Dread Journey (7 page)

He sat there, his hands quiet, watching the handsome man in the mirror. When the knock came at the door he raised his voice correctly and watched the door open. He liked Cobbett; the man wasn’t obsequious as were most attendants to the great Spender; he had dignity. Cobbett was decently interested but no more than that. The porter liked him. That was not unusual; where Viv gave liking, it was seldom not returned.

He said, “Cobbett, would you mind asking Miss Shawn, drawing room B, if she’d step in to see me?”

“Yes, sir.”

The door closed. He’d like a man such as Cobbett for his secretary. Mike had always been too personal, recently she’d intensified it. True, she’d warned him of Kitten’s changeless nature. But she ought not to refer to it now. It wasn’t her place to remind the boss of his mistakes.

Why had he kept Mike so many years? Laziness, he told himself sharply. No other reason. To avoid breaking in someone new. If he had someone like Cobbett he’d have the perfect secretary. Cobbett would never interfere; he would retain his aloofness. Vivien Spender amused himself with the idea while he was waiting. Cobbett was probably a college graduate; ridiculous that he should be forced to earn his living as a porter. Obviously he was qualified for a more intellectual position. If he took Cobbett for secretary, that would give the colony something to buzz about.

He couldn’t kick Mike out, not after twenty-odd years. He could pension her but she wouldn’t gracefully be turned out to graze. He could elevate her; everyone wanted to get into production. His hands moved slightly. There were so many fascinating things he could do. Once he was rid of Kitten.

He turned on his smile quickly at the knock on the door. “Come in.” His voice was warm; perhaps a shade too loud. His veins ran warm. But it was Cobbett who again stood there.

“She isn’t in her room, Mr. Spender.”

“Where is she?” His frown was slight and he erased it at once. Although he had a right to annoyance. She should have been there. Gratia Shawn knew no one on the Chief.

“I don’t know, Mr. Spender. There was no one there.”

He smiled mechanically. “Thank you, Cobbett.”

Kitten had taken Gratia on her club car maraudings. He couldn’t send for Gratia now, advertise his interest to the Chief gossips. He was not a man to be thwarted. He intended to see Gratia. He would go along to the club car, join the girls casually. Invite them to dine with him. It was a good move after all; everything friendly on the surface. The great man taking Kitten and her protégée to dinner.

The train was slowing. He looked out into the twilight, then glanced down at his watch. Needles already, six forty-five. He widened his smile. This was better. He’d get off and walk, board the train again at the club car. The meeting would be accidental, no seeking out. Fate, as was her custom, played his hand.

Even Fate would not thwart Vivien Spender.

Kitten said, “What does the publicity department want now that I should do? Ride in the baggage section?”

The train was stopping at Needles. The Chief was hermetically sealed in its own air-conditioned void. No desert heat could penetrate. The sluggish men and women on the station platform stood in the heavy, unmoving air outside and gazed curiously in at the sterile faces behind the train windows.

Mike said, “Not yet.” She laughed after she said it, but the laugh was too sharp; it was almost a cry. “You’re a riot, Kitten. No, it’s just some releases for New York I wanted you to okay.”

Kitten took the typewritten pages disinterestedly. “That’s the trouble with these cross-countries. No agent to do the dirty work.” She looked at papers with disdain. “Do I have to read all this stuff?”

“I’ve read it; you don’t have to,” Mike said. “Just pencil on your initials.”

Kitten took the pencil Mike offered. “Viv and his bureaucracy. The other studios don’t go in for this red tape.”

“It’s for your own protection,” Mike said mechanically.

She had to bring up the subject of the wife. She had to delay long enough to get Mike to talk about it. She nibbled the pencil and looked over the first page. “Maybe I’d better read them,” she said. “Maybe he is trying to slip a fast one over me. Like putting that girl in my drawing room.”

“How are you getting along with her?” Mike spoke absently, without interest. She was gazing out the window.

Kitten followed her gaze. She drew back. He was striding down the platform. Viv Spender, the king. She didn’t want him to see her. She didn’t want a scene with him now. She wanted to get back to Hank; it wasn’t safe leaving a man with Gratia Shawn.

Mike, too, had drawn back as Viv passed. Kitten’s eyes were shrewd. “He’s trying to put something over. What is it?”

Mike eyed her for a long moment out of her green-rimmed glasses. Her hand moved to a typewritten sheet on another sheaf of papers. She held it put silently.

Kitten took the sheet but she didn’t look at it. She looked at Mike. Mike’s eyes were as expressionless as the glass panes covering them. The paper was undated. Kitten read: Vivien Spender (his name must be first always) announced today that Gratia Shawn…Kitten crumpled the paper from her. It fell to the carpet, lay there, a white blotch.

“He isn’t putting anything over on you. He told you.”

Kitten asked, “When is he releasing that?” Her throat was dusty.

“When we get to New York.”

“He’s already signed her?”

“He says so. I haven’t seen the contract.”

Kitten said harshly, “He can’t do it.”

“I wouldn’t try to stop him.” Behind the slant green glasses Mike’s eyes appealed to her. “He’s in an ugly mood.”

“So am I.”

Mike cried out now, “Why not settle your contract, Kitten?” It wasn’t like Mike, the unemotional, to be emotional.

It brought the fear again to Kitten’s spine but she arched her anger against it. “He can’t do it to me. I’ve got him where I want him.”

Mike’s voice was ragged. “Don’t fight him, Kitten.” It broke. “For God’s sake, why would you want to marry him? He’d be a rotten husband.”

He’d told Mike. And Mike had brought up the subject. Kitten said, “I wanted to be the first Mrs. Spender.” Now that the opening was made, Kitten was almost afraid to move towards it. She was forced to; she must know. But she was awkward, the shadow of death lay there. “I didn’t know there’d been one.”

Mike didn’t help; she sat motionless as the desert air outside.

Kitten spoke hushedly, as if he were listening. “Why does he never talk about it? Why does no one ever talk about her?”

Mike said heavily, “She’s dead.”

“You told me that. But why is it she’s—” She finished slowly, “It’s as if she never existed.”

“He doesn’t want to be reminded of her.”

Kitten stood there, trying to control curiosity that was more, and less, than curiosity. Not wanting to ask, not wanting to know, yet having to seek the answer. “How did she die?” Her whisper was terrible.

Mike said in that monotone, “An overdose of sleeping tablets.”

There was no implication beyond the statement, not in Mike’s face nor in her shoulders nor her quiet hands and feet. There was nothing said or unsaid to frost Kitten’s fingertips. Nothing to diminish her voice to whisper. “Why? Why?”

Mike touched her tongue to her lips. The words came hard. “She wasn’t happy.”

Kitten took a small breath. “You knew her.” She realized that now. Mike had been his secretary since he first started in pictures, while he was yet an unknown. Mike had been his secretary when there was a Mrs. Spender. “What was she like?”

Before Mike answered the room was so quiet you could hear the beat of your heart.

Mike said, “She was just an ordinary woman. She liked her home and meeting friends for lunch and going shopping, having her hair done and driving out in the Valley on Sunday afternoons. She wasn’t ambitious, she just wished to be happy. She wanted children. She was very much in love with her husband.”

He killed her. Kitten hadn’t spoken aloud but it screamed from her throat. He killed her! She knew it now. Knew it in the way Mike had shrunk, diminished to a green pinpoint before her eyes, it was what Mike had tried to tell her yesterday. Tried but failed, because the words wouldn’t come out of her mouth. The horror was like a fog before Kitten’s face. She repeated, “Why, why?”

The Chief stirred. It crept away from the station so quietly it might not be moving, only giving the illusion of moving. But the faces were going away.

“It was Rosaleen.” Mike didn’t look at Kitten, her fingers twisted together. “He isn’t like other men. He sees everything through a dream.”

Kitten’s voice was hard. “His dream.” Bitter and hard as green fruit. “For once he’s going to have to pay. Pay through the nose. He’s not going to kick me out the way he did the others. Maybe you can wake him up long enough to tell him that.”

She began penciling the pages rapidly.

Mike picked up the blotch from the floor, smoothed it out. She said, “I wish I could tell him.”

Kitten thrust the sheaf at her. She wasn’t going to think about it longer now. She knew enough to keep away from Viv Spender. There’d be no overdose of sleeping tablets for her. She rose from the seat.

“Thanks, Mike.”

“Kitten—”

She turned back at the door.

Mike said only, “Be careful.” It wasn’t what she’d started to say.

Kitten smiled, lifted her hand in salute. But there was no smile on her face as she stood in the corridor outside the compartment. She stood a moment, then fled back to the next car as if the hooded shadow were falling over her head.

H
E HAD PLANNED AND KITTEN HAD ELUDED THE PLAN.
He sat in the car tearing paper into small neat pieces. He didn’t know where the paper had come from but he tore it down, across, across again until the palm of his hand was filled with the small particles.

He had watched them as they passed through the club car on their way to the diner. None of them saw him; they were too busy laughing together. In the lead Leslie Augustin and the lovely Gratia Shawn. Following the two, Kitten and a tall, seedy-looking fellow who was obviously drunk.

Gratia had no business being with Augustin. Augustin was an arrogant young whipper-snapper who played the piano or drums and who mocked at a Spender motion-picture contract. Augustin was too well known. The petty gossip spies who crawled through the train would be checking up on the girl now.

Gratia wasn’t to be mentioned until she was introduced with proper fanfare by Vivien Spender. Now he’d have to go to Mike, see what she could do to silence the gossips before they could speak in print. His knuckles where white and hard. He wasn’t going to have his plans for the girl upset. Not if he had to buy off every one of the scavengers of rumor.

Kitten knew he didn’t want Gratia Shawn bandied around the Chief; she must have known. It was deliberate on her part, involving the girl with the adder-tongued Augustin and an unknown drunk. Mike would have to do something about it. He hadn’t suggested that Kitten keep Gratia undercover, he couldn’t very well do that. But he had counted on Kitten's natural meanness. The suggestion that she look out for the girl ordinarily would have been enough to keep Gratia a nonentity for the journey.

Kitten wouldn’t have been smart enough to think this up alone; Augustin must have had a hand in it. He’d warned Kitten before about Augustin’s sly malice; unfortunately the band leader was fashionable and Kitten thought more of the latest fad than of good advice. Kitten evidently had told Augustin how the wind blew from Fisherman’s Wharf. The papers began to trickle from Viv’s hand. She wouldn’t have told Augustin the whole story; she wouldn’t have dared. She’d have to withhold her ammunition until the psychological moment; her crook lawyer would insists on that.

It would be Augustin who would realize that flaunting Gratia openly would twist a knife in Spender. Not that Augustin had anything against Viv Spender; only that he enjoyed experimenting with knives. He’d break Augustin yet. There’d be a way; he’d find the way. The fair-haired boy was increasingly irritating.

That much of the picture was clear. The drunk with Kitten wasn’t. Kitten was usually too proud in her public appearances. Yet she’d been looking up at that fellow as if he were someone important. Where had she found him? And where had she and Gratia been for the past hours?

They’d been laughing. They’d walked by him as if he were a hardware salesman, without seeing him. He opened his hand and the confetti spilled to the carpet. He was ready to rise when he saw Mike winding through the aisle, skirting the long legs of someone on the couch by the entrance.

Mike saw Viv and she stopped in front of his chair. Her face had been sober when she appeared in the car. The brightness that came to it when she saw him wasn’t natural. It was as if she’d pressed a button forcing it to light.

She asked, “Whatever brought you in here, Boss?”

He flashed a good smile. “I came down with claustrophobia. Took a walk at Needles and had to jump on. Have a drink?”

“No, thanks. I’m after food.” She started away but he stopped her by rising.

“How about joining me for dinner? Now that I’m here, I might as well try the diner.”

“You won’t like it,” she warned. “It’s full of people.”

“Tonight I like people. I’m observing them. Research.”

They could smile at each other because they’d known each other a long time, long enough that each could respect the other’s cloak of pretense. Mike wasn’t easy; maybe she knew what Kitten was up to, was trying to spare him. She didn’t want him to go into the diner; even now that he was urging her forward, she was hesitating.

He said, “I mustn’t lose the common touch, Mike. You can’t sit on Olympus and direct the American street scene.”

“I thought you were planning to sit on the Schwarzhorn.”

“Don’t quibble.”

The steward didn’t know Vivien Spender. The steward was a small man, suave, impersonal. He said, “Two? This way.” The table to which he led them was already occupied by a middle-aged couple, facing forward. Mike slid into the window seat, Spender sat beside her. He’d asked for the common touch; he’d accept it gracefully, dining backwards opposite the dullness of strangers.