1958 - Not Safe to be Free (7 page)

“Does he?”

There was a pause, then he said: “I’ll have to hurry. You’re going, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I’m going.”

He moved away from the cupboard and, going over to his chest of drawers, he began to empty his pockets, putting his gold cigarette case, his lighter, handkerchief and money on top of the chest.

Sophia drew in a long, slow breath.

“Jay . . . is there something wrong?”

He stiffened, then slowly turned his head. The dark lenses of his glasses gave him a sinister appearance.

“Wrong? Why, no. What do you mean?”

“It’s a feeling I have,” she said, not moving. “This girl . . .”

“You don’t have to worry about her,” Jay said. “She has gone now.”

“But is she likely to make trouble?”

“Why should she?”

“She might try to blackmail you.”

Jay smiled: at least his lips curved into a smile but the rest of his face was stiff and tense. “She won’t do that. What makes you think she would do such a thing?”

“A girl like that . . .”

The words hung in space. Sophia saw that Jay’s eyes were riveted on the cupboard and she looked too.

Very slowly, the cupboard doors were opening.

Sophia suddenly felt very frightened.

She saw Jay make a movement forward and then stop. His face had gone the colour of tallow.

The doors of the cupboard swung fully open.

Lucille Balu’s rigid body swayed uncertainly, then as Sophia’s hands went to her mouth, stifling her scream of horror, the dead girl slid to the floor at Sophia’s feet.

Chapter Four

I

N
o one, not even her husband, suspected that under the veneer of Sophia’s beauty there was a core of armour-plated hardness forged there by the misery and horrible squalor of her childhood. Very few people knew that Sophia was the product of the slums of Naples. As soon as she had been able to walk, she had roved the Naples waterfront with a band of other filthy, ragged children, preying on tourists, surrounding them, dirty hands outstretched, while chanting the only English word she knew: “Money—money—money.”

At night she returned to the tiny hovel constructed out of two wooden crates and a strip of corrugated iron that served as her home. She lived there with her father, a short stocky Italian, with the flat black eyes of a gangster, who had never done a day’s work in his life.

If Sophia failed to bring home less than five hundred lira a day, her father would seize hold of her, raise her ragged dress and savagely flay her naked flesh with his belt. This existence continued until she was thirteen years old. Then one night, on returning home with less than the required five hundred lira, her mind and body cringing at the thought of the thrashing she would receive, she found her father curled up on the bundle of rags that served him for a bed, a dagger buried to the hilt in his heart.

She stared down at him for a long time, savouring the joy of finding him dead, then moving up to him, she had spat in his dead, snarling face and had left, happy to realize she was on her own, that she had now only herself to think of and the bite of the strap into her flesh was now a thing of the past.

Even in rags and under a coat of grime, Sophia had been a beautiful child. It was not long before she attracted the attention of a man who called himself Giuseppe Francini, a pimp, who worked the cafes in the festering alleys off the Via Roma. He saw her possibilities, took charge of her, dressed her, found her a reasonably clean room and launched her on the career of a prostitute: all this before she had reached the age of fifteen.

Realizing the money that could be made from this profession, Sophia had entered into her new career with an enthusiasm that astonished and delighted Francini. He quickly realized that he was wasting her talents by allowing her to work the low class cafes. He arranged with a friend of his to share the expense of sending her to Rome and renting an apartment there for her.

By the time she reached the age of seventeen, Sophia was a highly successful prostitute. She had shaken off Francini, had taken a luxury apartment in the fashionable quarter of Rome, she was making a substantial income, owned an Alfa—Romeo car and had a wardrobe full of expensive, fashionable clothes that included a mink stole.

A few months after her seventeenth birthday she met Hamish Wardell, a movie director on vacation from Hollywood. Wardell, impressed by her beauty and her enthusiastic lovemaking, took her back to Hollywood with him and arranged for her to have a small part in the movie he was making.

Sophia made an immediate hit in the movie. Her beauty, her strident sex appeal, wiped all the other actresses and actors out of the picture. She made such an impact on the public that she was immediately signed up on a six-figure salary to do three movies and an increase on a further three. From then on, money flowed unceasingly into her various bank accounts, the public’s adoration was hers and the horror of her childhood and the memories of the brutalities of her past clients when she had been walking the streets of Rome became a blurred memory.

She had met Floyd Delaney when she was twenty-four. He had fallen in love with her and they had married within six months of their first meeting. She was now the wife of one of the richest and most powerful men in Hollywood. She had everything she could wish for. Her position in life was secure and security to Sophia was her most important possession, next to life itself.

She sat on the settee in the lounge, her knees pressed tightly together, her hands in fists as she stared at Jay who sat opposite her, his face set and pale, a muscle close to his right eye twitching.

She had no doubt that he had murdered this girl and she realized this mad act had jeopardized her own position. If ever this thing hit the headlines of the world’s newspapers, the security and her position she had suffered so much to gain would go.

She was now recovering from the shock of seeing the girl’s body falling at her feet. The fibre in her was tough and after the initial shock of horror, she was now able to cope with the situation. Her mind was already searching for a way out. She had no intention of weakly surrendering to the situation, but before she could decide what she could do, she had to know all the facts.

“She was Lucille Balu?” she asked, staring at Jay.

“Yes.”

He too was recovering from the horrible moment when he had seen the doors of the cupboard slowly opening. His mouth was dry as he wondered what Sophia was planning to do. He was surprised that her nerves were obviously stronger than his.

“And you killed her?” Sophia said, her hands turning into fists.

“It was an accident,” Jay said and forced his lips into a tight, meaningless smile.

“How—an accident?”

The tip of his tongue moved over his lips as he hesitated, then he said, “What I told you was the truth. When I saw her in this room I knew I had made a mistake. I suppose I was tactless. I told her to get out. She became angry. She threatened to scream. I was frightened someone would hear her. I put my hand over her mouth. There was a struggle. She was stronger than I imagined. I—I must have used more force than I realized. Suddenly she went limp. I thought she had fainted. When I tried to revive her, I found she was dead.”

Watching him and listening to the flat tone of his voice, Sophia knew he was lying. She recalled the picture of him threatening her as he moved across the room, the scarlet curtain cord in his hands and she knew the girl had been deliberately strangled.

She studied him.

The dark screens of his glasses covering his eyes gave him a protective camouflage.

“Take those glasses off,” she said.

He stiffened and frowned. His hand went to his glasses, hesitated and then he took them off. His pale, washed-out blue eyes with their lost, furtive expression gave her confidence. They told her he was more frightened and shocked than she was.

“You’re lying,” she said. “You deliberately brought her up here and killed her. You killed her with the curtain cord.”

Jay’s eyes went completely blank. They looked like the eyes of a blind man. Then his lips curled upwards and he made a little choking sound as if he were suppressing a giggle.

“You are quite right,” he said. “You’re much cleverer than I had imagined. Yes, of course. It wasn’t an accident.”

Sophia drew in a deep breath and got to her feet. She crossed the room and took a cigarette from the box that stood on the table. As she lit it she noticed her hands were quite steady and that surprised her.

She now had no doubt that the boy was insane. She had always suspected that he had inherited his mother’s mental instability. She was alone with him in this room. Was she in any kind of danger? Would he suddenly turn on her? She would have to be careful not to antagonize him. She moved back to her chair and sat down.

“Why did you do it?” she asked, her voice gentle.

He looked sharply at her, reacting to the sympathetic note in her voice.

“Why did I do it?” he repeated and he slid further down in his chair. “Because I was bored, Sophia. You wouldn’t know what real boredom means. You wouldn’t know what it means to be always playing third fiddle: not even second fiddle. I’ve been unwanted ever since I was born. My mother hated me. Father has always regarded me as a nuisance. All my life I have been farmed out to please him or my mother or his second wife or whenever I happened to be in the way.”

Sophia nodded.

“Yes, I know. I had a rotten childhood myself. That’s why I’ve always tried to make you feel you are wanted and that you’re not in the way. Don’t think I don’t understand. I do. Your life hasn’t been much fun.”

Jay’s eyes lit up. He suddenly looked very young and eager.

“I’ve always admired you, Sophia. You are the only one who has come within any distance of understanding me, but your kindness has come a little late. Twenty years of playing third fiddle isn’t very exciting.” He leaned forward, staring at her. “Being pushed aside, unwanted and only trotted out to be shown off when it was convenient isn’t very exciting either. For years now I have searched for something in life that really means something. I have come to the conclusion that taking risks is more important than anything else in life. At first I thought that risking my freedom would be enough. When I was at school I became a burglar.” His pale lips moved into his boyish smile. “I didn’t steal anything. I broke into houses and crept into people’s bedrooms. That was quite exciting, to sit by their bedsides watching them sleep, not knowing if they would suddenly wake up and catch me. But after a time I got bored with that. I realized I didn’t put enough value on my freedom to care if I were caught or not. After a lot of thought, I decided the one thing that was irreplaceable and of most value to me was my life.”

Sophia touched off the ash in her cigarette. Her mind was active. She let Jay talk, but she was only half concentrating on what she was saying. He was trying to excuse himself. Before long, they would come to the dead girl. It didn’t matter to her why he had done it. What did matter to her was what would happen once the news broke. Jay was Floyd’s son.

The thought of the publicity, the scandal, the horror of the newspaper men, the effect on Floyd’s film, the resurrection of Harriett’s suicide, the trial, the pity of their friends and the frightful newspaper headlines that would go on and on and on made her blood run cold.

“I tried Russian roulette,” Jay was saying. “Do you know what that is? You put a cartridge in the cylinder of a revolver, spin the cylinder so you don’t know if the cartridge is or is not under the firing pin, then you put the gun to your head and pull the trigger. But it is a gambler’s risk and although it provided intense excitement at the first attempt, I realized it wasn’t the kind of risk I was looking for. If I was to risk my life, I wanted to be sure that it wouldn’t be blind chance but my own planning, my own wits, my own intelligence I had to rely on. That brought me to murder. I have thought of murdering someone now for quite some time. This

afternoon I decided to do it.” He was leaning forward now, his face tense. “I saw this girl. It was easy enough to persuade her to come up here; as easy to kill her. She was so pathetically unsuspecting. Of course I could have arranged it differently. I could have made it much safer and easier for myself, but I didn’t want that. I wanted a genuine risk. It seemed to me that to be landed with a dead body in this hotel would test my inventiveness to the limit. I made no plans. Even now, I don’t know what I am going to do with the body.”

He ran his fingers through his hair as he continued to stare at Sophia. “I didn’t anticipate that you would be so clever, Sophia. I didn’t include you in my plan. Just what are you going to do about this thing?”

Just what was she going to do about it? Sophia asked herself. Tell Floyd? Call the police? Deliberately cut her own social throat? Once the news hit the headlines, there would be no more dinners at the White House, no more exciting evening parties in London when it was possible that members of the royal family might look in on an unofficial visit, no longer would the rich hostesses in New York fight among themselves for the privilege of having the Delaneys on their dinner list. And Floyd? He had sunk millions in this film of his. Could the film be shown while his son was standing trial for murder?

She knew it would be fatal to confide in Floyd. His reaction would be unthinking and instinctively correct. He would call the police and hand his son over to them without hesitation.

She loved and admired Floyd. He always did the right thing, but this thing couldn’t be handled like that. This was something special. A wrong move could ruin their future and she was very conscious that, at this moment, she held the destinies of Floyd, herself and this insane boy in her capable, shrewd hands. She hedged a little because she wanted more time to think about this thing.

“What do you expect me to do?” she asked.

“Tell father,” Jay said.

“If I told him, you know what he would do.”

“Yes, I know. He would call the police.”