items in Arthur’s office, that dress among them.

“Okay then. Sure. It’s not complicated. I’ll bring over my own test kit and you can do the test yourself.”

“That would be great,” Deirdre said, feeling as if a heavy weight had lifted.

“How about later this morning? I could come to your house—”

“No,” Deirdre said, louder than she’d intended. She heard the dogs stirring in Henry’s bedroom. “Sorry. My family is already stressed out, and I’d rather they not know about this.”

“Then how about I meet you somewhere and we can do it right now?”

“Now? Really?”

“Sure. I’m awake.” He yawned again.

“Sorry.”

“No need to apologize. I’m glad you called. Where do you want to meet?”

Where? She hadn’t gotten that far. Somewhere nearby. “You know the fountain on the corner of Santa Monica and Wilshire, across from Trader Vic’s? Will that work?”

“We should be able to find a spot there that’s dark enough to see the reaction. Assuming you don’t mind crawling around a bit under some bushes.”

It wouldn’t be the first time she’d crawled around under those bushes. She and Henry used to play hide-and-seek in that park, but never at five in the morning.

“Meet you there in thirty minutes,” Tyler said.

“Thirty minutes.” Deirdre couldn’t believe how easy this was turning out to be. “Thank you so much.”

“If you want to thank me, let me take you out to breakfast after.”

He was being so nice it scared her. “Okay. But my treat.”

“We can argue about that later.”

Deirdre rummaged through the dresser in her room and found a white T-shirt to wear with her leggings. She ran a brush through her hair, and scrawled a note for Henry and her mother in case they got up and found her missing. Carefully she folded the dress around the knife again and tucked them in her messenger bag. At the last minute, she stuffed the folder with her father’s manuscript in the bag, too.

When she drove off, it was still dark. It took only ten minutes to drive to the little park that was home to the fountain. She parked around the corner and made her way across the hard-packed dirt path leading to the tiled piazza. The moon was a substantial crescent that hung right over the head of the kneeling Indian on the plinth in the center of the circular fountain. As always, his head was bent and he held his hands out in front of him as if to capture the water playing around him. Or perhaps he was offering thanks to the gods for finding him, among all his compatriots, such a cushy permanent home.

Even at this odd hour the plaza wasn’t deserted. A young couple was entwined, necking on one of the benches. Deirdre picked a spot upwind from the fountain’s spray, feeling first to be sure the bench was dry. The parade of colored lights in the fountain was still going, but as the sky was starting to lighten, the jets of water looked pale rather than vibrant—powder blue, then seafoam green, then pink, cycling through color after color until the grand finale, all the colors at once. When she was little, her father would occasionally bring her there after getting ice cream at Baskin-Robbins. Even as they faded, the lights still seemed magical.

Traffic was sparse in the usually busy intersection of Santa Monica and Wilshire. Deirdre remembered when there’d been a vast empty field across the street where the Hilton Hotel now stood. Trader Vic’s, attached to the hotel’s near end, stuck its palm-tree-lined, Tiki-bedecked entrance into the intersection. More and more, Los Angeles and Disneyland were merging into a single entity with reality at a far remove.

Tyler loped across the plaza in jeans and a black T-shirt that showed off a muscular chest and powerful shoulders and upper arms. “Hey, sorry. I got held up,” he said. He held a black backpack with white letters stenciled on: ARSON.

“It’s been ages since I was down here when the lights were going,” Deirdre said. “I forgot how cool it is.”

“Me too. I feel personally responsible for that,” Tyler said, pointing to a sign that read NO SKATEBOARDING ALLOWED. “We used to come down here when they were doing repairs and the fountain was empty. We’d race around in circles inside the fountain. Jump in and out. Popped more than a few tiles, I’m ashamed to say.”

Deirdre said, “My brother claimed he and some friends put a box of Tide in the fountain once. Supposedly the suds spread all the way out onto the street and stopped traffic. He was very proud of that accomplishment.”

“Adolescent boys are all idiots.” Tyler sat next to her on the bench. Deirdre could smell his aftershave. “So what you want tested is in there?” He indicated the bag in her lap. “Let’s have a look, see what you’ve got.”

“It’s a dress,” Deirdre said, opening the bag. “It’s probably nothing.” Leaving the knife in the bag, she pulled out the dress and handed it to him.

Tyler turned his back to the fountain and took the dress from her, holding it gingerly away from him. “Like I said, we need to take this somewhere dark enough to see the reaction.” Just then the lights in the fountain went out and the fountain’s jets turned off. Deirdre looked back at Wilshire. The streetlights had gone off, too.

“We should do this now, before it gets much lighter. Behind there.” He pointed to the tall wall that formed the back of a long bench at the rear of the plaza.

Deirdre followed him out and around to where tall bushes lined the back of the wall. It smelled just like it had years and years ago when she’d hunkered down, waiting for Henry to find her. Pee and rotten eggs.

Tyler turned on a penlight, crouched in the shadow between the bushes, and crept in closer to the wall. Taking shallow breaths and steadying herself with her hands, Deirdre followed him, frog walking in close to the base of the wall where it was darkest.

Tyler waited until she was right there in position, too. Then he opened his pack and pulled out a plastic spray bottle. “Okay. You ready?”

“Ready.” She hoped she really was.

“Let’s see what we have here.” Tyler turned off the flashlight and waited. In moments, Deirdre’s eyes adjusted to the dark. Tyler held the dress in front of them and gave her the spray bottle. “Just give it a spritz or two.” Deirdre aimed the nozzle and gave it two squeezes. An instant later, bluish-green puddles of light glowed on the underskirt and the netting lit up like a star-sprinkled fisherman’s net.

“Probably blood,” Tyler said.