Текст книги "Night Night, Sleep Tight"

Автор книги: Hallie Ephron

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

Chapter 11

Can they search my car?” Deirdre whispered to Sy once they were outside, getting settled at the patio table.

Sy gave her a narrow look. “Where is it?”

“Parked on the street.”

“Then no.”

At least that was a relief. But as Sy started going over the details of Arthur’s will, Deirdre found herself barely able to follow. She strained to see over the bushes at the edge of the patio. The ground vibrated as the police investigators dropped item after item onto a plastic tarp spread out in the driveway. Crowbar. Tire iron. Shovel. Hedge clippers. Long-handled branch lopper. A candlestick lamp. All of them heavy blunt objects. Obviously they didn’t think Arthur Unger’s death had been an accident. He hadn’t been taken ill. They were looking for a murder weapon.

Deirdre tried to make sense of it. Maybe Arthur had surprised an intruder. He hadn’t turned on any lights, so the intruder didn’t realize he was out there. Arthur could be impulsive, belligerent, especially after a few drinks. Maybe he’d confronted the person. Thrown a punch, even. The intruder would have fended him off. Picked up something readily at hand. Something heavy. Swung it at Arthur and knocked him into the pool.

“Deirdre?” Sy was saying. “Do you understand what that means?”

“I’m sorry. I zoned out.”

“I said, your father named you his literary executor. You’ll need to go through his personal effects. His papers, letters, memos, photographs, keepsakes. Who knows what you will find. Early drafts of movie scripts. Unpublished manuscripts. He entrusted you with deciding what to preserve.”

Deirdre thought of Arthur’s memoir, sitting in the drawer in her bedside table. She was having fun reading it, but did it have historical or literary merit? “I’m hardly qualified—”

“Your father thought otherwise. Just take it item by item, one step at a time. First sort and cull. Then inventory what is worthy of preserving. If you are not sure, I can help. Try to imagine someone coming along a hundred years from now, trying to understand your father’s Hollywood. What you are doing: conserving his piece of it. His legacy.”

“Legacy.” Henry snorted a laugh.

“Okay,” Sy said, “your parents were not Comden and Green. But they were not hacks, either. Their films, and even some of the projects your father worked on later alone? Among the best of a certain breed. His collected works are emblematic of an era.”

“Still, Mom would make a much better judge—” Deirdre started.

“You do not get to decide. Your father selected you.”

It would be no small task, going through Arthur’s papers. Deirdre hadn’t been in his office on the second floor of the garage in ages, but she remembered it was lined with bookshelves and file cabinets. Then there was everything in the den. More probably in his bedroom. Maybe there were storage boxes. Her mother would know where all to look. It would be a huge chore, but secretly Deirdre was pleased. Flattered that her father had entrusted her with the task. “Of course I’ll want your advice—” she started.

Henry interrupted. “So there are no other assets? No life insurance?”

“No life insurance.”

“What about their movies?” Henry again. “Aren’t there residuals?”

“There were none back then. Who knew television would be hungry for old movies?”

Henry hunched over the table, absorbing this news.

Before the police left, a technician took Henry’s and Deirdre’s fingerprints. Martinez explained it was to eliminate theirs from others that they lifted. Soon after that, Deirdre and Henry walked Sy out to his car.

Henry glanced up and down the street. “So Sy, is that it? Will they be back?”

“Always, they can come back. But they will need a new warrant.” Sy stopped and turned to face them. “Listen to me, both of you. If the police do come back, you call me right away.” He took out a business card and wrote a phone number on the back. “In case I am not in my office or in my car, here is my home phone. Anytime.”

He handed the card to Henry and winked at Deirdre. Then he got into his car and rolled down the window. “I know you, Deirdre. You are a Girl Scout. You will want to help them with their investigation. But the police are not your friends. They want to fix blame and close the case. I know you think you have nothing to hide, but believe me, we all do.”

As Deirdre watched him drive off she felt a chill as a light breeze rustled the leaves overhead. “So, tyell me zis,” Henry said, lowering his voice and imitating Sy’s accent. He put his arm around her and squeezed harder than he needed to. “Where’s that bag?”

“In my car.” Deirdre crossed the street and opened the trunk.

“You might have told me you’d taken it out of the house,” Henry said. “Freaked the hell out of me.”

“You’re welcome.”

“That, too.” He reached for the bag.

“Back off.” Deirdre pressed down with the end of her crutch on Henry’s foot. Henry yelped in pain.

Deirdre opened the bag and foraged around in it, pulling out a half-dozen twist-tied baggies of loose pills. Another contained a handful of the pot she’d already smelled, along with a packet of rolling papers. She gave all that to Henry, then rummaged some more, past papers, old clothes, and what she thought at first were telephone directories but turned out to be Motion Picture Academy Players Directories, making sure she hadn’t missed anything else that was illegal.

Henry was on a slow burn. “What are you going to do with the rest of it?”

“You heard Sy. I’m Dad’s literary executor. I’m going take it up to his office and start executing. Maybe I’ll throw all of it away. Maybe I’ll keep it all. I get to decide. You just take care of that shit”—she indicated what she’d given him—“so none of it comes back to bite us.”

Henry turned and stomped back into the house.

Chapter 12

Deirdre lugged the bag up the driveway to the garage. The door to her father’s office turned out to be unlocked, so up she went, pulling the bag step by step behind her.

As kids, she and Henry had been forbidden to so much as knock when their parents were up there working, so it felt strange to put her hand on the knob and just open the door. The little apartment exhaled stale, musty air. The walls were papered with fraying grass cloth and the ceiling was waterstained. An electric typewriter with a plastic cover sat on a metal table on one side of the room. Against a wall was a sagging pullout couch. On the table next to it Deirdre spotted a dust-free circle. That’s where the candlestick lamp the police confiscated must have stood. She raised one of the bamboo shades, releasing a cloud of dust motes, then cranked open one of the louvered windows.

The floor was stacked with piles of papers and videocassettes, and below a large mirror on the opposite wall stood two-drawer metal file cabinets. Deirdre pulled open a file drawer and poked through. Contracts. Correspondence. Bills and receipts.

Sort. Cull. Inventory. As Sy had said, she’d have to take it item by item, one thing at a time. It hardly mattered where she began.

She pulled out a file at random. Telephone bills starting in 1963. That had been around the year that her parents lost their contract at Fox and started using this space as their office. Toss.

The unlabeled folder behind it had about a dozen black-and-white stills from a movie she didn’t recognize. She set it aside. Keep.

Another file folder contained stock certificates. One was from the DeLorean Motor Company. Hadn’t they gone bankrupt? Ask Sy.

On top of the file cabinet Deirdre noticed a glass ashtray from Chasen’s, the celebrity hangout where her parents had dined regularly. She needed another pile for personal keepsakes. Not for any literary legacy, but because she’d always loved the restaurant with its red leather banquettes, dark corners for secret trysts, and special tables set aside for moguls and stars. Even if there’d been nothing on the menu that an eight-year-old could stomach.

Four items and already she’d started four piles. She hadn’t even cracked open the closet. Make that closets—there were two of them. She’d be at this for weeks, culling the trivial from the memorable from the valuable and setting aside items that signified her father’s literary life.

Deirdre went out onto the landing and retrieved the black plastic bag. She sank down on the floor beside it and started sifting through the items that Henry said their father would have wanted him to throw away. Newspaper and magazine clippings, a restaurant review for a Chinese restaurant on Beverly Drive dated 1978, empty Cuban cigar boxes. All of it: toss.

Next she pulled out six Motion Picture Academy Players Directories, the annual compendium that listed every Hollywood actor. She’d spent hours and hours poring over directories like these when she was stuck home recuperating after the accident. In it were pages and pages of head shots of actors, most of whom could have strolled down Rodeo Drive and not turned a single head. And yet they were all members of the Screen Actors Guild. It just brought home the formidable odds against becoming a celebrity.

These were a straight run from 1963 to 1968. Deirdre opened the 1963 directory, flipped through until she found someone she recognized—sexy, sultry Edie Adams who sang the Muriel Cigar TV commercial. That ad had ended with a sly wink and the suggestive, Why don’t you pick one up and smoke it sometime, delivered with a sensual subtlety that Madonna never could have managed. A few pages on, there was Donna Douglas, all wide-eyed with her Elly May blond curls tamed. Annette Funicello, Deirdre’s favorite Mouseketeer, looking grown-up and bland.

Tucked between two pages, Deirdre came across a snapshot. She recognized the white rippled edges as an early Polaroid. She was five years old the Christmas her father got their first instant camera. He’d snapped a picture of Deirdre with her new Tiny Tears doll, Henry, and their mother, still in their bathrobes and seated on the white “snow” carpet around their tinselly tree. Deirdre had watched breathless for what seemed like forever until the second hand on her father’s watch went all the way around and he opened the camera’s trapdoor. Like magic, he peeled away the film and an image bloomed.

But the person in this faded snapshot wasn’t Deirdre or Henry or their mother, and there was no Christmas tree. Instead it showed an attractive young woman, her collared blouse unbuttoned halfway, kneeling on the floor beside an end table and gazing at the camera with wide, kohl-rimmed eyes worthy of Keane. A mirror in the background reflected a window with a bamboo shade, and in front of it the photographer with the camera held to his face.

Deirdre realized with a jolt that the woman was kneeling in precisely the spot where she was sitting now. She turned the picture over. On the back, in red pen, were five asterisks.

The same girl’s picture, much clearer and crisper, was in the Players Directory on the page where the snapshot had been tucked in. Second row from the top. Melanie Hart, the kind of white-bread, feel-good name—like Judy Garland or Hope Lange—that studios selected for young hopefuls.

Poor Melanie Hart. If she’d harbored any illusions that this photo session would lead to her big break, she’d been disappointed. Flipping the pages of the Players Directory, Deirdre found more faded Polaroid photographs, each with asterisks on the back. Her father favored buxom blondes and redheads, each of them photographed the same way, in the same spot.

Deirdre felt sick to her stomach. Her father had been taking advantage of young women who were desperate to break out in the film business. She stacked the photographs on the floor. They conjured the smell of My Sin and soiled sheets. At least her father had realized these needed to be destroyed. Burn. A pile she hadn’t yet started.

Deirdre heard footsteps on the stairs and a moment later Henry loomed in the doorway. He had on a black leather bomber’s jacket and badass cowboy boots. A motorcycle helmet—ice blue with an eagle sprouting red and yellow flames painted on it—hung from his hand. He tossed her a set of keys. “Here, so you can get in the house.”

“Did you know about these?” she asked, pointing to the pile of pictures.

“Good God. I haven’t been up here in ages.” Henry took in the deflated garbage bag, then the Players Directories and the snapshots Deirdre had stacked on the floor. “Got to hand it to Dad. He was a pretty slick operator.”

“You knew?”

Henry smirked. He picked up one of the pictures. “She doesn’t look too unhappy, does she?”

“You can be such an asshole.” She grabbed the picture back.

“And you can be so predictable. Dad was a jerk, but he wasn’t Satan. That’s how things were done in those days.”

Those days. The 1960s had been a decade of upheaval in Hollywood. Her parents, along with most of Hollywood’s “contract” talent, lost their jobs. From then on they worked project by project, from home, and didn’t get assigned work unless some panel of studio honchos, usually decades younger than they, gave them a thumbs-up.

There had been upheaval at home, too. The car accident that crippled Deirdre had been in the fall of 1963. A year and a half later, she was finishing high school, Henry was flunking out of college, and their mother was making frequent trips to a commune in the desert.

“They knew,” Henry said. “Every one of those girls knew the score.”

Girls? Women! Deirdre wanted to shout back at him. “And I guess he was so proud of himself that he made you promise to destroy the evidence.”

“You think this should be part of his legacy?” Henry poked a steel toe at the pictures. “If you’d just let me—” He leaned down and picked up one of the photographs.

“Put it down.”

Henry glared at her.

“I’m telling you now, Henry, if anything disappears without my say-so, even something like that, then I’m . . . I’m . . .”

“What’ll you do? Tell Mom?”

“Don’t push me. Okay?”

Henry scowled and dropped the picture. “Fine. Lucky you. What on earth are you going to do with all this shit?” He didn’t wait for an answer, just turned on his heel and walked out.

Good question. What was she going to do with all of it?

As Henry stomped down the stairs, Deirdre picked up one of the Players Directories by the spine. Shook it. More photographs rained out. The thought of what must have gone on in this room, on that couch or on the floor, made her sick to her stomach. Her father had been luring hopeful young women with promises he’d never had the clout to fulfill.

She heard the rumble of a motorcycle starting, and the floor shook as the garage door opener beneath kicked in. A minute later, the floor shuddered again as the garage door shut.

But what shook Deirdre was that one of the photographs that had dropped out wasn’t another pretty stranger. It was Joelen Nichol.

Deirdre picked up the picture. Joelen had been so young. Had Deirdre been in the house while her father was out here, indulging in this sordid hobby?

Disgusted, Deirdre shoved the picture into her pocket, grabbed her crutch, and started to struggle to her feet. She was half up when the crutch tip snagged on the plastic bag, slipped, and she went down with a howl of outrage. Dammit. Damn him. On top of everything else, if it hadn’t been for Arthur, she wouldn’t have to deal with the goddamned crutch at all. In a fury she shoved away the crutch and surrendered to what she knew was a sorry bout of self-pity. The chaos, the sheer volume of it, and the sadness of the tawdry, pathetic minutiae she’d have to paw through—it was too much.

The crying jag left her with a pounding headache and an aching chest. Defeated and deflated, she dried her eyes on the hem of her T-shirt, then tried to pull herself together as she surveyed the room. The piles she’d started. The file cabinets she’d barely cracked open. None of this had to be taken care of today, or even this week.

She scooted over so she could reach her crutch and set it carefully on the carpet, realizing as she stood that the crutch had torn a hole in the plastic bag. She bent to gather up the items that threatened to spill out of it. Among them was what looked like an armful of crumpled yellow netting, brittle with age. It was wrapped around a flat wooden box. On the box’s lid was a little metal shield with the word SHEFFIELD burned into it. She opened the box. Inside, set into a red flocked cardboard inset, was a knife with an old-fashioned antler grip. The blade was long and tapered. A silver cap covering the butt was engraved with the fancy initial n.

N for Nichol? Deirdre felt a chill creep down her back. She snapped the box shut and began to wrap it up again, her mind lurching ahead. Toss?Keep? That’s when she realized that the decaying netting with which she was wrapping the box was the tulle skirt of a dress with a high-necked lace bodice and long sleeves. She drew back, her hand over her mouth. The yellow satin underskirt was covered with dark stains. Blood?

There should have been more blood. That was what one of the expert witnesses had testified at the inquest into Tito Acevedo’s murder. On the carpet under Tito’s body. On the nightgown Joelen had been wearing when she stabbed him. On the nightgown Bunny had been wearing when she said she’d cradled him as he breathed his last. Well, here was more blood: on the dress Deirdre had been convinced made her look like a movie star when she’d borrowed it from Bunny Nichol to wear it to the party the night Tito was killed.

Chapter 13

Deirdre dropped the dress. She’d been fast asleep, passed out in Joelen’s bedroom when Bunny’s final fight with Tito had turned lethal. Hadn’t she?

It had been long past Deirdre’s bedtime when Bunny sent her and Joelen upstairs to bed. Instead the girls had sat at the top of the stairs and watched the party wind down. Deirdre’s parents had been among the first to leave, and Deirdre had run down to kiss them good night.

After the rest of the guests had gone home, after Bunny and Tito had retired, Deirdre and Joelen had padded downstairs. They smoked lipstick-stained cigarette butts left in the ashtrays and polished off the remains of pink champagne in abandoned flutes and vodka in martini glasses. They’d staggered about giggling, stuck fat black and green olives on the tips of their fingers, and gorged on leftover crab dip, pâté, and shrimp cocktail. They’d gotten slaphappy and performed a boozy duet, an a cappella “Let Me Entertain You.” They twirled. And twirled. So much that Deirdre staggered outside and puked in the bushes. After that, she lay on the grass beside Joelen and stared up at the sky. So this is what it feels like to be drunk, she’d thought as stars seemed to streak across the sky like meteors and the ground felt as if it were flipping her like a pancake. She rolled over and threw up again and again until there was nothing left.

She must have passed out on the lawn, because her memory of what happened after that was fragmentary at best. She did not remember going back into the house. She did not remember climbing the stairs, as she must have, to get to Joelen’s bedroom. She hadn’t heard Bunny and Tito fighting. She hadn’t heard Joelen leave the bedroom.

All she remembered was leaving the house herself. Being guided through a dark tunnel that smelled of camphor and floor wax, down a narrow, steep staircase—not the grand staircase in the Nichols’ house, which was like something you’d expect Ginger Rogers to dance down. Wondering why her father had come back to get her in the middle of the night. Shivering in her pajamas, she’d stumbled out to his car through chilly night air.

That had been the last normal walk she ever took.

She had no idea when she’d taken off the beautiful lemon-colored dress. And was this the knife that had killed Tito? How on earth had her father ended up with them both? And what was she supposed to do with them now?

Deirdre stuffed the dress and the knife back into the torn plastic bag, shoved the bag in a closet, and slammed the door shut. Then she stumped down the garage stairs and across the garden. Back in the kitchen, she washed the dust and sour smell from her hands. If only she could erase the stench that the photographs and the stained dress had left in her head. She felt like Pandora, trying to figure out what to do with what she’d found in the box.

The answering machine was flashing “Full.” Deirdre half listened to the messages, intending to write down the names of people to call back when funeral plans were final. But instead she just sat there, staring at the machine and letting the voices wash over her.

Until the message that was not from a well-wisher. “This is Detective Martinez. I need to speak to Deirdre Unger.” Deirdre sat forward, feeling a wave of dread. She was thoroughly rattled by what she’d found in her father’s office and in no frame of mind to answer questions.

Before Deirdre could decide what to do, Detective Martinez’s voice was drowned out by the dogs stampeding out of Henry’s bedroom and skidding into the front hall moments before the doorbell chimed.

Detective Martinez’s voice on the answering machine was giving Deirdre his telephone number as she peered out the window. A police cruiser was parked out front. She stood there, unable to answer the door, listening to her own breathing and the next message of condolence on the answering machine. Deirdre’s armpits were damp, and butterflies fluttered in her stomach.

If the police do come back, you call me right away. Sy’s voice came back to her. But he’d handed his card to Henry, and Henry had gone out.

At the knock at the front door, Deirdre sank down onto the floor under the window, her heart in her throat. Moments later she heard a sharp rap at the kitchen door. The dogs were going wild, racing from the front door to the kitchen. Any minute the police would come around to the back, look through the sliding glass doors, and see her cowering. Were the doors even locked? Would the police try to open them? Would they break in?

Deirdre pulled a phone book from the drawer under the phone. She found the page that began STANDISH and drew her finger down the column looking for STERLING. Was Sy even listed?

And then, just like that, the dogs stopped making their racket. The knocking stopped. Deirdre peeked out the window. Martinez and a uniformed officer were getting back into the police car. Car doors slammed.

Could it be that easy? Were they just going to give up and drive off? Deirdre drew back and waited to hear the engine start. She was still waiting minutes later when the phone rang. She didn’t reach for it. It had to be Detective Martinez or the other policeman, watching the house and making the call from their car phone.

But when the answering machine picked up Deirdre heard a familiar voice after the beep. “Deirdre? Are you there? I don’t know if you got my earlier message. I hope the fruit basket we sent over got there—”

Deirdre picked up the phone. “Joelen?” she whispered, even though she knew the police couldn’t hear her.

“Hello?” Joelen said.

Deirdre put the receiver closer to her mouth. “Hi. I’m here. Can you hear me?”

“Yes, I . . . Is everything okay? I mean, of course it’s not. But you know what I mean. Is it?”

“The police are back. They want to talk to me. I’m here all alone—”

“Do they know you’re there?”

“No. Maybe. My car’s parked out front.”

“And they’re—?”

“Sitting outside in their car. Waiting. Maybe I should just go out there and get it over with. I have nothing to hide.”

Joelen laughed a not-funny laugh. “Honey, everyone has something to hide.”

Deirdre thought about the yellow dress and couldn’t argue the point. She heard a car pulling up in front and peered out. A bright blue van had parked behind the police cruiser. KABC-TV NEWS 7 was emblazoned on the side. A slender blonde in a dark pantsuit hopped out and went over to the window of the police car. She was chatting with Martinez’s partner when a white-and-blue KNBC van pulled up and stopped across the street.

“Shit,” Deirdre said. “Two news vans just pulled up.”

“Okay. That’s it. You need to get out of there. Now. Go out the back.”

“But my car—”

“Don’t take your car. I’ll pick you up. Go out in the alley and start walking north. I’ll be there in five.”

“But what if someone—”

But Joelen had hung up. Deirdre stared at the dead handset. She remembered a moment years ago when Joelen had climbed onto the roof of her pool house and dared Deirdre to come up and join her. Henry had been there, too, and while Deirdre was screwing up her courage, Henry shoved her into the pool.

“That’s what happens when you hesitate,” Joelen had told her when she’d climbed out. Even now Deirdre’s face grew hot, remembering how Joelen and Henry cracked up because Deirdre’s white pants had turned semitransparent.

She hung up the phone, lurched to her feet, and peered outside again. A man who must have been in the first news van was filming the pantsuited woman talking into a microphone in front of the house. The passenger door of the second van opened, and a man in a suit followed by another man wearing a T-shirt and jeans and carrying a camera got out and headed up the path to the front door.

The dogs started up again. The doorbell rang. Deirdre felt as if she were under siege. Joelen was right. She had to get out of there. Now. She grabbed her jacket and messenger bag and exited through the sliding glass doors. Crossed the yard. Took a quick glance down the driveway to where the hood of the police car was just visible.

She slipped down the narrow passageway between the chain-link pool surround and the garage. Her nose tickled with a smell, ever so faint. Was something burning? It reminded her of the once pervasive metallic smoke that backyard incinerators belched decades ago before they were banned.

It wasn’t until she was in the alley, enveloped in the smells of eucalyptus and garbage ripening in the metal cans lined up behind each house, that she realized she was wearing the Harley T-shirt and drawstring pants she’d slept in. She stayed close to the edge, careful that the tip of her crutch didn’t skid on the layer of grit and broken glass coating the broken asphalt, checking over her shoulder to see whether the police or the TV newspeople had picked up her scent.

She was halfway up the block when a dark sedan started coming toward her, kicking up a cloud of dust. A hand waved out the window and then the car pulled up alongside Deirdre and the passenger door opened. Deirdre threw in her crutch and hopped in after it. She slammed the door and sat back, resting one hand on the dash and the other over her chest. Her heart was pounding and she was sure she was about to throw up.

“Just breathe,” Joelen said, accelerating, the tires spinning on loose gravel. “Sit back and relax.” The car emerged from the alley. No cruisers or media vans were there to meet them. Joelen pulled out onto the street, stopped at a corner, and turned north. “You okay?”

Deirdre took a deep breath, held it for a moment, then blew out.

“You know,” Joelen went on, “you’ll have to talk to them eventually. The police. They don’t just give up and leave you alone. But you can do it on your own terms.”